Keoki Jackson: Lockheed Martin | Lex Fridman Podcast #33
the following is a conversation with keoki Jackson he's the CTO of Lockheed Martin a company that through his long history has created some of the most incredible engineering Marvel's human beings have ever built including planes that fly fast and undetected defense systems that intersect nuclear threats that can take the lives of millions and systems the venture out into space the moon Mars and beyond in these days more and more artificial intelligence has an assistive role to play in these systems I've read several books reparation for this conversation is a difficult one because in part Lockheed Martin builds military systems that operate in a complicated world that often does not have easy solutions in the grey area between good and evil I hope one day this world will rid itself of war in all its forms but two paths to achieving that in a world that does have evil is not obvious what is obvious is good engineering and artificial intelligence research has a role to play on the side of good Lockheed Martin and the rest of our community are hard at work at exactly this task we talk about these and other important topics in this conversation also most certainly both keoki and I have a passion for space us humans venturing out toward the Stars we talk about this exciting future as well this is the artificial intelligence podcast if you enjoy it subscribe on YouTube give it five stars on iTunes supported on patreon or simply connect with me on Twitter at Lux Friedman spelled Fri D M am and now here's my conversation with K okie Jackson I read several books on Lockheed Martin recently my favorite in particulars by Ben rich called skunkworks personal memoir it gets a little edgy at times but from that I was reminded that the engineers of Lockheed Martin have created some of the most incredible engineering Marvel's human beings have ever built throughout the centuries throughout the 20th century and the 21st do you remember a particular project or system and Lockheed or before that at the space shuttle Columbia that you were just in awe at the fact that us humans could create something like this you know that's a that's a great question there's a lot of things that I could draw in there when you look at the skunk works and Ben Rich's book in particular of course it starts off with basically the start of the jet age and the p80 I had the opportunity to sit next to one of the Apollo astronauts Charlie Duke recently at dinner and I said hey what's your favorite aircraft and he said well was by far the f-104 starfighter which was another aircraft that came out of Lockheed there what was the first Mach 2 jet fighter aircraft they called it the missile with a man in it and so those are the kinds of things I grew up hearing stories about you know of course the sr-71 is incomparable as you know kind of the epitome of speed altitude and just the coolest looking aircraft ever so so there's a connoisseur that's a flame that's a yeah intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft that was designed to be able to outrun basically go faster than any air defense system but you know I'll tell you I'm a space junkie junkie that's why I came to MIT that's really what took me ultimately to Lockheed Martin and I grew up in so Lockheed Martin for example has been essentially at the heart of every planetary mission like all the Mars missions we've had a part in and we've talked a lot about the 50th anniversary of Apollo here in the last couple of weeks right but remember 1976 July 20th again national space days the landing of the Viking the Viking Lander on the surface of Mars just a huge accomplishment and when I was a young engineer at Lockheed Martin I got to meet engineers who had designed you know various pieces of that mission as well so that's what I grew up on is these planetary missions the start of the Space Shuttle era and ultimately had the opportunity to see Lockheed Martin's part and we can maybe talk about some of these here but Lockheed Martin's part in all of these space journeys over the years do you dream and I apologize for getting philosophical at times or sentimental I do romanticize the notion of space exploration so do you dream of the day when us humans colonize another planet like Mars or a man a woman a human being steps on Mars absolutely and that's a personal dream of mine I haven't given up yet on my own opportunity to fly into space but but as you know from the Lockheed Martin perspective this is something that we're working towards every day and of course you know we're we're building the Orion spacecraft which is the most sophisticated human-rated spacecraft ever built and it's really designed for these deep-space journeys you know starting with the moon but ultimately going to Mars and being the platform you know from a design perspective we call the Mars base camp to be able to take humans to the surface and then after a mission of a couple of weeks bring him back up safely and so that is something I want to see happen during my time at Lockheed Martin so I'm pretty excited about that and I think you know once we prove that's possible you know colonization might be a little bit further out but it's something that I'd hoped to see so maybe you can give a little bit an overview of the Lockheed Martin's partner with a few years ago with Boeing to work with the DoD and NASA to build launch systems and rockets with the ula what's beyond that what's lakis mission timeline and long-term dream in terms of space you mentioned the moon I've heard you talk about asteroids as Mars what's the timeline what's the engineering challenges and what's the dream long term yeah I think the dream long term is to have a permanent presence in space beyond low-earth orbit ultimately with a long-term presence on the moon and then to the planets to Mars and rage interrupt and that's a long term presence means sustained and sustainable presence and an economy a space economy that really goes alongside with human beings being and being able to launch perhaps from those so like hop you know it says that there's a lot of energy that goes in those hops right so I think the first step is being able to get there and to be able to establish sustained basis right and and build from there and a lot of that means getting as you know things like the cost of launch down and you mentioned United Launch Alliance and so I don't want to speak for ula but obviously they're they're working really hard to on their next generation of space launch vehicles to you know maintain that incredible mission success record that ula has but ultimately continue to drive down the cost and make the flexibility the speed and the access ever greater so what's the missions that are in the horizon that you could talk to so I hope to get to the moon absolutely absolutely I mean I think you know this or you may know this you know there's a lot of ways to accomplish some of these goals and so that's a lot of what's in discussion today but ultimately the the goal is to be able to establish a base essentially insist lunar space that would allow for ready transfer from orbit to the lunar surface and back again and so that's sort of that near-term and I say near-term in the next decade or so vision starting off with you know stated objective by this administration to get back to the moon in the nineteen or the 2024 2025 timeframe which is is right around the corner here so how big of an engineering challenge is that I think the big challenge is not so much to go but to stay right and so we demonstrated in the 