You know, one of the great failures of traveling and one of the great pleasures in the andhnographic research is to live with the people who remember the old days, who still feel their past in the wind, touch them on the rained rocks, taste them in the bitter sheets of plants.
Just the knowledge that Jaguar boys still travel beyond the Milky Way, or the meaning of the myths of the elders of the Inuit still matter, or that in the Himalayas, the Buddhists are still following the breath of the dharm, is to call themselves the central revelation of the anthropology, which is the idea that the world that we live in doesn't exist in an absolute sense, but just as a model of reality, as a suite of a group of particular ways of adapting to our ancestors, if successful, many generations ago.
And of course, we all share the same adaptations.
We are all born. We bring children to the world.
We go through initiation.
We need to deal with the unexplained separation of death, so it shouldn't surprise us that we all sing, dance and make art.
But what's interesting is the unique nature of the song, the rhythm of dance in each culture.
It doesn't matter whether it's the Penan in the forests of Borneo, or the Voodoo Akolyths in Haiti, or the warriors in the Bay Area Desert, the Curanderos in the Anden, or a Karawansy in the middle of the Sahara. This happens to be the colleague I traveled to the desert a month ago, or even a yak slammed up on the slopes of the Qomolangma, Everest, the godmother of the world.
All these people teach us that there are other possibilities of existence, other ways of thinking, other ways of orienting the Earth.
And this is an idea that, if you think about it, you can only meet with hope.
Together, the myriad cultures of the world form a web of spiritual and cultural life that covers the Earth and is as important to the good of the Earth as the biological life web that you know as a biosphere.
You can think of this cultural network as an Ethno sphere, and Ethno sphere can be defined as the sums of all thoughts and dreams, mythic ideas, inspirations and intuitions that have been unleashed by the human imagination since the beginnings of consciousness.
The atmosphere is the great legacy of humanity.
It's the symbol of all of what we are and what we are capable of as an amazing species of technology.
And just as the biosphere was swept away, this happened with the atmosphere -- only at greater speed.
No biologist would argue, for example, that 50 percent or more of all species are short of extinction, because it's just not true. And yet, this -- the most apocalyptical scenario in the field of biodiversity -- is barely equivalent to what is known to us as the most optimistic scenario in the field of cultural diversity.
And the key indicator of this is the extinction of languages.
When each of you was born in this room, 6,000 languages were spoken on Earth.
Now a language is not just the sum of the vocabulary or a set of grammar rules.
A language is the expression of the human mind.
It's a means by which the soul of a particular culture finds access to the physical world.
Every language is like an ancient forest of the mind, a turning point, a thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities.
And of those 6,000 languages, as we sit here in Monterey, half aren't whispering into the ears of kids anymore.
They're not taught by infants anymore, which means if nothing is done, they're actually dead.
What could be more lonely than being swallowed by silence, one of the lasts of your people talking about your language, not having an opportunity to pass on the wisdom of your ancestors, or the hope of children?
And yet, this terrible fate actually happens to someone anywhere on Earth, about every two weeks, because every two weeks, a older person dies and takes the last saw of an old language into the grave.
And I know some of you say, "Isn't it better?" Isn't the world a better place if we all talk only a language?" And I say, "Well, let's be a Yoruba language. Let's be a Kantonian.
Let them be Kogi."
And then you would suddenly realize what it would be like if you couldn't speak your own language.
So today, I'd like to take you on a journey through the atmosphere, a quick journey through the atmosphere to try to understand what's actually been lost.
Now there are some of us who, in a way, forget that when I say "reverse possibility of being," I mean really different possibilities of being.
For example, this kid, the Barasana in the northwest of the Amazon, the people of the Anakonda, believes that they came up with the mythological milk flow from the east into the belly of sacred snakes.
This is a people who don't naturally distinguish between the colors blue and green because the circumcision of the forest depends on the people.
You have a curious language, and a marriage slogan is called the linguistic exogamie: You have to marry somebody who speaks a different language.
All of this is rooted in the mythological past, and the strange thing about these big houses, where, because of the niches, six or seven languages spoken, is that you never hear somebody learning a language.
You just stop and start talking.
Or, one of the most fascinating tribes I've ever lived with, the Waorani in the northeast of Ecuador, an amazing people who was first contacted in 1958.
In 1957, five missionaries were trying to get in touch and made a severe mistake.
They threw brilliant pictures of themselves down from the air, which we would judge as a kind gesture, and they forgot that these people from the rainforest in their lives had never seen anything in two dimensions.
They raised these photographs from the forest floor, tried to see behind the face or the character, didn't find and concluded that these were the business cards of the devil, and they killed the five missionaries with the spear.
But the Waorani didn't just kill the outside with the spear.
They were peering through each other.
54 percent of the deaths were killed by breakthroughs.
We went back to the geology eight generations, and we found two cases of natural death, and when we made people feel a little bit about it, you said that one of the people had become so old that he died because of his age, and we still killed him with the spear.
But at the same time, they had a clear knowledge of the forest that was astonishing.
Their hunters could smell the urine of an animal at 40 steps away, determine which animal species they belonged to.
In the early '80s, I got a really amazing task when my professor at Harvard asked if I was interested in going to Haiti and going to infiltrate the secret societies that were the foundation of the strength of Duvalier and Tonton Macouts and the poison that was used to make zombies.
In order to make sense of this Sensation, of course, I had to know something about this remarkable faith in the Vodoun, and Voodoo is not a cult of black magic.
On the contrary, it's a complex metaphysical worldview.
It's interesting.
If I asked you to count the great world religions, what would you say?
Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, whatever.
A continent is always left out, because the assumption was that in sub-Saharan Africa there was no religious belief, and of course there was one and Voodoo just the overble of these very profound religious ideas that came across during the tragic diaspora in slavery's time.
But what Voodoo is so interesting is this living relationship between the living and the dead.
The lives give the minds.
The spirits can be swallowed from below the Great Water, respond to the rhythm of dance, to temporarily stretch the soul of the life, so that the Akolyth becomes a brief, shining moment for God.
Deshabs like to say, "You white people go to church and talk about God.
We dance in the temple and become God."
And because you're obsessed, are you going to take your mind. How can you get harm?
Look at these amazing demonstrations: Voodoo acolyths in a tranced state, the glowing coal with no combustion, an amazing illustration of the ability of the mind to influence the body in such a way that it lasts when it's put into a state of extreme arousal.
Well, of all the people I met were the Kogi from the Sierra Nevadas of Santa Marta in northern Colombia, the most extraordinary.
According to the ancient tyrannical civilization, which populated the Caribbean coastal plains of Columbia, and as a result of the conquesting, this people moved back to an isolated volcanic massif that goes beyond the Caribbean coastal plain.
In a blubbing continent, these people were the only people who had never been conquered by the Spaniards.
Up until today, they're governed by a ritual priesthood, but the training to the priesthood is very extraordinary.
The young Akolythens are separated at the age of three and four years from their families, and in a shacky world of Finsternis, stone huts at the foot of the glacier for 18 years, two periods of every nine years, deliberately chosen to mimic the nine months of pregnancy they spent on their mother's lap, now they're now spending a metamorphorphoric on the grandmother's lap.
And throughout that time, you're being introduced culturally into the values of their society, values that sustain the claim that their prayers and only their prayers, the cosmic -- or we could say the ecological -- sustaining balance.
At the end of this amazing initiation, they're suddenly taken outside one day, and for the first time in their life, at the age of 18, they see a sunrise, and in this kristall moment of consciousness of the first light, when the sun begins to shine on the slopes of the amazing beautiful landscape, all of a sudden what they've learned in the drawer is confirmed in astonishing glory, and the priest comes back and says, "Are you? It's really how I told you.
It's so wonderful. You have to protect it."
They call themselves the older brothers and say that we are responsible for the destruction of the world.
Now this level of intuition is very important.
Whenever we think of an infatuation and landscape, we're either going to have Rousseau and the old smell of the noble wildlife, which in its simplicity is a rassist thought, or the Thoreau, and say, these people are more connected to nature than we are.
So, ageborene is neither sentimental, nor are they weakened by nostalgia.
There's not a lot of room left in the malarial odors of asmat or the cold winds of Tibet, but they have yet, through time and ritual, formed a mysterious nimbus of the Earth that's not based on the idea of being aware of it, but in a far more subtle intuition, the idea that the Earth can only exist because it's being sucked into the human consciousness.
Well, what does that mean?
It means that a little child from the Anden, who grows up in the belief that the mountain is an Apu-Geist who is either or her fate, will have a very different human being and have a different relationship with that resource or that place, as a little kid from Montana who grows up in the belief that a mountain is a pile of stones that can be worn away.
Whether it's a repository of a mind or a bunch of effort, it doesn't matter.
What's interesting is the metaphor that defines the relationship between the individual and nature.
I grew up in the forests of British Columbia, and I believed that these forests were here to become rogue.
This made me think of another person as my friends under the Kwakiutl who believe that these forests are the equivalent of Hukuk and the rainbow and the cannibal spirits living in the northern part of the world, ghosts that they would participate in their Hamatsa initiation.
Well, if you start to look at the idea that these cultures can create different realities, you can understand some of their extraordinary discoveries, like this plant here.
This is a photo I took just last April in the northwest of the Amazon.
This is Ayahuasca, which many of you have heard, the most powerful psychoactive preparat from the repertoire of the shaman.
What Ayahuasca is so fascinating is not just the pharmacologic potential of this preparat, but the processing of it. It's actually made out of two different sources, and on the one hand, there's this wooden liane that has a series of betacarbons, Harmin, armolin, a slight squint. And this climb plant is about as if a blue tart crosses of smoke in its consciousness, but it's mixed with the leaves of a shack from the family of coffee plants called the psychotria viridis.
This plant contains some very strong Tryptamines that are very similar to serotonin, dimethyltryptamin-5 and Methoxidimethyltryptamin.
If you've seen the Yanomami, as they swept this stuff, this substance that they make out of different ways also has methoxydimethyltryptamin.
Putting this Puder is about the same as being shot out of a gunfire, dreamed of rock paintings and landing on a sea of electricity.
It's not a distortion of reality, it's the resolution of reality.
In fact, with my professor, Richard Evan Shultes, the man who initiated the psychedelic bean with the discovery of the magical mushrooms in Mexico in the '30s, I argued that you couldn't initiate this tryptamine as a hallucinogen, because when you feel the impact, you're not there anymore to experience a hallucination.
But the thing about tryptamines is that they can't be taken orally, because through a human gut, they're naturally occurring enzymes called myoamin oxidase.
You can only be associated with a few other chemicals that the MAO isaturing.
Now, what's fascinating is that the betakarbolines that are contained in the lianes are MAO-Inhibitors of exactly the kind that are required to bribe the tryptamine, so ask yourself.
How can these people out of a Flora of 80,000 types of charges of plants find these two morphologically non-related plants that, combined in this way, create a kind of biochemist version, so that the whole thing is bigger than the sum of its parts?
We use this great euphemism, trial and error, which turns out to be meaningless.
But the Native Americans ask them, "The plant speaks to us."
So, what does that mean?
This tribe, the Cofan, has 17 variants of Ayahuasca that they all recognize at a large distance in the forest that appear to be a species to our eyes.
And then you ask them how they do their Taxonomy, and they say, "I thought you understand something about plants.
I mean, you know nothing at all?" And I said, "No."
So it turns out that you take every one of those 17 different varieties in the whole world and they sing one in a different tone.
Now, this doesn't give you a Ph.D. in Harvard, but it's much more interesting than counting Stamina.
Well, the problem is that even those of us who have sympathy for the difficult situation of indigenous people, look at them as kinematic and colorful, they somehow limit them to the past, while the real world, look at our world.
So, the fact is that in the 20th century, 300 years from now, you're not going to remember for your wars or technological innovation, but rather as an era where we were, and the massive destruction of biological and cultural diversity on Earth was either active or passively accepted, so the problem is not change.
All cultures have entered the dance again with new life possibilities.
And the problem is not the technology itself.
The Sioux Indians didn't listen to being less to the Sioux when they put bows and arrows when Americans stopped being Americans when they gave up horse and horses.
It's not change and technology that threatens the integrity of the ethnicity, it's power, the ugly face of the rule.
And wherever you go around the world, you'll discover that these cultures are not ruled at the bottom. These are dynamically living people, whose existence is suspended by visible forces, will go beyond their capacity of adaptation. Whether it's the massive deforestation in the homeland of Penan, a nomadic from Southern California, from Sarawak, a people who lived in front of a generation free in the forest, and now cnecency and prostitution on the riverufer, where you can see that even the river is polluted with the mud, which seems to have nearly half a Borneo in the Southern Sea, where the Japanese Frachters on the horizon are prepared to fill their ships with raw trees that they have in the forest, or in the case of the Yaamia, where they have been in the stormwater of the gold.
Or if we go into the mountains of Tibet, where I explore a lot more recently, you'll see the ugly face of political dominance.
You know, the genocide, the physical extinction of people gets sentenced in general, but the Ethnozid, the destruction of people's lives, is not only sentenced, but generally and vastly celebrated as part of a strategy of development.
And you can't understand Tibetan suffering if you haven't seen it at a lower level.
I traveled with a young colleague of Chengdu in Westchina acrossland through Southeast Tibet, and only when I came to Lhasa, I saw the face behind the statistics of which one hears: 6,000 holy monuments turned into rubble and ash, 1.2 million people killed during the Cultural Revolution.
The father of this young man was identified as the followers of the Panchen Lama.
This meant that, during the Chinese invasion, he was killed instantly.
His uncle fled with his Holiness in the Diaspora, bringing people to Nepal.
His mother was locked in prison as a punishment for the crime of being wealthy.
He was smuggled into prison at the age of two to hide away under her skirt, because she couldn't live without him.
The sister who passed this brave action was brought into an educational camp.
One day, she came out of sight on an armband of Mao, and for that intersection, she had to go to a tough labor camp for seven years.
The suffering of Tibet can be unbearable, but the empowering spirit of the people is something that is unbearable.
And we're really at the end of a choice. Do we want to live in a monochromatic world of monotonia or a polychromatic world of diversity?
Margaret Mead, the great anthropologin said before she died, it's their greatest fear that as we move toward a bland, staltless, generical view of the world, we would not only see the full range of human imagination being reduced to a curved mindset, but that one day we would wake up from a dream, and forget that there were ever other possibilities.
And it's humbling to think that our species may have been around for 600,000 years.
The neolithical revolution that brought us agriculture, and applied us at that moment to the cult of the Saatkorns, the poetry of the shaman through the Prosa of the priesthood, and created hierarchy, specialization and surplus -- was only 10,000 years ago.
The modern industrial world as we know it is barely 300 years old.
Now, this shallow story doesn't tell me that we all have answers to the challenges we face in the coming millennia.
When we ask these myriad world cultures about the meaning of human beings, they respond with 10,000 different voices.
And in this song, we're going to rediscover the possibility of what we are: people with full consciousness who are aware of the importance of all humans and gardens to be able to thrive in space, and there are great moments of optimism.
Here's a picture I took up at the north end of the Baffin Islands, when I went to Narwhal, and this man, Olaya, told me a wonderful story of his grandfather.
The Canadian government has not always gone very well with the Inuit, and over the '50s, during the course of the decline of our regime, they were forced to move into settlements.
The grandfather of this old man refused.
The family who was scared about his life took away all the weapons and all the tools.
Now you have to know that the Inuit don't have fear of the cold; they used it to their advantage.
They were originally made by fish that were wrapped in Karibu-Hauts.
The man's grandfather didn't fear the arctic night or the storm.
He'd come out, he'd let his pants down from the sea floor and he'd put his hand down, and as his feces started to fry, he'd shape it as a knife.
He sprayed saliva on the sides of the feces, and when it was completely frozen, he would get a dog with it.
He cleaned the dog and improvised a dishes, took the dog's skeleton and improvised a sled, snouted another dog and snucked over the ice cream with the feces on the body.
There's nothing you can do about it.
And this is, in many ways, a symbol of the resistance of the Inuit and all the indigenous peoples in the world.
The Canadian government gave the Inuit in April 1999 complete control over an area bigger than California and Texas combined.
It's our new home country, and it's called Nunavut.
It's an independent area. They control all the supplies of minerals.
An amazing example, like a nation, a state that can seek and achieve regression with its citizens.
And finally, I think it's pretty obvious, at least for those of us who have traveled to these remote goals of the Earth to realize that they're not at all removed.
They are the countries of the home of somebody.
They represent parts of the human imagination that go back in time past, and for all of us, these children's dreams, like the dreams of our own children, become part of the geography of hope.
What we end up trying at National Geographic is that we believe that politicians never achieve anything.
We believe that Poland -- we believe that Poland is not compelling, but we believe that storytelling can change the world, and so we're probably the best institution for storytelling in the world, and our website is getting 35 million hits every month.
Fifteen6 nations send our television channel.
Our magazines are read by millions.
And we're taking a series of travels into the atmosphere that we're taking our audiences into places of such cultural miracles that they're blinded from the present, and hopefully, one by one, they're going to take on the central revelation of anthropology: that this world deserves to exist in different ways that we can find a way of life in a truly multicultural pluralistic world where the wisdom of all people can contribute to our common well-being.
Thank you very much.
What I'm going to show you, first of all, as quickly as possible, is the basic work, a new technology that we've given Microsoft as part of an overtake just a year ago, which is Seadragon, and it's an environment in which you can either locally or remote from enormous amounts of visual data.
We see many, many gigabytes of digital photographs here that you can seamlessly and continuously recover, all the way to rearrange.
And it doesn't matter how much information we look at, how big these collections are, or how big the images are.
Most of them are digital photographs of a camera, but this one, for example, is a scan of the Library of Congress, and it's in a field of 300 megapixles.
It doesn't matter, because the only thing that can restrict the performance of a system like this is the number of pixels on your screen at any moment. It also has a very flexible architecture.
This is a whole book, an example of non-image data.
This is Bleak House of Dickens. Every column is a chapter.
To prove that it's really a text, and it's not a picture, we can do something like this to really show that this is a real representation of the text and not a picture.
Maybe this is an artificial way of reading an E-Buch.
I wouldn't recommend it.
This is a realistic case. This is a copy of The Guardian.
Every big picture is the beginning of a section.
And that really gives you the pleasure and the good experience of reading a real paper edition of a magazine or a newspaper, which is a kind of medium with multiple scales.
We've also done something in the corner of this special edition of the The Guardian.
We've designed a false ad with very high resolution, much higher than a normal ad, and we added additional content.
If you want to see the functions of this car, you can see it here.
Or other models, or even technical representations.
And this really embraces these ideas of creating these limitations for the available place on the screen.
We hope this doesn't mean pop-ups and other rubbish -- it shouldn't be necessary.
Of course, shopping is one of the really obvious applications for a technology like this.
And I really don't want to spend a lot of time here, except to say that we're also going to be contributing to this area.
But these are all the streets in the U.S.A.
They're stored on top of the Earth's dream image of NASA.
Now let's take a look at something else.
It's actually live on the Internet now. You can check it out.
This is a project called Photosynth, which really links two different technologies.
One is Seadragon, and the other one is a very good research on computer vision, which is from Noah Snavely, a university university in Washington, under Steve's guidance on the U.W.
Rick Szeliski at Microsoft's research has been done, a very good collaboration.
So this is live on the Internet. It's powered by Seadragon.
You can see this when we create these kinds of views where we can penetrate through images and make this experience of morefach resolution.
But the spatial order of images is actually relevant here.
The computer vision algorithms have held these pictures together so they have this real room where these images that are all made close to the grassy Lakes in the Canadian Rockies, and you can see here elements of robust slides or panoramic imaging, and these things have all been spatially connected to each other.
I don't know if I still have time to show you other environments.
There are some that are much more spatial.
I'd like to just show you one of the original data sets of Noah, and this is from a very early prototype of Photosynth that we've been working on for the first summer to show you what I think is really the point behind this technology, the Photosynth technology, and this is not necessarily as obvious as looking at the environments that we have on the website.
We had to worry about the lawyers and so on.
This is a reconstruction of Notre Dame, who's only been on the computer with pictures of Flickr, just give Notre Dame in Flickr, and you'll get images of men in T-shirts and in the university campuses and so on. Each of these orange cones represents a picture that's been detected as part of this model.
So these are all Flickr images, and they all are spatially related to each other.
And we can navigate in this very simple way.
You know, I never believed I was going to work at Microsoft eventually.
I'm very grateful for the reception here.
I suspect you can see that these are many different types of cameras: all from the mobile phone camera to the professional SLRs, a very large number of them all being clicked together in this environment.
And if possible, I will find some of the strange ones.
Many of them are covered by faces, etc.
Somewhere here are a series of photographs -- here they are.
This is actually a poster by Notre Dame, who was properly recorded.
We can change from the poster to a physical view of this environment.
The point here is that we can do things with the social environment. It's now being collected data from all -- from all the collective memory of how, visually, the Earth looks -- and everything is connected to each other.
All these pictures are connected to each other, and there's something bigger than the sum of the parts.
They get a model that comes from all over the world.
Think of this as the sequel to Stephen Lawler's work on Virtual Earth.
And this is something that grows with the complexity that people use, and the benefit for the user is getting ever bigger.
Your own photos are placed with meta-data that another person has given.
If someone has done the trouble and wrote all of these saints and said who they are all, then my photo of the Notre Dame Cathedral suddenly adds up to all of this data, and I can use it as a starting point to dive into this room, into this metaverse, using photos of other people, and therefore making a kind of transcendent social experience using other performers.
And of course, by-product, all of these are the ultimate virtual models of every interesting part of the Earth that have not only been preserved by overhead or by satellite images and so on, but by collective memory.
Thank you very much.
Do I get you right? Does your software allow you to connect at some point in time, in the next few years, all the images that are being used by somebody in the world in principle?
Yeah. She does nothing but discover.
If you want to make it hyperlinks between the images.
And she does that because of the content in the images.
And this is really exciting when you think about the abundance of semantic information that many of these images have.
Like if you take a web search for images, where you put sentences in and the text of the website contains a lot of information about what the image is.
But what if the image connected you to all your images?
And then the volume of the semantic cross wiring and the abundance that comes out of it is really enormous. It's a classic network effect.
Blaise, that's really incredible. Hearty happiness.
Thank you very much.
I'm going to tell you a couple of things from my book that I hope are related to other things that you've already heard, and I'm going to try to make a couple of connections if you haven't noticed them.
I'd like to begin with what I call the "official Dogma."
The official dogma of what?
The official faith in all Western industrialized societies.
The official dogma works like this: When our goal is to maximize the public goods of our citizens, this is mainly about maximizing the freedom of the individual.
The reason for this is that freedom in itself is good, valuable, meaningful, undeniable for the human.
When people have freedom, each of us is about doing the things that are maximizing our well-being and no one has to decide for us.
The way to maximize freedom is to maximize choice.
The more choices people have, the more freedom you have, and the more freedom you have, the more public good you have.
This, I think, is so deeply embedded in our water supply that it wouldn't make any sense to question.
And it's also deeply embedded in our lives.
I'm going to give you a couple of examples of what makes us modern progress.
This is my supermarket. No big.
I just want to say a little bit about salad.
There's 175 missiles in my supermarket, if you don't count the 10 different extra olive oils and 12 Balsamico-Essig that you could buy to make a large number of your own Salat Dessings, in the unlikely case that none of the 175 in the store is right for you.
So this is the supermarket.
And then you go to the consumer electronics store to put together a stereo system -- speaker, CD players, a cassette player, radio, amplifier -- and in this one electronic store there are so many stereo installations.
We can put together 6,5 million different stereos from the components that are offered in this business.
You have to admit that this is a big choice.
In other parts, the world of communication.
There was a time when I was a boy, you could have every phone provider you wanted as long as it came from Ma Bell.
You rented your phone. You didn't buy it.TM.
One consequence of that was that the telephone was never broken.
These days are over.
We now have almost an infinite set of phones, especially in the world of mobile phones.
These are the mobile phones of the future.
My favorite is in the middle -- MP3 player, nose-haar-too and Crème Brugle.
And if you haven't seen that in your business right now, you can be sure you're going to get it soon.
And what it does is it makes people walk into the business and ask that question.
Do you know what the answer to that question is?
The answer is no.
It's not possible to buy a mobile phone that doesn't do too much.
In other aspects of life that are much more significant than buying objects, the same explosion of choice.
Public health -- it's no longer the case in the United States that they go to the doctor, and the doctor tells you what to do.
Instead, you go to the doctor, and the doctor tells you we could do A, or we could do B.
A has these benefits and risks.
B has these benefits and risks. What do you want to do?
And you say, "Doctor, what do I do?"
The doctor says, A has those benefits and risks and B has those benefits and risks.
What do you want to do?
And if you say, "If you were me, doctor, what would you do?"
The doctor says, "But I'm not you."
The result is -- we call it patient autonomy. That sounds like a good thing, but in reality, it's a shift in the burden of making decisions by someone who knows something -- named after the doctor -- to someone who doesn't know and is extremely likely to get sick, and therefore, not in the best constitution, a decision -- named after the patient.
There's an enormous marketing for prescription drugs for people like you and me that if you think about it doesn't make any sense at all because we don't buy you.
Why are you crying for us if we can't buy it?
The answer is, they expect us to call up the doctor the next morning and ask us to change the prescription.
Something as profound as our identity is now a matter of choice as to show this slide.
We don't have identity; we invent it.
And we're reinventing ourselves as much as we want.
That means every day you wake up in the morning you have to decide what kind of person you want to be.
In terms of marriage and family, there was a time when the default position was that almost everybody had one, and you got married as quickly as you could, and then you got kids as quickly as you could.
The only real choice was "one," not when, and not what you did after that.
Today, it's easy to have.
I teach wonderful, smart students, and I give them 20 percent less work than I used to.
And that's not because you're less smart, and it's not because they're less carefully.
It's because they're involved in other things, they're asking themselves, "Would I be married or not? Should I be married now?
Should I get married later? Should I have children, or should I have careers?"
Those are all about questions.
And they're going to answer these questions regardless of whether this means doing all the tasks that I'm proposing to you and not getting good grades in my class.
And in fact, they should. These are important questions to answer.
Work -- we're blessed, as Carl has pointed out, with the technology that allows us to work every minute of every single day on the planet -- to the Randolph Hotel.
There's a corner, by the way, that I'm not going to tell you about that works on the WirelessLAN.
I'm not going to tell you about it because I want to use it.
So what it means is that we have this incredible freedom of choice in terms of making decisions of work, over and over again, whether we should work or not work.
We can watch our kids play football, and we have our mobile phone on the hip and our Blackberry on other hips and our laptop probably on our lap.
And even though they're all turned off, every minute we look at our child when they're collecting a football game, we're also asking, "Should I take this call?
Should I answer that email? Should I write that letter?"
And even though the answer to the question "no," it's certainly going to be very different from your child's football experience than it would have been.
Where we look, big things and small things, material things and lifestyles, life is a matter of choice.
And the world that we lived in looked like this.
So I want to say that there were a number of choices, but not everything was a matter of choice.
And the world that we live in now looks like this.
And the question is, are these good news or bad news?
The answer is yes.
