60 Minutes - Sunday, January 13, 2019

Episode Date: January 14, 2019

Venture capitalists say artificial intelligence will displace 40-percent of the world's jobs. Scott Pelley reports. Lesley Stahl introduces us to a blind architect. Plus -- How does the house oversight committee plan on investigating President Trump? Steve Kroft finds out from the committee's new chairman, Elijah Cummings on tonight's "60 Minutes." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. You've asked the White House for a bunch of things. You've asked for documents connected to Jared Kushner's use of private emails, child separation policy at the border. You ever got anything? Nothing. Zero. Nothing. Zero.

That's the point. I don't know if any president has ever done this. None. None. Well, that's about to change. Democratic Congressman Elijah Cummings is now chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, with the constitutional authority to compel testimony, demand documents, and investigate anything, creating new problems for the Trump administration.

Today, artificial intelligence is not as good as you hope and not as bad as you fear. You do believe it's going to change the world? I believe it's going to change the world more than anything in the history of mankind, more than electricity. Kai-Fu Lee believes the best place to be an AI capitalist is communist China. One of Lee's investments is Face++. Its visual recognition system smothered me to guess my age. It settled on 61, which was wrong. I wouldn't be 61 for days.

Chris Downey had constructed the life he'd always wanted. An architect with a good job. Happily married and coaching his 10-year-old son's little league. But then something awful happened. He went blind, and that threatened to end his career. Is that sufficiently different? Oh, yeah. Or did it?

I'm a kid again. I'm relearning so much of architecture. It wasn't about what I'm missing in architecture. It was about what I had been missing in architecture. I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Anderson Cooper.

I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm Bill Whitaker. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. What's your next adventure? Everyone deserves a chance to do what they love. Pacific Life helps you reach financial goals while you go after your personal ones. Plans change over time and your financial solutions can too. Pacific Life has a variety of financial solutions that can help you complement your life goals and passions while managing the uncertainties.

Backed by more than 150 years of experience, you can count on Pacific Life to be there so you can go out and keep living your best life. Pacific Life is one of the most dependable and experienced insurers in the industry and has been named one of the 2019 World's Most Ethical Companies by the Ethisphere Institute. The freedom to go after whatever is next for you? That's the power of Pacific. Ask a financial professional about how Pacific Life can help give you the freedom to do what you love. Or visit www.pacificlife.com. On Thursday, we learned President Trump's former lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, who is headed for prison, will testify in a televised hearing before the House Oversight

and Reform Committee. It marked the beginning of season three of what's been called the Donald Trump reality show, with a fresh plot and new characters ushered in by voters in the midterm election, who gave Democrats control of the House of Representatives. Among the recently empowered is Congressman Elijah Cummings, the new chairman of the House Oversight Committee. It has the constitutional authority to investigate anything it wants, creating serious problems for the Trump administration and making Cummings one of the most powerful people in Washington. We are better than that. Elijah Cummings has been a familiar face on Capitol Hill for a long time,

a respected 13-term Maryland congressman who has served on the Oversight and Reform Committee under four different presidents. And he was handpicked by the Democratic leaders for this job. We are in a fight for the soul of our democracy. And you've got to understand that. This is serious business. You can dismiss the congressman's statement as partisan hyperbole, but part of the government is shuttered. Four of President Trump's former associates are now convicted felons.

Ten of his original cabinet secretaries have left, four under a cloud of scandal. And there are 17 other investigations underway. Will you all please raise your right hand? Not counting the ones that are about to begin in the new Democratic House of Representatives, empowered with the legal authority to compel testimony and demand documents. So how are you going to run this committee? What I'm going to do is I'm going to try to work with the Republicans as I have in the past. You know why? Because that's our job.

And when it comes to subpoena, I know the power of a subpoena. Having practiced laws, in order to do oversight, you've got to have documents, you've got to have e-mails, you've got to have information. For the first two years of the Trump administration, that kind of information was beyond the reach of House Democrats. The power of subpoena belonged exclusively to the Republican majority. As ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee,

Cummings made 64 requests for subpoenas on things like White House security clearances, hurricane relief efforts in Puerto Rico, and the Justice Department's refusal to defend the Affordable Care Act. All of them were blocked by the Republican chairman's refusal to defend the Affordable Care Act. All of them were blocked by the Republican chairman. You've asked the White House for a bunch of things. You've asked for documents connected to Jared Kushner's use of private emails, child separation policy at the border. You've ever got anything?

