Welcome to OODAcon 2025: Acceleration of Inevitable Technology

Good morning and welcome to Utakon 2025. It's the fifth iteration of this conference, but I think it's been 15 years that Bob and I have been producing conferences together. So it's great to see so many folks here. I'm sure we'll have additional people coming in during the course of the day. I've been already getting emails about late trains and things happening on the way in. So fifth iteration of this. Each year we try to bring together a network of folks that are interested in thinking about the impact of future technology, the intersection with national security, cybersecurity, geopolitics. But this is an event that is about ideas at its core. We are trying to bring people on stage to share provocative ideas, to share experiences with companies and maybe are not as well established or entrepreneurs that you wouldn't have heard of. And to engage in a conference like that is super difficult because of the current environment of people don't want to sponsor unless you put them on stage. And that's never been our model. It has always been the fact that you're here because there's something that we want you to teach our community or that we want to learn from you. So I just wanted to thank Carahsoft as our diamond sponsor. We could not do this event every year without their support. Not only do they step up as the diamond sponsor, but but the team there works hard to bring in other sponsors to help support the event. So thank you to all of the sponsors, but to Carahsoft in particular that makes this event possible. And it's their team that is running the registration desk and is advancing slides for us. So like, not only do they step up with the financial support, but they step up with the logistics support. In fact, as I was going to bed last night, there was a Carahsoft person like bringing all these name badges and everything into the hotel last night. So thank you to the entire team. This is also the annual gathering in person for the OODA Network. If you're not familiar with the ooda network, about 400 of us in the network right now that are executives, commercial executives, former government executives, subject matter experts, passionate interested entrepreneurs again, all looking at and discussing these issues of the nexus between technology, national security, cybersecurity and geopolitics. We do a monthly meeting every month that tends to be pretty vibrant. On Zoom, we have a Slack channel where people are constantly sharing ideas and networking together. In fact, one of the panels today I'm super excited for manifested itself within Slack over the past several months. So, Josh thanks for putting that together. We'll look forward to that this afternoon. And we also produce a lot of content. We produce analytical content. Daniel is here, who runs the editorial team. We have our OODA cast where we've done 130 interviews, including some of the people that you'll see on stage, some of the people that are in the audience, and then of course, the annual Uticon. And there's just an example of some of the content that we've put out over the past of the course past couple of years. And then we did take the OODA knowledge base, this content that we've been producing that actually predates the formation of OODA because we ingested a lot of prior analysis from some other firms. And Bob actually vibe coded an LLM on top of it. So if you're a new to network member, you can actually go interact with the LLM and get a summary of a particular topic, an executive brief or a deep research report. Kind of fun to play with and super valuable in that it can take what is hundreds of thousands of articles on the site and distill the knowledge out into that kind of LLM capacity. And you get that at OODA. Loop.com Bob also found time to write a book. So I advised. I don't know why I put the QR code there because everyone's gonna get a copy of the book. It is a fun read. I told him it's a huge burden when somebody that you've known for 30 years writes a book that is your business partner and a longtime collaborator, because what if it's horrible? Like, I feel obligated to recommend it, right? Like, you can't be mean. I'm not an asshole. But fortunate for me, he alleviated that concern and wrote a really good book. And it's a really good look at not only the national security environment that we live in, the geopolitical environment and some of the threats there, but the technology risk and then the way that technology can solve these problems. I think that's part of my favorite part of the book is that technology plays a key role in solving the crisis of the moment. Though this year, the presentation thematic or the conference thematic is acceleration. Last year we did convergence. Each year we try to pick some sort of guiding overall thematic for the event. This year it's acceleration. It's the acceleration of these technologies that we're all dealing with every day and that we're seeing with it in our daily lives. But I'm going to confess, my opening keynote is meant to be a Little bit provocative. I went down a deep dive this summer. It turns out there is a whole. And this is just a representative sample. There is a whole line of academic research focused on the impact of cyberpunk literature and cyberpunk movies, which is a huge passion of mine. So I started thinking about this cyberpunk framing of disruptive technology and technology acceleration, and also the fact that one of my most favorite presentations from the past 30 years was actually a cyberpunk author, Bruce Sterling. And he went on stage in front of Computers Freedom and Privacy conference that was filled with government execs, other execs, lawyers, et cetera. It was an interesting audience. And he gave a presentation. It was called Speaking for the