We all know what's good about this, so I'm going to go through what's bad about it.
All these choices have two effects, two negative effects on people.
One effect, paradoxically, is that it's going to get rid of.
With so many options you can choose, people are really hard to decide at all.
I'm going to give you another radical example of this, a study of investments in voluntary-age care.
A colleague of mine had access to capital services by Vanguard, the giant fund society of about a million employees and about 2,000 different jobs.
And what she found was that every 10 investment fund offered to the employer took participation by two percent.
They're offering 50 investment funds -- 10 percent less employees participate than if you were to offer five. Why?
Because it's 50 investment funds that are choices, it's so hard to decide which one should vote to move it tomorrow.
And then tomorrow, and then tomorrow, and tomorrow, of course never comes tomorrow.
Understand that it's not just that people have to eat dog foods when you go to rest, because you don't have enough money to go back, it also means making decisions so hard that you miss large investment offerings to your employer.
By the time you're not engaged, you're giving up to 5,000 dollars a year from the employer who'd been happy to raise your contribution.
paralysis is a consequence of too many choices.
And I think it makes the world look like this.
You really want to make the decision right when it's for all eternity, right?
You don't want to choose the wrong investment fund, or even the wrong salad.
So that's the one effect. The other effect is that even if we overcome paralysis and make a decision, we end less happy with the outcome of choice than if we had the chance to choose between less possibilities.
And there are several reasons for this.
One of them is conditioned by the large selection of different lettuces, if you buy one, and it's not perfect -- and which lettuce has been perfect? It's easy to imagine that you could have made another decision that would have been better, and what happens is this typical alternative causes you to regret the decision, and this will work negatively on the satisfaction that you made by your decision, even if it was a good decision.
The more possibilities there are, the easier it is to say nothing to regret at all is disappointing to the choices you make.
Secondly, what economists call oppertunity costs.
Dan Gilbert made a big dot this morning by saying how much the way we evaluate things depends on what we compare.
Well, if there are many alternatives to consider, it's easy to imagine attractive properties of alternatives that you exclude, that makes you less satisfied with the alternatives that you've chosen.
Here's an example. For those of you who aren't New Yorkers, I apologize.
But here's what you should have thought.
Here's a couple on the Hamptons.
Very expensive real estate.
Beautiful beach. Nice day. They have it all for themselves.
What could be better? The man thinks, "It's August.
Everyone in my Manhattan neighborhood is gone.
I could park right in front of my house."
And he spends two weeks of his thoughts tracking the possibility of having a nice parking lot a day.
Oppertunity costs down the happiness we get through our selection, even though what we've chosen is fantastic.
And the more choices there are, the more attractive properties of these choices are taken into the operating system.
Here's another example.
Now, this cartoon makes some statements.
He's making a point about living now, and maybe doing things slowly.
But an important point that he does is, whenever you decide for one thing, you don't decide to do other things.
And these other things might have many attractive properties, and it's going to be what you're going to do less attractive.
Three: Eskalation of expectations.
This struck me when I wanted to share my jeans.
I'm wearing jeans, almost all the time.
And there was a time when there was only jeans of a kind, and you bought it, and you didn't care, and you were incredibly uncomfortable, and if you carried them long enough and often made enough, you started to feel OK.
So I went to buy new jeans after many years of the old man's tray, and I said, "I'd like to have a couple of jeans, this is my size."
And the salesman said, "Would you like to come down, look easy, or straight down?
Do you want the buttons or the hot buttons? The rock or the acid?
Do you want jeans with holes?
Do you want to cut down the bottom, cegely, blah, blah, blah -- and so on he talked.
My jaw was down, and after I recovered, I said, "I'd like the way that used to be the only way."
He had no idea what that was, so I spent an hour trying to convince all these damn jeans, and let the deal -- and I say the truth -- with the best appropriate jeans I've ever had.
I had better. All of these choices made it possible for me to have better.
But I felt worse.
Why? I wrote a whole book to try and explain it to myself.
The reason I felt worse was with all these available possibilities, my expectations for what a good pair of jeans went up.
I had very low expectations. I didn't have any specific expectations when there was one way.
When you came to 100 species, damn, one of them should have been perfect.
And what I got was good, but it wasn't perfect.
And so I compared what I had gotten to what I expected, and what I had was disappointed compared to what I expected.
Adding opportunities to people's lives inevitably increase the expectations that people have about how well these choices are.
And this leads to less satisfaction with the results, even though the results are good.
No one in the world of marketing knows this, because if you did, you wouldn't all know what this is about.
The truth is more like this.
The reason is that it was better than anything worse than anything worse than anything, it was possible for people to experience a pleasant surprise.
Today, in the world we live in -- we have wealthy, industrialized citizens, with perfection as an expectation -- the best you can ever hope for is things are as good as you expect them.
You're never going to be surprised because your expectations, my expectations, are homehochs.
The secret to happiness -- that's what you've all come to -- the secret to happiness is low expectations.
I want to say -- a short autobiographical moment -- that I'm married to a woman, and she's really wonderful.
I couldn't do it better. I didn't let myself down.
But letting down is not always that bad thing.
Finally, a consequence of buying a bad sitting jeans if there's only one way to buy, is that if you're dissatisfied, and you wonder why, who's responsible, the answer is clear. The world is responsible. What could you do?
If hundreds of different types of jeans are available, and you buy one that's disappointing, and you ask why, who's responsible?
It's also clear that the answer to the question is you.
You could have done it better.
With 100 different types of jeans in the window, there's no excuse for mistakes.
And so when people make decisions, and even when the results of the decisions are good, you feel disappointed about it, you apologize for yourself.
The classic depressions have exploded in the industrial world in the last generation.
I think a significant -- not the only, but a significator of contributions to this explosion of depression, and also suicide, is that people have been disappointing because your standards are so high, and then, if you have to explain these experiences, they think it would be their fault.
And so the Bilanz result is that we're usually better, objectively, and we feel worse.
So let me remind you.
This is the official dogma, which is one that we all think is right, completely wrong. It's not true.
There's no question that any choice is better than no, but it doesn't follow that more choice is better than choosing.
There's a magic crowd. I don't know what it is.
I'm pretty sure we've missed this point on the selection of our public good.
Now, as a basic question -- I'm almost done -- as a basic question, the thing to think about is, what enables all of these choices in the industrialized societies is the material wealth.
There are many places in the world, and we've heard many of them whose problem is not the big choice.
Your problem is you have too little.
So the things I'm talking about are a curious problem of modern, rich, western societies.
And what's so frustrating and irritable is Steve Levitt told you yesterday about how these expensive and hard-to- installing kids don't help. It's a waste of money.
What I'm telling you is that these expensive, complicated decisions -- it's not easy that they don't help.
They even hurt.
They make us feel worse about it.
If something that allowed the people of our society to make decisions to the societies in which people have little choice, not only would the lives of the people, but ours would also be improved.
Economists call this a paradigm-shifting application.
The income distribution is going to make everybody better -- not just the poor -- because all of these big choices are pleading us.
Finally, please read this cartoon, and, you know, a sophisticated person, says, "Ah! What does this fish know?
You don't know what it is possible in this Goldfishglass."
Imagination, vision of the world -- and that's the way I read it first.
But the more I thought about it, the more I came to think the fish knows something.
Because the truth is, if you break the goldfish glass so that everything is possible, you have no freedom. You have paralysis.
If you break the goldfish glass, anything you can do, you reduce happiness.
They increase paralysis and reduce happiness.
Everyone needs a goldfish glass.
This is almost confined to complete certainty -- possibly for the fish, definitely for us.
But that being done by a metaphoral goldfish glass is a recipe for misery, and, I guess, disaster.
Thank you very much.
You know, I've talked about some of these projects before, about the human genome and what that could mean, and about discovering new groups of genes.
In fact, we're starting from a new point: we've digitized biology, and now we're trying to get from the digital code into a new phase of biology by designing and building new life.
We've always tried to ask meaningful questions.
What is life? It's something that I think many biologists have tried to understand and do at different levels.
We've tried different approaches to simplify it down to the minimal components.
We've digitized nearly 20 years, and when we sequenced the human genome, the shift from the analog world of biology to the digital world of computers.
Now, let's try to ask, can we regenerate life, or can we create new life out of this digital universe?
This is the map of a small organism, Mycoplasma geitalium, which has the smallest genome of a species that can replicate itself in the lab, and we tried to do this with a smaller genome.
We've managed to avoid about a hundred genes from the 500 or something that's here.
But if we look at this metabolic map, which is very simple, compared to ours, trust me, it's simple, but if we look at all these genes that we can eliminate from one to the other, it's very unlikely that this would lead to a living cell.
So we decided that the only way to go forward is to actually synthesize this chromosome, which allows us to vary the individual components and thus ask some of these fundamental questions.
And so we started with the question, can we synthesize a chromosome?
Is it possible for chemistry to create these really large molecules that have never been done before?
And if we can do that, can we start the chromosome?
A chromosome, by the way, is just a piece of inert chemical material.
Our steps to digitize life were exponential.
Our ability to write the genetic code has been evolving very slowly, but it's still increasing, and our final point would be at an exponential curve.
We started this 15 years ago.
It actually took a few years to start with a bioethical review before we did the first experiments.
It turns out that DNA synthesizers are very difficult.
There are tens of thousands of machines around the world that can make little pieces of DNA, 30 to 50 letters long, but it's a degenerative process, so the longer you make a piece, the more errors happen.
So we had to develop a new method where we could put these little pieces together and correct the mistakes.
This was our first attempt, starting with the digital information, the Phi X 174 genome.
It's a little virus that kills bacteria.
We made little pieces, we made a error correction, and we had a DNA molecule of about 5,000 letters.
The exciting phase came when we took this piece of inert chemical and put it into a bacteria, and the bacteria started reading the genetic code and made viral particles.
The viral particles then got off the cells and came back and killed E. coli.
Recently, I talked to the oil industry, and they said they'd exactly figure out this model.
They laughed more than you do here.
So we think that this is a situation where software can actually build its own hardware in a biological system.
But we wanted to go a lot further. We wanted to build a whole bacterial chromosome. It has more than 580,000 letters of genetic code, so we thought, we're going to build it in cassettes the size of the virus that we could vary the size of the cassettes to understand what are the individual components of a living cell.
Design is the key, and if you want to start with digital information in the computer, that digital information has to be really zero.
When we first sequenced the genome in 1995, the error rate was a 10,000-base pair error.
We found that if we could sequence 30 errors, if we had used the original sequence, it would never have been possible to go up.
One part of the design is to create pieces that are long for 50 letters and have to overlap with other 50-letter pieces in order to build smaller sub-unities so they fit together.
We've built unique elements here.
You may have heard that we have built some watermarks.
Think about it: we have a four-letter code: A, C, G and T.
Triplets of these letters -- these letters encode about 20 amino acids, and there's a single purpose for each of these amino acids.
So we can use the genetic code to write our words, sentences, thoughts.
We just signed up.
Some people were disappointed that it wasn't poetry.
We've engineered the bits so we could just break them down with enzymes, and there are enzymes that repair them and reassemble them.
And we started making pieces, starting with pieces containing five to seven thousand letters, putting them together to make 24,000 bits of paper together to fit them back up to 72,000.
At every step, we produced these pieces in excess so we could sequence them, because we tried to create a very robust process that you'll see in a minute.
We tried to get to the point of automation.
So, this looks like a basketball player.
When we get to these really big chunks -- over 100,000 base pairs -- they're not just going to grow in E. coli -- it's going to exceed all the possibilities of modern molecular biology, and so we turned to other mechanisms.
We knew about a mechanism called the hemologist recombination that uses biology to repair DNA that can assemble these pieces.
Here's an example of this. There's an organism called Deinococcus radiodurans, which takes over three million rads of radiation.
You can see in the upper field that the chromosome just falls apart.
12 to 24 hours later, it all came together as it was.
We have thousands of organisms that can do this.
These organisms can be completely dry, they can even live in a vacuum.
I'm absolutely sure that life can exist and move, looking for aquatic conditions.
In fact, NASA has shown that there are many out there.
Here's a close-up of the molecule that we've made by using these processes -- actually, we've just used yeast mechanisms with the right design of the pieces, and we've fitted them in, and then automatically put them together.
This is not an electron microscope slide; it's a regular microscope slide.
It's such a big molecule that we can even see with the light microscope.
This is a six-second record.
This is the publication we just finished recently.
This is over 580,000 letters of the genetic code, and it's the largest molecule of defined structure ever created by people.
It has a molecular weight of over 300 million.
If we print it out with a 10- and zero-grade score, it would contain 142 pages just to print that genetic code.
Now, how do we start a chromosome? How do we activate it?
Obviously, with a virus, it's very simple. It's much more complicated to deal with bacteria.
It's as simple as you do in euukaryonten as we are: you just take out the Nukleus and put another one in it, and that's exactly what you've all heard about the clones.
In archaebacterials, the chromosome is integrated into the cell, but just recently we've shown you can take a full transplant of one chromosome from one cell to the other, and then activate that.
We cleaned the chromosome of a microbes species. In fact, these two are as distant as humans and mice, and we gave some extra genes to choose this chromosome, and we destroyed it with enzymes to destroy all the proteins, and it was very amazing when we put it in a cell -- and you'll appreciate our very sophisticated graphs here.
The new chromosome went into the cell.
In fact, we thought this was the end of it, but we tried to move the process a little further.
This is the main mechanism of evolution here.
We find all species here that have taken a second chromosome or a third from somewhere, each time added thousands of characteristics in just one second to a species.
So people who imagine evolution as a gene have changed at some point in time a lot of biology has missed.
There are enzymes called restriction enzymes that actually digest DNA.
The chromosome that was in the cell has no one; the chromosomes that we've put in already.
It was expressed in the cell and recognized the other chromosome as a strange material, and so at the end we had just a cell with a new chromosome.
It was blue because of the genes we put in.
And after a very short period of time, all of the characteristics of the species had lost and completely converted into a new species based on the new software that we gave into the cell.
All the proteins changed the membranes -- when we read the genetic code, it was exactly what we transferred.
It may sound like genomic Alchimie, but we can, by shifting the software DNA, change things quite dramatically.
Now I've argued that this is not genesis -- this is based on 3.5 billion years of evolution.
And I've argued that we may be creating a new form of the Kambrian Explosion in which there may be massive new forms based on this digital design.
Why should we do that?
I think it's pretty obvious what we need.
We're growing from six and a half to nine billion people in the next 40 years.
To put it in my context: I was born in 1946.
Today, three people on this planet have existed for everyone in 1946, within 40 years, it's going to be four.
We have problems with food, fresh water, medicine, 6.5 billion people fuel.
It's going to be a challenge to offer to nine.
We need over five billion tons of coal, 30 billion barrels of oil. That's a hundred million barrels a day.
If we think about biological processes, or any process to replace that, it becomes a huge challenge.
Then, of course, there's the whole CO2 of this stuff that goes into the atmosphere.
We have now, from our discoveries around the world, a database of about 20 million genes, and I want to believe that these are the design components of the future.
The electronics industry had a dozen components, and look at the diversity that came out of it.
We're primarily bumping into the limits of biological reality and the limitations of our imagination.
We have technologies today because of these rapid synthesis methods to do what we call combinatoric genetics.
We now have the ability to build a large robot that can make millions of chromosomes a day.
If you imagine making these 20 million different genes, or optimizing these processes to make Oktan or drug new vaccines, we can change with just a small team more molecular biology than the last 20 years of science.
And it's just time selection. We can salt up life skills, production of chemicals or fuel production and so on.
This is a shot of really design software that we're working with that you actually sit down and design new species on the computer.
You know, we don't necessarily know what it's going to look like. We know exactly what their genetic code will look like.
We're focusing now on the fuel of the fourth generation.
You've seen corn on ethanol recently, which is just a bad experiment.
We have the fuel of the second and third generation that's going to come out relatively soon, which will have much higher rates of sugar, like the Oktan or different kinds of butanol.
But, as we think, the only way in which biology is going to have a big impact without further growing the food or the limitations of its availability is when we see CO2 as a source material, and so we're working on cells that go this way.
And we think we're going to be the first one with the fuel of the fourth generation, in about 18 months.
Sun and CO2 are a way.
But in our discovery of the world, we have all sorts of different ways.
This is an organism we described in 1996.
It lives in the deep sea, about a mile deep, at almost boiling water temperatures.
It converts CO2 into methane using hydrogen as a source of energy.
We're looking at whether we can use stored CO2, which could be just brought into production locations, converting CO2 into fuel to run this process.
Within a brief period of time, we believe that we may be able to solve one of the fundamental questions of life.
You know, we really have -- moderate goals like the replacement of the entire petrochemical industry, right. If you couldn't do that at TED, where else? become a major source of energy.
But the same thing we're working on right now is using the same approaches to developing vaccines.
You saw this year with the flu, we're always in the back of the year, and we have a dollar too little when it comes to the right vaccine.
I think that can be changed by making recombinating vaccines in advance.
That's what the future might look like with changes, can now be sped up by the evolutionary tree with synthetic bacteria, archaenes, and possibly eukaryontens.
We are light years away from getting people better, and our goal is that we have a chance to survive long enough to do that. Thank you very much.
I gave an introduction to the LHC at the last TED conference.
And I promised to come back to explain to you how the machine works.
So it's here. And for those of you who weren't there, the LHC is the largest scientific experiment ever done -- 27 kilometers across.
His job is to create the conditions that existed less than a billionth of a second after the universe began -- and that existed up to 600 million times within a second.
It's just breathtakingly ambitious.
This is the machine underneath Geneva.
We're taking pictures of these mini-ecnalls in detectors.
This is what I'm working on. It's called an ATLAS detector -- 10 feet wide, 22 meters wide.
Here's a spectacular picture of the ATLAS in construction so you can see the scale.
On September 10th, last year, the machine was running for the first time.
And this picture was taken by ATLAS.
It caused a huge bully in the control room.
It's a picture of the first radiation bomb that went all the way back to the LHC, deliberately collided with part of the LHC to clean a rain of particles into the detector.
In other words, when we saw this image on September 10, we knew that the machine works, which is a great triumph.
I don't know if this created the biggest jubel, or this, as someone went to Google, and picked up the front page like this.
It means that we have reached a cultural impact next to the scientific.
About a week later, there was a problem with this machine that had to do with these wires here -- these golden wires here.
These guys are running 13,000 employees when the machine is running high-performances.
Well, the engineers among you are going to look at them and say, "No they don't. They're little wires."
You can do that because if you cool them down very far, they become what we call superconductors.
So at minus 271 degrees, colder than the space between the stars, these strings can maintain tension.
In one of the links, between over nine thousand magnets at the LHC, there was a mass detector.
As a result of that, the bumps came down low, and 13-thousand people suddenly faced electric resistance.
This was the result.
Now, this is all even more amazing if you imagine that the magnets weigh over 20 tons and move around about 30 centimeters.
So we damaged about 50 of the magnets.
They had to remove what we did.
We redefined them, we repaired them.
They're all on their way back now.
By the end of March, the LHC will be again functional.
We're going to turn it on, and expect to collect first data in June or July, and continue our journey to figure out what the building blocks of the universe are.
Well, of course, in a way that accidents like this, again, the debate about the value of science and engineering on those boundaries -- it's easy to dismiss something like this.
I think the fact that it's so hard, the fact that we reach beyond our limitations is the value of things like the LHC.
I'm going to leave my final words to an English scientist, Humphrey Davy, who, as I suppose, argued the useless experiments in his apprenticeship, was Michael Faraday, who said, "Nothing is so dangerous for the development of the human mind as to assume that our scientific ideas are final, that there are no mysteries in nature that our triumphs are full of, and that there are no new worlds to conquer."
Thank you very much.
I'm a writer.
Reading books is my job, but it's more of course than that.
It's also my great lifelong love and fascination.
And I don't expect that to ever change.
However, recently, there's been something curious about my life and my career that has led me to completely rethink my relationship with this work.
This strange event was that I recently wrote a book -- a biograography called "Eat, Pray, Love" -- which, unlike all my previous books, for some reason, went out into the world and became a big mega-Ereignis, international BestsellerD.
The result is that, no matter where I'm coming, I'm being treated as if I'm running out of the ground.
Seriously -- get out of the way!
For example, they get very concerned about me and say, "Don't you want you to never get through this success?
Don't you fear that you keep writing your whole life and never create a book that anybody cares about in the world? Never again?
Okay, that really makes courage.
However, it would be worse if I didn't remember that over 20 years ago, when I first told when I was a teenager that I wanted to be a writer, I was confronted with the same kind of terrifying response.
People said, "Don't you fear never to succeed?"
Do you have no fear that you're killing the humiliation of a balance?
Do you have no fear that you take this craft and never make it happen, and that you will die on a junkyard of bursty dreams -- of your mouth filled with the bitter waters of failure?
Like that, you know.
The answer -- the short answer to all of these questions is, yes. Fold.
Yeah, I'm afraid of all these things.
And I always had that.
And I feared a lot more things that no one would want.
Like algae -- and other scary things.
But when it comes to writing, I've been thinking about it for a long time, and I'm thinking, why?
Is that rational?
Is it logical that somebody should be expected to be fearful of doing the work that they're calling to?
And what's going on with the creative inferences that they make us insecure about the humanities of each other -- in a way that other professions don't do?
My father, for example, was a chemist, and I can't remember any situation in his 40 years as a chemist that he was asked to be afraid to be a chemist.
With your chemist friend John -- how do you do that?
It just didn't happen, you know?
But to be fair -- the group of chemists, over the centuries, didn't get the call of alkohol's addictive manic.
But we also seem to have these kinds of calls, but not just the writers, but the creatives of all generes, they seem to have this reputation, to be mentally unstable.
All you have to do is look at the bitter death rates of really great minds just from the 20th century who were young and often died by their own hand.
And even those who didn't actually commit suicide seemed to be really neglected by their talents.
Norman Mailer said shortly before he died in his last interview, "Some of my books have killed me a little bit further.
It's an extraordinary statement that you can do about your work.
But we don't even notice that when we hear someone say that, because we've known these kinds of statements for so long, somehow we've embraced the notion of creativity and suffering somehow, of course, and that art -- in the end, always leads to the soul'squal.
The question I want to ask everyone here today is this idea for you, isn't it okay?
Do you feel that way? Because it's only one centimeter away -- I don't feel that way at all.
I find it disgusting.
And I find them dangerous, and I don't want to watch them take place in the next century.
I think it's better if we encourage our great creative people to live.
And I definitely know that for me -- in my situation -- it would be very dangerous to start offsing this dark path of guess -- particularly in the sense that I'm in my career right now.
That means -- look, I'm pretty young. I'm only about 40 years old.
I've got maybe another 40 years of work to do.
And it's extremely likely that all I'm going to write from now on is listed by the world as the work that came after my last book's success, right?
I'm just saying it out, because we're all kind of friends right now -- it's most likely that my greatest success lies behind me.
Oh, Jesus, what a thought!
These are the kinds of thoughts that can get someone to start at nine o'clock in the morning to drink Gin, and I don't want that.
I would like to continue doing this work that I love.
So the question is, how?
After a while of reflection, it seems to me that to continue to write, I need to design a kind of protective psychological construct.
Somehow, I have to figure out a way to make writing a safe distance between me and my very natural sense of how the reaction is to be written.
While I've been looking for models for this past year to do this, I've also been looking for in the past, and I've been trying to find other societies to see if they may have better or more sensible ideas about it than we can help to deal with the emotional risks associated with creativity.
This quest led me to the ancient Greece and the old Rome.
Please join me because the circle is going to end.
But in ancient Greece and Rome, people didn't believe that creativity comes from people, OK?
They believed that creativity was a kind of patronizing agent that comes from a distant, unknown source to people -- for innocent, unknown reasons.
The Greeks called these divine deniers of creativity.
He's known by Socrates that he believed he had a damon who shared wisdom from afar.
The Romans had the same idea, called this kind of mindless creative mind-bending.
That's great. The Romans didn't really think that a genius was a particularly smart individual.
They believed that a genius was this kind of magically divine thing to believe that it was literally living in the walls of an artist's studio -- something like Dobby, the house -- who came out and the artist at work was kind of invisible and the outcome of the work.
This is brilliant -- there it is, there's the distance I talked about -- the psychological construct that protects you from the consequences of your work.
And everybody knew it worked like this, right?
The artist of age was protected with certain things, like, too much narcissism, right?
If your work was brilliant, you couldn't take all the sights for you. Everybody knew that you had this mindless genius that helped you.
If your work fails -- not entirely your fault, right?
Everybody knew that Dein genius was a bit of a laugh.
So people in the West have been thinking about creativity for a really long time.
And then the Renaissance came along, and everything changed. We had this great idea. And this great idea was, let's put the human individual at the center of the universe -- about all the gods and the mystics, and there's no room for mystical creatures accepting orders of divinity.
It's the beginning of rational humanism, and people began to believe that creativity came entirely from its own individual.
For the first time in history, people hear this genius or this artist -- instead of having a genius.
I have to tell you, I think that was a big mistake.
You know? I think to allow a single person that he thinks he or she's like the vessel, like the pelvis and the essence and the source of all the divine, creative, unknown, infinite mystery is a little too much responsibility to get them to a fragile, human psyche.
It's like asking someone to swallow the sun.
And that deforms and deforms all the egos, and it creates all these inability to expect success.
I think this success impression has killed our artists over the last 500 years.
And if that's true -- and I think it's true -- the question is this.
Can we change it?
Perhaps returning to an aging understanding of the relationship between people and the mystery of the creatives.
Maybe not.
Maybe we can take rational humanism from 500 years into an 18-minute talk.
And there are certainly people in this audience who would have really legitimate scientific doubts about the idea of -- basically -- figs that follow people and apply fine magic to their projects and so on.
I'm probably not going to be able to take all of you on this journey.
But the question I want to ask is, why not?
Why not think about it that way?
Because it makes as much sense as any other thing I've heard about when it comes to explaining the absolutely crazy launity of the creative process.
A process that -- as everyone knows, who's ever tried to do something -- so in other words, everyone in this room -- doesn't always act properly.
In fact, it can feel like a paranormal sometimes.
I had a encounter recently when I met the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone who was now over 90, but she was a poet all of her life, and she told me that when you were growing up in rural Virginia, out in the fields, she said she would feel and hear a poem about the landscape coming to her.
She said it would be like a watershed train.
That would roll across the country.
She felt when it came, because it would take the earth below her feet.
She knew that in such a moment she could only do one, and that was -- in her words -- run like the devil.
She ran like the Devil to the house while she was being pursued by this poem, and it was all she had to quickly get enough to a piece of paper and a pencil to allow her to, if she could get through them, grab it and hold it on the sheet.
In other times, she wasn't fast enough. She ran and ran and run, but she didn't reach the house and the poem rolled through her and she missed it. She said it would keep going over the land and -- as she said -- looked for another poet.
And then there were these moments -- the part I'll never forget -- she said there were moments when she nearly missed it.
So she runs out to the house and looks for the paper and the poem goes through them, and she grabs a pen straight as it goes through them and then -- she said -- it was as if she grabs her other hand and grabs it.
She grabbed the poem on her tail and pulled it back into her body and took it on the sheet of paper.