Zero. Nothing. Zero. That's the point. I don't know if any president has ever done this. Nothing. Zero. That's the point. I don't know if any president has ever done this. None. None. That has ever said, I'm not giving you anything.

For anything. Nothing. But you're sitting here telling me you think somehow miraculously he's going to change. It's not about miraculous. It's about adherence to the Constitution and the American people and the Congress is insisting that he allows us to do our job. Basically, what the president has done and the Republicans have done, they've joined hands. And the Republicans have been basically not only blocking, but become the defense counsel for the president. Okay. But no documents?

I mean, come on. Now, as chairman of the Oversight Committee, Cummings no longer has to consult with the Republicans to issue subpoenas, initiate investigations, or call hearings. And he has a much bigger budget and staff. So will Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Gerald Nadler, chairman of the Judiciary Committee. But their inquiries will be limited to their specific jurisdictions.

Cummings Committee has the authority to investigate anything inside or outside the federal government. We can look at anything. You could look at government. We can look at anything. You could look at interior, you could look at EPA. Anything. But the fact that we can look at anything is part of the problem. There's so much. I'm serious. There's so much.

And you only have two years. Less than that. Actually, less than that, the Congress doesn't meet but so many days in a year. And all I'm saying is that we've got to hit the ground not running but flying. Some Democrats believe Cummings should go for the jugular and push for impeachment. He says it's premature. And he also wants to pursue other issues, especially the high cost of prescription drugs. His staff has already sent out 51 letters to government officials, the White

House, and the Trump Organization, asking for documents related to investigations that the committee may launch. The issues range from the private use of government-owned aircraft by cabinet members, to the flow of foreign money into various Trump enterprises like his hotel in Washington. You think he's making money off this job? Please. A lot of money? A lot of money. And you say the Constitution and the laws say it's not okay?

It's not okay. But this is the other piece. I still believe that people, the average citizen, the guys on my block, they ought to know if the president is making a deal, whether he's making it in his self-interest or that of the country. In response, the White House said these claims are completely baseless, but we cannot comment further about ongoing litigation. Elijah Cummings has been in Congress for 23 years, but he's not a creature of Washington.

This is our parliament district. When he needs to be there, he commutes from his Maryland district an hour's drive to the north, where he represents 700,000 people and most of the city of Baltimore. He was born here 67 years ago to parents with fourth-grade educations who'd been sharecroppers in South Carolina before moving north for a better life. His father worked in a chemical plant. His mother was a domestic. Both were Pentecostal ministers. First it was religion, and then it was education. My father, Steve, had a saying. He told us if you miss one day of school, that meant you died the night before.

And he meant that. I did not miss one second of school between kindergarten and graduating from high school. Not one second. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Howard University before earning a law degree at Maryland. He says he's one of the few congressmen who live in an inner-city, working-class neighborhood. How long have you lived here?

37 years. He says he keeps a campaign poster in the front window so people will know where to find him. So you like to be among your constituents? I like to be among my constituents. Let me tell you something, man. If I don't do well in this block, I'm in trouble. I mean, if you want to take a poll, if I lost in this block, I might as well go. I might as well stay home. When riots broke out in Baltimore three years ago after the death of a young black man, Freddie Gray, who was fatally injured in the back of a police van,

Cummings gained national attention walking the troubled neighborhoods trying to keep the peace. He is part of the city's fabric. This is pretty impressive. Oh, yeah, I love it, man. But now he has stepped onto a much larger stage under the bright lights of the Oversight Committee. Well, I sit here, and the Democrats will be all over here, and the Republicans will be over there. Our hearings can go anywhere from an hour and a half to 11 or 12 hours.

So you've got a good, comfortable chair. I've got a good, comfortable chair. Got a good, comfortable chair. And I got to tell you, Steve, standing here, it just, it sort of gives me chills in a way, because I think about my journey to this chair. After years as the committee's ranking minority member, he is ready to wield the gavel and the subpoena. You've got a lot of power, but you don't have unlimited power. I gavel and the subpoena. You've got a lot of power. But you don't have unlimited power. I mean, and the Republicans are going to put a lot of obstacles in your way.