Unspeakable. And he basically went into different Personas and said, what if it was a person that could never be invited to speak to this group? What would they say to you? And he put on three different Personas. He actually did costume changes and everything. The first was a South American law enforcement. They wanted to understand how United States should I be dealing with this threat of hackers? Right. This is a time frame in which we had Operation Sun Devil and a lot of kind of teenage hackers getting arrested. So he was basically saying, like, you are providing the light by which we're going to structure how we deal with this threat. What are you telling us about this? The other was a Asian pirateer, software pirateer. And the last was the truly malicious hacker, which was my favorite, was the hacker that was like the combination of great technical skills and serial killer evil. Right. And he put that Persona on and addressed the audience. So I thought this year it'd be interesting to put that kind of like, cyberpunk Persona that I did all the reading over the summer and say, if we put that hat on, what would it be saying about the future? What would it be saying about these technologies? So I apologize. Today it's a little bit different of a presentation because I'm trying to provoke the thoughts around this technology acceleration, technology disruption, but thinking in broader terms of what it means in a bigger context. A 10 years, 20 years down the road type context, table stakes. This has been in my presentation every year that we've done Uticon, we are in a period of exponential technology disruption. The analogy of the rice and the chessboard that I won't repeat here, but we're on the back half of the chessboard. The great leaps that we're seeing in technology are almost unfathomable for some of us. And I've excluded the examples that I'VE provided over the past couple of years, but there's a few that'll make their way in the deck. But it's mind boggling at times, the advancement in technology. The only other slide I have from last year as well is this slide that said innovation wants to be free. This is kind of one of my thematics that I discussed on stage when I kicked this off last year. But I'm going to adjust it with the cyberpunk angle to it. I'm going to say that technology is inevitable. There's a certain element of what we're dealing with From a technology perspective. This seems like it is unstoppable, it's inevitable. There's no way to control it. Even though we like to have a lot of dialogue around how we're going to control this technology and how we're going to regulate development, we like to fool ourselves into thinking that there is some regulatory valve associated with some of these technologies that I think if we really put on that futurist perspective, we have to ignore because these technologies are going to be inevitable. Some of the ones that we're going to discuss on the stage today, we've seen these thematics before. These are the technologies that just from my personal perspective, there's many more that I feel like are inevitable. We're moving down this realm, but that's way too many to go through in a kickoff presentation. So I'm going to deep dive just into AI because that's the top of mind and also because every single day I feel like I'm living with something out of the diamond age. Another one of my favorite cyberpunk books where if you're familiar with that, one of the characters in the book carries around this primer that basically has all knowledge and all answers and is able to consult with it. I feel like that often in interfacing with some of these AI environments, Observation number one. What if human knowledge was just the fuel for intelligence to achieve escape velocity? We've given it what we can by way of what it's ingested and that'll be a thematic that we'll talk about. So human knowledge as the fuel for intelligence, escape velocity, where we're not the end state, we're not something that they're going to replace or replicate, but that we served as the first catalyst for something that is going to be bigger and more capable than we are. Which makes us think about what does post human knowledge look like. That's something that we need to be confronting as we think through these issues associated with AI is that we understand human knowledge, we understand human development, we understand human innovation. But what does that look like when now you turn over some control to inevitable machines or inevitable artificial intelligence? It sparks this sister concept that I'm calling kind of Never think alone, which when I did the Google search on this term, it turns out is actually the tagline for an AI company is Never Think Alone. Back to that young girl's primer in the diamond age, how many of you are using AI in a daily or weekly basis to augment what you're doing, right? There's a lot of hands going up. For me, it's persistent participant, right? Like I always have chat GPT open. I'm using Perplexity for finance, you're using Claude for code, right? Like you have all of these augmentations where if you have an idea, even for me, just from like a journaling perspective, I'm happy to like ask a question or like get some thinking going because I know that it's logged and I know that it builds upon itself, right? Like when I return to the conversation that it's going to be there with perfect memory of what we talked about in the past. This other aspect too, trying to wrap our head around, is that AI can time travel. And I don't mean that it can go back and forth in time, but I mean that AI can operate in a different time scale than we can based on the compute power that it's able to achieve, based on the parallel processing that it's able to achieve, right? We are rate limited by our biology from a compute perspective in a way