In these opportunities, the poem came in and out of the paper intact -- but backwards -- from the last word to the first.
When I heard that, I thought that was creepy -- that's exactly how my creative process unfolds.
It's not like my creative process at all -- I'm not the channel!
I'm a maulter. In order to work, I have to stand up every day at the same time and sweat, drag me down and really get uncomfortable.
But even I in my cave art sometimes have this thing melted.
And I guess many of you have done that too.
Even I had work or ideas that came through me from a source that I really can't identify.
What is that for a thing?
And how do we relate to this without losing our minds, but maintaining ourselves in the opposite, even in mental health?
For me, the best living example of how you can do this is to teach the musician Tom to watch. I was allowed to interview him for a magazine a few years ago.
We talked about this. And you know what? Most of his life, Tom was the embodiment of the magnificent modern artist, who was trying to master these uncontrolled creative impulses that lived in him and deal with them.
But then he got older and quieter, and he told me that one day he was going on a road in Los Angeles, and it changed everything for him.
He was driving at high speed when he suddenly hears a little fragment of a melody that, as inspiration is often made for him, is difficult to see, and he wants to have it. It's hopeful. He's leaning after it, but he can't believe it.
He doesn't have a piece of paper, he doesn't have a pen, he doesn't have a tape recorder.
So he's starting to climb up this old track into him, like, I'm going to lose this thing, and I'm going to be followed by this song forever.
I'm not good enough. I can't do it.
But instead of panicing, he just stopped.
He ended the whole thought and did something completely new.
He just looked in the sky, and he said, Believe me, can't you see I'm driving a car?
Go and visit Leonard Cohen.
His whole work process changed after that.
Not work itself. It was always as dark as ever.
But the process and the heavy stress that surrounds him was lifted up when he took the genius out of him, where he didn't cause anything but anger and left him where he sort of came from, and he realized that it didn't have to be a mess, a mess.
There could be a selfish, miraculous, bizarre collaboration, a kind of conversation between Tom and the strange, alien thing that wasn't quite Tom.
When I heard this story, it also changed a little bit of the way I worked, and it saved me once.
This idea saved me as I was in the middle of the writing process of Eat, Pray, Love, I fell into one of those pits of doubt that we all fall when we work on something and it doesn't work. You start thinking it's a disaster. It's the worst book ever written.
Not just bad, but the worst of all times.
I started thinking, I should just pop the project once.
But then I remembered Tom talking in the open sky, and I tried.
So I took my look from the manuscript, and I spoke to my comment in a blank corner of the room.
I said, "Listen, Du thing, you and I know both if this book isn't brilliant, it's not completely my fault, right?
Because you can see that I'm investing everything I have. I don't have that anymore.
So if you want to get better, you've got to check this out and hold your share of your balance.
Okay. But, if you don't do that -- you know what, the hell with that.
I'm going to keep writing, because that's my job.
And I want to give protocol to you that I was here today for my part of the job.
Because, at the end of it, it's like this. For centuries, people have gathered at the greatest moonlights in the deserts of North Africa with holy dances and music that have been held hours -- until dawn.
These solids were always great because the dancers were professional and they were fantastic.
But over and over again, very rare, something special happened, and one of the actors actually became above-ground.
And I know you know what I mean, because I know you've all seen a performance like this before in your life.
It was as though the time would stand still and the dancer would step through a kind of a discomfort, and he wouldn't do anything different than he'd ever done before -- 1,000 nights before, but it all came together.
And all of a sudden he didn't seem purely human anymore.
It was healed from the inside, and it was heated from the bottom, and everything was healed through a divine fire.
When that happened, people knew what that was. They called it his name.
They put their hands together and they started singing, 'Allah, Allah, Allah, God, God, God, God. Flight.
That's God, you know?
Interesting historical note: When the Moding Southern Spain brought this practice, the language changed over the centuries of "Allah," Allah, Allah, Allah, Allah, Allah, Allah, to Ole, ole, ole, olecular, that you still hear about in the fights and the loneco courts.
If an actors in Spain have done something impossible, a magical thing: "Allah, ole, ole, Allah, great, bravo-polical," it's: a glimpse of God.
And that's great, because we need that.
But the tricky part follows the next morning when the dancer wakes up himself and realizes it's 11 o'clock on a Tuesday -- and no longer wears a joy of God.
It's just an aging geek with painstaking knees, and maybe it's never going to go back to those altitudes again.
And perhaps nobody will ever call God's name again when he turns, but what will he do with the rest of his life?
That's hard.
This is one of the most painful arrangements of a creative life.
But maybe it doesn't have to be that full of embarrassments if you didn't believe in the beginning that the most extraordinary aspects of your being came from you.
If you may just believe that they're a ticket -- from an incredibly resource for reading your life that's passed on to someone else if you're done with it.
When we start thinking about this, it changes everything.
So I started thinking, and so I certainly think in the last few months, working on the book that's going to come soon -- as the dangerous, scary, very expected successor of my failed success.
What I have to say to myself, when I get crazy, is: Don't be afraid.
Don't be discouraged.
Just do your job.
Be still for your contribution, whatever it is that it is.
If Dein job is dance, dance.
If the stupid genius that you're sent to your side decides to show for a brief moment a hay of wonder through your effort, then punk!
And if not, you still tan your dance.
And pulp! Foolf for all of you.
I believe that, and I feel that we should teach that.
Oddle! It's just for all of you to be there, for all of you to have the only human love and self-interest to be there.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Whoa!
Last year, I showed these two slides to illustrate that the Arctic Circle, which for nearly three million years has shrunk the size of the lower 48 states to 40 percent.
But this doesn't really express the seriousness of this particular problem because it doesn't show the thickness of the ice.
In a sense, the Arctic ice cap is the beating heart of our global climate system.
It grows in the winter and it shrunk in summer.
The next slide I'm going to show you is a time-lapse picture of what's happened in the last 25 years.
The last ice is labeled with red.
As you can see, it grows on the dark blue. This is the annual ice in winter, and it shrunk in summer.
The so-called permanent ice, five years old or older, is almost like blood coming out of the body here.
It will be gone from here to here in 25 years.
This is a problem because warming up the frozen reason for the Arctic Ocean, where there are large amounts of frozen carbon, which, when it's attacked, is made by microbes to methane.
Compared to the entire amount of climate-changing materials in the atmosphere, this amount could double if we crossed that critical point.
Already today, in some flat lakes in Alaska, methane is itself out of water.
Professor Katey Walter at the University of Alaska traveled to another group of work to another flat lake last winter.
Wow!
You're fine. The question is, how are we going to do it?
And one reason is because of this enormous heat store, Greenland heats up from the north.
This is an annual water stream.
But volume is much bigger than ever before.
This is the Kangerlusuaq river in southwest Greenland.
If you want to know how sea level is melting through land ice, it's going to fly into the sea.
These rivers are fast-forward.
On the other end of the planet, Antarctica, the largest ice mass on the planet.
Last month, researchers reported that the entire continent now has a negative sheet of ice.
And the Westantarktis, which has showed up over a couple of submarines, is particularly very crucible.
This is 20 feet of sea level, just like Greenland.
In the Himalayas, the third-largest ice mass, you see a new seas up there that were glaciers a few years ago.
40 percent of all the people in the world get half of their drinking water out of this melting water.
In the Anden, this glacier is the water source for this city.
The amount of water has evaporated.
But when they turn, most of the drinking water will fall away.
In California, a 40 percent reduction in the snow cover of the Sierra Leone.
This is in the sinks.
And the predictions they've read are serious.
This drying across the world leads to a dramatic increase in fires.
And the disasters all over the world have declined in a truly extraordinary and unprecedented way.
Four times as many in the last 30 years as of the previous 75.
This is a completely unsustainable model of development.
If you look at this historical context, you can see what it says.
Over the past five years, we've produced 70 million tons of CO2 every 24 hours -- 25 million tons a day in the oceans.
If you look at the region of the Eastern Pacific right now, the American continent, west, and on the other hand, the Indian sub-constinent, where there is a dramatic decline in oxygen in the seas.
The biggest single factor for global warming, next to deforestation, which is 20 percent, is burning fossil fuels.
Oil is a problem, and coal is the same biggest problem.
The United States is one of the two largest advocates, along with China.
And the proposal was to build many more coal plants.
But we're starting to see a change.
Here are the ones that have been taken over the last few years with some green alternatives that have been proposed.
Meanwhile, there is a political dispute in our country.
And the coal-industrial and oil industries have spent a quarter-acre dollars last year's revenue to promote clean coal, which is a contradiction in itself.
This picture reminded me of something.
For Christmas, I was walking around at home in Tennessee, making out a billion tons of coallamm.
You saw it appear in the news.
This is in our entire country of America's second largest waste stream.
This happened on Christmas.
One of the commercials of the coal industry for Christmas was this one.
Frosty of the coal man is a glowing, happy bug.
There's an envelope and abundance in America, and it's helping our economy grow.
Frosty, the coal man is getting clean every day.
It's affordable and loving, and workers stay in wages and bread.
This is the source of most coal in West Virginia.
The most powerful mountainworker is the head of massy Coal.
Let me tell you one very clearly: Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, they don't know what they're talking about.
So the alliance for climate protection has started two campaigns.
This is one, part of it.
We see climate change as a serious threat to our business.
That's why we set it up to the top, a substantial amount of money to get an ad campaign to get the truth about coal.
In fact, coal is not dirty.
We think it's clean -- it smells good still.
So, don't worry about global warming.
Just leave that alone.
Sauber coal, you've heard a lot about it.
So let's take a tour of this modern, clean coal factory.
Fantastic! This machine is quite noisy.
But it's the sound of clean coal technology.
And yet the burning of coal is one of the main reasons for global warming, the remarkable clean coal technologies that you see here, everything changes.
If you look at it carefully, this is today's clean coal technology.
Finally, the positive alternative to our economic challenge and our global security challenge.
America is in a crisis, the economy, the national security, the climate crisis.
The red thread that connects them all together is our dependence on carbon-based fuels like dirty coal and foreign oil.
But now there's a bold, new solution to get us out of this miserable position.
America's worth 100 percent clean electricity, in the next 10 years.
A plan to bring America back to work, make us safer and help stop global warming.
Finally, a solution that is large enough to solve our problems.
Renew America. Find them out more.
This is the last one.
It's a new supply of America.
One of the fastest ways to reduce our dependence on old, dirty materials that stift our world.
The future is here. Wind, sun and a new energy system.
New investment to create well-paid jobs.
Renew America. It's time to accept reality.
There's an old African saying, "If you want to be quick, go alone.
If you want to get far, go together."
We need to get far, and we need to get fast.
Thank you very much.
I'd like to begin by asking you to think back to the time of your childhood when you were playing with building blocks.
While you realized how to put your hands out and attack the balls, and move, you actually learned to think and solve problems through understanding and changing spatial contexts.
Space thinking is closely connected to how we understand a large part of our environment.
As a computer scientist -- inspired by the way we interact with real objects -- with my professional advisor Patti and my colleague Jeevan Kalanithi, I began to wonder: What if we could use computers instead of a mouse cursor moving like a digital fingertips on a flat surface of work -- what if we could intervene with both of our hands and physically engineer the data and organize it the way we want it?
The question was so profound that we evolved to explore the answer and the potential.
In short, a silicon is an interactive computer about the size of a cookie.
They can be moved by their hand, they can sense each other, they can sense their movements, and they have a screen and a radio receiver.
More importantly, if you're physical, why you can move them like building blocks just by extending hands and access.
And the smarts are an example of a new generation of tools for manipulation of digital data.
And if these tools become physical and they develop a consciousness for their movements, to recognize each other and to perceive the subtleties of our dealing with them, then we can begin to explore new and fun kinds of interactions.
I start with some simple examples.
It's a siftible for video reference, and when I snap it in one direction, the video will be played forward; when I snap it in the other direction, it's going backwards.
And these interactive portraits perceive each other.
So when I put them side-by-side, that's what they're interested in.
If they're surrounded by alders, they'll notice that too, and they can get a little nervous.
And they also feel their movement and their tendency.
One interesting implication of the interactions that we started to recognize was that we could apply everyday gestures to data, like we could pour out colors to do this with fluids.
In this case, we've configured three siftables as a color pot, and I can use them to pour paint in the middle where they're then mixed up.
If we overlay it, we can pull back a little.
There's also a few nice opportunities in education like languages, math, logic games, where we give people the opportunity to predict quickly, and we want to see the results immediately.
Here I am -- this is a Fibonacci series that I do with a simple equation program.
This is a game of words, which is a kind of mixture of scrabble and soggle.
Basically, you get every turn on every single siftable random letter, and as you try to make words, they're tested in a dictionary.
Then, after about 30 seconds, you mix again, and you have a new letter combination and a new way of trying.
Thank you very much.
These are some kids who came to the Media Lab on a trip to the Media Lab, and I could get them to try it out and have a video of it.
You really loved it.
One interesting fact about these kinds of applications is that you don't have to give people lots of instructions.
All you have to say is "Thinkle Words," and they know exactly what to do.
Here are some people who test it.
This is our latest beta tester in the lower right-hand corner.
It turns out he just wanted to stack the whistles.
So for him, they were just building blocks.
This is an interactive motion filmmaking.
We wanted to develop a learning tool for linguistics.
This is Felix.
He can bring new characters into the scene by lighting up the siftable from the table, showing this character.
Here, it lets the sun go.
The sun rises.
Now he's got a tractor in the scene.
The orange tablet.
Good job! Yes!
By shaking the whistles and putting them side-by-side, he can let the characters interact ...
... invent your own story.
Hello!
It's a story with an open end, and it can decide how it evolves.
Flying cat.
The last example I have today to show this is a live concert of music that we've developed recently in the whistles as sound, like leadership, bass and drums.
Each one has four different variations; you can choose which one you want to use.
And you can put those notes into the sequence that you can then assign to any patterns.
And you plot them by simply holding a ton of a single-stranded sound to a sequence sensory.
There are effects that you can change in real life, such as Hall and filters.
You connect it with a particular tone, and then you tend to unite it.
And then you have overstate effects like speed and volume that you use on the whole sequence.
So let's take a look.
We're starting to place the leader in two sequences where we can put them in a row, expand them and add a little more to the voice.
So now I add a base.
Now I'm going to do a little bit of a drum here.
And now I combine the filter with the drums so I can direct the effect.
I can accelerate the entire sequence by bending the pace into one direction or another.
And now I'm going to combine the filter with the base, with a little more expression.
I can rotate the sequence as it unfolds.
So I don't have to plan them in the field, but I can improvise; I can extend them in the process or shorten them.
And finally, I can light up the whole sequence by snowing the volume on the left.
Thank you very much.
So as you can see, my excitement is to develop new computer interfaces that fit better to the way our brains and bodies work.
And today I've had time to show you a part of this new design world and some of the possibilities of what we're working on in our lab.
The idea that I'd like to leave you with is that we are on the verge of this new generation of tools for interacting with digital media, bringing information into our world that corresponds to our demands.
Thank you very much.
I'm happy to talk to all of you.
Yes, good day.
I'm glad I'm there.
Yeah, so what should be biohacking?
I've got to pick up a little bit of that, and that's what biohacking is doing with modern molecular biology.
I've been studying molecular biology, and I've been working on biohacking for a couple of years now, and I've started this because I just wanted to know and really wanted to do it themselves, which is what I've learned from studying theoretically.
So, that was my primary motivation.
So it was curiosity, and I wanted to kind of get closer to the material, like this.
I think that molecular biology in general now, so generally speaking, biotechnology, everything you count on, Synthetic biology and so on.
Extremely important, now extremely important and much more, much more important will be in the future.
There's such a controversial thing as all these technic-changing plants on the crop.
There's Craig Venter now in the U.S.A. trying to make biofuels, which is gasoline from algae.
And then there's all kinds of things that have come about everyday life that most people don't realize, for example, leaseaseases that allow us to wash at four degrees at a time, are also gentechly optimized enzymes.
And you can make the list go endlessly.
And so from the interest of this technology, I just went on and on.
So why are we hacking now?
Most people know this from the software sector.
Computers hack, and it's always going to be like, yeah, the hackers are going to break somewhere and steal data and so on.
That's kind of sad for the hacker's scene, because it doesn't really matter what it really started like, and what's really behind it.
In fact, the software have started, in the '70s, in the '80s, in the '80s, with computer bases, and it's also created the Internet.
And it's about solving a playful, creative, original way of solving a problem.
And the problem is that it's not just a technical problem, it can also be a social problem, it can also be just a problem of access, which is how to simplify things, so any problem of question, and how to fix it, or how to make it better.
And it's just been big in software, but it's also in the electronics industry, so there's a whole lot of build-ups that deal with electronics all kinds of stuff.
And now I'm going to go to biology, and I'm going to take this metaphor that comes out of synthetic biology, that biology is actually information science, because, the D.N.A code is an abstract code, which is, yes, it's not quite the same as computers, because it's more dynamic because it's matter, so real matter is, not just cyber.
But it's also a code, and you can program that as well as you can hack that way, and that's what I found incredibly fascinating, and that's where I just wanted to get a lot deeper.
It's actually only taken two thousand eight really big forms, these networks.
There's hackteria dot org, which is originally from Switzerland, which is with Europe, and with cooperation in India, which is a network that is based, but now has members or active people all over the world.
This has a more artistic orientation, so there's a lot of artists and philosophers, and working with scientists to just sort of dive down with these technologies and ask questions and process creatively, there's museum shows and yes, all kinds of things.
But it's always about finding such a loose access, having a playful relationship with it.
And then there's do-it-yourself organic dot org, D.I.Y.bio.
This is a network from the U.S.A., which is actually more of a kind of forum, where you stand up and you talk online.
They're a little bit more technical and a little bit more business-oriented as well, so there's some questions that are being asked.
And from these networks that made the whole thing popular, it turned out to be a scene that I'd like to play for a moment.
Here in the picture on the upper left, you see biocurious, which is a hackerspace, so basically a kind of school, a private school, a nonprofit, where everybody can come.
Kids, Alte, all kinds of people go there to just sort of dive into it, put up a laboratory and look at what you can do if this lab lab is on top of it.
On the lower left is a group in Indonesia called House-of-Natural Services, but they've been around for quite a long time.
Even longer than those other two networks.
They're also interested in this kind of artistic aspect of biological materials and, yes, electronics platforms as well, and they're combining that in a kind of more smooth way.
A group from Ankara, whom I met a while ago, who have had a student group who wanted to communicate more to the public, what they're learning in college, and they've done so on streetlights and tried to explain to people what D.N.A is.
And I have a lecture up in Copenhagen in the medical museum in combination with an exhibition on the subject.
And that's, yes, that's mostly fairly young people, but the only thing that really unites you are is this fascination with technology.
And what you can do with it, and just specifically go to society and say, "Well, what do you know, what do you want to do, do you have an interest in getting you to do that?"
So, O.K. now, to hack biology, you kind of need materials.
You need, of course, biological materials, and you also need tools, and that's a lab.
Particularly, what you normally understand under a laboratory is that they're sort of shutter machines, extremely expensive, extremely distant, just for professionals, trained academics with Ph.D.s and so on.
And our approach was to say, O.K., you really don't have to do that.
It's actually not necessary because each coffee machine has actually developed higher technology than most lab equipment, which is really like this.
And if I had this premise with this premise, for example, Brian Degger tried to put together a mini-mal lab, he took a vapor pressure pot, a heat plate, and, yes, so soup soup, and then he formed bacteria and worked.
So anybody who's ever gathered a soup that he's left for too long, even done.
I then tried it out in my lab to scale it up a little bit, and then I bought myself this Second-Hand-Equipment on eBay, and I did some D.N.A analysis, trying to do a dadship test, like this one. N.A. Fingerprint, even to make it home.
Now that shouldn't be a joke, but ...
Down here in the picture, you can see the laboratory, in performance clips, so there's this appropriate garage with all sorts of laboratory hangers that the university had exploited, a group in Paris that's sort of set up and fairly successful at doing this, and also doing pretty interesting things, and I want to cut a project for a moment.
And this is biocurious, who's just mentioned hackerspace, this one, this one, a kind of folk college, basically for molecular biology.
And yes, so, you can see, it's relatively heterogeneous, so there are some people who are doing it themselves out there until too many larger organizations that are doing more formal already in institutionalized form.
But always the approach is to make it easy and accessible.
The first project that we've done as an international group, when we've become somewhat aware of our own, O.K., we're now here as a real scene, and we're online, and we know the people who are always talking and so on.
And then from the Do-it-yourself organic org website, the founder's website, and they said O.K., we have to really meet now, meet real, and then have two events organized, one in London, two thousand, 10, and shortly after that in the U.S.A., San Francisco.
And then it was about, yes, O.K., who are we, what do we want, what do we want to share?
And what are our values and what is our goal, our foundation?
And then we created a code-of-conduct.
This was pretty intuitive, so everybody just kind of put up his desires, hiss and the things that moved him, he put it, he said.
There was, I think, a very good code being done.
And then we have the one that's not supposed to be, but that's what I think is, I think, has been pretty good, that people are quite convinced of this.
And we even tried to put that back into the academic world, but somehow it didn't happen.
So I believe that we are from the biohackers, in fact, a step further than the academic world.
Yes, what kind of projects do we do now?
One project I did with the hackteria network in Switzerland was that we wanted to build something called an optical trap or an optical pinceette.
This is, if you're focused on a laser beam, on one in the room, then you can catch little particles in the air or in the liquid, and then move that focus, so it's captured there, so it's like a tractor beam, basically.
It really works, and it's done in academic publishing, and then we thought, okay, okay, that's what we might get, we've taken a webcam, we've taken the lens off, we've turned around, you've got a microscope that's about four hundred times bigger.
This is what you see down there.
And then we took a D.V.D. Brenner apart, and we pulled the laser out, and then we tried to focus on this camera.
And that didn't work, unfortunately, but we still learned a lot about it.
So another project, which is from the French group out of Paris, that's been working, that's pretty cool.
He's got a bit of a brainwave device, like E.E.G., or something like that, so he's engaged in neurobiology, his name is Sam Neurohack.
He then handed that helmet over there, and in cooperation with the museum, that's what went.
Then the visitors could go in the room, sit on this chair, sit on this helmet.
Then their brainwaves were measured, and according to what they thought or how they thought, they've gone through different lights in the room.
It was a pretty fancy project.
Another thing from the U.S., which also has to do with this dadhood test story, is the P.C.R., that's the polymer box reaction, complicated word.
So it's about copying genes, breeding D.N.A, breeding fragments so you can make them visible.
So if I do this, which is the profilers in the Tatort, they go, they collect any hair sample, and then they apply that method, and then they can say, "O.K., this hair belongs to this human being, so."
And the machines that do this are pretty expensive, they're like, you buy commercials, the cheapest ones go off at 4,000 Euros.
And that's not in the hobby, but it's a really cool technology that can also do a lot.
So this is just an application of many that you can do with it.
And they sat there like two tinkerers, and they said, O.K., we're making it easier and cheaper, and then they've just got open source, so open source hardware, open hardware, electronics tools, built this thing up, and now they've actually brought this into the market market, and now they're the world's cheapest supplyr of these devices.
I think it's sort of like six hundred dollars or something.
But anyway, it's still not cheap, but it's certainly in a framework where it's more clearly available.
So I think it's a very successful hack.
One project I started last was to build a gene genome.
Gene-Gun is, yes, a kind of air-druck machine that shoots about as far as it is two inches or so.
You invite D.N.A to Goldpartikel, and then the gold particles into this air balloon, and then I shot them onions and then made them glow to it.
So the device that you see there, it didn't work.
But that's my prototype, which was kind of, you know, sort of, you know, the thing on it, the electronics on it, the print on it, and that was the pressure was too high, the thing had broken.
And then I took a sahnespender and I joined it.
A sahnespender, if you make it full of water, has the pressure enough, so I think, that's the furthest way down to studdly bar on it.
And then you can accelerate the particles much enough, and then they go into the onion as well.
And the commercial device costs about five and a half thousand euros up or something like that, Sahnespenders for the 50th.
So it doesn't have the same efficiency, but it's basically feasible.
So, and that's, right now, the crux of the scene is just increasing this availability of technology and also increasing the information and the resilience, that more people can engage in that.
Because, as I said at the beginning, it's an extremely important technology, and most people have pretty little idea of it, and also no opportunity to really get good at it.
Because if you're just reading about it, from a second-literature, it's not the same as if you've done it yourself or seen it.
And I think technology is becoming more important in our modern societies.
And if, as an informed citizen, you want to make meaningful decisions in society and want to connect, you need the access to knowledge and technology.
And you also have to do it and understand it in order to do it and understand it.
And that's what's called Open Knowledge and Citizen Science.
So, as citizens, you'll be able to deal with these scientific technologies.
And that's the crux of the biohackers.
These are the people who at least put themselves on the website, D.I.Y.bio-dot-org website.
This is a relatively remarkable number of people around the world.
And what's interesting is that they're also represented in Southeast Asia.
This is, I think, that there are fewer people there than there are actually.
So I know some people who didn't.
And these are just the biohackers, the individual people.
Part of it also has to do with these hackerspaces, so these places are being put together.
And that's very much at the beginning.
As I said, two thousand times it just started.
And Hackerspaces, which is the Computerhackerspaces, because the C-Base in Berlin was the first nineteen hundred-pound architecture.
And this has now become a huge network of very good, yes, infrastructure centers that are represented all over the world.
And we hope, of course, that sometimes we're similar to spreading, and then we're similarly well connected, so that even more people can be engaged.
And I would invite each of you to deal with it and also try something on my own.
Now, it's not that simple, but it's not impossible either, if you have enough curiosity and you put enough energy in, you're going to get far.
Thank you very much for listening.
That's it.
Yeah, Hello.
How do we actually work?
This is a question that I'm very moved by as a designer, but also in the field of research and science and all kinds of things in the field of User Experience.
It's about how you encounter people in interactive media so that they can use these interactive media and make it possible for them to have a satisfying experience.
Because I believe that the interactive media is speaking to us archaeological, cognitive models, so paradigms that have been programmed in our biological memory a very, very long time ago, and that we can now reproce them through interactive media.
And that's very amazing, because it's actually believed that this high-technology that you've come across is that it actually brings you into the future, but in fact, it's as if the future is right with us, at our archaean roots.
So what are really archaeous models now?
I wrote down four words, and I'd like to explain them briefly.
In archaeological cognitive models, these are the models that we've made in the pre-industrial era.
So these archaeological models are that we have a fundamentally natural relationship to virtuality.
This basically sounds unusual.
But I'm going to go back to that in a second, and I'm going to prove to you in a trial that you also have a natural relationship to virtuality.
The second aspect is that since this archaeological model we've been able to speak very, very metaphorically even though we're using a coded language these days.
And the third area, which actually explains itself.
We all know that interactive media, by definition, are nonlinear, which contains linearity, and what, of course, tells us is that we experience linearity today as normal.
The fourth thing is that the story for us is a place of information.
Now, how about that with virtuality, which is really the most natural thing in the world.
I'd like to prove that to you.
How many doors does the house they live in?
We're not going to be able to answer that to you immediately, but this is going to happen, and it's going to happen right now.