Sure. I expect that. Now, there's one big elephant that's sitting around here that we don't know what it's going to yield. And that is Mueller's report. I don't know what that report is going to have in it. One thing I do know, though, is whatever it is, even if it if it exonerates the president, fine. But this I do know. I want whatever it is for the Congress to have it. And I want the public to have it so that everybody can make a judgment. Do you think it's possible the Republicans will try and suppress the report?

I hope not, but that's a possibility. But I hope not. I hope they don't. Cummings' Republican foil on the committee is Ohio's Jim Jordan, one of the president's most loyal and enthusiastic supporters. You've known Elijah Cummings for a while. How would you describe your relationship? Well, look, there's not much of anything that Mr. Cummings for a while. How would you describe your relationship? Well, look, there's not much of anything that Mr. Cummings and I agree on policy-wise,

but I certainly respect his toughness, his tenacity. You know, he's demonstrated that he's a fighter, and my background is such that I kind of appreciate that. A founding member of the Freedom Caucus, Congressman Jordan is a one-time college wrestler and coach, still known for his scrappiness. He's seldom seen wearing a jacket and always ready to go to the mat. Taxes have been cut, regulations reduced, economy growing at an unbelievable rate, lowest unemployment in 50 years, 312,000 jobs added last month alone. Gorsuch and Kavanaugh on the court were out of

the Iran deal. The embassy's in Jerusalem. Hostages are home from North Korea. And oh, by the way, there's a new NAFTA agreement. So it's an amazing record. And that's what I know about the two years that we've had Donald Trump as president of the United States. After the midterms, you wrote a letter to the Republicans saying you must valiantly defend the president. Is that your job? My job is getting to the truth. If the president's getting a raw deal, I'm going to defend him. I feel like I would be remiss in this if I didn't point out that truthfulness

has not exactly been President Trump's strongest asset. Well, I mean, Steve, look, this president has probably been attacked more than any president in my lifetime. And here's what I know. Over the last two years, in spite of the unprecedented attacks that have come against President Trump, the last two years have been amazing. Chairman Cummings wouldn't disagree that the past two years have been amazing, but in a much different way. I don't think the other presidents call the lie the truth and the truth the lie.

I'm going to tell you, that's what makes the relationship so difficult. It's hard to trust. You want to believe that if you make an agreement with someone, and I believe that with the other presidents it was this way, their word was their bond. I don't know how to compare. I don't, and I'm not trying to be smart.

We're a new territory here. Yes, it's a new territory. The new territory now includes a beefed-up White House counsel's office. It's added more than a dozen new lawyers to fight what it anticipates will be a barrage of requests and subpoenas from Congress. What happens if you issue a bunch of subpoenas and the administration doesn't respond or invokes executive privilege? We probably will end up in the courts. And one of the interesting things about the courts is that our president has been making sure that some of the most conservative judges are being appointed to the federal bench. And I think he relies on that. And I think that he assumes that the courts

will possibly be, it all depends, be helpful to him. It promises to be a demanding time for a man who spent nearly six months in the hospital over the last year and a half for heart and knee surgery. As he showed us the Victory Prayer Chapel, a church founded by his mother, Congressman Cummings relied on a cane and a walker. He says his chairmanship will be a physical burden on him, but his strong faith and awareness of his mortality will see him through. Do you feel like you have the strength and the stamina? Oh, yeah, man. I'm good. I'm good. Oh, I'm good. Like I tell my constituents, don't get it twisted.

