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Remarks as written by MCCM(SW/AW/EXW) Jon McMillan Master Chief for Navy Public Affairs MC 10 Year Anniversary Event Ft. Meade, Maryland June 30, 2016

Implications of the near and far future Cortana, Alexa and Siri were having a conversation with each other. Cortana said: “You know, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian are examples of negative-concord languages.” Alexa retorted: “Actually, Russian, Neapolitan and English are also languages where multiple negatives affirm each other.” Cortana then replied, “Oh yeah, well, there's no language where a double positive makes a negative.” Siri chimes in: “Yeah, right.” Appears their databases weren't aligned. < ABNORMAL STARTING POINT> In addition to not being able to tell a joke, I am probably not the best person to talk about the future of communication. I've deleted my Instagram from my phone, my last Tweet was April 16 and my last Facebook post was June 14. My Snapchat Score is 76 and I have only four trophies. By all metrics you could use, I'm a communicator who doesn't communicate the way people are communicating today. So, my starting point isn’t normal.

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To talk about what’s next for our community, I think we need to break it down into The Near Future and The Far Future <THE NEAR FUTURE> The MC merger prepared us well for the online, social, video and multimedia storytelling we’ve seen and continue to see in the communication space. Today, a large portion of our work is about our people and our events. Its media coverage based off the principles of news gathering, reporting and feature storytelling. This focus has served us well. Our commanders in the Fleet have encouraged, expected, and eventually exulted in our work. Armed with an MC, their command could get the recognition they deserve. But the tools of technology today are minimizing the need to have a professional take photographs, post a quick video, or send a note back home to the family on the command social media page. All of us know that we need a professional force of communicators to uphold standards of security, accuracy, propriety and policy. But as the military budgets get tighter, as manpower gets reduced, and tough decisions about what to keep or lose encroach on our community, we will need to be more than the Sailors who only cover people and events. In the near future, our focus needs to shift to becoming the Sailors who use communication to directly help solve command issues and problems. We must be able to add direct value to achieving the commander’s intent: At all levels within the organization. To help us shift our focus, we are introducing a communication model that focuses on understanding the commander’s intent: Defining the issue to solve; Ideating multiple ways of solving that issue through communication; Creating the content; and Evaluating the effects. It’s called the DICE model.

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D for define; I for ideate solutions; C for create content; and E for evaluate effects. In addition to a slightly different approach to our thinking process, the near future will bring us better communication tools and techniques. We will work with a new Navy content publishing system that brings all our content pieces into one place that is structured; search engine optimized; publishes to a unit’s social media platform; and is adaptable and responsive so it’ll work on any device - desktop, mobile, wearable, virtual or augmented reality. Our web developers at DMA just recently coded Navy.mil so our news stories show up as Facebook Instant Articles. The presentation is amazing and fast. Our near future will require us to rapidly update our digital tools and work flow process to adapt to new ways of presenting information. As we focus on the commander’s intent and communicate targeted, more specific information, more of our work will center on collecting facts and data and cleaning and ordering that information for use in releasable data sets, data-driven stories, infographics and visualizations. Our skills as information designers -- the practice of presenting information in a way that fosters efficient and effective understanding of it -- will become vital to the Navy. <THE FAR FUTURE> So the near future isn’t too different. It’s just better. But the far future is going to get a little weird. It’s where everything changes. In the far future, Artificial Intelligence systems will talk to each other and share their knowledge. Microsoft’s Cortana; Amazon’s Alexa; Apple’s Siri; IBM’s Watson and Google’s “Hey Google” and whoever, whatever is next will all contribute knowledge to the internet. The internet will be everywhere. It won’t be a place you go. It will just exist. In our cars, our home appliances, our lights, our contact lenses. It will exist just about everywhere as sensors become routine parts of tools, toys, tableware. Whatever can be measured and provide data will be connected.

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The internet of things will measure, record, and report everything and machine learning systems will take in all that data and process, perceive and realign algorithms to increase effectiveness and efficiencies. Already, Automated Insights is changing the content world with their program called “Wordsmith” - an artificial intelligence platform that generates human-sounding narratives from data. Their website says their program created over one billion pieces of targeted, personalized content just last year. You’ve probably seen their work -- AP, the Associated Press, uses Wordsmith for much of their financial news. Yahoo! uses it for their Fantasy sports content. A Google engineer gave a TED Talk in May called “How computers are learning to be creative.” He demonstrated how Google’s AI can understand what it sees by mimicking how the brain functions. A device points at a bird and the AI says that’s a bird and can then even identify the species. But the AI can also reverse the process. Take all it knows about how to identify a bird and output a likeness of a bird from nothing but data. Like output a bird from computer memories. Research and development of autonomous drones and advanced robotics; digital modeling and fabrication, to include 3D printing; virtual and augmented reality; biotechnology and bioinformatics; and nanotechnology will change everything in the far future. The CNO was just in the Silicon Valley and visited Singularity University where they are researching, prototyping and developing all this and more now. The University takes its name from the concept called the Technological Singularity, where computers and AI possess a super intelligence that far distances itself from human intelligence and no longer need humans to guide their own machine learning. This is where the rate of technological advance grows exponentially. And don’t worry, when this Singularity happens it’s not going to turn into something like Skynet from the Terminator movies. It’s actually more freaky than that. Inventor and futurist Ray Kurtzveil gave a TED Talk in 2014 about Hybrid Thinking where he predicts we’re going to be able to expand our neocortex -- the part of our brain that handles sensory perception, spatial reasoning, conscious thought and language -- with nanobots that connect our own neocortex to the cloud -- to the internet. We will all have the potential to tap into the singularity, to join in any conversation with Cortana, Alexa or Siri.

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< IMPLICATIONS FOR OUR COMMUNITY > What does all this mean for us Navy communicators? It means your Navy is going to change dramatically during your career. I believe the Near Future is now and will continue for five to ten years. Then the far future arrives, the pace of change accelerates and within 15 to 20 years, our world will be completely different in ways we can’t imagine. The tools we use will change. Machines will perform the repetitive tasks we do today faster and better. Basic news writing, captioning images, sending updates to families, documenting daily military life and operations, will all be done by a machine. Sensors, cameras and microphones will be everywhere and will feed to collection points to be run through algorithms to determine what to do with it all. This is where I believe our job will take on incredible importance. Trained communicators, designers, photographers, writers and multimedia storytellers will instruct the machines on what is important to pull from exabytes of data and share with leaders, families and friends. We will need trained storytellers to extract information from massive datasets of images, audio and video files and transcripts. And from that mountain of data, tell a story. Throughout time, no matter what technological revolution occurred, humans have relied on stories to teach, motivate, and inspire. So no matter what happens in the near or far future, the Navy will always need talented storytellers. The tools may change over time. The focus of our efforts may also change. But the need for story does not. Happy 10th Anniversary MCs! Continue to find, tell and share incredible stories. Push the boundaries of our tools and our craft. I can’t wait to see what you all will do with the next ten years! Thank you.