60s that you could send somebody up to a couple of days of mission and bring them home again successfully now we're talking about doing that I'd say more time I was saying adust real scale but a sustained scale right so permanent habitation you know regular reuse of vehicles the infrastructure to get things like fuel air consumables replacement parts all the things that you need to sustain that kind of infrastructure so those are certainly engineering challenges there are budgetary challenges and those are all things that we're gonna have to work through you know the other thing and I shouldn't I don't want to minimize this I mean I'm excited about human exploration but the reality is our technology and where we've come over the last you know forty years essentially has changed what we can do with robotic exploration as well and you know to me it's incredibly thrilling this seems like old news now but the fact that we have Rovers driving around the surface of Mars and sending back data is just incredible the fact that we have satellites in orbit around Mars that are collecting weather you know they're looking at the terrain they're mapping all these kinds of things on a continuous basis that's incredible and the fact that you know it's you got the time lag of course going to the going to the planets but you can effectively have virtual human presence there in a way that we have never been able to do before and now with the advent of even greater processing power better AI systems better cognitive systems and decision systems you know you put that together with the human Keith and we really opened up the solar system in a whole different way and I'll give you an example we've got osiris-rex which is a mission to the asteroid Bennu so the spacecraft is out there right now I'm basically a year mapping activity to map the entire surface of that asteroid in great detail you know all autonomously piloted right with the idea then that this is not too far away it's gonna go in it's got a sort of fancy vacuum cleaner with a bucket it's gonna collect the sample off the asteroid and then send it back here to earth and so you know we have gone from sort of those tentative steps in the 70s you know early landings video of the solar system so now we've sent spacecraft the Pluto we have gone to comets and brought and an intercept at comets we've brought stardust date you know you know material back so that's we've gone far and there's incredible opportunity to go even farther so it seems quite crazy that this is even possible that can you talk a little bit about what it means to orbit an asteroid and with a bucket to try to keep pick up some soil samples yeah so part of it is just kind of the you know these are the kinds of techniques we use here on earth for high speed high speed high accuracy imagery stitching these scenes together and creating essentially high accuracy world maps right and so that's what we're doing obviously on a much smaller scale with an asteroid but the other thing that's really interesting you put together sort of that neat control and you know data and imagery problem but the stories around how we design the collection I mean as essentially you know this is the sort of the human ingenuity element right that essentially you know had an engineer who had a one-day cycle starts messing around with parts vacuum cleaner bucket you know maybe we could do something like this and that was what led to what we call the pogo stick collection right we're basically I think comes down it's only there for seconds does that collection grabs the essentially blows them the regolith material into the collection hopper and off it goes it doesn't really land almost it's it's a very short landing Wow that's that's incredible so what is uh in those talk a little bit more about space eh what's the role of the human in all of this what are the challenges what are the opportunities for humans as they pilot these these vehicles in space and for humans that may step foot and on either the Moon or Mars yeah it's a great question because you know I just have been extolling the virtues of robotic and you know Rovers autonomous systems and those absolutely have a role I think the thing that we don't know how to replace today is the ability to adapt on the fly to new information and I believe that will come but we're not there yet there's a ways to go and so you know you think back to Apollo 13 and the ingenuity of the folks on the ground and on the spacecraft essentially cobbled together a way to get the carbon dioxide scrubbers to work those are the kinds of things that ultimately young and I'd say not just from dealing with anomalies but you know dealing with new information you see something and rather than waiting twenty minutes or half an hour an hour to try to get information back and forth but be able to essentially Ravech there on the fly collect you know different samples take a different approach choose different areas to explore those are the kinds of things that that human presence enables that is still a ways ahead of us on the AI side yeah there's some interesting stuff we'll talk about on the teaming side here on earth that's that's pretty cool to explore and it's okay so let's not leave the space piece out so what is teaming what does AI and humans working together in space look like yeah one of the things we're working on is a system called Maya which is you can think of it it's what's an AI assistant and in space exactly and you think of it as the Alexa in space right but this goes hand-in-hand with a lot of other developments and so today's world everything is essentially model-based model-based systems engineering to the actual digital tapestry that goes through the design the bill the manufacturer the testing and ultimately the sustainment of the system and so our vision is really that you know when our astronauts are there around Mars you're going to have that entire digital library of the spacecraft of its operations all the test data all the test data and flight data from previous missions to be able to look and see if there are anomalous conditions until the humans and potentially deal with that before it becomes a bad situation and help the astronauts work through those kinds of things and it's not just you know dealing with problems as they come up but also offering up opportunities for additional exploration capability for examples so so that's the vision is that you know these are going to take the best of the human to respond to to changing circumstances and rely on the best of AI capabilities to monitor these you know this almost infinite number of data points and correlations and data points that humans frankly aren't that good at it's how do you develop systems in space like this whether it's a alexa in space or in general any kind of control systems any kind of intelligent systems when you can't really test stuff too much out in space it's very expensive to test stuff here so how do you develop such systems yeah that's that that's the beauty of this digital twin if you will and of course with Lockheed Martin we've over the past you know five plus decades been refining our knowledge of the space environment of how materials behave dynamics that controls the you know radiation environments all of these kinds of things so we're able to create very sophisticated models they're not perfect but they're they're very good and so you can actually do a lot I spent part of my career you know simulating communication spacecraft you know missile warning spacecraft GPS spacecraft in all kinds of scenarios and all