They go to the mind through this house where they live, and look at how many doors there are.
And that's what they do.
They virtualize reality without computers.
Fantastic, right?
And we're getting a lot of effort into media design, for example, showing virtual reality in our V.R. lab, and we can actually do that all the time.
And this wealth of virtualizing the reality that people in the pre-industrial era also had a lot to do, because they had nothing at all.
They had no books.
Or they didn't have a photographics.
They didn't have mass media.
The only thing they had was their head.
And the memory was in that head.
In that head, knowledge was initiated, and using these virtual images, Imagination, knowledge was also passed on.
And that's why it's so strong in us that we can deal with virtuality so well.
The interesting thing about this is, if I can get a little trip.
Yes, that's it.
The interesting thing about this is that at that time, the human being was media media media media itself.
Now, if you're going to keep thinking about a piece of paper.
What is media today?
Then they'll notice that there's been a change.
But that's what I'm going to talk about in a minute.
The essential tools of information exploration have always been stories.
Shameists, priests, what we call knowledge guards, were out of place to keep knowledge in stories.
And we're still very, very close to stories today.
The author of the book "The Storytelling Animal," Jonathan Godschall, as we speak, we still have a thousand, a hundred hours a year with the recipe for stories.
That means for a child that has spent it until the achievement of the greatness of his life with the prescription of stories.
Now we think that our love of stories depends on us as a child on the lap of our parents.
No, no, it's a long way.
It goes much further back to the cultures of the pre-industrial era.
But to me, in the realm of interactive media, what's so amazing about it is that we've been branching into our biological memory, the ability to think nonlinearly.
I brought you an example from the North American tribe of Nootka Indians.
And they lived in the coastal region of British Columbia.
And as you can see, this is a very intimate area, and you had to kind of navigate from the island to the island to create food.
And they've done this with so-called lead-Land maps.
You may know that if you're a little bit interested in that, of the Australian Native Americans.
They have similar principles.
They don't have lead-Land maps, but they have used the so-called songlines, or the trauma zone.
And what's interesting about this is that the navigation and topography of regions could be mapped to songs.
The language understated by the subordinated Range.
That means you navigate through sound and rhythm.
And these sounds and rhythms have shown the geology, the topography of a region, and it has also enabled, of course, that you could defragize these songs and put them together differently and move them back to the left, to the right and back to the source.
Why don't we sing more to get from A to B up?
Anyway, not to navigate.
What actually happened?
This is what's going on as a fun machine age.
We've moved forward to what's called the Vogt Age.
It's the machine age, and it's the book, and it's happening, and it's the photolitograography.
And that's what's happened is that we've shifted the responsibility for our memories and the production of our individual memories to external media.
On the book, on the image.
So we have, unfortunately, a piece of God refuses to translate.
Virtuality has suddenly become alien to us, and has nothing to do with reality.
Bruce Brown, a well-known Design researcher at Brighton University, has come so far to say that these mass media, he means the book and the picture, so not television, the Internet and so on, what we call mass media today, is that these mass media of our memories have been fossilized, and our ability to virtualize.
Let's do a little commuting.
From the Vogt Age to the machine age.
What's the influence on our thinking and our memory?
Then we have the kind of loose influence in the pre-industrial cultures.
And they've been over and over again over the centuries by the influence of the machine age.
So instead of remembering each other, we have standardized, widespread, mass-created patterns of memories that we can depend on our personal memories.
We are no longer producing ourselves.
We have an abstract language.
We don't think about it anymore in images that doesn't represent things in pictures, but we make them code for our language.
We've become used to things that happen linearly.
And we've embraced linearity as law, and there are only exceptions, like non-Linearity.
What we have left is the story story story.
Still, we're very, very arrested by the news as an information medium.
The question is, what's next?
We had the dawn -- we had the machine age, and we're now taking what's called the Cyber Ages.
It sounds very spacious, and it sounds like science fiction, I know.
But these concepts of cyber-perceivence are bringing us back to our ability to rediscover.
It's about virtuality; it's about non-Linearity; it's about narrative.
I want to explain that a little bit.
There are technical concepts like augmented reality, which means augmented reality.
So if you look at Glasses, for example, it's such a concept that lets us combine the virtual world with the real world, which is our affinity to virtualization, to feel the visual as something normal, of course, is again spoken.
Another example is what's called a virtual reality.
So crazy, of course, in the context of my talk, that's when we move physically into non-existence, virtual worlds, all the way through the holodeck model.
And other examples are the surrounding, intelligent systems.
These are spaces that can respond intelligently to a human being.
All of this needs the ability to accept virtuality as a real habitat.
I graduated from high school, and I hope the video will work, a very, very beautiful project, which is Michael Burk's graduate work, Ann-Kathrin Krenz, Joris Klause and Jan-Moritz junk.
And the two last ones are here today.
Maybe you can just stand up for a moment so you can talk to the two about the project.
And I brought this project as an example, again, to address these archaeological, cognitive models.
The whole thing is a game, I have to say.
Which, of course, comes extremely close to telling the story, and it's a computer game.
And when I say computer games, you're very likely to see that some people are calling around in front of anysols or playing with any cane in your hand.
Anyway, they do that in there.
This is a game outside.
And that's specifically thought that I cover the outside world, so I cover the real world again.
And this game connects the virtual world, so the data sets up the data space we make with the real world.
I'm sorry I have to cut off so much.
You can explain it in a much better way, there's a lot more to it.
And that's because I cover a city by looking at which places have been positive or negativelywitted.
And so I get from the city to a very different perspective, a very different impression, which is that I see negative and positive zones of a city, and I get a very different sort of virtual map of a very real city.
And we can look at that now.
Ah, what you can see here, sorry, is another little explanation of what you're seeing right now.
Of course, this virtual world lives in the walls of our cities.
And with a kind of a flashlight, we can make these virtual worlds visible.
So, I'd like to summarize this to my talk, which is in the sense that the properties and the capabilities that we've acquired from the experience -- age-old, and have gone a little bit like this in the machine age that can be activated with the help of the so-called cyber -- age-old, and that we can, in this way, over complex, technological, new products don't actually come into the future, but actually come back to our roots.
Thank you very much.
Yeah, I'm very excited to be with you.
I've been asked if this bag is a talking bag, and I'm not going to talk.
He's not going to do that.
I'm also going to dissolve in what's in there.
But I'm just going to make it a little bit curious.
Yes, kids are naturally curious, or ought to be curious, designers too.
I'm a designer of a house, so I'm also involved in the subject of curiosity, and how curiosity changes our thinking again, and why maybe we lose curiosity and need to reboot and so on and so forth.
This is a whole series of things that you're dealing with next to the actual icon as a designer.
When professors are curious, they're often pushed into what's called the research major.
And that's what I've had for the last half a year.
A research expert on natural User Interface design.
Now you're going to ask yourself, why do all of the designers begin to deal with so natural archaean forms of communication, interaction and so on and so forth?
And I'm just holding one of these little devices up because things are supposed to be more intuitive, more natural, more user-friendly, and you have to look at what's actually natural for us humans, which is user-friendly or intuitive.
And before that, I've been in the field of Natural User Interface design, so the next generation of human computing, where we're dealing with the relationship of the human computer, how our tools, or how the computer, changes from the computer to the digital assistants.
So I've been looking at what's natural or intuitive.
Maybe take a look at it again.
Why does this happen at all?
So if we look at the evolution of our society, which is just shown here, we're now moving from the third to the fourth generation of society or to the form of society.
So from modern to computer society.
Every society is shaped by a primary education.
At first, the tribal society is through language.
That is, it's been found, because you've talked a common language, you could communicate with each other, you've moved to the same cave, or you've moved to other areas, you've formed cities, you've got villages, and you've kind of created a tribal society.
But the primary medium was the language, which was very natural, was a very lifelike thing.
If you're going to learn too, not a small child can talk about nature, but we're learning about it sukzesive and disproportionately, of course.
That was then passed away by the ancient society and the first form of abstraction.
This was a huge outcry at the time, because, of course, the living language began to manifest in the form of writing, which is what's fluid and alive, I start it and I put it in stone and I manipulate it as well.
After I'm bitching and when I'm biting, of course, it's a very different kind of coverage than if there's a living kind of one from there.
But sukzesive then moved this script as a primary medium, got an elevator.
Then came the next generation that we actually live in today.
This is just the printing and print typeface with Gutenberg and others.
At the time, it was just like a front where Adel, Klerus and others said, "You're actually insane if the people start to read, then the people want to read again, and that's obviously totally fatal."
And now we come to the next generation, and the exciting thing is, a generation shift is just every few hundred years, and we're really at the moment in this phenomenal phase that we're doing this.
Of course, we're completely confused because we're seeing on the one hand the new media, social media, Facebook and so on.
With total transparency, what the new thinking is, what's wrong with old thinking is, doesn't say that in the lasagn horse meat and no beef is more or other phenomena, which I just want to virtue this and I want to explore this.
And these two worlds are just pinching together, new and old thinking.
The exciting thing is, when you look at this, this new society, this computer society, comes up with a lot of mechanisms, principles and archaeous paradigms from the tribal society.
Now, not at a local level, but at a global level.
We understood that the weather is global.
That the theme of ecology is a global one.
It's not that if I think about locally ecologically and the neighbor is thinking less ecologically, it doesn't work.
That means, from the local village, a global village has actually become the same principles, of course possible, intuitively possible, but also total transparency.
As you knew then in the village, who has what with whom and when, this is what's happening today about this expansion of our self through these mobile end devices at a global level.
It's that we access knowledge globally, and it's getting faster and better and better and better.
This is how it used to happen in the village.
So before I start looking at this, what does it mean to us, what's natural, what we might have learned, but what's intuitive for us, so what's different?
Because a lot of times people come, you can't do it in terms of use, so that anybody can deal with it.
So you have to deal with what that means, and not just change it, that it's different, but it's supposed to be better.
And when, of course, it's also an intuitive thing, and how can I, as a designer, take influence, and just fashion things according to that, that they're a useable person, so they're intuitive, because then they're fun and they're easy to use.
So you're busy, even studying, talking about perception and perception psychology.
And, of course, that's what, then you start and look and say, okay, now I'm just going to look inside yourself.
And what does that actually look like in there?
So how do we work when we look inside?
And what does that mean, of course, intuitively, and how do our channels work in perception, and how does cognitive processing work?
Because Steve Jobs once said, "You've got to dig deeper and understand how it works."
So you really have to look in detail if I want to make something that's useable or intuitively hand-habable, which is what the core means.
And you already see that A is our seven senses, which most of us think we've only got five, now it's even seven recognized, and certainly in the near future, there's a real sense to add, and as an extension, again, to ourselves.
And to look at how we process information, how do we apply information?
Just say, what is information?
Information is every difference that makes a difference.
A lot of people use the word, but don't even know what it means in detail.
But I have to understand basically, in nature, when information becomes information, when information comes from information and from information, again, knowledge so that I know how to make things intuitively possible, or, of course, hand-held.
And of course, also, how does design influence perception.
We see this when I'm painting things, I can make them confusing, like on the right-hand side, where I don't know what salt and pepper is, or I can make them kind of intuitively by showing things.
So much more natural is in a vessel, but I'm sort of looking directly at where salt and pepper is in.
And when I say to someone, give me salt or pepper, they'll think to the right one, where's what's inside.
And then the left is just intuitively accessing, and then hopefully, hopefully, that there's no sugar in there, that salt will give you that same.
But also, our perception of ourselves, how do they feel to us?
For example, this perception in context.
The right circle looks bigger than the little one, even though that's not the case, but they're just about the same size, and yet our perception changes, depending on which context we put things in.
Does anybody know what that is?
Come on.
Pattern recognition should still work.
There's more of my glasses going on.
So it's circled.
A second circle already begins to correlate, or associate, in some ways.
And then if I add a semioval to that, suddenly we don't see one more thing, which is circle and circle and circle and, but we see one unit, we don't see three parts, one circle, one circle, another.
So what's called the laws of design, or even forms of psychology, which also affects us in perception.
It's important for the designers who have this most commonly in the first semesters who have great design laws.
The laws of closeness, the laws of continuity and so on.
More recently in the third time, forget about it.
But that's an essential component, if you want to make things very intuitively possible.
The next phenomenon, which is also very interesting, is the vision.
First of all, it's kind of a trite thing, but it's kind of exciting when you're getting close to it.
So we have the eyes in front of us, and now you think, we're seeing from the front to the back.
That's wrong.
You see the first time from the back to the front.
That is, they project an assumption in advance that they see something that they recognize, in fact, play circles.
That means we're just going to project our vision before we see it, bringing it back into our visual system to say, all right.
I have this sort of cognitive relocation, you've done what you want to see.
And then that's where it comes back.
Then we go back to the front, because the hind doesn't pick up the front, and says, "Oh, look back now and see if that's what you see, that's what you want to see."
And then it goes back to the back, and it's actually just been seen.
So a very, very exciting process of how certain things are going on, and what kinds of things are going on for milliseconds are going on.
I don't know who of you know this picture.
There's exactly the same thing that I just described.
Now, everyone from this pattern is trying to figure out something.
I don't know who's going to know.
Does anybody know anything about this?
A Dalmatiner, right.
Once I saw that, there's a Dalmatine in there, you know that.
You're never going to forget that anymore, because I'm going to show you where the Dalmatiner is.
Now you see the Dalmatiner.
And further, now you see it all the time.
That means, I actually adored you so far that you don't recognize a pattern of dadrin anymore, but I have conditioned it within a very short period of time to see that dog in that blurry picture again.
And this is the projection of vision, feedback, vision.
Now I know this, and now I'm going to project to the front that I see the Dalmatiner.
I see the Dalmatiner.
So it's really, really exciting processes that are going on in this, yeah, it's actually not gray, but it's going on right up here in this pinkish mass.
Anyone know what three seconds are?
Long, yes.
That's our present.
So, it's always interesting to know as designers.
If I know something takes three seconds to sort of bridge from the present into the past loop, I can also bridge very well past hours, in which I'm always involved in three seconds.
It has to be processed as a present.
Then it goes into the past, so I can overlay very elegant waiting hours, for example, on the computer when I know this phenomenon.
What does five and a half thousand seconds take?
Yes, milliseconds.
It's also a very exciting phenomenon.
This is the time when you fall in love.
That means, pay attention, if you know that now, pay attention to who you're looking at for a long time, because I don't think there's any propriets for what can happen to you.
And 15 milliseconds are also a very exciting phenomenon.
This is the period of time that most perceptions we have.
That means, the first impression that happens in a speed that is quick, as we perceive things.
And as we also see things, what we're paying attention to, and how we sort of protect ourselves against our environment, so we can think about that in a way.
Of course, designers are not only involved in perception and neural processing or cognition, but primarily on human-object relationship.
So, how does a person deal with certain things?
Once upon a time, the practical functions, so formal aspects or formalesthetic aspects.
There are signs, where I know exactly where I need to reach.
But there's also symbolic functions, why is it that somebody gives such a little twelve, where doesn't anything ever get in the way, so full sums of money, even though it's not that practical?
We're more likely to be on the symbolic level, at the level of meaning that we're also concerned about as designers, of course.
Back to my actual theme of Natural User Interface, and the theme of what's going on, of course, is Usability.
Usibility always means how I can achieve a certain goal quickly, or how a user can do it in a certain context of use effectively, efficiently and contentiously.
That's what the norm says.
How can I make something possible that is useable?
Can I do that directly, or I need a manual, or I need a proper training for that.
And less utilisable or user friendly, it is.
That I do it just differently and make it beautiful doesn't mean it's better handable.
You have to understand that too.
And if you're part of the software that we've just seen, and you look at it, you'll also understand why nine percent of our software today is less intuitive, or isn't good at using on-the-box, which includes the I-Pad in many areas or the I-Phone, although it's much more intuitive than classical software.
It's not just intuitively practical since Apple, but it's a basic business factor, a basic success factor, if I'm going to use technology tools to use people.
Why?
Because usually we're dealing with this new kind of efficiency, which is the natural user interface, for example, five times the average on our target.
You've got to imagine that if you do something of the classical Softrware thing, you need five hours, and with this new kind of natural software, you just have an hour.
That doesn't mean you're probably going to have to go home four hours more, but your employer or anyone's going to notice how he's going to work you for the four hours.
But I want to say that, of course, for us, it's a reasonable increase in performance to achieve certain things.
If we go back to the software sphere, here's the first Commandment interface interface that was very abstract, where it took months to deal with these systems.
Then the next one that's already been working with 'nem neural model or mental model like the software called Eergonomen, which is that you would have an idea of something called the metaphor, the metaphor of a desktop to harness the computer.
So no longer zeros and ones, or kryptic codes, but a metaphor.
This has done a lot of work that's more user-friendly, but it's also done a lot better, of course.
The next generation of graphics surfaces are already working a lot more on behavior.
So, as a designer, I was very much more familiar with behavior than appearance.
This is also a paradigm shift.
That, at one point, I think the appearance of this becomes increasingly important for success, which is just the utility of an app.
And then if I take a step further into these natural User interfaces where I per voice, per language, per touch, by gesture, and no longer per mouse and cursor, I have to control things, then I'm faster and even more immediate.
But that also leads me to the point when things are actually getting more intuitive?
When they become more intuitive, and then I have to put my little friend back here and look at what does that mean from the perspective of cognition, when is really something intuitive now?
And this is for us humans, always, intuitively, if I have to think very little about it.
So it doesn't seem to like to think, but it's totally easy to do.
The less I kind of think about it, the more intuitive it is.
And what does that mean for designers?
That means, if we look at the fact that we can transfer existing models of action from one to something else, for example, the metaphor, then I can use that as a designer.
So that means, I can apply an intuitive, human model of action to software, and therefore make the software much more user friendly.
Of course, the question is, what is the most intuitive plot of our human beings, and now I've already hinted that.
This is called the Osit model.
This uses all of us and Osit is an acronym that stands for Easters, Seloning, Information, Transagnation.
This is what every one of you does all the time, but it does something that's unconscious, and it's sort of intuitive, or partly intuitive.
The model is already in the womb, and it's intercultural, so it works around the world at young and old, and it's being used all the time without the most people knowing that this model is there.
OSIT Osit turns out to be about 50 to 70 thousand times of us ever after activity, so in sleep, it's been found to be less frequent than in the day.
I can now translate this mental model of action to the East, to commenting, to implementation, to transit to an interaction system.
And through this sort of transmission, similar to the metaphor of the desktop, but now no longer a metaphor for a physical object, but a metaphor for a pattern of action, a principle of action.
And that's on a higher level of consumer-friendlyness than transmitting a classic metaphor, which is the desktop.
And if I overlay that now, for example, where I'm acting as an overview, as a selection, an information in the case, it's coming up to me, I can look at it in detail, and yes, "transagning," I can throw that anywhere, or I can send someone, or I can buy somebody, and so on.
Then I can transmit the whole thing.
I'm trying to do that in an example.
Everyone's eating a cake already.
Exaggerating: now I'm sort of interacting with the object, zooming out, zooming in.
I'm going to get the full track, I can filter this up here, and I can say, well, I'm going to get all the chocolate stuff for example.
And suddenly I have an interface, which is more intuitive and much more natural.
Because, you know, I can grab things like the piece of paper and touch it, and it's coming to me, which is more natural than, you know, organized websites or other mechanisms, to sort of make these things accessible.
Imagination is more important than connaissance, and with that sentence, I'd also like to close, I'd like to give the clue, that designers also have to think differently to come up with new solutions, and in that sense, thank you very much for your attention and please.
I want to help you with a very specific aspect of curiosity.
The first thing is, if you're a kid, if you're a baby, if you're a baby, you're all concerned about what kind of exercise you've got, right? And as long as your parents have allowed you to play more or less in the room and feel more, more, in a way, your curiosity is, of course, wore you.
And curiosity doesn't learn.
That's why all of you who are here and are curious, in fact, people who have a property that you can't learn.
What I'm about to do now is basically take all of this environmental intersection, world-class, 40-year-old club-of-the-art, into quality.
And there's a central point there.
And it depends on phosphorus.
Give pee a chance.
Every day you give .0 to two grams of phosphorus, and every day you have to take two grams of phosphorus.
Otherwise you can't have teeth.
You can't store energy.
You can't have bones.
We could do it just as an amorphic mollus that we could do around the world.
In fact, if we don't take phosphorus and give it away.
And what's amazing about this is that we're dealing with something here, which is really, you know, naturalness, but it's not that way.
Because everybody talks about energy, but nobody talks about the phosphorus problem.
The phosphorus problem is much more critical.
We depend on two countries.
We've only got phosphorus for two years, and we're now getting a lot more uranium from the world's phosphorus mining than it's used in all nuclear facilities.
In the last 20 years alone, 150,000 tons of uranium have been spread across our fields in Germany.
And we take it all up.
It makes leukemia in kids.
And we think we would protect the environment if we're a little less harmful.
So, for example, make the environment feel less automobile.
Forget the environment, make less trash.
Forget the environment, use less energy.
But that's not a protection.
It's as if I would say, "fore your child," it's only three times, instead of five times.
It's just a little less destruction.
If we think from the meadow to the paon, our whole Earth will become a cemetery sooner or later.
That's why thinking about how to behave.
And the most important thing to do is to look at the ground as the best.
In the soil, over 100 percent of the carbon is stored.
Right now we're building corn on and losing between 11 and 30 kilograms of 30 tons per hectare, or at the square meter also.
That means we lose about five thousand times more in the ground than we are rebuilt.
Of course, we can look at the trash problem first.
And everything is packaging or content.
For example, in Offenbach, 20 percent of the trash is now winding.
And because we get older, the winds get bigger.
So that's all of you, in a sense, in the headwind phase.
Yes?
A baby needs about six thousand winds.
Of course, we could reduce that by about 10 percent, but what does that do?
That's balanced in China in a second.
This is completely trivial.
So the question is, how do we deal with these windmills?
Here's the evidence, by the way, that men are not pigs.
I want to tell you.
Because the phosphorus is emitted in pigs by the solid ingredients of excrement.
People over the Urin.
Yeah.
So men can't be pigs.
Because that's what I mean by that, right?
Traditionally, we think in the environmental intersection, we're too many in the world.
And if you tell the people that if you tell the people that they exist, if you say, that would be better, you wouldn't be there, they will be refinement and hostile.
And so someone like Al Gore, one of our great heroes, there's nothing more important than the human population to stabilize.
In Israel, you say, if you're living a human life, you're going to get off the earth.
Here it says, the more you turn, the better.
Yeah.
The first question is, are we really too many?
If you look at the ants, the weight of the ants on the Earth, the ants weigh about four times as much as we humans do.
I could take Termits as well, but in the United States, no one likes Termiten, as far as they're vegetarians.
That means that ants weigh a lot more than we do.
And because they work a lot harder than us, and because they live only three to six months, they correspond to their weight, their energy consumption, to three billion people.
That means we're not too many, we're too stupid, yeah?
And where you see how far away we are from what we really wanted to achieve and could, and as sad as we are, we're all on Earth at all, you can see that, for example, open-source has a program that's going to be carbon-neutral here, right?
You can only be climate-neutral if you don't exist, right?
The only chance.
Have you ever seen a carbon-neutral tree?
Yes?
One?
That means, our whole intelligence means we want to be as trees, right?
Yes?
No tree is carbon-neutral.
Thankfully not, yes?
There's no overpopulation problem in trees.
There are still six hundred billion trees in the Amazon area alone.
Have you heard about the overpopulation problem of trees?
That means all of our intelligence means we want to be as trees.
And where you see, even at something like Demeter, which is the largest organic agriculture, doesn't allow our own metabolic products to go back.
Every year we lose three million tons of phosphorus that really should go back into cycles.
And so we're too many.
Just about that.
That means we feel so guilty about the Earth that we say, there's no organic farming, there's no organic land, there's no Nature and there's no such thing as they all say, that allows our own excrement to go back.
Isn't that sad?
So we're too many.
It makes sense to be less harmful to the use of oil.
But where are we useful?
We're trying to minimize our ecological footprint, but it's about having a big footprint that's useful.
We want to be good for the society, we want to be good for the economy, but when it comes to the environment, the top is not to be there, right?
Zero emissions, right?
You can only have zero emissions if you're not there.
Even if you were to shoot now, you would have emissions.
So you can't solve this at all.
We can do it differently.
We can get our nutrients back.
We do agriculture in Brazil where we reclaim nutrients.
Very directly, we can get nutrients back in agriculture in this way.
We do this in China, for example, where we take the fall away from it.
In China, a night pot is still called honeybees, like, yeah?
And in our Western world, we were always too stupid to bring our nutrients back.
That is, the whole Western civilization story is characterized by the fact that the city has only taken place, but the farmers have never returned anything.
As a result, the cities had to grow more and more, because the farmers were going to the cities, and the cities had to keep pulling their nutrients away.
That's why all the Western empires are always expanding until they've gone out of infrastructure and then they're implemented.
Yes?
In China, it was different.
You've made civilization arose over five thousand years, because you've always been able to bring the nutrients back.
Even today, when you're invited to eat in China, you expect food to stay until you pick up the toilet.
Because it's unfriendly to go and take nutrients.
You've invited you to eat, not to feed.
That means you can see on the Internet how to get the nutrients back.
The really nice thing about this is, if you do this, if you do this, if you do this, agriculture, it's producing biofuels on a hectare of land that's five thousand people in favelas, it can grow about a thousand times a hundred dollars, and it can wait for chickens and pigs to grow and produce produce produce produce produce produce produce and vegetables and fish.
And the great thing about this is that the crime rate in the favelas is about nine percent.
So we don't have to control people, be very little bad.
We can support them to be good.
This is, of course, high-tech farming, but the plants carry themselves.
The byproduct is clean water.
And they're designed like this through design that a farmer can simply farm them.
That means that the crime rates are going to go back.
And none of these facilities, we've been building for over a hundred years now, in the last 20 years, none of these facilities have ever been sabotized.
You could just throw a liter of oil in that light, and then the plant would be ruined for years.
Find it not instead.
That means we don't have to control the people, we don't have to be so poor.
We can support them to be good.
That means we have to get phosphorus back.
And by the way, if you want to do something about it, write down, in Germany, the best suitable of all the assets is Frankfurt.
Unfortunately, it's not open-source, but maybe you can help the Frank Furts a little bit.
Because the Frankfurer facility could best get the phosphorus back.
And it has to go back.
We see that phosphorus is really critical.
And we see that it does.
We've been in Holland now for over three years.
The Dutch government explained that they will be the first country in the world, which will return phosphorus.
But we need it all together.
You know, there are two countries that are controlling almost 70 percent of the world's phosphorus needs.
There's Opec a bunch of orphans out there.
These are six-and-a-half countries that control seven percent of the oil reserves.
And we can replace the oil with other energy carriers.
But you're not going to be able to replace the phosphorus.
It's not about making the existing a little less bad, it's about making something right.
And first of all, it's like, what is the right thing?
That is, it's about efficiency, not about efficiency.
You know, of course, in Holland, it's easier to understand, because in Holland, the country is built on flowers.
Yes?
Imagine if, for example, your wife's sad, if you lied her, and you get 50 roses.
Totally ineffizient.