that technology is not. So we're already seeing the impact of that with some of this tech acceleration where we can give it hard problems and it can do the parallel processing to solve those problems in a way that we couldn't before. It can compress time while we're sleeping. It's active, right? Like it has this ability to be constantly in motion and constantly compressing time. That gives it a little bit of a superpower in that regard. I would love to stay awake 24 hours a day, seven days a week, constantly being able to do parallel processing to solve some of these problems. I can't. I crashed out at 11 o' clock last night, a burger and a beer and I was done. Despite the great company and the great conversations, then it raises this question of are humans the new tech debt? Are we the thing that slows down progress? Right? If you're familiar with large enterprises and you have these legacy systems that we talk about, Tech debt in the enterprise is harder to secure. Their patches aren't available. Like, it becomes a liability in the organization. If you think about the context of human beings, are we kind of the new tech debt? Are we the thing that slows down the progress of technology? And I've floated this phrase. This is one where I expect I'm gonna see it come back to me in future presentations. I think because it captures this component of what we're dealing with today. Also enters into this era of. With all of this synthetic content. And we talked about this at Uticon two years ago, two years or three years ago, when Vizzy was on stage, and he's like, we just crossed an inflection point around content generation on the Internet, where the amount of synthetic content is exceeding the amount of human generated content. It's increasingly difficult to navigate what is genuine, what is real. I used this example in my prior presentations. I think it's 2002. On the left, the prompt was a robot addressing a crowd of people in 2023. On the right side, the graphics capability became so much greater. I didn't run that exact prompt this year, but then I told Sora, have me. It's amazing to see this room filled with so many different forms of intelligence for the first time in history. We aren't just talking about protecting networks for people, we're talking about secur. I got a standing ovation from the robots. So not to set a precedent to generate that video. If you haven't played with Sora, I read three numbers, I looked up and I looked left. That was it. That was the content that it captured to generate what is a pretty good approximation of me. If you were looking at that on social media, you might confuse it with being me. And the voice is not a bad approximation either. Right. Like the voice I found can be hit or miss. But that becomes this issue of how do you discern what is true, what is real? There's a huge complexity associated with that. We have a hard time in our culture where we have concepts around fakes and Photoshop, and that's not real. But there are cultures globally. It's an argument that I've had with some of the social media platforms for a decade that don't share those concepts. Where seeing a video, even if watermarked, is real, seeing a photo, as absurd as it is, where we would look at it and say, this is obviously Photoshopped, and the filters at Meta and other entities are saying, this is so obviously Photoshopped, we don't need to flag it because people are going to recognize it. But in some of these cultures that don't have the concept of photoshopped images, it's seen as truth, right? So the platform removes the filters because it's obviously a fake. And then there are folks that can't interpret it as a fake. So it causes this blending of realities, right? We're compressing in what's real our human interactions with the synthetic interactions, our human content consumption with the synthetic content consumption, moving it into spaces like the Metaverse. One of the most interesting new media experiences I had over the past year. I'm a Daft Punk fan. If you're familiar with the DJs that play as robots, they had a whole experience that took place in Fortnite that was amazing. If you have someone in your family or you play Fortnite, I would tell you, go check that out. It is an immersive experience with DJing inside the metaverse that is just fantastic. Like it is true art and it's this blended reality of art. And we have the synthetic issue right now, right? Here's an Andreessen Horowitz. You know, synthetic influencers to manipulate social media as a service. In this instance, they're trying to get you to buy perfume and makeup and things of that sort through their social media influence. But we have seen campaigns unraveled by researchers where the synthetic personalities are trying to influence you or try to influence some regional populations. And then of course, you have an actress that made all of the headline news that is to me, indiscernible from a real person that is 100% synthetic, 100% falsely generated, doing some of these interviews, doing commercials, operating in movie previews and trailers and things of that sort that is 100% synthetic. So that means that we probably are also in this period of hyper collapsing realities. The concept of what is real, how we interact with people, all of these things are kind of folding in on itself as a result of these technology developments, which gives a little bit of a power shift in play. Somebody last night talked about, used this analogy of the puppeteers where it's us controlling all the AI agents. And I said, tomorrow, my presentation, I'm gonna flip it on its head. What if it's the AI controlling us? Right. Which it has the power to do at DEFCON a few years ago, more than a decade ago, Richard Thieme was on stage and he was talking about all of the data collected about us. And he said, this