kinds of environments so this is really just taking that to the next level the interesting thing is that now you're bringing into that loop a system depending on how its developed that may be non-deterministic it may be learned as it goes in fact we anticipate that it will be learning as it goes and so that brings a whole new level of interest I guess into how do you do verification and validation of these non-deterministic learning systems in scenarios that may go out of the bounds or the envelope that you have initially designed to so had this system in its intelligence has the same complexity some of the same complex as a human does than the it learns over time it's unpredictable in certain kinds of ways in the so you still you also have to model that when you're thinking about saying you're in your thoughts as possible to model the the majority of situations the the important aspects of situations here on earth and in space enough to test stuff yeah that's this is really an active area of research and we're actually funding University Research in a variety of places including MIT this is in the realm of trust and verification and validation of I'd say autonomous systems in general and then as a subset of that autonomous systems that incorporate artificial intelligence capabilities and this is not an easy problem we're working with startup companies we've got internal R&D but our conviction is the autonomy in more and more AI enabled autonomy is going to be in everything that Lockheed Martin develops and fields and it's going to be retrofit autonomy and Nai are gonna be retrofit into existing systems they're going to be part of the design for all of our future systems and so maybe I should take a step back and say the way we define autonomy so we talk we talk about autonomy essentially system that composes selects and then executes decisions with varying levels of human intervention and so you could think of no autonomy so this is essentially human doing the task you can think of effectively partial autonomy where the human is in the loop so making decisions in every case about what the autonomous system can do either in the cockpit or remotely or remotely exactly but still in that control loop and then there's what you'd call supervisory autonomy the autonomous system is doing most of the work the human can intervene to stop it or to change the direction and then ultimately fall at full autonomy where the human is off the loop altogether and for different types of missions want to have different levels of autonomy so now take that spectrum and this conviction that autonomy and more and more AI are in everything that we develop I the kinds of things that Lockheed Martin does you know a lot of times our safety of life critical kinds of missions you think about aircraft for example and so we require and our customers require an extremely high level of confidence one that you know we're going to protect life to that we're going to have that these systems will behave in ways that their operators can understand and so this gets into that whole field again you know they're being able to verify and validate that the systems have been and that they will operate the way they're design and the way they're expected and furthermore that they will do that in ways that can be explained and understood and that is an extremely difficult challenge yes so here's a difficult question I don't mean to bring this up but I think it's a good case study that people are familiar with the Boeing 737 max commercial airplane has had two recent crashes where their flight control software system failed and it's software so I don't mean to speak of all Boeing but broadly speaking we have this than the autonomous vehicle space - semi autonomous we have millions of lines of code software making decisions there is a little bit of a clash of cultures because software engineers don't have the same culture of safety often that people who build systems like at Lockheed Martin uh do where it has to be exceptionally safe you have to test this on so how do we get this right when software is making so many decisions yeah and this there's a lot of things that have to happen and by and large I think it starts with the culture right which is not necessarily something that a is taught in school or B is something that would come here depending on what kind of software you're developing it may not be relevant right if you're targeting ads or something like that so and by and large say not just Lockheed Martin but certainly the aerospace industry of the whole has developed a culture that does focus on safety safety of life operational safety mission success but as you know these systems have gotten incredibly complex and so they're to the point where it's almost impossible you know state space has become so huge that it's impossible to or very difficult to do a systematic verification across the entire set of potential ways that an aircraft could be flown all the conditions that could happen all the potential failure failure scenarios now maybe that's soluble one day maybe when we have our quantum computers at our fingertips we'll be able to actually simulate across an entire you know almost infinite state space but today you know there's a there's a lot of work to really try to bound the system to understand predictable ways and then have this culture of continuous inquiry and skepticism and questioning to say did we really consider the right realm of possibilities have we done the right range of testing do we really understand you know in this case you know human and machine interactions the human decision process alongside the machine processes and so that's that culture that we call it the culture of success in lockheed-martin that really needs to be established and it's not something you know that it's something that people learn by living in it and it's something that has to be promulgated you know and it's done you know from the highest levels at a company of Lockheed Martin like Lockheed Martin yeah and the same as being faced at certain on his vehicle companies where that culture is not there because it started mostly by software engineers so that's what they're struggling with is there lessons that you think we should learn as an industry in a society from the Boeing 737 max questions these crashes obviously are their tremendous tragedies their tragedies for all of the people the the crew the families the passengers the people on the ground involved and you know it's also a huge business and economic setback as well I mean you know we've seen that it's impacting essentially the trade balance of the US so these are these are important questions and these are the kinds that you know we've seen similar kinds of questioning at times you go back to the Challenger accident and it is I think always important to remind ourselves the humans are fallible the systems we create as perfect as we strive to make them we can always make them better and so another element of that culture of mission success is really that commitment to continuous improvement if there's something that goes wrong a real commitment to root cause and true root cause understanding to taking the corrective actions and to making the system future systems better and certainly we want we strive for you know you know no accidents and if you look at the record of the commercial airline industry as a whole and the commercial aircraft industry as a whole you know there's a very nice decaying exponential two years now where we have no commercial aircraft accidents at all right and our fatal accidents