WASHINGTON AI NETWORK PODCAST HOSTED BY TAMMY HADDAD Ep. 18 - DAVID IGNATIUS

Tammy Haddad: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Washington A. I. Network podcast. I'm Tammy Haddad, the founder of the Washington AI Network, where we bring together official Washington DC insiders and AI experts who are challenging, debating, and just trying to figure out the rules of the road for artificial intelligence. This special episode features a keynote interview with legendary Washington Post columnist and bestselling author David Ignatius. Tammy Haddad: The conversation you're about to hear was the opening event at the Special Competitive Studies Project's inaugural AI Expo for National Competitiveness on Tuesday, May 7th in Washington, D. C. Join us as David Ignatius shares his insights on AI, national security, intelligence, and his latest thriller, Phantom Orbit. Tammy Haddad: I hope you enjoy the conversation. Thanks for listening. Tammy Haddad: Hi, everyone. [00:01:00] How are you? Come on. David Ignatius is here. Okay, I'm going to say it again. David Ignatius is here. Come on now. Unbelievable. We snatched him off the set of Morning Joe. David Ignatius: Even my late mother could not have done that better. Thank you very much. Tammy Haddad: It is so good to have you here, and everyone, thank you for joining us. This is the first AI Expo for National Competitiveness. Welcome all of you. David, there are 13, 000 people here today. We are the Washington AI Network. We are bringing people together to talk about innovation, all the different issues around AI. And it's so nice for Eric Schmidt and the Special Competitive Studies Project to put this all together so we can be here. Tammy Haddad: Eric. So thank you to all of them. David Ignatius: So let me give my thanks. There are people who think that Washington's run by the NSC or [00:02:00] the Office of Management and Budget. No. Washington's basically run by Tammy Haddad. If you haven't figured that out, Tammy Haddad: I'll take it. David Ignatius: It's time to get on board. It's wonderful to be invited here. I've followed Eric Schmidt's efforts with this conference and the studies that proceeded it. I don't know anybody who's taking national security technology issues more seriously than Eric is. It's really an honor for me as a journalist who writes about this and now as a novelist who's written a novel about space and space weapons to be invited here. So thank you, Tammy. Tammy Haddad: We're thrilled to have you. Thank you, David. And by the way, everyone's getting a book. I've read it. This novel is incredible. But David, we have to start with going on in the Middle East. David Ignatius: Yeah. Tammy Haddad: Can you please give us your take on this possible deal? David Ignatius: So, every time in the 40, gosh, 44 years that I've been covering the Middle East, when you get close to a deal that may work, you get a [00:03:00] spasm of last minute fighting, you get jockeying for position, people reject this set of terms and demand this set of terms. That's sort of part of how negotiations go. So, sometimes everything blows up and you're back to square one. But usually, this is part of the process of tacking toward an agreement. So I hope that's true. What I would say, based on what I know, in this period where drafts are being exchanged, Israel is conducting aggressive negotiation, you might say, with troops entering Rafah or near Rafah, but I, I still, I still see this in the negotiating context, not the all out attack context. The central driver here really is is the United States, and I have to hand it to our CIA director Bill Burns, who has been tireless moving back and forth from Cairo to Doha to Cairo and behind him clearly is President Biden, who wants this ceasefire [00:04:00] agreement in a way that is palpable. So they put the effort in whether they'll get there in the next couple days is impossible to predict. I wrote a column overnight that said, let's not forget that whether they get the cease fire deal or not, what the people of Gaza and Israel need is security and stability. And how do you build that? Because that's gotten too little thought. I mean, we may get hundreds of humanitarian assistance trucks getting into Gaza, but we We, in another day or two, will have a floating port to deliver supplies coming from ships. Who's going to protect all that food and infrastructure equipment as it arrives in Gaza City? You know, where there are disorganized, sometimes armed gangs ready to grab stuff. This is a lawless place. So people need to think about that right now. Tammy Haddad: So U. S. troops are helping build [00:05:00] that? Uh huh. David Ignatius: So U. S. troops are building it, but they will not go into Gaza City. Tammy, I was in Gaza City in, gosh, I guess November. It was the first time the Israelis had let people come in. And I saw this terrible sight that we've all witnessed. And I, just to make it clear what it looks and feels like, we went from one of the Israeli kibbutzes that was overrun, where people were slaughtered. We saw the vehicles of people who just had been forced to abandon their homes. in some of these places, 60 or more people who live there were dead in the space of a few hours. We