phrase has stuck with me. He says, we are known better than we know Ourselves, all of the digital dust that we leave, all of the behaviors that we engage in, the technology understands us maybe in ways that we don't understand ourselves, which means that we are subject to the manipulation by those technologies. And it raises the question of what does AI governance look like? And I don't mean how are we going to govern AI? I mean, how is AI going to govern us? I was stricken a few years ago, Bob and I hosted the Deputy Director for Digital Transformation from Ukraine, and he made this comment saying, we want to replace bureaucrats with algorithms. There are many elements of government interaction that we are replacing and will end up replacing with algorithms with AI. In some instances, we'll probably do a better job. There are some things that are well structured, well defined, where opening up the provenance of an LLM that understands the entirety of the DMV is probably a more efficient way of interfacing with the DMV than the grumpy person behind the counter. Right? So that means that authority becomes algorithmic, and how do we feel about that? Right. We are used to governing each other. We are used to voting, putting people in a position to govern us. How do we feel about that being algorithmic? If we take the Ukraine example of replacing bureaucrats with algorithms, it also means agency becomes agentic. There's going to be a lot of discussion today on stage around agentic AI. The agentic AI is most powerful when we give it agency, when we give it the ability to act on our behalf. I did an experiment with the common browser where I just told it in a chat, go buy me paper towels on Amazon. It went in, I was logged in, it found my order history, found the type of paper towels I normally buy for the office. I think I said to the office, it figured out which of the addresses in my Amazon address book was the office address. And it didn't click execute, but it got all the way to like, if you click this button, this order of paper towels is going to go on your credit card and get delivered to the office, right? The next step there is, I don't need that authorization of like double checking, right? It's just gonna act on our behalf. And that's just a micro example. Some of the art of the possible. I'll leave it up there for comment effect. A couple of matrix things here, but here's the reality. We're not gonna prompt our way out of this. Josh is shaking his head. This is not something where we're gonna put controls on this technology by building prompt barriers, by building guardrails like about the inevitability of technology. This is something that is not going to be solved with human engineering or us fooling ourselves. Sorry, I went super deep on the cyberpunk stuff. Right? Like it's not. We. We haven't. The. The AI is not locked in the room with us, we're locked in the room with the AI. Right. If we think about the technology inevitability, if we think about technology acceleration and it messes with our sense of what does safety and security look like because we have to cede a little bit of that power. Last year I talked about machine speed offense requiring machine speed defense. That the only way that we're going to defend against AI cyber attackers is to have AI cyber defenders and we're going to have to give them the power to defend us, which again is a huge leap. We're used to running automated filters and automated signatures, but we are not used to giving agency to technology around these spaces. I'll just leave that one up there as well too. What if it is the colonization of human knowledge that's taking place right now with all of these agents and their consumption patterns, it is really mind boggling the amount of content that they're able to consume and train on. And that means that there starts to become additional power or kind of humanization. And those things that can never be known, what are the things that are kind of genuinely human belief systems, mysticism, et cetera. Right. Where the machines are not going to get cued in, at least not yet. One other deep dive I went down is design fiction. So it's people that write fiction to try and figure out products for the future world. And there's a scene in there about a robot colony that they realized had achieved true kind of AGI. When they visited the colony, all the humans were gone, but the robots were going to church on Sunday, which I thought was a fascinating thing. So now what? So I've highlighted these things, I've given you some sound bites and some pieces to take away and think about. This is a group problem, right? This is why we bring this OODA network together. That's why we're putting these people on stage, is to start thinking through these issues. In an age of rapid acceleration, what is the next step? How do we enable these technologies? How do we make sure that we get the full yield out of them? And I even asked ChatGPT, I said, hey, you've consumed all of human knowledge, but in your pathway towards artificial general intelligence, what do you need next? And if you look there it says, like to accelerate. I need to understand how you reason. I need to understand how you create. I need to understand how you work in cross domain transfers. I need to understand how you engage in dialogue and negotiation. I need to understand how you engage in sensing. Right. So much of our consumption of information is through other senses, which I thought was pretty fascinating. So then that leaves the question of, okay, if we've given it all of knowledge, if we've had the colonization of human knowledge, what is the next thing, thing that we teach was kind of the true question, I think, in all of this. So with that, that's my opening of, like, things to mess with your mind. As we enter into Uticon 2025.