and all so that didn't happen by accident it was through the regulatory agencies FAA the airframe manufacturers really working on a system to identify root causes and driving them out so maybe we can take a step back and many people are familiar but Lockheed Martin broadly what kind of categories of systems are you involved in building you know Lockheed Martin we think of ourselves as a company that solves hard mission problems and the output of that might be an airplane or spacecraft or a helicopter or a radar or something like that but ultimately we're driven by these you know like what what is our customer what is that mission that they need to achieve and so that's what drove the sr-71 right how do you get pictures of a place where you got sophisticated air defense systems that are capable of handling any aircraft that was out there at the time right so that you know that's what you'll did an sr-71 was build a nice flying camera exactly and make sure it gets out and it gets back right and that led ultimately to really the start of the space program in the u.s. as well so now take a step back to Lockheed Martin of today and we are you know on the order of 105 years old now between Lockheed and Martin the two big heritage companies of course were made up with a whole bunch of other companies that came in as well General Dynamics yeah kind of go down the list today were you can think of us in this space of solving mission problems so obviously on the aircraft side tactical aircraft building the most advanced fighter aircraft that the world has ever seen you know we're up to now several hundred of those delivered building almost a hundred a year and of course working on the things that come after that on the space side we are engaged in pretty much every venue of space utilization and exploration you can imagine so I mentioned things like navigation timing GP communication satellites missile warning satellites we've built commercial surveillance satellites we've built commercial communication satellites we do civil space so everything from human exploration to the robotic exploration in the outer planets and keep keep going on the space front but I don't you know a couple other areas I'd like to put out we're heavily engaged in building critical defensive systems and so a couple that I'll mention the aegis combat system this is basically the integrated air and missile defense system for the u.s. and allied fleets and so protects you know Carrier Strike groups for example from incoming ballistic missile threats aircraft threats cruise missile threats and kind of go down the list of the the carriers the fleet that itself is the thing that is being protected the carriers aren't serving as a protection for something else well that's that's a little bit of a different application we've actually built the version called Aegis ashore which is now deployed in a couple of places around the world so that same technology I mean basically it can be used to protect either an ocean-going fleet or a land-based activity another one the Thad program so Thad this is the theater high altitude area defense this is to protect you know relatively broad areas against sophisticated ballistic missile threats and so now you know it's deployed with a lot of us capabilities and now we have international customers that are looking to buy that capability as well and so these are systems that defend not just defend militaries and military capabilities but defend population areas we saw you know maybe the first public use of these back in the in the first Gulf War with the Patriot systems and these are these are the kinds of things that Lockheed Martin delivers and there's a lot of stuff that goes with it so think about the radar systems and the sensing systems that cue these the command and control systems that decide how you pair a weapon against an incoming threat and then all the human and machine interfaces to make sure that they can be operated successfully in very strenuous environments yeah there's a there's some incredible engineering that I never find like you but like you said so maybe if we just take a look at Lockheed history broadly maybe even looking at skunk works what are the biggest most impressive milestones of innovations if you look at stealth I would have called you crazy if you said that's possible at the time and supersonic and hypersonic so traveling it first of all traveling at the speed of sound is pretty damn fast and the supersonic and hypersonic three four or five times the speed of sound that seems I would also call you crazy if you say you can do that so can you tell me how it's possible to do these kinds of things and is there other milestones and an innovation that's going on you can talk about yeah well let me start you know on the skunkworks saga and you kind of alluded to it in the beginning and skunk works is as much idea as a place and so it's driven really by Kelly Johnson's 14 principles and I'm not gonna list all 14 of them off but the idea and this I'm sure will resonate with any engineer who's worked on a highly motivated small team before the idea that if you can essentially have a small team of very capable capable people who want to work on really hard problems you can do almost anything especially if you kind of shield them from bureaucratic influences if you create very tight relationships with your customers so that you have that team and shared vision with the customer those are the kinds of things that enable the skunkworks to do these these incredible things and you know we listed off a number that you can you brought up stuff and I mean this this whole you know I wish I could have seen been rich with a ball-bearing you know rolling across the desk to a general officer and saying would you like to have an aircraft that has the radar cross-section of this ball bearing probably one of the great you know the least expensive and most effective marketing campaigns in the history of the industry so just for people the not familiar I mean the way you detect aircraft does I mean I'm sure there's a lot of ways but radar for a longest time yeah there's a big blob they peers in the radar how do you make a plane disappear so it looks as big as a ball bearing what's involved in technology wise there what's the broadly sort of it the stuff you speak about I'll stick to what's in been Rich's but obviously the geometry of how radar gets reflected and the kinds of materials that either reflect or absorb arcum kind of a couple of the critical elements there I mean it's a cat-and-mouse game right I mean you know radars get better stealth capabilities kids better and so it's a it's a really game of continuous improvement and innovation there I'll leave it at that yeah so the idea that something is essentially invisible it says quite fascinating but the other one is flying fast so speed of sound is 750 60 miles an hour with this little SuperSonics 3 you know Mach 3 something like that yeah we talked about the supersonic obviously and we kind of talked about that is that realm from Mach 1 up through about Mach 5 and then hypersonic so you know high supersonic speeds would be past Mach 5 and you got to remember I know Lockheed Martin and actually other companies have been involved in hypersonic development since the late 60s you know you think of everything from the x-15 to the Space Shuttle as examples of that I think the difference now is if you look around the world particularly the threat environment that we're in today you're starting to see you know publicly folks like the Russians and the Chinese saying