You know, my knee may be hurting a little bit, but my mind is clear. My mission is clear, and I am prepared and able to do what I have to do, and I will do it to the very best of my ability. So help me God. Despite what you hear about artificial intelligence, machines still can't think like a human. But in the last few years, they have become capable of learning. And suddenly, our devices have opened their eyes and ears, and cars have taken the wheel. Today, artificial intelligence is not as good as you hope and not as bad as you fear. But humanity is accelerating into a future that few can predict. That's why so many people

are desperate to meet Kai-Fu Lee, the oracle of AI. Kai-Fu Lee is in there somewhere in a selfie scrum at a Beijing internet conference. His 50 million social media followers want to be seen in the same frame because of his talent for engineering and genius for wealth. I wonder, do you think people around the world have any idea what's coming in artificial intelligence? I think most people have no idea and many people have the wrong idea. But you do believe it's going to change the world? I believe it's going to change the world more than anything in the history of mankind, more

than electricity. Li believes the best place to be an AI capitalist is communist China. His Beijing venture capital firm manufactures billionaires. These are the entrepreneurs that we funded. He's funded 140 AI startups. We have about $10 billion companies here. Ten $1 billion companies that you funded? Yes, including a few $10 billion companies.

In 2017, China attracted half of all AI capital in the world. One of Li's investments is Face++, not affiliated with Facebook. Its visual recognition system smothered me to guess my age. It settled on 61, which was wrong. I wouldn't be 61 for days. On the street, Face++ nailed everything that moved. It's a kind of artificial intelligence that has been made possible by three innovations.

Super fast computer chips, all the world's data now available online, and a revolution in programming called deep learning. Computers used to be given rigid instructions. Now they're programmed to learn on their own. In early days of AI, people tried to program the AI with how people think. So I would write a program to say, measure the size of the eyes and their distance. Measure the size of the nose. their distance. Measure the size of the nose. Measure the shape of the face. And then if these things match, then this is Larry and

that's John. But today, you just take all the pictures of Larry and John and you tell the system, go at it. You figure out what separates Larry from John. Let's say you want the computer to be able to pick men out of a crowd and describe their clothing. Well, you simply show the computer 10 million pictures of men in various kinds of dress. That's what they mean by deep learning. It's not intelligence so much. It's just the brute force of data having 10 million examples to choose from.

So Face++ tagged me as male, short hair, black long sleeves, black long pants. It's wrong about my gray suit, and this is exactly how it learns. When engineers discover that error, they'll show the computer a million gray suits, and it won't make that mistake again. Over a thousand classrooms. Another recognition system we saw, or saw us, is learning not just who you are, but how you feel. Now, what are all the dots on the screen, the dots over our eyes and our mouths? Sure. The computer keeps track of all the feature points on the face.

Sun Fan Yang developed this for TAL Education Group, which tutors 5 million Chinese students. Let's look at what we're seeing here. Now, according to the computer, I'm confused, which is generally the case, but when I laughed, I was happy. Exactly. That's amazing. The machine notices concentration or distraction to pick out for the teacher those students who are struggling or gifted. It can tell when the child is excited about math. Yes.

Or the other child is excited about poetry. Yes. Could these AI systems pick out geniuses from the countryside? That's possible in the future. It can also create a student profile and know where the student got stuck so the teacher can personalize the areas in which the student needs help.

If you do, raise up your hand. We found Kai-Fu Lee's personal passion in this spare Beijing studio. He's projecting top teachers into China's poorest schools. This English teacher is connected to a class 1,000 miles away in a village called Defang. Many students in Defang are called left-behinds because their parents left them with family when they moved to the cities for work. Most left-behinds don't get past ninth grade. Lee is counting on AI to deliver for them the same opportunity he had when he immigrated to the U.S. from Taiwan as a boy. When I arrived in Tennessee, my principal

took every lunch to teach me English. And that is the kind of attention that I've not been used to growing up in Asia. And I felt that the American classrooms are smaller, encouraged individual thinking, critical thinking, and I felt it was the best thing that ever happened to me. And the best thing that ever happened to most of the engineers we met at Lee's firm. I went to Cornell for a master's degree in information science. They too are alumni of America with a dream for China. You have written that Silicon Valley's edge is not all it's cracked up to be. What do you mean by that? Well, Silicon Valley has been the single epicenter of the world technology innovation when it comes to computers, Internet, mobile, and AI.

But in the recent five years, we are seeing the Chinese AI is getting to be almost as good as Silicon Valley AI, and I think Silicon Valley is not quite aware of it yet. China's advantage is in the amount of data it collects. The more data, the better the AI. Just like the more you know, the smarter you are. China has four times more people than the United States, and they are doing nearly everything online.