went from that place where so many were killed into Gaza and saw the effects of the war that inevitably followed that attack. And I have to say, for all the pictures that you've seen, it was nothing for me like actually looking at Gaza City and I couldn't see a building that hadn't been hit by explosives. I saw a column as long as I could see, let's [00:06:00] say it was, nearly a mile, of refugees who were fleeing northern Gaza, Gaza City, heading south. Those are the people, when you read about the people in Rafah who will be displaced, those are the people who are leaving to go to Rafah to flee violence. It's just seeing so many people trying to find their way with Israeli help. With Israeli guns protecting them from fire, making their way toward what they thought was safety. So when I hear our government say we need good plans for the refugees who've gone to Rafa, who've gone south to find a safe place to be, I think of those people trudging each with a suitcase mile after mile to get away from suffering. And I want, I think President Biden's right to say, we need a really clear plan about how these people will be safe. Tammy Haddad: What about Bibi Netanyahu? You wrote this column about the day after and all the years you have covered him. He's not going [00:07:00] anywhere. David Ignatius: So that that's the first thing you'd say about Prime Minister Netanyahu is he is a survivor. I've covered him for so many, so many years. I first met him in 1984, I think, when he was the number two person in the Israeli embassy here. He is a veteran politician. He's dealing with another veteran politician, Joe Biden. Those two are, you know, sometimes are like metal on metal. I'd have to say based on the poll numbers that I read, he's pretty unpopular in Israel. Israelis are not happy with where they are. A lot of questions in the military about the leadership of the campaign. But, I'm not an Israeli citizen, it's not appropriate for me really to offer a lot of comments about who their Prime Minister should be. All I can say from my reporting is, I pick up a lot of dissension, disagreement about the path ahead. I hope, in every country, ours most especially, [00:08:00] needs good leadership. Right now, whoever it is, Israel needs good leadership. Tammy Haddad: What do you know about the hostages? How many are there? How many are alive? David Ignatius: Whenever I ask, Tammy, I'm reminded by Israeli friends that you have to understand that many of the hostages in the larger count are probably dead. So we often talk about 132 maybe. Of those, the living hostages who might come out is a smaller number. I just would be guessing. But that's the first thing that people try to remind us, it's crucial to Israelis to get those bodies back. It's just, it's so heartbreaking when you think about the families and what it's been like for now for seven months to live with the loss of the person you love, but the certainty that the conditions they're living in are nightmarish. I just can't imagine what that'd be like if it was your child, your brother, your sister. So we all pray that that will be resolved. [00:09:00] Tammy Haddad: Is there anything else you think the U. S. government should be doing? David Ignatius: So ,Tammy, I think the, over all these years I've covered the Middle East, the one thing we're good at when we really get it together is helping parties plan for the future. The Camp David Agreements are an example where a president decided., "I'm going to, I'm going to make peace between Israel and Egypt." And he wouldn't let go. He just, he just stuck at it. Jimmy Carter took them all to Camp David and he basically wouldn't let them leave until they got it done. And there's some of that in President Biden's desire to get the ceasefire agreement. For months he's been convinced that the pathway to anything good begins with a ceasefire. So you can begin to deescalate tensions. begin to get humanitarian aid in for people who are near starvation in some cases so you can Begin to relieve Israelis about the threats to their border that all the [00:10:00] things get the hostages home So Israelis aren't grieving. So he's always felt that's the first that's the portal you have to go through for anything else to happen. I think that was a sensible decision, but we've seen how hard it's been. They got the first agreement. I was in Doha and then in Israel to kind of break the stories about that back in the late fall. But then there was this long delay. I think, to put it simply, and then we'll maybe close this, the problem in this war is that wars in the Middle East usually are resolved by a kind of fuzzy agreement where both sides get to claim that they've won. And there's even a, a phrase in French that was always used in Lebanon, Lebanese wars, ni, ni victoire, ni vancu, neither victorious nor vanquished. Well, that's not going to work here. Israelis at every level insist that Hamas must be defeated in the [00:11:00] sense that Hamas cannot run Gaza again. They won't get rid of every Hamas supporter. That's impossible. But, but Hamas should never run Gaza again, and in that sense, they're not seeking a compromise, an ambiguous, fuzzy settlement. They want a victory. And I think people who