they have hypersonic weapons capability that could threaten us and allied capabilities and also basically you know the claims are these could get around defensive systems that are out there today and so there's a real sense of urgency you hear it from folks like the Undersecretary of defense for research and engineering dr. Mike Griffin and others in the department of defense that hypersonics is is something that's really important to the nation in terms of both parody but also defensive capabilities and so that's something that you know we're pleased it's something Lockheed Martin's you know had a heritage in we've invested Hardie dollars on our side for many years and we have a number of things going on with various US government customers in that field today that we're very excited about so I I would anticipate we'll be hearing more about that in the future from our customers and I've actually haven't read much about this probably you can't talk about much of it at all but on the defensive side it's the fascinating problem of perception of trying to detect things that are really hard to see can you comment on how hard that problem is and how how hard is it to stay ahead even if we go back a few decades stay ahead of the competition well maybe I again you got to think of these as ongoing the capability development and so think back to the early days of missile defense so this would be in the 80s the SDI program and in that timeframe we proved in Lockheed Martin proof that you could hit a bullet with a bullet essentially and which is something that had never been done before to take out an incoming ballistic missile and so that's led to these incredible hit-to-kill kinds of capabilities pac-3 that's the Patriot advanced capability model 3 the Lockheed Martin builds the THAAD system that I that I talked about so now hypersonics you know they're different from ballistic systems and so we got to take the next step in defensive capability I can leave that there but I can only imagine you know let me just comment sort of Resident Engineer it's sad to know that so much that Lockheed has done in the past is classified or today you know and it's shrouded in secrecy it has to be by the nature of the application so like what I do so we what we do here at MIT would like to inspire young years young scientists and yet in a lucky case some of that engineering has to stay quiet how do you think about that how does that make you feel is there a future where more can be shown or is it just the nature the nature of this world that has to remain secret it's a good question I think the public can see enough of including students who may be in grade school high school college today to understand the kinds of really hard problems that we work on and I mean look at the f-35 right and you know obviously a lot of the detailed performance levels are sensitive and control but you know we can talk about what an incredible aircraft this is you know supersonic super cruise kind of a fighter a a you know stealth capabilities it's a flying information you know system in the sky with data fusion sensor fusion capabilities that have never been seen before so these are the kinds of things that I believe you know there was these are kinds of things that got me excited when I was a student I think these still inspire students today and the other thing and say I mean you know people are inspired by space people are inspired by aircraft our employees are also inspired by that sense of mission and I will just give you an example I had the privilege to work and lead our GPS programs for some time and that was a case where he actually worked on a program that touches billions of people every day and so when I said I worked on GPS everybody knew what I was talking about even though they didn't maybe appreciate the technical challenges that went into that but I'll tell you I got a briefing one time from a major in the Air Force and he said I go by callsign GIMP GPS is my passion yeah I love GPS and he was involved in the operational test of the system he said when I was out in Iraq and I was on a helicopter Black Hawk helicopter and it was bringing back you know sergeant and handful of troops from a deployed location and I you know I said my job is GPS I asked that sergeant he's you know beaten down and kind of half asleep and I said what do you think about GPS and he brightened up his eyes lit up and he said well GPS that brings me and my troops home every day I love GPS and that's the kind of story where it's like okay I'm really making a difference here in the kind of work so that that mission piece is really important the last thing I'll say is that and this gets to some of these questions around advanced technologies it's not you know they're not just airplanes and spacecraft anymore for people who are excited about advanced software capabilities about AI about bringing machine learn the things that we're doing to you know exponentially increase the mission capabilities that go on those platforms and those are the kinds of things I think are more and more visible to the public yeah I think autonomy especially in flight is super exciting do you do you see if a day here we go back into philosophy future when most fighter jets will be highly autonomous to a degree where a human doesn't need to be in the cockpit in almost all cases well I mean that's a world that to a certain extent we're in today now these are remotely piloted aircraft to be sure but but we have hundreds of thousands of flight hours a year now in remotely piloted aircraft and then if you take the f-35 there I mean there are huge layers I guess in levels of autonomy built into that aircraft so that the pilot is essentially more of a mission manager rather than doing the data you know the second second elements of flying the aircrafts on in some ways it's the easiest aircraft in the world to fly and kind of funny story on that so I don't know if you know how aircraft carrier landings work but basically there's what's called a tail hook and it catches wires on the deck of the carrier and that's what brings the the aircraft to a screeching halt Britain and there's typically three of these wires so if you miss the first the second one you catch the the next one right and you know we got a little criticism I don't know how true this story is what we got a little criticism the f-35 is so perfect it always gets the second wires we're wearing out the wire I guess it always hits that one so that but that's the kind of autonomy that just makes these that essentially up levels what the human is doing two more that mission managers so much of that landing by that thirty-five is autonomous well it's just you know the control systems are such that you really have dialed out the variability and what that comes with all the environmental condition wearing it out so my point is to certain extent that world is here today do I think that we're gonna see a day anytime soon when there are no humans in the cockpit I don't believe that but I do think we're gonna see much more human machine teaming and we're gonna see that much more at the tactical edge and we did a demo you asked about what the skunkworks is doing these days and so this is what something I can talk about but we did a demo with the Air Force Research Laboratory or laboratory we called it have Rader and so using an f-16 as an autonomous wingman and we demonstrated all kinds of maneuvers and verus mission scenarios with the autonomous f-16 being that so-called loyal or trusted wingman and so those are the kinds of things that you know we've shown