I just don't see any Chinese without a phone in their head. College student Monica Sun showed us how more than a billion Chinese are using their phones to buy everything, find anything, and connect with everyone. In America, when personal information leaks, we have congressional hearings. Not in China. Do you ever worry about the information that's being collected about you? Where you go, what you buy, who you're with.

I never think about it. Do you think most Chinese worry about their privacy? Not that much. Not that much. With a pliant public, the leader of the Communist Party has made a national priority of achieving AI dominance in 10 years. This is where Kai-Fu Lee becomes uncharacteristically shy. Even though he's a former Apple, Microsoft and Google executive, he knows who's boss in China. President Xi has called technology the sharp weapon of the modern state. What does he mean by that? I am not an expert in interpreting

his thoughts. I don't know. There are those, particularly people in the West, who worry about this AI technology as being something that governments will use to control their people and to crush dissent. As a venture capitalist, we don't invest in this area and we're not studying deeply this particular problem. But governments do. It's certainly possible for governments to use the technologies just like companies. Lee is much more talkative about another threat posed by AI.

He explores the coming destruction of jobs in a new book, AI Superpowers, China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order. AI will increasingly replace repetitive jobs, not just for blue-collar work, but a lot of white-collar work. What sort of jobs would be lost to AI? Basically, chauffeurs, truck drivers, anyone who is driving for a living, their jobs will be disrupted more in the 15 to 20 year time frame. And many jobs that seem a little bit complex, chef, waiter, a lot of things will become automated. We'll have automated stores, automated restaurants.

And all together in 15 years, that's going to displace about 40% of jobs in the world. 40% of jobs in the world will be displaced by technology? I would say displaceable. What does that do to the fabric of society? Well, in some sense, there's the human wisdom that always overcomes these technology revolutions. The invention of the steam engine, the sewing machine, the electricity have all displaced jobs, and we've gotten over it. The challenge of AI is this 40 percent, whether it's 15 or 25 years, is coming faster than the previous revolutions. There's a lot of hype about artificial intelligence,

and it's important to understand this is not general intelligence like that of a human. This system can read faces and grade papers, but it has no idea why these children are in this room or what the goal of education is. A typical AI system can do one thing well, but can't adapt what it knows to any other task. So for now, it may be that calling this intelligence isn't very smart. When will we know that a machine can actually think like a human? Back when I was a grad student, people said, if a machine can drive a car by itself, that's intelligence.

Now we say that's not enough. So the bar keeps moving higher. I think that's, I guess, more motivation for us to work harder. But if you're talking about AGI, artificial general intelligence, I would say not within the next 30 years and possibly never. Possibly never. What's so insurmountable? Because I believe in the sanctity of our soul. I believe there's a lot of things about us that we don't understand. I believe there's a lot of things about us that we don't understand. I believe there's a lot of love and compassion that is not explainable in terms of neural networks and computational algorithms. And I currently see no way of solving them. Obviously,

unsolved problems have been solved in the past, but it would be irresponsible for me to predict that these will be solved by a certain time frame. We may just be more than our bits. We may. At age 45, Chris Downey had pretty much constructed the life he'd always wanted. An architect with a good job at a small housing firm outside San Francisco, he was happily married with a 10-year-old son. He was an assistant Little League coach and avid cyclist. And then doctors discovered a tumor in his brain.

He had surgery and the tumor was safely gone, but Downey was left completely blind. What he has done in the 10 years since losing his sight as a person and as an architect can only be described as a different kind of vision. Several mornings a week as the sun rises over the Oakland estuary in California, an amateur rowing team works the water. It's hard to tell which one of them is blind, and Chris Downey thinks that's just fine. It's really exciting to be in a sport where nobody looks in the direction they're going. You're facing this way in the boat, and you're going that way.