But really, really effective, right?
Or take a lipstick.
A woman in Germany eats about six Komma three kilograms during her lifetime.
By the way.
This is not scientifically correct, because we don't know how much away it is.
But a lipstick, even in that light, I can tell you, is completely inefficient, but completely effective, right?
Everything that's beautiful in life is not efficient.
That's not resource efficiency, it's efficiency.
To ask, what is the right thing?
It's not, you know, burn a little bit better, and deposit it with it, and lose it in the burn department all the materials for roundabouts, but first of all, ask yourself, how do you include loops?
Imagine Mozart being efficient.
Yes?
If I invite you to dinner and say, yeah, there's a tablet with open-source bag and a glass of water on it.
Wonderful, right?
This is efficient.
Everything that's beautiful in life is not efficient.
If you fall in love with somebody, efficient?
Yes?
That is, everything that matters in life is not about saving, avoiding reducing.
All the environmental intersection.
We tell people, oh yeah, you don't have an environmental awareness in the south.
No, the throwaway is exactly the right thing, right?
In every place you throw away, from, yes, you create opportunities for life.
But the wrong things.
If you throw away the wrong things, you have a waste problem.
As we think of Nordens.
That's where every footprint is remote.
If you walk, yes, every footprint destroys the ground.
Because the soil, the mosses will die off, and the wind and the water will blow the soil away.
But if you're in Italy, every footprint means the water stays longer in the meadow.
So it's about creating a big footprint that's going to become a wetlands.
Not management of guilt.
We say sustainability in Germany.
Yes?
But if I ask you, how do you feel about your wife?
What do you say?
Result.
Then I say, "Great love, right?
This is just the minimum.
So don't save, forget, avoid.
Every waste is nutrient.
And it's a funny thing to do, when you see in Italy, how people in the high arc throw out a Coke can out of the car.
Because, you know, it's a convoluted process.
It's a form of consumerism, right?
You can show, I was there.
But with the right design, please.
For example, we've developed an ice cream packing, which is at room temperature, the liquid.
You can throw them away where you go and stand.
In two hours, it builds off everywhere.
And it contains seeds of rare plants so that you contribute through the disposable diversity.
That means we're useful, not less harmful.
So there are two cycles.
It's not all to be compostable, of course.
A TV set or a washing machine that you use only that you don't use.
Just the things that go away, like shoesols, like brakes, like car tires, they have to be like they go into biological systems.
The things that are just being used go into technical systems.
But today we're only talking about the biological systems.
Yes?
For example, the Sneaker, right?
Totally direct advertising, not for the company Puma per se, but for you to help this company succeed.
Because we don't make things free.
Yes?
So if I invite you to dinner and say, "That's free to feed, it doesn't help you.
No, we're stuck with what's inside.
Positiv.
So it's not like detox.
Not poisonous in there.
So anything that's in there is useful.
These are the first shoes that you can put on the chavalier launch on the pedestrian's pole, and the rubber can go into biological loops, right?
All of these are compostable.
And of course, if we do, we do it for Adidas, for Nike, for Hennes and Mauritz and the whole textile industry.
And that's half the world's sewage problem that's caused by the textile industry.
That's why you help with them, ask people to ask.
Hey, Puma, are you really serious?
Because they have changed the board twice.
And I'm not really sure whether they really stick with it.
So, help me with that a little bit.
But it's okay.
Yeah.
That's what's just been shown.
Here we go.
We can do things like this right now that when they're cracking, they can do things in biological circles.
Technical roundabouts are the same thing.
There's a direct feedback system for this.
This is the first ecological backpack, actually, that's done to go back into the cycle.
Again, in every store you can get things back.
If you come to this, right?
Do you remember the windmills?
At the moment, that's the waste.
All around the world these winds are almost.
In the countries where people come to money.
From there to the deponia, but from there to the landscape, right?
If we change the plastic, so that it can go into biological systems, if we change the water storage, inside that it can go back to cellulose, then you can plant hundreds of trees with a baby in Israel or Tunisia.
Yes?
If you take these winds alone, they're shrinking, sterilizing and taking the powder to plant the trees.
So the baby's carbon positive for all life, starting from scratch.
So we don't need to be climate-neutral, we can be climate-positive.
It's kind of a positive type of poop.
Yeah, so to speak.
Yes?
We can do that.
We can reinvent everything.
I set up an institute.
There's a lot of people working there, and you can all engage.
There's an extra club, cradle to cradle, where everyone can join.
So no longer save, no longer diet, no more reduce, no guilt management, no intelligent waste.
Do you think that's curious?
Thank you.
Interpretence works.
Music as a language.
In the description of my speech, I'm written as an interpreter, I'm a translator, so in the English word, I understand.
Interpretens are translators of written notes in sound music.
That, as a translator, you don't just have a word that transfers the text into a different language, but you also have to understand the deeper sense of the word and the word link so that it makes a reasonable translation, everybody knows who has to do with foreign language.
From the Germans to translate into English, more knowledge can require, at times when it comes to poetry or even poetry.
But it's alien to Laien, which is what we're doing with our music language.
As an interpreter of a piece of music, I first have the written notes.
You're certainly thinking that the composer in the notes wrote down everything he had figured out.
In fact, the notes are very vacant and ungenaunt.
These notes are about as specific or as innocuous as a verbal, even though very seemingly implausible, description of a landscape.
Because in this verbal landscape, the fragrance of the flowers is not to smell, the degree of the green just to seek out the winds don't listen to feeling.
That means that the Interpret has to translate this undencence of notes into another, which is auditory, concrete, nonverbal music language.
Today I want to show you what I otherwise refer to as music, which is to interpret, again translated into a verbal language.
So basically, a translation of the translation.
So I prefer to do this in German, because if I had to translate it into English again, it would be equivalent to me to translate the translation of the translation.
So the music works for me as much as the spoken language.
The notational notes have the function of the letters of a script.
So it's not enough to just learn the notes and to press the keys on the piano or the right place on a violinist.
That's just the letters you've learned to paint.
The meaning of the letters is that you only recognize when you can get the language to it.
So, for the process of learning the music language, you need at least as long as the spoken language.
There's also a lot of variation in whether you're learning it for the use of the house, whether you're learning it for the use of the house, whether you're understanding passively, or you can also talk to the person who's talking to the musical mother.
The work of the Interpreten starts very similar to the work of the theater director.
After you first picked up a piece of play, because you're excited about it, you're afraid of the composition forming.
You collect information about the piece in the Sekundaryature.
You read in the letters, journals, notes, or whether there are words, thoughts of composers themselves.
You study the works that he did before and after.
You make comparisons.
The motivation is to write it.
How and what did he feel?
How were its circumstances, like society and politics?
I'm interested in that.
You think about it this time by looking at contemporary pictures, or reading literature.
But over time, as an interpreter, you have a rich knowledge about the composers that you play more often, and it makes you easier to think inside and feel.
The composer is going to become more and more of a friend to live with.
His cause to write the piece will become more and more of my personal cause to play it.
Now the notes are everything else but an accurate record of the cause of the composer, but only a framework, I now turn this framework to fill it with meaning and meaning again.
I then say to my own words, what could be written between this framework?
I'm going to play by explaining what those sounds could mean.
Now for me and for the composers then and what they might mean for him today.
Each tone, each phrase makes sense of it, because I feel it myself, because it comes out of my personal experience.
It's got to be consistent for me in this room and now, or else I can't convince my audience that this is my cause.
It's still a very happy concert when I can have the experience, the piece that I've been working on for so long in advance how to experience new.
How to experience a happy new day over and over again, even though the same rituals of life, get up, breakfast, go to work, I also experience the same piece over and over again.
I've become another day of age, changing seasons, and my pulse is slower at night than the morning, in a concert hall, it takes longer than the sound comes back home.
I realize the audience's breathing, consciously or unconscious.
All of this is affecting me and all of this is also affecting my experience with the composition.
It's also wonderful when I'm standing on the stage with a duo party and we have the same wavelength.
Then the same thing happens in a good, angered conversation.
You bring a new idea into it, and it's going to answer that with a response.
It's exciting because then things happen that we didn't do that, and what you can't do as well.
It's a lot of fun making music like this, and you, as the audience, have seen how the music communicates live.
So every concert is a different concert.
I'm never going to play like this moment.
I can't play as much as I did in 20 years today.
I'm going to have more life experience than I am now, and therefore, on my palette of music length, I'm going to have a lot more color personality, emotions and feelings than I am today.
Sure, I'll have some color pots cut out too, but I'll get some new ones to do it.
Have a nice concrete example of that.
It was on a piano course for music students at my beloved old teacher, Professor Jürgen Ude, a well-known Beethoven specialist, concertist and long-term professor of music school here in Stuttgart.
Unfortunately, I was too young, so that he was already acknowledgment when I finally started studying.
But I was very lucky to meet him at a very early age of three and a half years old, and so I've been doing his courses at school.
I was 14 when I participated in one of his courses, and I played the last one of the four Balladens of Chopin, a vending machine.
He asked me what was the introduction of that ballade for me.
This is such a worn part.
And I said in my youthfulness, anticipation.
He snuck in and he said, "What?
It has to be the age difference.
Because for me, it means memory.
He's been a little bit suspicious.
Well, you've got dreams with them, but you don't have significant memories.
I'm playing the play again every few years, and it's changed to me, even though it hasn't changed a single note.
Every time it's exciting, because over and over again, I read something new.
One example of that from a very different area: Monet has painted the searosen x-mal.
It's always the same garden, but at different times of day, different light.
He translated the sea urchins in different ways, as he saw them, as they did at that moment in time.
His personal impressions of the sea urchins.
The x-male interpretation of a piece is this comparable.
In the meantime, I'm older than Chopin at the age of two and a half years when he wrote the piece.
He's only lived for nine-and-a-half years.
And it's important for me to go back and look at the notes, even though I'm supposed to be able to memorize them.
To make the language, right with the composer.
Because the notes are the only connection directly to him.
Especially when he has already died.
Now, how do you start talking about the language of music?
I said yes, you need something like that for the spoken language.
Often, the music class is so good that you only learn to read the notes.
You're basically learning reading before you're just talking a word.
You learn to find the notes on the instrument.
So when all of the fingers are moving in time and the way they're in the notes are going, they're going to come up with sound like music.
When that doesn't happen, the student gets the next round.
Extraction is not spoken in the beginning of speech.
All right, so there's front, right, that's a quick piece.
Lento, slowly.
Sounds and dials, F and B, etc.
That's what most people know about this.
But even if you put those numbers on them, it's still a little technical.
And yet it's not interpretation.
I wonder.
I'm curious that a lot of times you forget something very elementary.
Namely, that to make music on the instrument should be present to you and touch.
That's the thing.
A child who hasn't learned the sing because they haven't done the parents, they're not going to do it by themselves.
It's like learning to speak.
It's necessary to have its own experience and idea of music, and then it's a different way of bringing it to an instrument to the blade.
People who have never drunk, have never felt immediately with their own body, as it is to make a sound.
Making a phrase with your own breath.
Because the musical instrument is the extension of our body.
Our vocal chords for singing, our hands and feet for dance.
So the hammerheads in the piano are the sequel to my fingers.
The tune comes from the strings and the rhythms of the dance.
The constant change now with music is not harmful.
You don't need to make yourself music if you're getting bored.
There's no need to whistle or sing a song.
Each of your own music is made flat when you're swept away from outside with music all the time.
Sure, there are some of you who say, yes, but what do you do when I can't sing?
I'm asking, can't you sing, A, because you believe you can't sing?
Or B, because you didn't learn to sing?
It's not too late to start trying to figure out whether you can't, or learn how to use these little muscles that are putting the vocal chords in place.
Because you can train this.
Or C, because you seem to be aware of it, you're imperfect.
So I ask, how technically competent was this diagnosis?
Have you ever taken a two- or three-year sentence, as you say it today?
Or D, you don't like music, and therefore you want to have nix too.
But then what I would regret is, because music is a beautiful, communist thing.
But maybe you can still agree with that.
Well, you can see, in all cases, no one has to be such a fearless candidate.
But don't say, "I don't understand classical music."
I can't say whether it's good or bad.
I say that, but surely you can say whether you like it or not.
Because I don't think it says to someone, I don't know if it tastes like me because I can't cook.
So, you don't know about food, just because you can't cook.
So you don't have to rely on classical music, because you don't play an instrument.
Listen consciously and say whether it tastes you or not.
Whether the music gives you too much or too much sweet.
Say what you're feeling.
At the time, you also get some demands, and you want something more to go in there, or even taste delicious differences.
Why do I struggle with my audience now that it's also actively listening?
Because the music is a language, and a language is to communicate there.
A piece of art that you never look at has no power to do.
The food that's been cooked by a carrot or by a cooking cook, has to be eaten and not just looked and traded recipes.
So please hear if a music is played.
It's not just a nice sound form.
If in an environment where adults do active music, or at least active music, a child grows up, it's easy for a music teacher to ask, "What color does your flower have?"
Can you play it in blue now?
And the child is playing after a memorial, instead of having a red flower now, a blue flower.
And this sounds very different than before.
So that was the very first beginning of a musical expression.
So the first step to an interpretation.
And what happens when you play a piece today that was originally written a hundred, two hundred, three hundred years ago, or even three hundred years ago?
Meanwhile, the instruments have moved on.
There was no piano at the time.
It was just not invented.
I think the stream would have been thrilling if it had had the sound possibilities of modern pianos.
I can tell you today the sound that the stream has had, on the modern wing, the sound that a baroque cembalo can't.
Also, from Beethoven, you know that he heard more than he had become deaf.
Today, a modern orchestra is able to play everything that an orchestra has rejected at the time as unplayable.
So the composers rely on us to interpreters who re-invent the pieces.
To make them soundable, what they've only imagined in the mind.
And also what they would think in the mind today.
Or the thing that I'm imagining today is that what they might have thought of.
Thank you.
Do you know what Neid is?
Have you ever been a native?
And how did that feel?
Screw.
I have a friend who drives a passerati.
And then when I come up with my little V W Piesel and I get past it, it's kind of like this.
I'm shooting something through my head.
I say, Ulf, what do you need to do with such a big car?
That's already half of its value in the first year.
And at all, you work much less than I do.
Why do I have to afford this little car?
And then I immediately go, it's unfair.
It's against justice.
And as I say the word justice, that unpleasant feeling is gone.
Our organism has invented a great way of making these unpleasant emotions, like Neid, just for the vanishing.
You can try that in words like revenge or winning or something like that.
I want to explain something to you today about this mechanism, or a little bit closer to what you're probably familiar with.
The mechanism is made from lie.
But don't think about the lie, as you may have heard, when people say, no one has the intention of building a wall.
And then stones come tumbling down so they can see the point.
In such a lie, you can see that the liars themselves don't believe what they say.
It's very easy to check that it makes very different sense.
It just deceives you and not yourself.
No, the lie that I'm talking about has to do with it that you fake yourself.
You need this lie to keep a lifeslide going.
You can make them less easy, yes, check it out, get them to the adversity.
You need time.
There's an anecdote from this period that you may know.
The Spanish painter Pablo Picasso once portraited a woman.
This woman then complained that the portrait wouldn't look the same.
Picasso replied, wait a minute.
It will always be similar to you.
At this point, and if you laugh, you realize how important this lying is and how much time you need to learn something that artists can tell us very well.
Because artists have a mixed relationship with lying.
The artist shares you something, and especially this lady, she doesn't see when she just looks in the mirror.
The artist shared you with a portrait like this, which they're only familiar with when you look at this piece of art over and over again.
Then this unpleasant feeling disappears, it might not be similar to you, and it will always be similar to you.
Here you have this mechanism where we can use the lie as a great invention for preservation of our lives.
And it's not just in art, it's also in folk tales, it's in mythology, it's emerging in stories.
You may know this idea of the lady who looked in the mirror every morning and asked him, "Who is the worst in the country?"
One day this mirror will say, yes, there's a more beautiful one.
Behind the seven mountains and so on.
And you also know how much hostility can come from this real exercise, even the mirror can't lie from this real exercise.
But we should just be familiar with it so that you can't tell a woman, that there's a nicer somewhere else.
This is what we need to do with political correctness over and over again.
We need to have this lie that keeps us up to deception without which we can't live.
We have not only been in art, we have people's poetry, but we have such great lies in science.
And there's this story of the woman of the Bischofs of Worchester.
She heard about this book by Charles Darwin, the origin of species and the line of man.
This was supposed to stem from the monkeys, and, yes, at least there would be a common ancestor between humans and apes.
And then she ran around to her husband and said, "Well, that's probably not true what Charles wrote in.
The person should come from the monkey or have a common ancestor.
No, no, it's not.
And if it's true, then we have to prevent people from knowledge.
Why do we need to prevent people from learning something when it's true?
Because without that kind of life, we can't live.
Because we have this self-sustaining, this sense of being great, elation of the tallest creature, not of a natural level, of something as incomprehensible as an organism that exists, that is comparable to a stone and whatever things, it's impossible for us to do.
So, we can't do these things at all.
We need to prevent people from knowledge of things, especially when they're true.
So you can see how slowly this mechanism is going to unfold and what the traces it's going to leave leave that lead to something else than this great image of ourselves, I want to bring you to another story.
A very beautiful story, as I mean.
My wife told me.
She came one day from school, she's a teacher, and she was told by a student.
A autistic student.
She loves him especially because he has an tendency to sincerity.
And she asked him, what are your hobbys?
And he says, "Well, I'm at the fire brigade.
And because I'm in the fire department, I'm interested in pyrotech things.
Yes, you already feel it when you're healed in this place. There's not something wrong.
I told my wife, whenever a human being in a moral law maker use the sausage, we should try to replace it with the sausage, even though.
Do that again, and then you learn the sentence.
Even though I'm at the fire department, I'm interested in pyrotech things.
You feel, that's the real truth behind the future.
This is a little bug that doesn't interest in firewoods.
It's interested in firemaking.
But there are no clubs where we can look, where you learn how to make fire.
There's only the second best, just the firemen.
He signed up.
And the thing is, you don't say to his teacher that you like to put in a fire somewhere and be happy when the fire comes up after that.
No, it just looks a lot better if we show that we're in charge of eliminating the risks that others can do when they're building fires.
Here you have this little mechanism.
This evidence that the Bub's otherwise known that he's actually related to the fire, but that he can't say that out loud.
Here you have this Zensor between the unconscious and the conscious that jumps up immediately, without you being able to do something about it, and the things that you know are very different, designed to sound much better for you and others.
It's just that we form these words that we also use in the language of political correct speech over and over again.
In fact, we know that something else is the case.
But we know that when we say that, social relationships are very sensitive.
We can't just do that.
It's impossible to present things like this in a society that should work.
So I want to talk to you about what we found in my institute.
What logic this illusion, this self-sustaining, the willingness to do another reality than what we actually know in unconsciously is that it's valid to spread outwards.
So I want to show you two, maybe three examples.
The first example predicts what many of you know, and some of you value, very few of you don't need at all.
I mean the soul.
What is the soul?
The soul is such a spirit thing, about Leibniz says.
It's something that isn't stop-diving, material nature.
And if you have people who believe that they have a soul, or you can also say that they believe that they have been brought to life by the soul, then they imagine that it's sort of as if the soul is such an intellectual framework about them, not from matter, they themselves just from meat and blood, some rocks, so to speak, to the Earth's pools, vulnerable, unimportant, yes dead.
And from that soul, they now think that somehow, in this cloudy nature, in this airy nature, it's in Latin, it's present, it's present.
And when that air dive takes over the people, it's filled with dignity, with spirit, with nature, with only life, with soul.
And then he can run off of it.
This is the idea of how the soul works.
So it's meant to get from the outside to the human.
So we should perceive them as something that should be present to our lives.
And if you have this preview of mind, you can understand the logic with which we experience happiness, through a lie, we can improve our world.
Because now you can use a three-step approach.
You know three things from school.
So this is a three-step here that describes a logic.
This is, by the way, the hardest part of my talk.
Here you need some logic, but also the willingness to lie.
That is, to lie so that you can just use this logic wrong.
In this three sentence, three sentences come in.
The first sentence is, Klaus says there's no soul.
So the second sentence is, if Klaus is right, he doesn't have a soul.
Now there's a third sentence.
I highlighted it in particular.
A third sentence that shows up immediately in people who have a strong sense of soul.
They say, who has no soul, who's dead and can't claim anything.
And this is where you feel relocated.
Here's the logic in this, yes, in this fake speech.
You see it immediately.
The first two sentences are logically correct.
Because I can say everything.
The logic doesn't make any statements about reality.
I can say, the Kanzlerin is a man.
And if I'm right, the Canadian is a man.
If I'm not right, the Canadian is not a man.
The logic doesn't make any statement about what's true.
I can say anything.
But crucially, if I'm right, it's true.
So when the Klaus says, "There's no soul."
Second, if he's right, he doesn't have a soul.
These things are logically correct.
And now our fooling consciousness feels right away, you can do something about it.
It depends on a third sentence that has nothing to do with the first two sentences that pretends that the opposite of the first sentence has already proven and predicted.
Because in fact, we have to prove whether or not there is the soul.
But with that logic, which it simply uses, that two sentences are logically correct, and a third suggested, which looks like he had something to do with it, so we can save our own lives.
So, we pretend that it's actually impossible to live without a soul.
And we're very happy about that.
We can do these things in different examples.
So in the present, for example, we have a very modern example that goes on and on and on and on and on.
So you've got to think of another philosophical topic, a constant philosophical subject from philosophy.
This has to do with it that we go back to the fourth century.
There was a scholar who was named Johannes Buridanus, and after that, the Buridanus named it.
The Buridan Esel is a Esel made of pure nature.
It doesn't have that soul.
This is a natural thing.
And if you place the exact same thing in the middle between two sizes of a single, it's going to starve.
Because he doesn't know which pile he's supposed to go first.
So it's right in the middle.
This is how nature works.
Similar forces with anti-satural cues come and resolve each other.
There's nothing going on there at all.
Only if you get another example, so if you make the pile bigger immediately, it doesn't need reason and nothing.
He's currently running the right thought.
So if you have this idea that somehow you're driven in nature, you're determined, you're determined by the bigger pile that immediately pulls you, then you also quickly feel like there's something like a free will.
And if we're here in Frankfurt on May, I remember the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research.
There's a scholar who's called Wolf Singer, and sometimes he's been told by Wolf Singer, there's no freedom of will.
Now we can form the second sentence again and say, if Wolf Singer is right, he has no freedom of will.
These sentences are perfectly logical and correct.
And what we can now read almost every day in the daytime, that's what you find in that third sentence.
It looks something like who doesn't have freedom of will, doesn't have the responsibility for his actions and his claims, and therefore it's incomprehensible.
You've got it again.
In fact, first of all, you have to prove whether there's something like free will.
But the logic of deception allows us to do that, as if the first sentence of the first sentence is wrong, of course you have to take the opposite without evidence.
And now you can just, if you want to do something for yourself, if you want to test something for yourself and especially if you want to make people happy, practice this courage to lie.
For example, if you meet a person who you can say, there's no predictor.
And please don't use the German word for predictor, which is prophet.
You can't call that a little bit more politically correct.
Say, there are no projections.
Immediately, you're going to be experiencing such predictions for which, of course, you can't prove that.
And you already have a problem.
Because while you're busy trying to realize that you can't prove that there are no predictives, the man is very happy.
He's very happy about this because he deceived you.
Because he's led to you on a track where he doesn't stop himself.
Because this man isn't interested in evidence at all.
He's just interested in stopping himself before the need to prove that there are predictives.
So, in the kind of shifting the evidence burden, you're seeing the magnificence of the lie.
And once again, if you have a chance to feel this three-fold in other people, do it, because you're going to make other people happy, if you don't remember them that way.
Thank you for your attention.
Yeah, good day.
I was allowed to ask Lilly if I could mention it.
She's one of the scholars here of this great event, and she asked me if I gave a talk here and gave my idea a prize.
I have to say honestly, you got it wrong, it was hard for me to talk about.
And perhaps I want to imagine my island project that I'm trying to introduce you.
But it's, of course, the sum of many ideas.
I'm probably here, the two nice girls, I'm probably here, I'm probably one of the generation that's been worrying about this bad green image, because I've already started studying machine engineering in Karl's Room, Technic Schools, and today it's called, I think, Kit.
And then I hit Berlin in the mid-'80s, because I wanted to make renewable energy, and that wasn't what was in Karl's rest.
There was a nuclear research plant called Leopoldshafen.
They were all called KFA at the time, the Jewish name was KFA.
They're now called projectors.
Because a good engineer has either built great cars or nuclear power plant.
But something like a solar cell, which comes out of a hundred watts at a square meter, was a toy.
And in Berlin, there was a crazy engineering collective.
I'm grateful to Premium-Kola-human that he re-inhabitated the word again, because after the break of the wall, you couldn't use the word anymore, because everything on the left was bad.
But in the '80s, that wasn't the case.
It was just like there was a self-regulated alterative operation, and one of them was sitting in cross-bord in the middle yard, where you think of evil.
The place of terrorism, but that was called Wuseltronic and made wind and solar energy, and I started in the mid-'80s.
And yes, many of the things that I've been told today are very touched by me because many, many beautiful expressions were what I've experienced too.
I've been working on the collective for 11 years, and that's been basic democracy.
We were 20 people.
If one didn't say, 'That's the Middle East, it's totally broken. I've been very upset about this for 10 years, I've been very upset about whether I'm really using my great engineering student to really do something wrong, because all my father's colleagues have always gotten him wrong, you've taken the money out to the window at your child.
It deals with tails.
And that was really, really bitter, and then you get into this kind of phase, and this is what the picture showed up on hold, where I asked myself 10 years later, a thousand D-Mark, that was back then, basic wages, unit wages, of course, in the collective, if that's really what a great thing to be.
And then I paused until about six and a half, and then with friends, I became co-founder of the Solon company, which then became, along with the spin-Off Q cell, one of the largest cells makers in the world.
A tremendous success story, but we also have, of course, the problem of a growing company, and we've got two thousand times, a small group, decided that we're going to start small, and we're going to go back to the next issue of the future, and I think that's kind of crazy again, and it's going to start with people saying, "What's the heck it's all about, we're talking about memory."
And I brought you a project that I want to share with you now.
And the title of the talk was, well, you get a hundred percent renewable.
And we just started asking a relatively simple story, where can you use a memory that's useful today?
On this island, this is the island of Graciosa on the Azoren.
Yes, that's the data.
There are four and a half thousand people living there.
They have a five-tenth percent renewable energy today.
And the question is, why don't they have more?
It's just not technological.
If you expand more wind, the system starts to fail.
I'm also telling the politicians when they're facing our facility in Berlin.
They always say, why?
We've had 20 percent in Germany.
Can't be a problem at all.
I don't think we have seven percent in Europe, and our net is physically the European.
If we had 20 percent in Europe, we would have the same problems that people have on this island.
The question was simple, let's just calculate it was two thousand2006, the first contacts started with the island, just calculate it.
How big would it have to be a battery, so you can get an island that's 20, 30, 40, maybe even 50 percent renewable.
And yeah, I'll go one more slide.
The conventional system looks like this all over the world.