ignore that, are missing the reality that this one is going to be hard to finesse. And I think that's what's holding up the negotiations right now, is that precise issue. There's a phrase, what is it, uh, Continuing calm or something like that, which is the fuzzy diplomatic phrase. And each side is saying, what does that mean? And it's very hard to say what it means. And that's the problem. Tammy Haddad: That's not in the Georgetown University Foreign Service curriculum, right? David Ignatius: The curriculum tells you how the diplomacy is about ambiguity. This is a situation where, because passions are so high, an ambiguous outcome may not be [00:12:00] satisfactory. Tammy Haddad: I want to turn towards Ukraine and for obvious reasons, and also because in your new novel, Ukraine is sort of the back plate, but AI and this new space warfare plays a key role. Can you tell us more about that? David Ignatius: So let me talk a little bit about technology in Ukraine and how I sometimes describe Ukraine as the first space war. So it's just a fact that. The Ukrainian military could not communicate and coordinate its forces without the broadband signals that Elon Musk's Starlink satellites provide. They have been an essential, uh, means of communication. And that broadband system is used to deliver information of every kind, detailed mapping that, in effect, allows intelligence analysis of where the Russian adversary is. It allows targeting where [00:13:00] coordinates are fed into the system and taken down close to the battlefield. It's just an absolutely essential piece of technology. What I've seen in Ukraine, including in my most recent visit about a month ago, is the range of commercial satellite data that the Ukrainians can draw down, as this audience probably knows far better than I. You've got all these companies, Maxar, Planet X, Capella, go down the list, that are providing imagery of different sorts, optical imagery, thermal imagery, synthetic aperture radar imagery, that can be downloaded commercially. You can dial down, I want these six providers, oh and tomorrow I want eight providers, because I have such a need for fidelity in coverage, and you can just. Get that on your constellation, on your screen, if you're a Ukrainian commander or somebody advising that person. That's a new realm of warfare. You can then obviously apply [00:14:00] AI tools to looking at the data that you've gotten and saying, well, 72 tank in mid that jumble of signals, that's what that is. And then there's a targeting phase that I don't know much about because it's pretty secret. But clearly, the Ukrainians are getting coordinates for targeting. I could go on about all the things that satellites are doing in this war, but I think this war, among other things, is a demonstration, just as the Gulf War in 1991 was a demonstration of what satellites could mean for precision weapons. The whole world saw it, and it changed warfare. So, too, this war is showing the power of these low earth orbit commercial satellites. The Russians have basically said, we think they're fair game for us, because they're so threatening to us. You noticed Mike Turner, the head of the House Intelligence Committee, said in February, demanded a briefing [00:15:00] of the House about what he said was a new Russian national security threat, which turned out to be use of a nuclear weapon in low Earth orbit, just to basically obliterate all those satellites. Starlink has 5, 000 satellites in low earth orbit. Amazon is about to put up its Kuiper system that will have 2000 plus satellites. I mean, low earth orbit is going to be full of these amazing commercial platforms, each satellite with different modular units that we plug, who knows what you can plug into those satellites. So, what are the Russians going to do? They have a problem and they have this really tragically, primitive answer. Let's just detonate everything in low earth orbit and turn it into a garbage heap. Hopefully they're, they're not serious about that. But, as I say, to me, Ukraine tells us that what I tried to say in this book, this is the first satellite war. The book imagines China in 1995 [00:16:00] seeing the future primacy of satellites, but not having any. Thinking how do we penetrate the supply chain for American satellite systems, all the things that go into being able to communicate, upload, download signals going way back. Tammy Haddad: And that's Space Force, right? That's essentially Space Force. David Ignatius: It is now, it's more Space Command, which is a combatant command that has all the different services, just to, at the risk of offending people here from the air force. I would say honestly that the reason we have a U S space force today is because when space was the air force's assignment, the air force just didn't put enough energy in focusing on it. The Air F orce was going to be led by fighter pilots, now, then, forever. And space was a secondary priority. And this happened under President Trump, but I think basically the Trump administration was right to create this. We do need more focus. I hope that Space Force [00:17:00] will attract really the best and the brightest. I was just talking a little earlier about efforts to bring really smart