So, okay, even Steven. We were just talking about that whole exterior. It's not exactly even Steven in this design meeting where Downey is collaborating with sighted architects on a new hospital building. Under the canopy where you can have down lights. But he hasn't let that stop him. Here you are in a profession that basically requires you to read, read designs and draw designs. You must have thought in your head that is insurmountable. No. You never thought, you never thought the word insurmountable. Lots of people, friends that were architects and anybody else would say, oh my God, it's the worst thing imaginable to be an architect and to lose your sight. I can't imagine anything worse. But I quickly

came to realize that the creative process is an intellectual process. It's how you think. So I just needed new tools. New tools? Downey found a printer that could emboss architectural drawings so that he could read and understand through touch. They look like normal prints, normal drawings on the computer, but then they just come out in tactile form. So it is like Braille, isn't it? Right. And he came up with a way to sketch his ideas onto the plans using a simple children's toy,

malleable wax sticks that he shapes to show his modifications to others. And he says something surprising started to happen. He could no longer see buildings and spaces, but he began hearing them. The sounds, the textures, and the sound changes because there's a canopy overhead. You can sense that we're under a canopy? Yes. It's all a matter of how the sound works from the tip of the cane. I was fascinated walking through buildings that I knew cited, but I was experiencing them in a different way.

I was hearing the architecture. I was feeling the space. It sounds as if you began almost enjoying, in a way, being the blind architect. Sort of this excitement of, I'm a kid again. I'm relearning so much of architecture. It wasn't about what I'm missing in architecture. It was about what I had been missing in architecture. Is that sufficiently different? Oh, yeah. Chris Downey's upbeat attitude doesn't mean that he didn't go through one of the most frightening experiences imaginable and struggle. He and his wife Rosa were living in this same home with their son Renzo, then 10,

when Downey first noticed a problem while playing catch with Renzo. The ball kept coming in and out of sight. The cause turned out to be a tumor near his optic nerve. Surgery to remove it lasted nine and a half hours. He says his surgeon had told him there was a slight risk of total sight loss, but that he'd never had it happen. When he first came out of surgery, he was able to see. But then things started to go wrong. The next day, half his field of vision disappeared. And then... The next time I woke up, it was all gone. It was just black.

It's complete and total darkness. No light. You can't see anything. It's dark. It's all dark. After days of frantic testing, a surgeon told him it was permanent, irreversible, and sent in a social worker. She said, oh, and I see from your chart you're an architect, so we can talk about career alternatives. Career alternatives. Career alternatives? Yeah. Right away? I'd been told I was officially blind for 24 hours.

And she's saying you can't be an architect anymore. And she was saying we could talk about career alternatives. I felt like these walls were being built up around me, just like, yeah, you're getting boxed in. Alone that night in his room, Downey did some serious thinking about his son and about his own father, who had died from complications after surgery when Downey was seven years old. I could quickly appreciate the wonder, the joy of, I'm still here. It was actually joy? Yeah. It's like, I'm still here with my family.

My son still has his dad. You know your eyes are tearing up. You know that. Sorry. I always have a hard time talking through that. He knew that how he handled this would send a strong message to Renzo. I had been talking with him

about the need to really apply himself. At the age of 10, it's that point where if you want something, you really have to work at it. And here I am, facing this great challenge. So motivated to set an example, he headed back to work only one month later. This was the most healthy thing about Chris. Brian Bashan is executive director of the non-profit Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired in San Francisco and is blind himself. He waited a few days until the stitches were out of his skull and 30 days after brain surgery is back in the office thinking, okay, there's got to be a way to figure this out, and I'm going to figure it out. Bashan's organization, The Lighthouse, helps people new to vision loss learn how to figure things out.

Let's try the first line. When someone becomes blind, the odds are 99% they've never met another blind person. Is that right? Yeah, that really is true. Blind people need those role models, how to be blind, how to hold down a job, how to live an independent life. Specifically, how to work in the kitchen safely. Good morning. How to navigate public transportation.

How to use screen reading software to listen to emails as quickly as the rest of us read them. Did you understand that? Yes. No. And most critically, how to get around in the world alone. Downey learned that at the lighthouse. When you first crossed a big street like this on your own, was it terrifying?

It was absolutely terrifying. I can't imagine. I can totally imagine. I remember that day, stepping off the curb. You would have thought I was stepping into raging waters. Take a deep breath and go for it. You've got to push through it. Within a few months, he was traveling the streets on his own

and getting back to normalcy with his son. The first Father's Day came up. Rosa was like, so what do you want to do? You want to go on a picnic, go on a nice lunch? I want to play baseball with Renzo. And Renzo was like, he popped up. I could feel him jump to the edge of his chair. Baseball, you want to play baseball?