By the way, about a hundred gigawatts of electrical power are being built on these bases in the world a year.
That's equivalent to the performance of a hundred nuclear power plants, because it's very fast everywhere.
The energy crisis in the world that's taking place is going to be deleted by this, because you don't need permission.
That's fast.
You make a box like this.
And then it usually looks like this.
In that space, three of the tiles go, two are always waited.
Yeah, this is what one down there is the load.
We also got very specific data.
And the wind power plant, or the solar system, or whatever it is, is usually a backup system, or a system, which can only feed in small amounts here.
Our goal was to say, okay.
This one's going to be called backup and the wind, and the sun's going to serve the load so that they can map the larger volume.
And if you want to go beyond 20, 30 percent renewable energy, so energy per year, not performance at the moment, you have to turn off the lights.
That means, at the moment, you have to make sure that renewables can sort of take over the whole network.
Of course, they can only, if they're bitten in any way, in any way.
Nobody else has done that in the world.
This is in a little bit of style, so you can also serve your Rasierer in the car about a little change worker.
People always ask me, what do you actually fear in adler's farm?
That's it.
But if you want to put together several of these trade-offs and build them up a net, that's going to be extremely complicated.
And our goal was, we wanted to get there by 90 percent renewableness, and then there's this rest, the last 10, 20 percent renewableness with it, which is going to be very, very expensive, and it's not going to work, you know, making it out of batteries.
This is going to be an energy carrier, which is going to be hydrogen, methane, power to gas, you know or sch, that's going to be it.
You've got to go to a saisonal store, and you've got to do winter stuff, and you've got to do it not just day care.
We just wanted to know what it was like to have a normal, stinky, electrochemical battery.
How far do you get there?
And then they did a whole bunch of simulations.
And the wind and the sun and the load went through and the result resulted, a very exciting result, that over the conventional system, which, after 20 years, is about 50 cents a kilowatt-hour, about four and a half cents is coming out.
This was the first ever calculations six years ago.
And then we said, "Okay."
It's great, then we have a business model.
We're cheaper than the diesel system when the cost of that price goes up five percent a year.
And then we started negotiating with the insulans.
What should be done?
Have negotiated with investors; I've looked for new societyers.
We were only five people then to rebuild society.
And here's the illustration again.
The brown is sort of the conventional system, the green is our system.
That our system also has a price increase, because we're still doing 20 percent of these, and we're not going to go through a price increase in other things.
And the power generation, which is what the electricity supply company on the island says, "We find this great."
Do we want to support, but we don't believe you can solve the technical problem.
And so we decided to build a hall in Berlin where we could sort of map the electrical ratios of the island to the scale to three very precisely.
That means we were looking for the first place to find the largest battery in the world.
Here it is.
It comes from Asia, naturally, in the case of Japan.
And funny enough, it's been developed in the 1960s at the BBC Mannheim, today ABB, and then it's been edited out to the Japanese.
You can see, it's a very, very large battery.
It's got a megawatts of performance, and it can get this performance for six hours, and that's the battery that we've sort of gotten out of simulation techniques.
And then they set up.
We also have one of these flares at the same size that it's sitting there, bringing it into the hall to actually simulate the entire dynamic behavior of this web, so in the hall it looks like this, right in the back there, there's this one, there's this big battery, here's the whole floor that we're going to simulate the web with.
Over here, we're simulating the entire transmission system, the miles of wire, to sort of image the vibrational behavior on the web.
And here you can see the whole thing again.
We can also turn up two hundred kilowatts of photovoltaics on the Web.
So what we're looking at here is again, we're going to see this one, again, all the individual aggregator.
And what we've done since two millennia was we've done the Halle eventually, until today, two millennials -- virtually everything that's here between the individual system of electronics, software, we've done it.
So we're not a battery maker, but we're defined as a company that's just between the battery and the topic of the web and everything in between.
You have to, of course, communicate to the battery, you have to communicate to the web, and that's very complicated.
The nice thing about this island is that basically today, everything that can happen to problems that we're going to get if we want to increase our share of renewables.
So this whole discussion of how to move forward and forward, energy use, how to go about this, where we have, for example, five-and-a-half percent accuracy on the island, so we're burning the wind and the sun.
Of course, it's got to be smart.
So smart, big issue everywhere.
We can start to integrate electromobility on the island, and we can start to explore, because you can manage the burden.
That is, if you're at 70 percent renewable, you're not going to be able to do that without memory.
You can do it by smart, you can do it by building the nets, yeah, you should do it anyway, you can hear the amount, but you're never going to be able to completely dismiss the memory.
And that's kind of the message.
That's why a lot of people come in and they look at it, because you can see what problems you get.
When we turn off the diesel, you don't have this rotating mass that causes a certain fragment of the web.
And our European network is basically just made out of all the reducing masss of large power plants, where the wave is all around Europe in the same way.
We're going to look inside this net, we're going to see the 50 Hertz, and if it's nine-and-a-half years old, we're going to catch a couple of valves, we're going to put a little sea-p steam in again, we're going to come back up.
This is the system.
And of course, it's incredibly busy.
If you tear it down somewhere, it's going to take a while.
The spinning reserves have at least 10 seconds to keep the net stable.
And over time, they can react to other things.
If you don't have that anymore, that rotating mass, you have to replace that with performance electronics and electrochemists.
And we can turn two milliseconds into this big battery.
Then you can see what enormous speed choices there are.
And the message is now, we have to rely on these rotating masss, if we're sort of our goals 20, 20, 20 percent, 20, 30, 30 percent and so on, if we want to do it at all.
Then we have to rebuild our Must-Run capacity on the Net.
Must-Run just means that the power plant is running to keep the frequency.
Yes, it's a huge debate right now, building coal-fired plants, because we don't have any, or gas turbines, because it doesn't.
And we're just trying to make it clear that you can deconstruct the capacity, the capacity of the Must-Run capacity, by also providing electrochemical memory to the grid.
So, fortunately, there's a whole bunch of studies as well.
And for that purpose, people will always come and look at our quest, sort of, our island test.
And yes, the discussion is always about the question of, how far can you take a chunk of the future?
And a lot of the discussions that I've had over the last six years were kind of like the discussion that I've had over the last 30 years on about photovoltaics.
It's not, it's Schwachsin', it's child play stuff, we've all figured it out, never math.
We have 30 gigawatt photovoltaics in Germany today.
It's pictured.
And I'm just going to make sure that in the next 30 years we're going to have the same capacity for electrochemical storage all over the world.
Simple, this is how it's coming.
There's going to be a lot of conflicting and arguing.
The nice thing is, I've been through basically now in the last two years, the scientists are setting up on my side.
We've now got over 10 million grant projects, including to put on the 10 Megawatt battery now to the German net.
This will happen next April.
So from that, you also realize that there's a change there, and it's only getting rid of that defense system to the idea that a hundred percent renewable is true.
And if you have a hundred percent renewable, that's like a dead system.
So far, in discussions, these insulans are always trying, these insulaners, they're all over the place, they've got a little net, and that's nothing to do with our connection.
The question is, quite simply, if you make yourself completely independent from any fossil or uran energy carrier that gets out anywhere in the world and get laid down to you, they're an island.
Then they just use what's available to the sun and the wind where they live.
And that's kind of our vision of a clean energy supply, and I'm also thankful at cradle to cradle that they said, use solar energy.
And that's what we're doing, and in that way, the Premium Kola's talk is, again, you can be a collective and use solar energy, a little bit together.
Well, I just want to encourage you, in the sense that you can still be a little crazy and also have a vision.
And you really have to be tough about this, but I think it's okay.
Thank you very much.
When Steve Lopez, the London Times columnist, walked through the streets at the center of Los Angeles one day, he heard a wonderful music.
She came from a man, an African-American, sympathetic, harsh, homeless man who played on a violin who had only two songs.
Many of you will know the story, because from Steve's article on this later, a book that was filmed again with Robert Downey Junior as Steve Lopez and Jamie Foxx as Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, who was a bassist who studied at the Juilliard Council and whose promising career was tragically ended with his paranoid schizophrenia early.
Nathaniel left Juilliard, suffered a confusion, and 30 years later he lived as homeless on the streets of Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles.
I'm recommending to read Steve's book or to watch the film so you don't just understand the wonderful connectedness that came between these two men, but also how the music helped that connection, and how it ended up being the instrument when that word play is allowed to get Nathaniel out of the street.
I met Mr. Ayers in 2008, two years ago, at the Walt Disney Concert Hall.
He had just heard a performance by Beethoven's first and Four Sinfonie and came up behind the stage to imagine.
He spoke in a very elaborate and gregarious note about Yo-Yo Ma and Hillary Clinton, and how the Dodgers would never do it in the baseball World Series, and that's because of the Danish Passage of the first violin in the last sentence of Beethoven's Fourth Sinfonie.
We came to talk about music, and a few days later, I got an email saying that Nathaniel was interested in teaching violins.
I have to mention that Nathaniel was able to train medical treatment, because he was already treated with electric shocks and Thorazis and handcuffs, a trauma that followed him his whole life.
And as a result of that, he's particularly prone to these schizophrenic periods, which are sometimes so bad, and he disappears for days in the streets of Skid Row, always subject to this horror and torture quest of his own mind.
And in that particular moment, Nathaniel was when we began with our first lesson in Walt Disney Concert Hall, and he had this red herring in his eyes, and he was completely lost.
He talked about invisible damons and smoke and how someone wanted to poison him in sleep.
I was afraid, not my way, but I was afraid that I could lose it, that he could sink into one of his conditions, and that I could destroy his relationship to violin when I started talking about keys and arrogance and other exciting forms of didactic pedagogy.
So I just started playing.
I played the first sentence of Beethoven's Violinkonzert.
And while I was playing, I noticed that in Nathaniel's eyes a complete change was happening.
It was like being under the effects of an invisible arrogance, a chemical reaction that was a catalyst in my game.
Nathaniel's manic anger transformed into understanding, into quiet curiosity and grace.
And like a miracle, he took his violin and began playing some of the clips of Violinkonzers after hearing, and then he asked me to play them at the end: Mendel'sohn, Tschaikowski, Sibelius.
We started talking about music, starting from Bach about Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner and all the other Bs, from Bartók to Esa-Pekka Salonen.
And I realized that he not only had an enzyklopädic knowledge of music, but connected him to his also an intimate relationship.
He talked about her with a passion and a understanding that I don't know about my colleagues in Los Angeles Philharmonic.
By playing music and talking about music, it was this paranoid, confused man who had just moved through the streets of Los Angeles, who was a very handsome, educated, excellent player, at Juilliard, trained musicians.
Music is medicine. Music changes us.
For Nathaniel, music means visual health.
Because music allows him to reflore his thoughts and delusions with his imagination and creativity into something real.
And so he exudes his heated conditions.
I understood that this is exactly the nature of art.
That's why we make music, so that we can create something deep inside of us, our feelings, through our artistic lens, through our creativity to reality.
And the reality of that expression is all of us, and moves, inspired and unite us.
What Nathaniel was doing was bringing the music back to a community of friends.
The repulsive power of music brought him back to a family of musicians who understood him, who recognized his talent and brought him back.
And I'm going to play again with Nathaniel, whether it's in Walt Disney Concert Hall or Skid Row, because he reminds me of why I became a musician.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much. Thank you.
Robert Gupta.
Robert Gupta: I'd like to play something that I'd casually stole the cellists.
I hope you'll forgive me.
So I've fished a lot in my life.
I only loved two.
This first one was more like a passionate affair.
It was a beautiful fish, suspicious, good consistence, rich, best-seller on the menu.
What a fish.
Even better, it was pushed into aquaculture after the supposed highest standards of sustainability.
So you could feel you could sell it.
I had a relationship with that beauty for several months.
One day, the head of the company called and asked if I could go to an event about the sustainability of the farm.
"Of course," I said.
Here was a company that tried to solve what had become this unimaginable problem for our cooks, how do we keep fish on our menus?
In the last 50 years, we fished the ocean as we beat the forests.
It's hard to overvalue the destruction.
90 percent of the big fish that we love, the tunas, the hebs, the salmon, the swordfish, they've collapsed.
There's almost nothing left.
So it's going to be, you know, aquaculture, a fish farm, is going to be part of our future.
A lot of the arguments about it. Fish food plants pollute the environment, most of them anyway, and they're inefficient, and we take tuna. A big disadvantage.
He's got a 15-year feed.
That is, 15 pounds of wild fish are required to get a pound of fear fish.
Not very sustainable.
It doesn't sound very good either.
So, finally, there was a company that was trying to do it right.
I wanted to support them.
The day before the event, I called the head of public work for the company.
Let's call him Don.
"Don," I said, "an order to have the facts right, you're famous for growing out in the sea so far that you don't pollute the environment."
"That's right," he said. "We're so far out that the waste from our fish is not concentrated."
And then he said, "We're basically a own world.
That food rating from one to one," he said.
"The best in industry."
Eight to one, great.
"25 to one? What are you feeding?"
He said, "No protein."
"Great," I said. Open up.
And that night I was lying in bed thinking, what the hell is a sustainable protein?
So I called up the next day, just before the show, Don.
I said, "So what are sustainable proteins?"
He said he doesn't know. He'll ask.
Well, I phoned up with a few people in the company, and nobody could give me a proper answer, until I finally phoned up with the lead biologists.
Let's call him Don as well.
"Don," I said, "What are, for example, sustainable proteins?"
Well, he mentioned some algae and some fish flour, and then he said chicken pellets.
I said, "Does you think?"
He said, "Yes, feathers, skin, bones, remains, dried and processed food."
I said, "How much percent of your food is chicken?"
In the assumption of maybe two percent.
"Well, that's about 30 percent," he said.
I said, "So, what's sustainable to feed chicken to fish?"
There was a long pause in rentment, and he said, "There's just too much chicken in the world."
I loved this fish.
No, not because I'm a self-righteous genius and well-mean.
That's actually me.
No, I actually fell in love with this fish, because, I swear to God, the fish hated after this conversation for chicken.
This second fish, this is a different kind of love story.
It's the romantic way, the way in which you, the better you learn your fish, you love the fish.
I first ate it in a restaurant in Southern Spain.
A friend of mine had been talking about this fish for a long time.
It's sort of dulled us.
He came to the table with a bright, almost glowing white color.
The chef had conned him.
Hold twice.
And amazingly, he was still delicious.
Who can make a fish taste so well after it's been washed?
I can't, but this guy can.
Let's call it Miguel. In fact, it's called Miguel.
And no, he didn't cook the fish, and he's not a chef, at least in the way that you and I understand under them.
He's a biologist at Veta La Palma.
This is a fish farm in the south corner of Spain.
It's near the mouth of the Guadalquivir river.
Up until the 1980s, the farm was in the hands of Argentina.
They were feeding on what was basically wetlands.
They did it by irrigating the land.
They built this complicated series of canals, and they urged water out of the land and out into the river.
Well, they couldn't do it, it didn't do it economically.
And ecologically, it was a disaster.
It killed about 90 percent of the birds, which are many birds in this place.
And so in 1982, a Spanish company with environmental awareness bought the country.
What did they do?
They reversed the water's river.
They literally moved the lever.
Instead of pushing the water out, they used the canals to pull the water back.
They fled the canals.
They created 11,000 hectares of fish -- barsch, sea lions, shrimp, aal -- and in this case, microns and his company completely reversed the ecological destruction.
The farm is incredible.
I mean, you've never seen anything like this.
They're looking out at the horizon that's one million miles away, and all they're looking at are these fluent channels and these dense, abundant marchs.
I wasn't there long ago with Mexicans.
He's an incredible guy, three parts of Charles Darwin and a bit of "A crocodile to kiss."
Okay? There we were, and we fought through the wetlands, and I showered and sweated, had matschs to my knees, and still has a biology feed.
Here he picks up a rare gleitaar.
Now he's mentioned the mineral beds of Phytoplankton.
And here, he sees a pattern of bundles reminding him of the tansan giraffe.
It turns out that Miguel has spent most of his career in the Mikumi National Park in Africa.
I asked him how he became such a fish expert.
He said, "Really? I don't know about fish.
I'm an expert on relationships."
And then he goes and he falls into more of the Gereds of rare birds and algae and strange water plants.
And don't get me wrong, that was really fascinating, you know, the biotic community unplugged, like that.
It's great, but I was in love.
And my head was weak in this lovely piece of delicious fish that I had a day before.
So I interrupted. I said, "Miguel, how come Dein fish taste so good?"
He showed the algae.
But what do you eat your fish?
What's the food rating?"
Well, he goes on to tell me that it's such a rich system that the fish will eat what they would eat in the wild.
The flowering biomass, the phytoplankton, the zooplankton, is what feeds the fish.
The system is so healthy, it's totally autonomous.
There's no food.
I heard of a farm that doesn't feed their animals?
Later on the day, I was driving around this site with Miguel, and I asked him, I said, "For a place that seems to be so natural," unlike any farm that I've ever been to, "How do you measure success?"
At the moment, it was as if a movie designer would have asked a stage change.
And we turned around the corner, and we got the most incredible sight, thousands and thousands of pink lamingos, literally a pink carpet that's as far as the eye is concerned.
"That's success," he said.
You're stung."
Pain? I was completely confused.
I said, "Wouldn't you like your fish?"
"Yes," he said.
Well, last year, there were 600,000 birds on this site, over 250 different species.
It's become the largest and one of the most important private bird reserves in all of Europe.
I said, "Miguel, is a well-provening bird phenomenon not the last thing you want to do on a fishup?"
He shakes his head, no.
He said, "We build extensive, not intense.
This is an ecological network.
The flamingos eat the shrimp.
The shrimp eat the phytoplankton.
So the lap-only seatbelt is better than the system."
Okay, let's rethink this. A farm that doesn't feed their animals and a farm that measures their success to the health of their predators.
It's a fish farm, but it's also a bird farm.
Oh, and by the way, those fidddos shouldn't even be there.
They're burning 150 miles away in a city where the soil is better for nest maintenance.
Every morning they fly 150 miles to the farm.
And every night, they fly 150 miles back.
They do that because they can follow the sled white line on the highway A92.
Seriously.
I had introduced myself to a sort of journey of penguins, so I looked at Mriguel.
I said, "Miguel, are they flying 75 miles to the farm and are they flying back 100 miles at night?
Do they do it for the kids?"
He looked at me like I had just quoted a song by Whitney Houston.
He said, "No. They do it because food is better."
I didn't mention the skin of my beloved fish that was delicious, and I don't like a fish skin. I don't like them jumping. I don't like them wrinkly.
It's this hot, fuzzy taste.
I almost never cook with it.
And yet, when I tried it in this restaurant in Southern Spain, it didn't blow up after fishing.
It tasted sweet and pure as if you were to take a bit off the ocean.
I mentioned this to Miguel, and he nodded.
He said, "The skin acts like a sponge.
It's the last defense before something enters the body.
It's evolved over evolution to suck in unity."
And then he said, "But our water doesn't have any imperfections."
Okay. A farm that doesn't feed their fish, a farm that measures their success on their predators.
And then I realized, when he says that a farm that doesn't have any unity, it underlies tremendous, because the water that flows through that farm comes in from the river of Guadalquivir.
It's a river that brings all the things that rivers have now tend to lead them, chemical pollutants, deficiencies.
And when it's flown through the system, it's leaving the water clean as it came in.
The system is so healthy, it cleans the water.
So not just a farm that doesn't feed their animals, not just a farm that measures their success in the health of their predators, but a farm that's literally a water-processing plant, not just for these fish, but for you and me.
Because when the water comes out, it comes in the Atlantic.
A drop in the ocean, I know, but I take it, and you should also do that, because this love story, as romantic as it is, is also open.
You might say she's a recipe for the future of good food, whether we're talking about barsch or meat cattle.
What we need now is a radically new concept of agriculture, one that actually tastes good in food.
But for many people, that's a little too radical.
We are not realists, we are geniuses. We are lovers.
We love markets. We love small family farms. We talk about regional food. We eat organics.
And if you say these are the things that assure the future of good food, someone stands up somewhere and says, "Hey guys, I love pink filamingos, but how are you going to feed the world?
How are you going to feed the world?"
Can I be honest?
I don't like that question.
No, not because we're already producing enough calories to feed the world more than we are.
A billion people are going to starve today.
One billion -- that's more than ever before -- because of hidden inequality in the distribution, not overall production.
Well, I don't like that question because it's defined the logic of our food system over the last 50 years.
Fert grain in plants, pest-regulation drugs in maocultures, chemicals on Earth, chicken on fish, and all the time the agricultural industry just asked, "If we feed more people cheaper, how terrible can that be?"
That was the reason. It was the right thing. It was the business plan of American agriculture.
We should call them what they are, a probosce in development, a probosce that's rapidly saving ecological capital that's making this production possible.
This is not a business, and it's not agriculture.
Our Kornkammer is threatened today, not because of a waste-free supply, but because of a waste-free resource.
It's not through the latest harvest-and-saccoride growth, it's through fertile land, not through pumps, but through fresh water, not through chainsaws, but through forests, not through fishing boats and nets, but through fish in the sea.
You want to feed the world?
Let's start with the question: How are we going to feed ourselves?
Or better, how can we create conditions that enable each community to feed itself?
To do that, don't look at the agricultural system model for the future.
It's really old, and it's done.
Capital, chemistry and machines are up there, and it never produced anything really good for food.
Instead, let's look at the ecological model.
That's what's going on for two billion years' work experience.
Look at Miguel, farmers like Miguel.
Businesses that are not worlds for themselves, businesses that are recurrenating instead of digging up, businesses that are extensive instead of only intense farmers who are not just producers, but experts for relationships.
Because they're the ones who are experts for flavor.
And if I'm really honest, they're a better chef than I will ever be.
You know, I'm right, because if that's the future of good food, it's going to be delicious.
Thank you.
If I want to bring to you one thing today, it's that the totality of the data that we consume is greater than the sum of its parts, and instead of thinking about information overload, I want you to think about how we can use information to make patterns, and we see as trends that wouldn't otherwise be visible.
So what we're seeing here is a typical Sterbediagram of age.
The program I'm using here is a little experiment.
It's called Pivot, and what I can do with Pivot is I can filter after a particular cause of death, let's say accidents.
And immediately I see another pattern that comes out.
Because in the middle section here, people are most active and they're most abundant over here.
We can take it one step further and then re-code the data and see that cycles and cancer are the common suspects, but not everyone.
Now, as we move forward and age out, let's say 40 years or less, we see that even accidents are the main cause that people should be worried about.
And who's looking forward is that this is especially true of men.
So you realize that looking at information and data in this way is very much reminiscent of swimming in a living information graph.
And if we can do this for raw data, why not content itself?
So what we have here is the title picture of every singleport illustration that has ever been printed.
It's all there. It's all online.
You can test it in your rooms after I lecture.
They can dive into a decade with Pivot.
You can dive in a particular year.
You can jump right to a specific edit.
So if I look here, I see the athletes coming out of this edit and the sportings.
I'm a Lance Armstrong fan, so I'm clicking here by showing all the records that Lance Armstrong mentioned.
Now, if I just wanted to get a big picture, I could think, "Okay, what if I could get rid of all the bike rides?"
So I'm going to step back and extend the perspective.
Now I see Greg Lemond.
And so you get an idea that if you go through this kind of information, you pick it up, you zoom in, you zoom in, you don't just look for it, you don't just throw it out.
You do something that's actually a little different.
It's somewhere in between, and we think it changes the way information can be used.
So I want to take this idea a little bit further with something a little bit crazy.
What we've done here is we've taken every single page of Wikipedia, and we've reduced it to a small summary.
The summary contains a brief overview and a symbol for the area that it comes from.
I'm just going to show the top 500 of the most popular Wikipedia sites.
But even in this limited view, we can do a lot of things.
Immediately we get a sense of the issues that are most popular on Wikipedia.
I'm going to choose the issue of the government.
Well, after I've elected the Government, I realize that the Wikipedia categorys that are most concerned with Time magazine "People of the Year."
This is really important, because this is an insight that's not in a single Wikipedia page.
It's only to recognize when you step back and look at the whole thing.
Looking at a particular of these summaries, I can go into the Time magazine "People of the Year" and see them all together.
Now, when I look at all these people, I realize most of them are government officials. Some of them come from science. Some, even less, come from the economy. Here's my boss, and one comes from the music domain.
And interestingly, Bono is also a winner of the TED Prize.
So now we can jump and look at all the TED Prize winners.
You can see, we're surfing the web for the first time as if it's really a network, not just from page to page, but much more abstract.
And so I want to show you what else a little surprise might be.
I'm just going to show you the New York Times website.
Pivot, this application -- I don't want to call it a browser; it's really not a browser, but you can look at websites -- and we get this zoom technology to every single website like this.
So I can go back one step, and just jump to a specific selection.
So this is important, because you can only look at websites in this way and look at the entire Internet race in the same way.
So I can zoom in and zoom in in on a particular time frame.
This is the state of the entire demonstration that I've been holding up to here.
And I can sort of recreate everything I've looked at today.
And then, once I step out and look at everything, I might reorder my course for my search history, here I was looking for opticals, here to Bing, or here to Live Labs Pivot.
And from here, I can go into the site and call it back up.
It's a metaphor which is used over and over again, and it makes the overall picture bigger than the sum of the data parts.
Right now, in this world, we think that data is a curse.
We're talking about the spread of information overload.
We talk about information drowning.
What if we could turn that situation around and turn the Internet upside down, so that instead of going from one to the other, we can start from many things to many things, and by discovering patterns that would have remained hidden?
If we can do that, then this data set is going to be a new source of useful information.
And, instead of just moving into information, we can get knowledge out of it.
And if we learn knowledge, maybe we can even pull wisdom out of it.
I'm listening to that, thank you very much.
I grew up with a gehört portion science fiction.
I went to school with the bus to school every day for an hour.
And my nose always stuck in a book, a science fiction book that kidnapped my thoughts in other worlds and told me in a way that held my deep, unconfident curiosity.
This curiosity also showed me that when I wasn't in school, I would wander through the forests, and collect "probs," frogs and snakes and beetles and pond water, bring it home and look under the microscope.
I was a total science nerd, you know.
It was always about trying to understand the world and trying to explore the limits of what's possible.
And my love of science fiction seemed to mirror my surroundings, because back in the late '60s, we went to the moon and studied the deep sea.
Jacques Cousteau came into our living rooms with his fascinating shows that show us animals and places and a world of wonders that we never could have imagined before.
I think that's a great deal to do with this science fiction book.
And I was an artist.
I could draw. I could paint.
And since there were no video games or computer-generated movies, I had to create the imagery in the media environment, I had to create the images in my head.
We all had to do that at the time. When we were kids reading a book, we took the description of the author and projected it on the screen in our heads.
My response to that was to draw and draw from aliens, alien worlds, robots, spaceships and things like that.
In math class, I was constantly caught by the teacher, like me, tucked around behind the textbook.
Creativity had to be kind of out.
And something interesting happened, and what fascinates me about Jacques Cousteau's shows was the idea of a totally unknown world on our Earth itself.
I certainly would never reach an alien world with a spaceship, and it seemed pretty unlikely to me.