people into government to do these technology things. I know that's one of the things Eric Schmidt is passionate about. But the Space Force is part of that. I mean, the Space Force is recent, Tammy. These problems are not. They go back 20 years. Tammy Haddad: But when you talk about Starlink and Amazon, the hair stands up at the back of my head because it's not government. We're talking about private industry. So what is that relationship as we talk about this new space warfare? David Ignatius: So it's a double edged sword, as it were. The pace of innovation and the United States' the ability to use space has been astounding. I mean, just look at launch costs and the way launch costs, like, you know, one of those charts where it kind of goes along like this and then it goes, pffft. You know, it just, launch costs fell so radically. There was a time when it was so expensive we had to go to Russia to get them to launch our [00:18:00] satellites. We just didn't have the capability. Well, thanks to entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, but many, many others, launch costs fell and fell and it's now just so cheap putting up 5, 000 satellites in orbit. David Ignatius: It's like pretty trivial matter cause it's so cheap. So that's the positive side is that the private sector gives us a dynamism, entrepreneurial spirit, cost cutting that makes all this affordable. It keeps innovating and what you can provide. I listed the number of commercial technology is available from space: electro optical, thermal, S A R, incredible. That happened in the space of five years. The problem is, suppose those entrepreneurs decide, suppose Elon Musk wakes up one morning and says, "You know, I'm sick of these forever wars. You know, this Ukraine thing is going on forever and I've got business to do in China. I gotta, I wanna make and sell Teslas. In China, uh, that's enough. You know, we've had enough of [00:19:00] this." And, decides to pull the plug on Starlink's bandwidth that's essential for the Ukrainian forces. What happens then? That, that is actually a check to prevent that, but that's an example that I'm afraid is all too realistic. When private entrepreneurs are so central, so integrated in national security, they can take their chips and walk away. So that's, I don't, Tammy's going to help them figure that out. Tammy Haddad: Hardly. What about China? I mean, they're in the space race, too. David Ignatius: They're in the space race aggressively. Tammy Haddad: And you give the whole history in this novel. I found it fascinating. David Ignatius: Yes, I did. So I try in this novel to give examples, real examples, of all the things Chinese satellites can do now. How they can observee and then maneuver toward potential capture or disabling of satellites in geocentric orbit. You know, the ones that are most precious. There's a wonderful example that some of you may know of satellites in geo orbit that get tired. You know, the, [00:20:00] solar panels don't work anymore. Get kicked up into what's called the graveyard zone way beyond geo. Well, guess what? There's some Chinese satellites, at least one that was up in the graveyard zone, and everybody said, "Oh, well, that's that's not doing it anymore." And then It came back to life. It started firing up again. It maneuvered back towards orbits that could intercept things of interest. In other words, it was a zombie in the graveyard zone. Holy smokes. So, that's the kind of really interesting puzzle that the Space Force is trying to get its arms around. And it's doing that in the first instance, from what I know, simply by observing space more carefully with satellites in space that can take a look at what's going on, what's up there, what might people be doing. And then there are all kinds of obviously ground systems that are also useful. But, anyway, Tammy, the basic point [00:21:00] is it's so great to have the entrepreneurs, but it's potentially really dangerous to have them because they could walk away. Tammy Haddad: We're going to have time for a few questions. So if someone wants to line up, but I have to talk to you about the FBI director, Christopher Ray, who talked about lone wolf extremists. This is really bringing it back down to the ground, the combination of AI and these extremists. David Ignatius: Scary. Tammy Haddad: Where do you think it goes? Other than to a super scary place. David Ignatius: Chris Ray was asked by Lester Holt in an interview maybe 10 days ago, " what is it that keeps you awake?" And if you remember Donald Rumsfeld's "unknown unknowns," he said, that's it. It's, the known unknowns, the things that we know are threats, but we don't just know the precise, those, I think we, we will figure out a way to deal with it. It's those unknown unknowns. And so, he has been focused. over the last month. And the National [00:22:00] Security Council held a principles committee meeting of the most senior people about 10 days ago to talk about a threat that most of you probably just not on your radar, which is, an offshoot of the Islamic state called Isis K. It's based in Afghanistan. Horsan, as the Islamic State calls it. They were kicked out of Afghanistan by an aggressive Taliban that hates them, that now runs