So Dad would throw to me, and I'd play like I was playing first base. How could he throw the ball to you? I'd just call out, I'm over here. Yeah, there you go. And he'd point and I'd say, yeah, that's right, and then he'd throw it at me. But that's something I really loved about our relationship. He quickly was looking for possibilities. He wasn't seeing you can't do that.

He was like, well, why not? All right, here we go. Downey seems to have a knack for finding windows when doors slam shut. Just nine months after going blind, the recession hit and he lost his job. But he got word that a nearby firm was designing a rehabilitation center for veterans with sight loss. They were eager to meet a blind architect. What are the chances? You had to believe that God's hand came down. It took my disability and turned it upside down. All of a sudden, it defined unique, unusual value that virtually nobody else had to offer.

Nobody? Yeah. Starting with that job, Downey developed a specialty, making spaces accessible to the blind. He helped design a new eye center at Duke University Hospital, consulted on a job from Microsoft, and signed on to help the visually impaired find their way in San Francisco's new and now delayed four block long Transbay Transit Center, which we visited during construction. If you're blind, you don't drive, all right? You don't like it when we drive. So, you know, we're committed transit users. So the

question was, how on earth do you navigate this size of facility if you're blind? His solution? Grooves set into the concrete running the entire length of the platform. Now we'll just follow this, following those grooves. With a subtle change from smooth to textured concrete to signal where to turn to get to the escalators. Would you like to give it a try? Okay. I know to go straight because of this line, and I feel... Oh, my. Oh, my. So it's pretty obvious.

I can hear the difference from here. It's something sighted people may never notice, and that's precisely the point. Downey believes in what's called universal design that accommodates people with disabilities but is just as appealing to people without them. It's the approach he used for his biggest project yet, consulting on the total renovation of a new three-story office space

for his old training ground, the Lighthouse for the Blind. Coming into blindness need not be some dreary social service experience, but rather more like coming into an Apple store, thinking that there might be something fun around the corner. One of Downey's ideas was to break through and link the three floors with an internal staircase that sighted people can see and the blind can hear. In blindness, it's so wonderful to be on the ninth floor and hear a burst of laughter up on the 11th floor or to hear somebody playing the piano on the 10th floor. For the hallways, Downey chose polished concrete because

of the acoustics. I can hear the special tap of somebody's cane or the click of a guide dog's toenails. Click of a guide dog's toenails? Yeah. Well, is that good or bad? That's great. It's like you're seeing somebody coming down the hall. I know the sound of individual people who work here by the way they use their cane or the kind of walk they have. You can really distinguish between people by how they tap their cane. Absolutely. If you hadn't had Chris working on this building, a blind architect. It wouldn't have been as rich or so subtle for sure. Last spring marked the 10 year anniversary of Downey losing his sight. So what did he do? He threw a party, a fundraiser for the lighthouse, where he's been student, architect, and now president of the board. Maybe a slightly

bizarre thing, celebrating my 10-year blind birthday. But when you're 55 and you have a chance to be 10 again, you take it. I get the feeling that you actually think you're a better architect today. I'm absolutely convinced I'm a better architect today than I was excited. If you could see tomorrow, would you still want to be able to feel the design? If I were to get my sight back, it would be, I don't know. I would be afraid that I'd sort of lose what I've really been working on. I don't really think about having my sight restored. There'd be some logistical liberation to it, but will it make my life better?

I don't think so. Now an update on a story we called Plastic Plague. Last month, Sharon Alfonsi reported on a young Dutch inventor, Boyan Slat, who came up with a plan to clean up the enormous patch of discarded plastic in the Pacific Ocean. He raised more than $30 million to build a 2,000-foot floating boom with a nylon screen below that was towed out of San Francisco Bay for that great Pacific garbage patch. Five years of work and planning coming together in one nice shot.

It's overwhelming, exciting to see. Slatt's excitement and hopes have suffered setbacks. First, the device failed to corral the plastic. Then, 60 feet of the boom broke off. The contraption is being towed to Hawaii for repairs and is expected to arrive early this week. I'm Leslie Stahl. Next week, the AFC championship game will be here on

CBS. So we'll be back in two weeks with another edition of 60 Minutes.