But here was a world that I could actually walk into, here on Earth, and it was just as fascinating and exotic as any of the things that I'd always imagined when I read these books.
So I decided when I was 15 to be a diver.
The only problem was I lived in a small village in Canada, 3,000 miles from the nearest ocean.
But I didn't let myself down.
I irritated my father until finally he had done a dive school in Buffalo, New York, right on the other side of the border where we lived.
I was diving into a pool of YMCA in the middle of the winter in Buffalo, New York.
But the ocean, a real ocean, I was only given two years later when we moved to California.
Since then, in the 40 years since then, I've spent about 3,000 hours underwater, 500 hours in submersibles.
And I've learned that the world of the deep sea, even in the shallow ocean, is so rich in fascinating life, as we can barely imagine.
Nature's imagination doesn't know the boundaries, as opposed to our own unique human imagination.
Up until today, I feel the deepest awe for what I see in my dives.
And my love for the ocean, with the same intensity as before and ever.
So when I went to work as an adult, it was filmmaking.
This seemed the best way to tell my inner way of telling stories, with my need to make images, unite them.
As a child, I used to do comic books all the time.
So movies were the way to bring pictures and stories together, and that fit together.
Of course, the stories I came up with were from the science fiction business, "Terminator," "Aliens," and "Abyss."
In "Abyss," I was able to connect my preference for the underwater world and the diving with filmmaking.
So my two passions were kind of blurred.
Something interesting happened in "Abyss": to solve a storytelling problem in this film -- we had to create a kind of liquid water -- we went back to computer-generated animation, CG, back.
What came out was the first computer-generated soundtrack ever in a movie.
The film didn't bring any money, in fact, he was playing the cost of production, but I noticed something fascinating: The audience around the world was hypnotized by the magic that came out of it.
According to Arthur Clarke's Law, the most important technology and magic is not to be different from each other.
So they saw something magical.
And I found this incredibly exciting.
And I thought, "Wow, this must be involved in film art."
So we went to "Terminator 2," my next film, even further.
Together with ILM, we created the type of liquid metal there, and the success was very much about how this effect would arrive.
And it worked. Again, we had created something magical, and the effect in the audience was the same, but we had a little bit more money playing with the movie.
From these two experiences, a whole new world has been achieved, a whole new world of creativity for filmmaking.
So I started a company, along with my good friend, Stan Winston, who was at the time the best makeup and Creature designer, called "Digital Domain."
The basic idea of this company was to skip the phase of analog processes with visual printers and so on and start with digital productions.
We did that, and we created a competitive advantage of that for a while.
But in the mid-'90s, we realized that in the Creature and Character design -- which we actually founded the company -- we grew too slowly.
I had written this piece called "Avatar," which was supposed to push the messiness of visual effects and computer-generated effects across new heights with realistic human, expressive characters made by CG, and the key figures should all be CG, and the world should be CG.
But the Messlatte repressed beautifully, and the people in my company told me that we're not yet able to do that beforehand.
So I devoured that and made this other film about the big ship going down.
I sold this as "Romeo and Juliet on a ship." It became a epine-scale love film, a passionate movie.
In the secret, I actually wanted to dive down to the real wreckage of the Titanic.
That's why I made the film.
That's the truth. The studio didn't know that.
But I persuaded them by saying, "We're going to dive to the wreck. We're going to film the actual wreck.
We're going to show it in the opening sequence of the film.
This is tremendously important. It's a good marketing advocate."
And I persuaded them to fund an expedition.
Sounds crazy. But it's again that your imagination can make a reality.
We created, actually, six months later, a reality in which I returned to a Russian dive boat, four kilometers below the surface of the North Atlantic, looking at the real Titanic through a paddle.
This was not a film, not a HD film, that was real.
So, that really blew my mind.
And the preparations were enormous. We had to build cameras and turkeys and all kinds of things.
And I noticed how much these deep-sea dives, a space mission looked like.
Well, they were also high-tech and low-tech planning.
You go up into that capsule, and then you float down into that dark, hostile environment where there's no hope for rescue if you don't get it back.
And I thought to myself, "Wow, that's just as if I were in a science fiction movie.
It's really cool."
I was obsessed with exploring the deep sea.
Anyway, from the part that was about curiosity and science, it was all. It was adventure, it was curiosity. It was imagination.
And it was an experience that couldn't give me Hollywood.
Because, you know, I could imagine a creature that we could then create a visual effect, but I couldn't imagine what I was going to see outside the window.
In some of the following expeditions, I saw creatures in Thermal sources, and sometimes things that I'd never seen before, sometimes things that nobody had ever seen before, and science at the time that we saw them didn't find any words.
So that really blew my mind, and I wanted more.
And so I made a little unusual decision.
After the success of "Titanic," I said to myself, "Okay, I want to call my main call as a filmmaker in Hollywood on ice, and I'm going to do a full-time shoot for a while."
And then we started, we dived to the "Bismarck," and we studied them with robotic vehicles.
We went back to the wreckage of the Titanic.
We took little robots that we built that would make a fiberglass wire.
Our intent was to dive in and look at the inside of the ship, which had never been done before.
No one had ever explored the inside of the wreck. You didn't have any tools to do it. So we developed the technology we needed.
So now, I'm sitting on the deck of the Titanic, on a dive boat, and I see planks that are very similar to these Bretters, and I know that the band was playing there once.
And I fly with a little robot vehicle through the tracks of the ship.
I'm actually just referring to it, but my consciousness is within the vehicle.
It felt like I was physically present inside the shipwrack of the Titanic.
This was the most surreal form of an actual event that I've ever experienced, because before I go around a corner, I've always known what would happen in the light of the vehicle, because I've been walking around film for months when we were making the film.
The Set was an accurate copy of the blueprints of the ship.
So this was a very strange experience.
She made me realize this telephony experience that you can use such robotic avatars and also give your own consciousness into the vehicle, into this other form of existence.
It was really, really profound.
And maybe a little bit of perspective on what might happen in a few decades, if you have a cyborg industry to explore or do other things in all sorts of post-human future scenarios that I can think of as a science fiction tool.
After these expeditions, we started learning what we saw down there, to really estimate, for example, these deep-sea sources where we saw these incredibly amazing animals -- they're sort of alien, but here on Earth.
They live with chemosynthesis.
They don't exist in a sun-based system, as we do.
And so you see animals that are right next to a 500 degree Celsius that they can survive there.
At the same time, I was also very interested in space science, which was again the science fiction flow of my childhood.
And so I ended up with the people who were interested in space, and who are involved with NASA, and they're planning real space proposals for NASA, and they're going to go to Russia, and they're going to go to the biomedical protocol of everything from Drum and Dran, and then they're going to the international space station and using our 3D camera systems.
This was fascinating.
But in the end, it occurred to me that I took space scientists with us to the deep sea.
I took them, and I gave them access to the world at the bottom: astrobiologens, planetary scientists, people who were interested in these sort of extreme situations, and I took them to the sources so they could look around, take samples and test instruments and so on.
We were making documentaries, but actually science, more specifically: space science.
So the circle between my existence as a science fiction crowd, then as a child, and the manifestation of reality.
In the course of this journey of discovery, I've learned a lot.
I've learned a lot about science, but I certainly think that a director must also be a leader like a ship captain or something.
But I didn't really understand a lot of leadership before I went into these expeditions.
Because at a certain point, I had to say, "What am I doing here?
Why do I do that? What comes out of it?"
These stupid movies don't bring us any money.
We're just playing the production cost. We've got no track of fame.
Everybody thinks I'm from "Titanic" and "Avatar" and he'd have shoved my nails on a towel on a beach somewhere.
I made all these films, these documentary films, for a very small audience.
No fame, no honor, no money. What are you doing?
You're going to do it for the challenge, and the ocean is the most challenging environment that we have, and you're going to do it for explorer's sake, and the strange connection that comes up when a small group of people form a team.
Because we did all of this with just 10 to 12 people who worked 24/7, sometimes we were back two to three months in a row.
And in this community, you can see that the most important thing is the attention that you have in front of you is because you have a task that you can't explain to other people.
When you come back to land and you say, "We had to do it, the fiberglass, the sound friction, and all the drummer, all the technology, and the difficulty of human performance, when you're working on the sea," you can't explain to the other one. This is like a police officer or a soldier who's done something together and know that they can't explain it to somebody.
There's a connection, there's mutual respect.
So when I came back to make my next film, "Avatar," I tried to apply the same leadership style, which is that you respect your team and you earn yourself in the opposite of the respect.
It really changed the dynamic.
So I stood there with a little team on the unknown terrain, and we were spinning "Avatar" with a new technology that hadn't existed before.
Terrifyingly exciting.
It's a huge challenge.
And we've become a real family for four and a half years.
It changed my way of making films completely.
There were people who said that we would have really taken this ocean and transported to Pandora's planet.
For me, it was more of a principle way of doing my job, the actual process that changed in the end.
So what can we conclude from all this?
What lessons do we learn?
I think the first thing is curiosity.
It's the most powerful human trait.
Our imagination is a force that can even make a reality.
And taking care of your team is more important than any other team in the world.
To me, young filmmakers who say, "Give me a advice to do something like this."
And I say, "Don't blame yourself.
They're getting other ones for you. You're not doing it yourself, you're not fighting yourself. You're taking risks on you."
NASA has such a favorite phrase: "Charlies is not an alternative."
But in art and research, failure has to be an alternative, because there's a guarantee of trustworth there.
No big endeavor, the innovation demanded, had never been at risk.
You have to be willing to take those risks.
That's the thought I'd like to leave you with. A failure is an alternative, but fear is not an option. Thank you.
I'm going to talk to you today about energy and climate.
And that may surprise something because my full-time job at the foundation is mostly about vaccines and seeds to allow the things that we need to invent and deliver to allow the poorest two billion to be a better life.
But energy and climate are extremely important for these people, in fact more important than anyone else on the planet.
Climate degradation means that their seeds are not going to grow for many years, we're going to grow too much or too little, and things are going to change in the way that their fragile environment can't sustain.
This leads to starvation. It leads to uncertainty. It leads to riots.
So, climate change is going to be terrible for them.
Moreover, the price of energy for them is very important.
In fact, if you could only reduce price by one thing, poverty reduction would be the most effective energy.
Well, the energy price has fallen over time.
In fact, the progress society is based on momentum.
The coal revolution drives the Industrial Revolution, and even in the 20th century, there was a quick case in the electricity price, and so we have refrigerators, air conditionings, we can make modern materials and do so many things.
So we're in a wonderful situation of electricity in the rich world.
But if we lower the price -- let's cut the price down -- we're hitting a new barrier and that barrier is linked to CO2.
CO2 heats the planet, and the CO2 equation is actually quite clear.
They're summing the CO2 that leads to temperature strikes, and this temperature crisis has some very negative consequences, effects on the weather, and perhaps worse, the indirect result that the natural ecosystems can't adapt such fast changes and collapse whole systems.
Well, the exact correlation between a carbon footprint and a resulting temperature change and where the other consequences are, there's a number of gaps, but not very many.
And there's certainly indiscriminity about how bad these consequences are going to be, but they're going to be extremely bad!
I asked the top scientists several times, "Do we really need to get down to zero?
Isn't half a quarter or a quarter?"
The answer is, until we get close to zero, the temperature will go up.
So it's a big challenge.
It's very different to say that we have a three-foot tall truck that has to be under a three-foot bridge, and then you can do that kind of thing underneath.
This has to go down, down to zero.
Well, we emit a lot of carbon dioxide every year over 26 billion tons.
Every American is about 20 tons, people from poor countries, less than one.
On average, it's about five tons per person on the planet.
And somehow we have to create changes that go down to zero.
It's gone up all the time.
It's just different economic changes that have changed at all, and we need to move from rapid upheaval to zero.
This equation has four factors: a little bit of multiplication. You have this thing on the left -- CO2 -- that you want to get towards zero, and it's going to depend on the number of people, on the service that each human uses on average, on average energy for every service and on CO2, which is emitting per unit of energy.
So let's look at each factor and think about how we get this to zero.
Probably one of these numbers has to get very close to zero.
Now that's basic algebra, but let's go through it.
First of all, we have the population.
Today, 6.8 billion people live.
It's about nine billion. It's about nine billion.
If we're really successful with new vaccines, health care and reproduction, we could probably reduce that by about 10 percent to 15 percent, but we're now seeing a rate at 1.3.
The second factor is the services we use.
This includes everything we eat, clothing, television, heating.
These are very good things and poverty reduction in making these services accessible almost to anyone on the planet.
It's great that this number is rising.
In the rich world, in the upper billion, we might be able to make cuts and use less, but on average, that number will increase every year and therefore double, the number of services that each person has.
Here's a very basic service. Is there light at home so you can read the homework?
And these students don't have it, so they go out and read their school assignments under the streetlight.
Now, with efficiency, the E, the energy per service, there's finally good news.
We have something that doesn't go up.
Because of different successes in the field of light, through other types of cars, through new ways of building houses, there are many services where some individual services can reduce their energy consumption by 90 percent.
In other services, like making fertilizers, 105,00:056,000 -- WMAP 00:058,000 or air traffic or air traffic, the playground for improvements is much smaller.
Inspired, if we're optimistic, maybe we get a factor three reduction, maybe even a factor of six.
But for the first three factors, we've now gone from 26 billion to perhaps the very best 13 billion tons, and that's just not enough.
So let's look at the fourth factor -- and this is going to be a key factor -- that's the amount of CO2 emitting per unit of energy.
The question is, can you get this to zero?
If you burn coal, no.
If you burn natural gas, no.
Almost every way of making electricity today emits CO2, except for renewables and nuclear power.
So what we need to do on a global level is create a new system.
We need energy wonder.
Now, if I use the term "los," I don't mean the impossible.
The microprocessor is a miracle. The PC is a miracle.
The Internet and its service is a miracle.
People here have contributed to the development of many of these miracles.
There's usually no deadlines that you need a miracle to a certain date.
Usually you're just standing by the side, and some people are coming, some are not.
But in this case, we have to give full gas and get a miracle in a very short time.
Well, I wondered, how can I actually bring this over?
Is there a natural illustration, a demonstration that sparks the idea of people here?
I remembered last year when I brought mosquitoes, and somehow people liked this.
The idea became really tangible for them, you know, there are people living with mosquitos.
For energy, this was what struck me.
I decided that the freedom of smell would be my year's contribution to the environment.
So here are some natural fireflies.
I've been told that they don't bite. In fact, they probably won't even be out of the glass.
Well, there are all sorts of play-doubs like this, but they don't do much.
We need solutions, either one or more, that have an incredible scale and incredible reliability, and even though there are many ways in which people are looking for it, I really see only five that can afford these large demands.
I've left the tides, the tides, the fusion and the biofuels.
These may be a moderate contribution, and if they do better than I expect, that would be great, but my core statement here is that we have to work on all those five, and we can't give up any of them because they're incurring us, because they all have significant problems.
Let's first look at the burning of fossil fuels, either coal or natural gas.
What you need to do there may seem to be simple, but that's not it. You need to get all the CO2 that comes after the burning of the chimney, catching, burning under pressure, going somewhere down and hoping it stays there.
There are some pilots doing this at 60 percent -- 80 percent level, but getting it to 100 percent is going to be very difficult, and getting an input to the CO2 storage is a big challenge, but the biggest problem here is the warehouse question.
Who will make it safe?
Who can guarantee anything that literally many billion times larger than any kind of waste you can imagine from nuclear and other things?
That's a lot of volume.
So this is a tough nut.
Next, nuclear power.
It also has three big problems: the cost, especially in highly-regulated countries, the question for sure that you really feel that nothing can go wrong despite the human working that the fuel is not being used for weapons.
And what do you do with the trash?
Because even though it's not very large, there's a lot of concerns.
So three very difficult problems that are perhaps soluble, and that's why you should work.
I've summarized the last three of the five.
It's the renewables they're often called.
And they also have -- although it's great they don't need any fuel -- they have some drawbacks.
One is the energy density that these technologies generate dramatically lower than power plants.
These are energy farms, talking about many square kilometers, thousands of times more than a normal power station.
The other thing is that these kinds of interruptions happen.
The sun doesn't seem the whole day, it doesn't seem the same every day and the wind doesn't seem the same all the time.
That's why, if you depend on these sources, you have to have a way to get energy in times when you're not available.
So there's a lot of price challenges here. There are challenges in transmission, and if we say, for example, that the energy source is out of the country, you don't just need the technology, you also need to deal with the risk that the energy is coming from where it is.
And there's the storage problem.
And to put that in perspective, I looked at all the kinds of batteries that we make, which are the ones that are made for cars, computers, cell phones, flashlights, for everything, and I compared that to the amount of electronic energy that the world uses, and I found that all the batteries that we're producing could be less than 10 minutes of total energy.
So we need a big breakthrough here, something that will be a factor of 100 better than the approaches to time.
It's not impossible, but it's not that easy.
That's what happens when you try to get these cutaways to say 20 percent -- 30 percent of the use.
If you want to sustain 100 percent on this, you need an incredible miracle battery.
Now, where should we go? What's the right approach?
A manhatan project? How do we get here?
What we need are many companies working on this. Hundreds.
In each of these five areas, we need at least 100 people.
Many of you will say, they're nuts! That's good.
I think there are many people here in the TED group who are already getting involved.
Bill Gross has several companies, among them one called eSolar, which has great solar-thermal technologies.
Vinod Khosla invested in dozens of companies doing great things and having interesting opportunities, and I'm trying to support that.
Nathan Myhrvold and I are funding a company that, perhaps surprisingly, follows the nuclear approach.
There are some innovations in the nuclear area: modular, liquid.
The development stopped in this industry a while ago, so it's not a big surprise that there are some good concepts flying around.
The Terra Power Conzept means that instead of a part of the Uran, the one percent, the U235, we decided to burn 99 percent, the U238.
This is a pretty crazy idea.
But in fact, you've been thinking about this for a long time, but you could never properly simulate whether it would work, but since then there are modern supercomputers, you can simulate it and see that, yes, with the right materials approach, it looks like it's functional.
And because you burn that 99 percent, the cost profile is much better.
In fact, you burn waste, and you can even use waste from current reactors as a fuel.
Instead of breaking your head off, just burn it. It's a great thing.
The uranium is routinely used, a bit like a candle.
You can see that it's a kind of column, often known as the "Wandernde wave reactor."
That really solves the fuel problem.
Here's a picture of a place in Kentucky.
That's the waste, that's 99 percent. You've taken the waste that's burning today, so it's called a Uran waste.
This led to the U.S. for hundreds of years.
And if you filter ocean water cheaply and simply filter it, you get enough fuel for the rest of the planet's lifetime.
You know, there are many challenges, but it's an example of many hundreds of concepts that we need to move forward.
Let's think about how we should measure our success.
What should our witness look like?
Well, let's go to the goal that we have to reach, and then we talk about the progress.
Many talk about an 80 percent reduction by 2050.
It's really, really important that we get there.
The rest of the 20 percent are going to be produced in poor countries, and there's still a little bit of agriculture, and hopefully forestry will be clean and cement until then.
So in order to do that 80 percent, industry-states, including countries like China, have to completely transfer their electricity generation.
The other note is whether we're using the zero- emissions technology, whether it's used in all developed countries, and we're on our way to get it to the rest.
That's really important.
This is going to be a key part of this stuff.
If we go back from there, what should the 2020 evidence look like?
It should be the two elements again.
We should use efficiency to get reduction going. The less we emit, the less we emit, the less the carbon footprint and the temperature as well.
But in fact, it's this note for the things that we do that don't completely lead to the big reductions, just the same, or even slightly less important than the others that are the speed of innovation for these breakthroughs.
We need to track these breakthroughs with complete gas, and we can measure that in corporate numbers, in pilot projects and regulatory changes.
There are many great books on this topic.
The Al Gore book, "We have the choice," and David McKays, "Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air."
They really go through it and create a framework for which this can be debated across the board, because we need support from all sides.
There are some that need to come together.
That's a wish.
A very concrete desire for us to invent this technology.
If you gave me just a wish for the next 50 years, I could choose the president, I could choose a vaccine, and I love that, or I could choose that wish, which is, I'm going to invent half the price of energy without CO2, that wish is me.
This has the biggest impact.
If we don't get that wish, the trenches between long-term and short-term thinking people will be terrible between the U.S. and China, between poor and rich countries, and almost all of the lives of those two billion will be much worse.
So what do we need to do?
What kind of action do I call?
We need to use it for more research.
When countries come together in places like this, they shouldn't just talk about CO2.
You should address this innovation strategy, and you would be shocked by the ridiculously few funds spent on these innovative approaches.
We need market reforming, carbon taxes, Cap & Trade to create a price tag.
We need to spread the news.
We need to make dialogue more rational and more complete and also the things that are done by the government.
It's a very important wish, but I think we can fulfill it.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you very much. Just to understand Terra Power a little bit better -- first of all, can you give us an idea of the scale of this investment?
Bill Gates: In order to do the simulation on a supercomputer, get all the major scientists we've done, we just need a few 10 million. And even if we've tested our materials in a Russian reactor to make sure it works perfectly well, you're only in the 100 million.
The difficult step is to build the first reactor, to find more billion, the regulators and the place that actually builds the first one.
Once the first one is done, when it's running like we promised, it's all clear, because the economy, the energy density, is as different from nuclear power as we know it.
In order to really understand this, what does it mean to build deep down the ground, almost like a vertical column of nuclear fuel, this used garden, and then the process starts up and continues down?
Right. Today, you've got to retool this reactor, so there's lots of people and lots of controls that can go wrong, this thing where you open it up and you put things in or out. That's not good.
But if you have very cheap fuel, you can fill it for 60 years -- think of a column -- that you buried without all the complexities.
And it sits there and it burns for 60 years, and then it's done.
A nuclear reactor that offers a solution for waste itself.
BG: Yeah. Now, what happens to the waste: you can sit down -- there's a lot less waste on this method -- then take it and put it in the next reactor and then keep burning it.
And we're starting by taking the waste that's already there that's in these cool basin or dry beds at the reactors, which is our starting fuel.
So what was a problem for these reactors is what we put in ours, and it's going to dramatically reduce waste volumes during this process.
But as you've talked to various people in the world about these possibilities.
Where is the highest interest in getting this done?
Well, we haven't set ourselves in a place, and there's a lot of interesting off-the-shelf rules for everything that the Uklear is wearing, and there's a lot of interest, and the people of the company were in Russia, India, China -- I was here, and I met the Minister of Energy and talked about how this fits to the energy agenda.
I'm optimistic. You know, the French and the Japanese have done something in the direction.
This is a variant of one thing that has been done.
This is an important step forward, but it's like a faster reactor, and some countries have built this, so everyone who has done a rapid reactor is a caandidatat for our first.
In your mind, time frame and probability of calling something really into life?
BG: Well we need one of these scalable, scalable things that's very cheap, and we've got 20 years to figure out, and then we've got 20 years to set up.
That's sort of the deadline that's given us the environmental models that we need to hold.
And, you know, Terra Power, if everything's going well, and that's a big wish, could make it easy.
And fortunately, there are dozens of companies today, and we need hundreds that, just as if their approaches work, can provide funding for their pilots.
And it would be best if you could do multiple, because then you could use a mixture.
We certainly need a solution.
Is this the major possible breakthrough, is this the greatest thing you know?
BG: It's the most important thing to do.
It would have been without the environmental challenge, but it makes it so much more important.
In the nuclear sector, there are other innovative companies.
You know, we don't know what the work is like this, but there's the modular method, which is a different approach.
There's a liquid reactor type that seems a little bit difficult, but maybe it tells you about us.
And so there are different things, but the nice thing about this is that a uranium molecule has a million times the amount of energy like, let's say, a coal molecule, and that's why, if you can deal with the problems, and they're mainly radiation, footprint and cost, the potential, the effects of the land and other things, almost in one form.
If that doesn't work, then what?
Should we be in an emergency room trying to keep the temperature stable?
BG: When you get to this situation, it's like having too much eaten, and standing in front of a heart attack, what do you do? You might need a heart surgery or something like that.
There's a research facility called geoengineering that deals with various techniques to address warming, so we'd get 20 or 30 years to get together.
This is just an insurance method.
You hope we don't need that.
Some people say you shouldn't work on insurance at all because it might make you lazy, so you carry on because you know you're going to save your heart surgery.
I don't know if that's smart, if you think about the importance of this problem, but there's now a discourse in geo-engineering about whether to have that available, if things get faster, or whether that innovation needs more than we expect.
Climate change skeptics: Do you have one or two sentences to convince you, perhaps?
BG: Well, unfortunately, the skeptics live in very different camps.
Those who make scientific argument are very little.
Do you say there are negative effects that have to do with the clouds that move things?
There are very, very few things that you can even say about which there is a chance in a million.
The main issue here is kind of like AIDS.
You make the mistake now, and you pay a lot later.
And so the idea is, now, if you have all kinds of urgent problems to invest in something that you've just got a bit later -- and the investment isn't so clear. In fact, the IPCC Report isn't necessarily the worst case, and there are people in the rich world who look at the IPCC and say, okay, that's not a big drama.
The fact is that this uncertainty should make us worried.
But my dream here is that if you can do it economically and eliminate CO2 at the same time, the skeptics say, "Okay, I'm not interested that it doesn't emit carbon, I almost wish it did, but I'm going to accept it because it's cheaper than the previous method."
And that would be your answer to the Björn Lomborg argument that if you use all this time and energy to solve the carbon problem, all the other targets suffer, the poverty reduction, the eradication of malaria, and so on, it's a stupid waste of resources to invest money while there's better things we can do.
BG: Well, the actual research spending -- let's say U.S. should spend 10 billion a year more than they do today -- it's not that dramatic.
In addition, other things shouldn't suffer.
You can come up with a lot of money, and here are people who are rational, if you have something that isn't economic, and try to fund it, for me, most waste is happening here.
It's because you're very short of a breakout and you're just funding the learning curve, and I think we should try more things that have the potential to be much cheaper.
If the removal you get is a very high energy price, then only the rich can maintain.
I mean, any of us here could spend five times as much on our energy without changing their lifestyle.
For the bottom two billion, it's a disaster.
And even Lomborg is thinking.
His new masche is now, "Why isn't the research going to be discussed anymore?"
He's still associated, because of his earlier stories, with the Skeptiker-Camp, but he's understood that this is a very lonely group, and that's why he's now bringing the research argument.
And that's a thought that I think is appropriate.
Research, it's just crazy how little it's going to support.
Bill, I think I speak for almost all the people here when I say, I really hope that your wish will be true. Thank you very much.
BG: Thank you.
A couple of years ago, here at TED, Peter Skillman presented a design competition called "The Marshmallow-Herausfordation."
The idea is quite simple. Four teams have to build the largest open-ended structure with 20 spaghetti, about a meter of tape, about a meter of thread and a marshmallow.
The marshmallow needs to be on top of it.
And even though it looks really simple, it's actually really hard, because people are pressing to work very fast.
And so I thought this was an interesting idea, and I turned it into a design workshop.
It was a huge success.
Since then, I've done about 70 workshops around the world, with students, developers and architects, even with the CTOs of Fortune 50 companies, and there's something about this work that allows deep feedback in the nature of collaboration, and I want to share some of them with you.