the show in Afghanistan. And that had a negative consequence in CT terms, which is that they, it's like inkblots. They spread into neighboring countries, among them Tajikistan, Uzbekistan. So, this Central Asian Diaspora, if you will, that has been emigrating West, has been a source for recruitment, certainly for propaganda for ISIS K. The U. S. learned of two plots this year, both actually [00:23:00] materialized involving Tajik migrant workers. First was in Iran. Ninety five Iranians were killed in Karman. by Tajik migrants who'd been recruited into this ISIS K network. The US warned Iran had intelligence. This was taking shape, warned Iran. Nothing happened. And then as you know, in March, ISIS K, recruits, most of them Tajiks, in Moscow as immigrant workers, attacked the crocus city hall. shot everybody up and 144 Russians ended up dead. It's just a terrible death toll again. The U. S. gave them a warning in early March. This is coming, even named the place where it would happen, and the Russians couldn't get their minds around how to deal with it. So basically, I could wind this up, Tammy. The thing that's been worrying Director Ray is, we [00:24:00] know that these people have the ambition to do harm to their adversaries, including us. We know that more Central Asians have been moving to the U. S. Mostly for economic reasons, like most migrants. You know, Russia is not a place to go, it's fighting a war, so they've been going by Istanbul, getting to the southern border, crossing the southern border, and coming into the U. S. You ask the Department of Homeland Security, "what's the flow of Central Asian migrants?" "Well," they say, "well, you know, as best we can estimate, in the last year, it's been about 50 a day." That puts it way over 10, 000. You know, it's not an immense universe, but it's pretty big. They know where some people are, they don't know where other people are, and they do know that some of those people, some small group, again, most of these are folks who want to get, have a better life. Don't misunderstand me. But some small portion seem to [00:25:00] have links, and the question now then is, how serious, with facilitators, with people who are known to be part of these ISIS K networks. So that's what's got the government worried. Thank goodness the alarm bells rang loud enough that they pulled everybody together ten days ago and talked about it. I've been surprised, I guess everybody's so focused on the Donald Trump, Stormy Daniels trial with just no bandwidth for thinking about, about all this stuff. But it's, it's something that's worth paying a little attention to. Tammy Haddad: Half the world has elections coming up, right? Literally half the world in addition to the U. S. What worries you most? Is it AI? Is it the leaders that are cracking down? David Ignatius: Elections are character tests. They're character tests of the candidates. You know, what kind of leader would this person be? But they're character tests of the electorate. What values do people have? Do they apply reason [00:26:00] in sensible ways to judging information about the candidates and the issues? And this election, the United States will be a character test. It'll tell us a lot about who we are as a people right now. And I I don't want to be partisan here, but I'll be honest. After his first term, Donald Trump scares me, and so I'll be watching my fellow Americans with interest and concern because I want them to make a good decision. That's not to say Joe Biden's the greatest president in history. It's just to say the risks to me seem pretty significant on one side. But I just It's a character test all around the world. What, you know, what are citizens going to stand up and say, we want to live in free societies? Tammy Haddad: If they live in all these authoritarian regimes already running things, why would they go in the opposite direction? David Ignatius: So, Tammy Haddad: and did you expect this change, this dramatic change? David Ignatius: [00:27:00] So, in a world that's changing fast, the appeal of the Authoritarian leader who says, "This is the way the world is. These are our values. We're gonna stand by them. We're gonna be strong. We're not going to give way to, you know, just defies change and tries to reassure his population," is always a persuasive person. So you see some of that. I've been surprised. The United States, historically, has had populist, demagogic leaders. Our country has always had a pretty good, forgive me, BS detector. You know, we just, you know, we've seen through 150 years, a lot of flamboyant characters, and the country generally said, "Nah, I don't think so." and so we don't seem to be quite in that in that same mode now. So, so that, that concerns me, but I, you know, I'll close this out by saying I'm optimistic that people's reason is not totally degraded by our surroundings. Tammy Haddad: Well, let's hope you're right. Go ahead. Say your [00:28:00] name and where you're from. And please give us your question. Audience member: My name is Cameron. Thank you for being here. I'm in the media lab at CSIS. My question is your recent book about our, our, uh, quantum and this book and this conference being about artificial intelligence. Quantum has