what is possible now given that you've up leveled that pilot to be a mission manager now they can control multiple other aircraft they can almost as extensions of your own aircraft flying alongside with you so that's that's another example of how this is really coming to fruition and then yeah I mentioned the the landings but think about just the implications for humans and flight safety and this goes a little bit back to the discussion we were having about how do you continuously improve the level of safety through automation while working through the complexities that Automation introduces so one of the challenges that you have in high-performance fighter aircraft is what's called G lock so this is G induced loss of consciousness so you pull 9 G's you're wearing a pressure suit that's not enough to keep the blood going to your brain you have a blackout right right and of course that's bad if you happen to be flying low you know near the deck and you know earng obstacle or terrain environment and so we developed the system and our Aeronautics division called Auto G caso autonomous ground collision avoidance system and we built that into the f-16 it's actually saved seven aircraft eight pilots already and a relatively short time it's been deployed it was so successful that the Air Force said hey we need to have this in the f-35 right away so we've actually gone done testing and that now on the f-35 and we've also integrated an autonomous air collision avoidance system so I think the air-to-air problem so now it's the integrated collision avoidance system but these are the kinds of capabilities you know I wouldn't call them a high I mean they're very sophisticated models you know of the aircraft dynamics coupled with the terrain models to be able to predict when essentially the pilot is doing something that is going to take the aircraft into or the pilots not doing something in this case but those it just gives you an example of how autonomy can be really a lifesaver in today's world it's like a autonomous emerges automated emergency braking in cars but is there any exploration of perception of for example detecting G lock that the pilot has is out so as opposed to perceiving the external environment to infer that the pilot is out but actually perceiving the Pala directly yeah this is one of those cases where you'd like to you know not take action if you think the pilots there and it's almost like systems that try to detect if a drivers falling asleep on the road right with limited success so I mean this is what I call the system of last resort right where if the if the aircraft has determined that it's going into the terrain get it out of there and and this is not something that we're just doing in the in the aircraft world and I wanted to highlight we have a technology we call matrix but this is developed at sikorsky innovations the whole idea there is what we call optimal piloting so not optional piloting or unpiloted but optimal piloting so an FAA certified system so you have a high degree of confidence it's generally pretty deterministic so if we know that I'll do in different situations but effectively be able to fly mission with two pilots one pilot no pilots and and have if you can think of it almost as like a dial of the level of autonomy that you want but able so it's running in the background at all times and able to pick up tasks whether it's you know sort of autopilot kinds of tasks or more sophisticated path planning kinds of activities to be able to do things like for example land on an oil rig you know in the North Sea in bad weather zero zero conditions and you can imagine of course there's a lot of military utility to capability like that you know you could have an aircraft that you want to send out for a crewed mission but then in the at night if you want to use it to deliver supplies in an unmanned mode that that could be done as well and so there's there's there's clear advantages there but think about on the commercial side you know if you're an aircraft taking you're gonna fly out to this oil rig if you get out there and you can't land then you gotta bring all those people back reschedule another flight pay the overtime for the crew that you just brought back because they didn't get where they're gonna pay for the or for the folks that are out there and the oil rig this is real economic you know these are dollars and cents kinds of advantages we're bringing in the commercial world as well so this is a difficult question from the a space that I would love it if we're able to comment so a lot of this autonomy in AI you've mentioned just now as this empowering effect that one is the last resort it keeps you safe the other is there's a with the teaming and in general assistive assistive AI and I think there's a there's always a race so the world is full of the world is complex it's full of bad actors so there's there's often a race to make sure that we keep this this country safe right but with AI there is a concern as a slightly different race there's a lot of people in the eye space they're concerned about the AI arms race that as opposed to you the United States becoming you know having the best technology and therefore keeping us safe we even we loose ability to keep control of it so this the AI arms race getting away from all of us humans so do you share this worry do you share this concern when we're talking about military applications that too much control and decision-making capabilities giving too after AI well I don't see it happening today and in fact this is something from a policy perspective you know it's obviously a very dynamic space but the Department of Defense has put quite a bit of thought into that and maybe before talking about the policy I'll just talk about some of the why and you alluded to it being a sort of a complicated and a little bit scary world out there but there's some big things happening today you hear a lot of talk now about a return to great powers competition particularly around China and Russia with the US but there are some other big players out there as well and what we've seen is the deployment of some very I'd say concerning new weapon systems you know particularly with Russia and breaching some of the irbm intermediate range ballistic missile treaties that's been in the news a lot you know the building of Islands artificial islands in the South China Sea by the Chinese and then arming those Islands the annexation of Crimea by Russia and the invasion of Ukraine and so there's there's some pretty scary things and then you add on top of that the North Korean threat has certainly not gone away there's a lot going on in the Middle East with Iran in particular and we see this global terrorism threat has not abated right so there are a lot of reasons to look for technology to assist with those problems whether it's AI or other technologies like hypersonic search which we discussed so now let me give just a couple of hypotheticals so people react sort of in the second timeframe right you know your photon hitting your eye - you know movement is you know on the order of a few tenths of a second kinds of processing times roughly speaking you know computers are operating in the Nano second timescale right so just to bring home what that means a nanosecond to a second is like a second to 32 years so seconds on the battlefield in that sense literally our lifetimes and so if you can bring in autonomous or AI enabled capability that will enable the human to shrink maybe you've heard the term the Gouda loop so this whole idea that a typical battlefield decision is