a lot to do with about information getting out and the problems that creates artificial intelligence about the information space getting muddled and, problematic. Are these issues we can solve together or they're separate issues and, um, can you speak about the way that we can tackle these issues? David Ignatius: So, you know, they're separate issues in the sense that Quantum is primarily, initially a hardware issue. Can you create qubits that can stay stable enough for more milliseconds that they can actually do some computation before they decohere and lose their quantum properties. And people are working on that really hard. It's a super [00:29:00] complicated problem. But, you know, it will radically change anything that involves computation. AI and large language models are just rolling along regardless of, of whether we get quantum computing or not. Quantum computing would affect large language models, make them even more powerful, even faster, but not the fundamental change. When I ask people, Who really are technologists and designing these most advanced AI systems, whether they think the, rate of learning of large language models will continue to be as fast as it proved over the last several years, I think it really did surprise Sam Altman and all the other gurus just how fast large language models began to learn how to do things and give, give, I was surprised by it, but more to the point, what do I know? They were surprised, and they're the experts. So, when I ask them, [00:30:00] is that going to happen with so called super intelligence, where large language models speak to each other and begin to do things that you can't predict, or AGI, generalized intelligence, sort of human like intelligence, the answers I get tend to be, "I don't know." people really confess to uncertainty because the technology is so powerful and unpredictable. And that gives us, to me, a kind of brave new world sense. We really don't know exactly where we're going, which is a good reason for things like this to get the smartest people in private and public roles together to talk about these technologies. I don't have to say the issues are just so profound, world changing. We better understand them before the models understand us. Tammy Haddad: Okay. Sir, very quickly. Audience member: Can you tell us a little bit about your, um, insights or, um, fears and hopes of the impact of large language models and deep fakes in the media, both positive and [00:31:00] negative, and here and abroad. David Ignatius: Hard to think of the positive applications of deep fakes. I mean, we're, we're thinking of for a newspaper like the Washington Post, which is in the information business, large language models are a way of generating information that could be very useful to our readers, our subscribers, and also to our reporters. And they help open up very complicated questions quickly. But we're really just beginning to think about what applications might make sense. We are gatherers of proprietary information. What you read in the Washington Post, ideally, you didn't read anywhere else, because we got it. So, should we take you down deeper in a vertical sense in the information that we collect? Should our models learn on that? I shouldn't go any further than this, because A, I don't know what I'm talking about, and B, if I did, it'd be proprietary to the Post, so I should shut up. But the simple answer is large language models are part of our [00:32:00] news future. We, at least, just don't know the answer how yet. On DeepFakes, we're spending more and more time on forensics, as is everybody connected with our industry, as is, thank goodness, DARPA and other parts of the U. S. government to make sure that there's some provenance for information so we know something that comes to us, whether it's a photographic image or a voice is real. And we're just entering that era, but we're thinking a lot about it and we're getting some good help. Tammy Haddad: One thing we know for sure is that you wrote this book and you write all your columns. And David, everyone here received a bag and a book. Can you guys take your books out? Wow! Go ahead and take a quick photo before you go. I know you have a very busy day. David Ignatius: That's what every author loves to see, is people holding up his book. Yeah. Tammy Haddad: Okay. So if you guys pull all your books out, there you go. Okay. And then David and I are going to stand. We're going to take a picture with you guys. Can we go, David? Great. David Ignatius: What a nice sight. Tammy Haddad: How good is that, Tammy Haddad: Selfie with the books. David Ignatius: Yep. Okay, [00:33:00] everyone. Tammy Haddad: Join me in thanking David Ignatius. David Ignatius: Thank you. Tammy Haddad: So appreciated. David Ignatius: Thank you, Tammy. Tammy Haddad: Thank you. Good luck today. Bye. Tammy Haddad: Thank you for listening to the Washington AI Network podcast. Be sure to subscribe and join the conversation. The Washington AI Network is a bipartisan forum bringing together the top leaders and industry experts to discuss the biggest opportunities and the greatest challenges around AI. The Washington AI Network podcast is produced and recorded by Haddad Media. Thanks for listening.