characterized by observe so information comes in orient how does that what does that mean in the context decide what do I do about it and then act take that action if you can use these capabilities to compress that Oda loop to stay inside what your adversary is doing that's an incredible powerful force on the battlefield that's a really nice way to put it at the role of AI and competing in general has a lot to benefit from just decreasing from thirty two years to one second as opposed to on the scale of seconds and minutes and hours making decisions that humans are better at thinking and it actually goes the other way too so that's on the short timescale so humans kind of work in the you know one second two seconds to eight hours after eight hours you get tired you know you gotta go to the bathroom whatever the case might be so there's this whole range of other things think about you know surveillance and guarding you know facilities think about moving material logistics sustainment a lot of these what they called old dirty and dangerous things that you need to have sustained activity but it's sort of beyond the length of time that a human can practically do as well so there's this this range of things that are critical in military and defense applications that AI and autonomy are particularly well suited to now the interesting question that you brought up is okay how do you make sure that stays within human control net so that was the context for now the policy and so there is a DoD directive called 3009 because that's the way we name stuff in this world and and but it you know and I'd say it's well worth reading it's only a couple pages long but it makes some key points and it's really around you know making sure there's human agency and control over use of semi autonomous and autonomous weapon systems making sure that these systems are tested verified and evaluated in realistic real world type scenarios making sure that the people are actually trained on how to use them making sure the systems have human-machine interfaces that can show what state they're in and what kinds of decisions they're making making sure that you establish doctrine and tactics and techniques and procedures for the use of these kinds of systems and so right and by the way I mean the this none of this is easy but it I'm just trying to lay kind of the picture of how the US has said this is the way we're going to treat AI and autonomous systems that it's not a free-for-all and like there are rules of war and rules of engagement with other kinds of systems think chemical weapons biological weapons we need to think about the same sorts of implications and this is something that's really important for Lockheed Martin I obviously we are 100% complying with our customer and the policies and regulations but I mean AI is an incredible enabler say within the walls of Lockheed Martin in terms of improving production efficiency and doing helping engineers doing generative design improving logistics driving down energy costs I mean there's so many application but we're you know we had we're also very interested in so many elements of ethical application you know within Lockheed Martin so we need to make sure that things like privacy is is taken care of that we do everything we can to drive out bias in AI enabled kinds of systems that we make sure that humans are involved in decisions that were not just delegating accountability to algorithms and so it for us you know it all comes back I talked about culture before and it comes back to sort of the Lockheed Martin culture and our core values and so it's pretty simple for us and do what's right respect others perform with excellence and now how do we tie that back to the ethical principles of will govern how AI is used within Lockheed Martin and we actually have a world so you might not know this but they're actually awards for ethics programs Lockheed Martin's had a recognized ethics program for many years and this is one of the things that our ethics team is working with our engineering team on one of the miracles to me perhaps a layman again I was born in the Soviet Union so that I have echoes at least in my family history of World War two and the Cold War give a sense of why human civilization has not destroyed itself their nuclear war so nuclear deterrence and the thinking about the future there's this technology of a role to play here and what is the long-term future of nuclear deterrence look like yeah it's you know this is one of those hard hard questions and I should note that Lockheed Martin is you know both proud and privileged to play a part in multiple legs of our nuclear and strategic deterrent systems like the Trident submarine launched ballistic missiles you know you talk about you know is there still a possibility the human race could destroy itself I'd say that possibility is real but interestingly in some sense I think the strategic deterrence have prevented the kinds of you know incredibly destruct the world wars that we saw in the first half of the 20th century now things have gotten more complicated since that time and since the Cold War is more of a multipolar great powers world today just to give you an example back then you know there were you know in the in the Cold War timeframe just a handful of nations that had ballistic missile capability by last count and this is a few years old there's over 70 nations today that have that similar kinds of numbers in terms of space-based capabilities so so the world has gotten more complex and more challenging and the threats I think have proliferated in ways that we didn't expect you know the the nation today is in the middle of a recapitalization of our strategic deterrent I look at that as one of the most important things that our nation can do what is involved in deterrence is it is it being ready to attack or is it the defensive systems that catch attacks a little bit of both and so it's a complicated game theoretical kind of program but ultimately we are trying to prevent the use of any of these weapons and the theory behind prevention is that even if an adversary uses a weapon against you you have the capability to essentially strike back and do harm to them that's unacceptable and so that will deter them from you know making use of these weapon systems the deterrence calculus has changed of course with you know more nations now having these kinds of weapons but I think you know from my perspective it's very important you know to maintain a strategic deterrent you have to have systems that you will know you know will work when they're required to work you know that they have to be adaptable to a variety of different scenarios in today's world and so that's what this recapitalization of systems that were built over in previous decades making sure that they are appropriate not just for today but for the decades to come so the other thing I'd really like to note is strategic deterrence has a very different character today you know we used to think of weapons of mass destruction in terms of nuclear chemical biological and today we have a cyber threat we've seen examples of the use of cyber weaponry and if you think about the possibilities of using cyber capabilities or an adverse attacking the us to take out things like critical infrastructure electrical grids water systems those are scenarios that are strategic in nature to the survival of a nation as well so that is the kind of world that we live in today and you know part of my hope on this is one that we can also develop technical or technological systems perhaps enabled by a and athon imme that will allow us to contain and to fight back against these kinds of new threats that were not conceived when we first developed our strategic deterrence yeah I know that Lockheed is involved in cyber I saw I studied that you mentioned that it's an incredibly a nuclear almost seems easier than cyber because there's so many attack by there's so many ways that cyber can evolve it's such an uncertain future but talking about engineering with the mission I mean in this case that you're engineering systems that basically saved the world well like like I said we were privileged to deuce to work on some very challenging problems for for very critical customers here in the US and with our allies abroad as well Lockheed bills both military and non-military systems and perhaps the future of Lockheed may be more in non-military applications if you talk about space and beyond I see that as a preface to a difficult question so President Eisenhower in 1961 in his farewell address talked about the military-industrial complex and that it shouldn't grow beyond what is needed so what are your thoughts on those words on the military-industrial complex on the concern of growth of their developments beyond what may be needed that what where it may be needed is a critical phrase of course and and I think it is worth pointing out as you noted that Lockheed Martin we are in a number of commercial businesses from energy to space to commercial aircraft and so I wouldn't and I wouldn't neglect the importance of those parts of our business as well I think the world is dynamic and you know there was a time it doesn't seem that long ago to me it was I was a graduate student here at MIT and we were talking about the peace dividend at the end of the Cold War if you look at expenditure on military systems as a fraction of GDP were far below peak levels of the past and to me at least it looks like a time where you're seeing global threats changing in a way that would warrant you know relevant relevant investments in defense defensive capabilities the other thing I'd note for military and defensive systems it's it's not quite a free market right we don't sell to you know people on the street and that warrants a very close partnership between I'd say the customers and the people that design build and maintain these systems because of the very unique nature the the very difficult requirements the very great importance on you know safety and then you know operating the way they're intended every time and so that does create and it's frankly it's one of Lockheed Martin's great strengths is that we have this expertise built up over many years in partnership with our customers to be able to design and build these systems that meet these very unique mission needs yeah because building those system is very costly it's very little room for mistake I mean it's yeah just been Rich's book and so on just tells the story it's never I can just reading it if you're an engineer it's reads like a thriller okay let me let's go back to space for say I guess I'm always happy to go back to space so a few quick may be out there a fun questions maybe a little provocative what are your thoughts on the efforts of the new folks SpaceX and you know musk what are your thoughts about what Elon is doing you see Miss competition do you enjoy a competition Oh what are your thoughts yeah first of all certainly you on I'd say SpaceX and some of the and some of those other ventures are definitely a competitive force in the in the space industry and do we like competition yeah we do and we think we're very strong competitors I think it's yeah competition is what the US is founded on and in a lot of ways and always coming up with a better way and I I think it's really important to continue you know have fresh eyes coming in new innovation I do think it's important to have level playing fields and so you want to make sure that that you're not giving different requirements to different players but you know I tell people you know I spent a lot of time he places like MIT I'm going to be at the MIT beaver work Summer Institute over the weekend here and I tell people this is the most exciting time to be in the space business in my entire life and it is this explosion of new capabilities that have been driven by things like the you know the massive increase in computing power things like the massive increase in comms capabilities advanced and additive manufacturing are are really bringing down the barriers to entry in this field and it's driving just incredible innovation and it's happening at startups but it's also happening at Lockheed Martin may not realize this but Lockheed Martin working with Stanford actually built the first cubes that was launched here out of the u.s. that was called quakes and we did that with stellar solutions this right around just after 2000 I guess and so we've been in that you know from the very beginning and you know I I talked about some of these like you know Maya and Orion but you know we're in the middle of what we call smart sets and software-defined satellites that can essentially restructure and re map their purpose their mission on orbit to give you almost unlimited flexibility for these satellites over their lifetimes so those are just a couple of examples but yeah this this is a great time to be in space absolutely so Wright brothers flew for the first time 116 years ago so now we have supersonic stealth planes and all the technology we've talked about what innovations obviously you can't predict the future but do you see Lockheed in the next hundred years if you take that same leap how will the world of technology engineering change I know it's an impossible question but nobody could have predicted that we could even fly a hundred and twenty years ago so what do you think is the edge of possibility that we're going to be exploring the next I don't know that there is an edge I you know we've been around for almost that entire time right the Lockheed brothers and Glenn L Martin starting their companies you know basement of a church and a old you know service station we're very different companies today than we were back then right and that's because we've continuously reinvented ourselves over the all of those decades I think it's fair to say yeah I know this for sure the world of the future it's going to move faster it's going to be more connected it's going to be more autonomous and it's going to be more complex than it is today and so this is the world you know as a CTL Lockheed Martin that I think about what are the technologies that we have to invest in whether it's things like AI and autonomy you know you can think about quantum computing which is an area that we've invested in to try to stay of these technological changes and frankly some of the threats that are out there I mean I believe that we're going to be out there in the solar system that we're gonna be defending and defending well against probably you know military threats that nobody has even thought about today we are going to be we're going to use these capabilities to have far greater knowledge of our own planet the depths of the oceans you know all the way to the upper reaches the atmosphere and everything out to the Sun into the edge of the solar system so so that's what I look forward to and I I'm excited I mean just looking ahead in the next decade or so to the steps that I see ahead of us in that time I don't think there's a better place to end K okay thank you so much Lexus been a real pleasure and sorry it took so long to get up here glad we're able to make it happen you