Most people normally start to orient themselves to the task.
They talk about what it's going to look like, they're all about power.
Then you spend a little bit of time planning and organizing, skiing and putting spaghetti down.
They spend most of their time assembling constantly growing structures.
And finally, just before they don't have time, someone takes the marshmallow and they put it on the tip, they step back and they go, "Ta-da!" they admire their work.
But then, almost always, what happens is that the "ta-da" becomes a "uh-oh," because the weight of the marshmallow causes the whole thing to bend and fall.
There are a number of people who have much more "uh-oh" moments than others, and among the worst are fresh BWLAbsolvents.
They lie, they cheat, they're confused and they make really tasty forms.
And of course, there are teams that have many more "ta-da" banks, and they're among the best of all kindergarten graduates.
And that's pretty amazing.
As Peter told us, they are not only producing the highest towers, but also the most interesting structures of all.
What you might be asking is, how is that? Why? What about those?
And Peter says, "No one of the kids spends time being the head of spaghetti GmbH."
They don't spend time fighting power.
There's another reason.
And that is that BWL students were trained to come up with a real plan, okay!
And then realizing it.
What happens when they put the marshmallow at the top, they don't have time anymore, and what happens?
It's a crisis.
Sound familiar, what?
What kids in kindergarten do differently is they start with the marshmallow and build prototypes, successful prototypes, always at the top of the marshmallow, so that they have a lot of the chance to fix the commercialized prototypes.
Conservatives recognize this kind of collaboration as the core of an iterative process.
And with each try, the kids get instant feedback, which works and what doesn't.
So the performance of working with prototypes is essentially -- but let's see how different teams work.
The average for most is about 50 miles, BWL students are creating half of them, lawyers are doing a little bit more, but not much, kindergarten kids are better than adults.
Who is the most successful?
Architects and engineers, fortunately.
One is the height of what I saw.
And why? Because they understand triangles and self-help geometric patterns are the key to build stable structures.
CEOs are a little bit above average, but this is where it gets interesting.
If you put an Exekutive Administrator on the team, they will significantly better.
It's incredible. You look around and you see, "This team is going to win."
You can predict that. Why is that?
Because they have special skills of processor management.
They run the process; they understand it.
And the team that runs and gets eight at work will dramatically improve the performance of the team.
Special skills and processor skills and their combination leads to success.
If you have 10 teams that go typical, you get about six of them that have robust structures.
So I tried something very exciting.
I thought we'd get the poker handle right now.
So I offered a $40,000 prize for the winner.
What do you think happened to these design students?
What was the result?
This is what happened. Not a team had a stable structure.
If anybody had built a two-and-a-half-inch construction, he would have worn the price home.
So isn't it interesting that high stakes have a strong effect?
We repeated this practice with the same students.
What do you think happened?
Now you understood the advantage of "Prototypeing."
This is the same, bad team that became one of the best.
They produced the highest construction in the lowest amount of time.
So there are profound lessons for us about the nature of drive and success.
You might ask, why would someone actually invest time creating a marshmallow?
The reason is, I'm making digital tools and processes to help teams, cars, video games and "visual Effects."
And what the Marshmallow Challenge does is it helps you to identify hidden assumptions.
Because frankly, every project has its own marshmallow.
The challenge is to create a common experience, a common language, a basic position, to build the right prototype.
And this is the value of this experience, this simple exercise.
And those of you who are interested in can visit marshmallows.com.
It's a blog where you can see how to build the marshmallow.
There's a step-by-step line there.
They find crazy examples from around the world, like people optimize and refine the system.
There are also world recorders.
And the bottom lesson, I think, is that construction is actually a joint sport.
It requires that we all focus our senses on the task, and that we use our thinking optimally, like our feelings and our actions, in the challenge we face.
And sometimes a small prototype of this experience is everything it takes to get us from a "uh-oh" moment to a "ta-da" moment.
And that can make a big difference.
Thank you very much.
Let's pretend we've got a machine here.
A big machine, a cool, TED-like machine, and this is a time machine.
And everyone in this room has to go in.
And you can go into the past, you can go into the future; you can't stay in here and now.
And I wonder what you would choose, because I asked my friends this question a lot lately, and they wanted to all go into the past.
I don't know. They wanted to go back in time before there were cars or Twitter or America seeking the superstar.
I don't know.
I'm convinced that you're kind of drawn to nostalgia, to wishing.
And I understand that.
I'm not part of that group, I have to say.
I don't want to go into the past, and that's not because I'm an adventurer.
It's because possibilities are not going to go back on this planet, they're going forward.
So I want to go into this machine, and I want to go into the future.
This is the greatest time that we've ever had on this planet, no matter what scale you're making: health, wealth, mobility, opportunities, declining rates of disease.
There was never a time like this before.
My great-grandchildren all died when they were 60.
My grandparents urged that number to 70.
My parents are 80 on the heels.
So there should be better than nine in the beginning of my death row.
But it's not even about people like us, because that's a bigger thing than that.
A child born today in New Delhi would expect to live as long as the richest man in the world 100 years ago.
Think about it. It's an incredible fact.
And why is that?
Smallpox: smallpox killed billions of people on the planet.
They've reshaped Earth's demographics in a way that didn't make war.
They're gone. They're gone.
We force them. Puff.
In the rich world, there are diseases that are still threatened by millions of us just a generation ago.
Diphtry, wheel, child sewing ...
Anybody know what that is?
Vacines, modern medicine, our ability to feed billions of people, are success in the scientific method.
And from my point of view, the scientific method is to try things out, see if it works, it changes if it doesn't, one of the greatest achievements of humanity.
So that's the good news.
Unfortunately, that's all the good news, because there are a few other problems, and they've been mentioned a lot.
And one of them is that despite all of our achievement, a billion people around the world are hungry every day.
That number's going up, and it's going up very fast, and that's embarrassing.
And not only that, we've used our imagination to hard-wire this world.
drinking water, urable land, rainforests, oil, gas: they disappear, and soon, and if we don't evolve from that chaos, we also disappear.
So the question is: Can we do that? I think so.
I think it's clear that we can produce food that will feed billions of people without the country that they live on.
I think we can power this world with energy that it doesn't break at the same time.
I really believe that, and no, that's not a wishfulness.
But this keeps me awake at night -- one of the things that keeps me awake at night. We've never really needed scientific progress like this, never.
And we've never been able to put it rationally, as we can today.
We are at the threshold of astonishing, amazing events in many areas, and yet I really think that we have to go back hundreds, 300 years before the Enlightenment to find a time when we've been fighting progress, where we've come up with these things more fiercely, on more fronts than we are now.
People wrap up in their beliefs, and they're so intimate that you can't get them free.
Not even the truth will set them free.
And listen, everyone has a right to their opinion; even a right to their opinion to progress.
But you know what you're not right about?
You don't have a right to your own facts. Sorry, don't have a right to you.
And I took a while to figure that out.
About a decade ago, I wrote an article about vaccine for The New Yorker, a small article.
And I was amazed to take resistance, to resist what is ultimately the most effective measure in health care in human history.
I didn't know what to do, so I just did what I always do, and I wrote an article and went on.
And soon after that, I wrote an article about genetically modified foods.
Same thing, only bigger.
People were playing crazy.
So I wrote an article about this, and I couldn't understand why people thought this was "Franken Food," why they thought molecules were moving in a particular way, rather than a random way, a crossover in nature.
But you know, I do what I do. I wrote the article, I went on.
I mean, I'm a journalist.
We type, we pull in, we eat, that's okay.
But I was worried about this article, and I couldn't figure out why, and then I found it out.
And that's because those fanatics who made me crazy weren't a fanatics at all.
These were looking at people, educated people, decent people.
They were just like the people in this room.
And I was so disturbed by this ...
But then I thought, you know what, let's face it.
We've come to a place where we don't have the same relationship with progress as we used to.
We're talking a little bit about it.
We're talking ironic about this, with little demonstrations about "opence."
Okay, there are reasons for that, and I think we know what the reasons are.
We have the confidence in institutions, in authority, and sometimes in science itself, and there's no reason why it shouldn't be that way.
You can just call a few names and people will understand.
Chernobyl, Bhopal, the Challenger, Vioxx, weapons of mass destruction, the U.S. presidential election in 2000.
I mean, you know, you can choose your own list.
There are questions and problems with the people we thought they were always right. So be skeptical.
Ask, ask for evidence, ask for evidence.
Don't take anything for granted.
But here's the thing: When you get evidence, you have to take the evidence, and we're not good at it.
And I can say that for the reason, we're now living in an epidemic of fear, as I've never seen before, and hopefully we'll never see again.
About 12 years ago, a story was published, a terrible story that connected the autism epidemic with the Masern, the Mumps, and the whole vaccine.
Very scary.
A lot of studies have been conducted to see if this was true.
Lots of studies should be conducted; that's a serious issue.
The data came in.
The data came in from the United States, from England, from Sweden, from Canada, and they were all the same, no correlation, no connection, no nothing.
It doesn't make any difference. It doesn't make any difference because we believe in anecdotes, we believe what we see, we believe what makes us feel real.
We don't believe in a bunch of documents of a government that gives us data, and I understand that, I think we all do.
But you know what?
The result of that was catastrophic.
Conversely because of this fact, the U.S. is one of the only countries in the world where the vaccine is going down for masern.
This is scandal, and we should be ashamed.
It's awful.
What happened was we could do that.
Well, I understand that. I do that.
Because does anybody have a masern?
Has a single one in the audience ever seen someone die from Masern?
Doesn't do very often.
Doesn't fit in this country at all, but 160,000 times in the world last year.
That's a lot of deaths from Masern, 20 an hour.
But because it's not happening here, we can push it away, and people like Jenny McCarthy can run around and offer messages of fear and illiteracy from platforms such as Oprah and Larry King Live.
And they can do that because they don't connect cause and correlation.
You don't understand that these things seem to be the same, but almost never are the same.
And this is something that we need to learn, very quickly.
This guy was a hero, Jonas Salk.
He liberated us from one of humanity's worst freaks.
No fear, no qualen, child care, no puff, disappeared.
The guy in the middle doesn't do that much.
It's called Paul Offit.
He's just developed a redavirus vaccine with a couple of other people.
It can save the lives of 400 to 500,000 children a year in the developing world.
Pretty good, right?
Well, that's good, besides walking around Paul talking about vaccines and saying how valuable they are, and that people should just stop painting.
And that's actually what he says.
So Paul is a terrorist.
If Paul speaks in a public institution, he can't stand out without armed guards.
He gets calls home because people like to tell him that they know where his kids go to school.
And why? Because Paul made a vaccine.
I don't need to say that, but vaccines are essential.
If you take it away, the diseases come back, the terrible conditions, and this is what's happening.
We have Masern in this country now.
And that gets worse, and pretty soon, kids are going to die again, because that's just a matter of numbers.
And they're not just going to die of Masern.
What about child care? Let's take that. Why not?
A commander of mine wrote me a few weeks ago and said she thinks I'm a little too bad.
No one ever said that.
She wouldn't vaccinate her child against child care, in no way.
Fine.
Why? Because we don't have child care. And you know what?
We didn't have a baby sewing in this country yesterday.
Now, I don't know, maybe this morning somebody got on an airplane in Lagos, and they're flying right up to Los Angeles, right now they're over Ohio.
And within a few hours, he lands and rents a car, and he comes to Long Beach, and he's going to visit one of these fantastic TED dinners tonight.
And he doesn't know that he's infected with a paralyzing disease, and we don't know that, because that's how the world works.
This is the planet that we live on. Don't pretend it's not.
We love to cover ourselves in lies. We love that.
Have you taken all your vitamins this morning?
Echinacea, a little antioxidantium that helps you on the spray.
I know you've done this because half of Americans do this every day.
They take this stuff, and they take alternative cures, and it doesn't matter how often we figure out that they're useless.
The data keeps letting this happen.
They shake your urine. They almost never do.
That's okay, you want to pay 28 billion dollars for the dark urine.
I totally agree with you.
Dark urine. Dark.
Why do we do that? Why do we do that?
Well, I think I understand -- we hate the pharmaceutical industry.
We hate a too strong government. We have no trust in the system.
And we shouldn't. Our health care system is boring.
It's cruel to millions of people.
It's absolutely amazing cold, and it's silent for us to be able to afford.
So we run away from it, and where do we go?
We run into the arms of the placebo industry.
That's great. I love the placebo industry.
But, you know, that's a really serious issue, because this stuff is crap, and we're spending billions of dollars on it.
And I have all kinds of little props here.
None of it -- Gingko, fraud, euchinacea, fraud, Acai, I don't even know what it is, but we're spending billions of dollars on it, it's fraud.
And you know what? When I say that, people scream at me and say, "What's your concern? Let people do what they want.
That's how they feel good."
And you know what? You're wrong.
Because I don't care if it's the Minister of Health who says, "Hmm, I'm not going to take my experts' attention to mammography," or any kind of cancer nerd who wants to treat his patients with cataffic procedures.
If you go on this path where belief and magic replaces evidence and science, you get to a place where you don't want to be.
They go to Thabo Mbeki in South Africa.
He killed 400,000 his people because he insisted that red beet, cno bluech and lemon oil are much more effective than antiretroviral drugs, which we know can reduce the course of AIDS.
Hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths in a country that is considered worse than any other disease.
Don't tell me these things don't have consequences.
They have them. They always have them.
Now, the most mindless epidemic that we're in right now is this absurd battle between the most technically changing foods and the bio-elits.
This is an idiotic debate. It has to stop.
It's a debate about words, about metaphors.
This is ideology, not science.
Everything we eat, every grain of rice, every branch of Petersilia, every Rosenkohl, was changed by people.
You know, there were no mandarins in paradise.
There were no Cantaloupe-melons.
There were no Christmas trees. We did all this.
We've done it in the last 11,000 years.
And some of it worked, and some didn't.
We started off what didn't work.
Now we can do it more specifically, and of course there are risks, but we can do something like vitamin A in rice, and stuff can help millions of people extend millions of people to their lives.
Don't you want to do that?
I have to say, I don't understand.
We refuse genetically modified foods.
Why do we do that?
Well, what I hear all the time is: Too many chemicals, pesticides, hormones, maoculture, we don't want giant fields with one thing, that's wrong.
We don't want companies to patent life.
We don't want companies to have seeds.
And you know what my answer to all this is?
Yes, you're right. Let's fix it.
It's true, we have a huge food problem, but that's not science.
This has nothing to do with science.
It's right, morality, patent stuff.
You know, science is not a company.
She's not a country.
It's not even an idea; it's a process.
It's a process, and sometimes it doesn't work, and sometimes it doesn't work, but the idea that we shouldn't allow science to do their work, because we're afraid that's a real problem, and it prevents millions of people from flourishing.
You know, in the next 50 years, we're going to have to grow 70 percent more food than we are right now. 70 percent.
This investment in Africa over the last 30 years.
Shame. Shame.
They need it, and we don't give it to them.
And why? Gentechnically changed food.
We don't want to encourage people to eat this rotted stuff like Maniok.
Maniok is something that kills half a billion people.
It's kind of like a potato.
It's just a bunch of calories. It's nuts.
It doesn't have nutrients; it doesn't have a protein, and scientists are building all that in there.
And then people could eat that and not be blind.
You wouldn't starve, and guess what?
That would be nice. It wouldn't be Chez Panisse, but it would be nice.
And all I can say about this is, why do we fight this?
I mean, let's ask: Why do we fight this?
Because we don't want to move genes around?
It's not about pushing genes around. It's not about chemicals.
It's not about our ridiculous passion for hormones, our faiths at larger food, better food, unique food.
It's not about Rice Krispies; it's about getting people alive, and it's about getting them to understand what that means.
Because you know what?
If we don't do that, if we go on as we go on as we go on, I think we're guilty of something we don't want to be guilty of, high-tech colonialism.
There's no other description of what's going on here.
It's selfish, it's ugly, it's not worthy of us, and we really have to stop that.
So after this incredibly funny conversation, you might want to say, "Are you still going to go to this ridiculous time machine and into the future?"
Anyway. I certainly want that.
Right now, it's present, but we have an incredible opportunity.
We can put this time machine on everything we want.
We can move them where we want to move them, and we're going to move them where we want to go.
We need to have these conversations, and we need to think, but if we climb into the time machine and go into the future, we're going to be happy to have this done.
I know we can, and as far as I'm concerned, this is what the world needs now.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I've been interested in the placebo effect for a while, and it may seem strange that a magician is interested in it, unless you look at it the way I do, as "a deception which is going to be a scary thing if somebody just believes in enough."
In other words, sugar pills have shown in some studies a measurable effect, the placebo effect, and that's because the person thinks what's going on with them is a pharmaceutical or a type of -- in pain management, for example, if the patient believes only enough of this, there's a measurable effect in the body called the placebo effect.
Deception becomes a scary thing because somebody perceives it that way.
So in order to understand each other, I want to show you a basic, simple magic trick.
And I'm going to show you how it works. This is a trick that has been at least since the 1950s in every magic book for children.
I myself learned it from the Cub Scout Magic of the pathfinder in the 1970s.
I'm going to do it for you and then explain it.
And then I'll explain why I explain it.
So, see what happens.
The knife you can examine, my hand you can examine.
I'm just going to put the knife in my arm.
I turn my sleeve back.
And to make sure that nothing in my sleeve disappears or comes out of it, I'm just going to put my wrist right here.
In this way, you can see that at no time anything moves, as long as I push this way, nothing can move in my sleeve or come out.
And the goal here is very simple.
I'm going to open my hand, and hopefully, if everything goes well, the knife is held through my pure physical magnetism.
It's actually so stuck in its place that I can shake it without falling off the knife.
Nothing walks into my sleeve or comes out, no trickster, and you can study everything.
Ta-da!
Now, this is a trick I often teach little kids who are interested in magic, because you can learn a lot about deception if you look at it more closely, even though it's a very simple trick to do.
Many of you in this room probably know this trick.
It works like this.
I hold the knife in my hand.
I say I'm going to pour my wrist to make sure nothing disappears or comes out of my sleeve, and that's a lie.
The reason I hold my wrist is because it's the real secret to illusion.
Because the moment I throw away my hand from you, so you can see it from the back, that finger moves here, my index finger, just from where it was, in a position where it's so stretched.
Great trick?
There's somebody in the back who has no childhood.
So, it's here. Right.
And when I turn around, the finger changes its position.
And now you could talk about why this is a deception, why you don't realize there's just three fingers down here: because the mind and the way it processs information doesn't count, one, two, three, but sees it as a group.
But that's not really what it's about now, and then I open my hand.
Of course, it's held there, but not through the magnetism of my body, but through a trick, through my index finger, which is now there.
And when I close my hand, the same thing happens when I turn back, it's hidden from that movement that the finger moves back again.
I take that hand away. And here's the knife.
This is a trick you can introduce your friends and neighbors. Thank you.
Now, what does that have to do with the placebo effect?
About a year ago, I read a study that really blew my mind.
I'm not a doctor or a researcher, and so that was an amazing thing for me.
What it turns out is that if you offer a placebo in the form of a white pill in the form of an Aspirintablette, it's just a round white pill that has a particular measurable effect.
But if you give the shape you give the placebo, for example, to a smaller pill, and to color that blue and give a letter to it, it's actually more measurable.
And that, although none of them are pharmaceuticals -- they're just sugar pills.
But a white pill is not as good as a blue pill.
What? It really freaked me out.
But it turns out it's not all.
If you take capseln, they're even more effective than a tablet in any form.
A colored capsule which is yellow at one end and red at the other end is better than a white capsule.
The control also plays a role.
A pill twice a day is not as good as three pills -- I can't remember the exact statistics now. Sorry.
But the point is ...
... that the doctrines also play a role.
And the form plays a role.
And if you want to have the ultimate placebo effect, you have to reach the needle.
Right? A syringe with a no-brainer -- a few milliliters of an effectless substance that you inject into a patient.
It creates a very strong image in your head. It's much stronger than a white pill.
This chart is really -- I'm going to show you another time when we have a projector.
So the fact is that the white pill doesn't work as well as the blue pill, which doesn't work as well as a capsule that doesn't work as well as the needle.
And none of it has any really pharmaceutical quality, it's just our belief that has a stronger effect within us.
I wanted to know if I could use this idea for a magic trick.
I take something which is obviously a deception, and I make it look real.
So we know from this study that you have to reach the needle when you're supposed to do it.
This is an 18-inch Hutnadel. It's very, very sharp, and I'm going to sterilize it a little bit first.
This is really my meat. It's not Damian's specially bred meat.
This is my skin. This is not a special effect of Hollywood.
I'm going to stick this needle into my skin and run through it until it enters the other side.
If you're mad -- if you fall easily in Ohnmacht -- I performed this for a couple of friends last night in the hotel room, and some people I didn't know, and a woman has become almost drunk.
So I propose, if you're quick, you look away for the next 30 seconds, or, you know what, I'm going to do the first tricky bit in the back.
You can see it in a second, but you can also look away if you want.
So, it goes like this, right here, where my meat starts, at the bottom of my arm, I'm just going to make a little prick.
I'm really sorry. Is that crazy?
And now just a little bit of my skin and the other side like that.
So now we're actually in the same situation that we had with the knife trick.
About.
But now you can't count my fingers, right?
So, I'm going to show you. This is one, two, three, four, five.
Well, yeah.
I know what people think when they see that.
They say, "Okay, that's certainly not that stupid and self-sustaining the skin just for a few minutes."
Well, then I'm going to show it to you.
What does this look like? Pretty good.
Yeah, I know.
And the people in the back say, "Okay. I didn't really see this."
People in the outer space are now coming in.
Let me show you around.
This is really my skin. This is not a special effect of Hollywood.
This is my meat, and I can turn this around.
Sorry. If you're mad, look away, don't look.
The people in the back or the people who watch this on video later are going to say, "Well, that sounds quite impressive, but if it were real, he would -- you see, there's a hole and there, if it were real, it would bleed."
Okay, let me just take a little bit of blood out for you.
Yes, there it is.
I would normally take the needle out now.
I would clean my arm and show you that there are no wounds.
But I think in this framework here, and with the intention of making something real out of a deception, I'm just going to put the needle in there and go off the stage like this.
We're going to meet a couple more times in the next few days.
I hope you'll be looking forward. Thank you very much.
Everyone speaks about happiness these days.
I've let some people count the number of books that have been published in the title in the last five years, and they've been dropping out about 40, and there's a lot more.
There's a tremendous wave of interest in happiness among scientists.
There's a lot of happiness.
Everyone would like to make people happier.
But despite all this tide of work, there are multiple cognitive biases that make it almost impossible to think clearly about happiness.
And my talk today is going to be mainly about these cognitive biases.
This is for Laians who think about their own happiness, and it's true for scientists who think about happiness, because it turns out we're just as confused as anybody else.
The first of these cases is to admit complexity.
It turns out that the word of happiness is simply no useful word anymore, because we're applying it to many different things.
I think there's a certain meaning that we could limit it, but by and large, that's something that we have to give up, and we're going to have to take on the complicated view of what well-being is.
The second case is a transformation of experience and memory: It's basically between being happy in his life and being happy about his life or being happy with his life.
And these are two very different concepts, and they're both thrown together in the idea of happiness.
And the third is concentration bias, and that's the unfortunate fact that we can't think about a circumstance that affects well-being without meaning.
I mean, this is a real cognitive case.
There's just no way to get it right.
Now, I'd like to start with an example of someone who had a question and answer, after one of my lectures, who reported a story. [unclear ...] He said he had heard a sinfonie, and it was absolutely gorgeous music, and at the end of the recording, there was a terrible Kenyan sound.
And then he added, really quite emotional, which ruined the whole experience.
But it didn't have that.
What it ruined was the memories of the experience.
He had the experience.
He had 20 minutes of wonderful music.
They didn't count because he was with a memory; the memory was ruined, and the memory was all he had to hold.
What this really tells us is that we could think about ourselves and other people in the sense of two types of self.
There's an experienced self that lives in the present and knows the present, capable of experiencing the past again, but basically the present.
It's the experience of the self that the doctor says -- you know, when the doctor says, "Are you listening to this?"
And then there's a remembering self, and the remembering self is the one that counts and sustains the history of our lives, and it's the one that the doctor talks about by asking the question, "How have you felt lately?"
Or, "How did your trip to Albania?" or something like that.
These are two very different units, the experience self and the reminding self, and changing those two is part of the mess of happiness.
Now, the reminding self is a storyteller.
And this really starts with a basic reaction to our memories -- it starts right away.
We're not just telling stories when we're doing it to tell stories.
Our memory tells us stories, which means what we can preserve from our experiences is a story.
And let me start with an example.
There's an old study.
These are real patients undergoing a painful procedure.
I'm not going to go into the details. It's not painful anymore, but it was painful when this study was done in the 1990s.
They were asked to report all 60 seconds about their pain.
And here are two patients. These are their records.
And you're asked, "Who of them has suffered more?"
And this is a very simple question.
Patient B clearly suffered more. His gut reflection was longer, and every minute of pain the patient A had patients B, and more.
But now there's another question: "How much did these patients think they were suffering?"
And here's a surprise.
And the surprise is that the patient A had a much worse evaporation on her intestinal reflection as a patient B.
The stories of the intestinal reflection were different, and because a very important part of the story is how it ended.
And none of these stories are very educational or great -- but one of them is this clear ...
But one of them is clearly worse than the other.
And the one that's worse is the one where the pain was at the very end on its peak. It's a bad story.
How do we know that?
Because we asked these people about their gut reflection, and much later, "How bad was the whole thing?"
And it was much worse for A than for B in its experience.
Now, this is a direct conflict between the experience of self and the remembered self.
According to the present self, B clearly had a worse time.
Well, what you could do with Patient A, and we actually did clinical trials, and it's been done, and it works, you could actually extend patient A's guts by just letting the hose in there without getting too much of it.
This is going to lead the patient to suffer, but only a little bit less than they did before.
And if you do that for a few minutes, you've done that patient A's experience is worse, and you've done that patient A's memory is much better, because now you've given patient A a better story about their experience.
What's a story going on?
And that's true of the stories that memory provides us, and it's true of the stories that we invent.
So what a story is about breakthroughs, big moments and ends.
In the end, it's very, very important, and in this case, it dominated the end.
Well, the experience of the self lives on a continuous basis.
It has moments of experience, one after another.
And you say, what happens to those moments?
And the answer is really simple. They're lost forever.
I mean, most of the moments of our lives -- and I've calculated this -- you know, the psychological present is about three seconds long, which means, you know, there's about 600 million of them in a life in a month, there's about 600,000. Most of them don't leave any trails.
Most of them are completely ignored by the remembering self.
And yet, somehow you get the impression that they should count that what happened during that moment of experience is our life.
It's the limited resource that we use while we're in this world.
And how we use it would seem to be important, but that's not the story that keeps the remembered self for us.
So we have the remembering self and the experience self, and they're really quite different.
The biggest difference between them is dealing with time.
From the perspective of the self, if you have a vacation and the second week is just as good as the first, the second vacation is twice as good as the one-time vacation.
This doesn't work for the memory self at all.
For the remembering self, a two-week vacation is barely better than the occasional vacation, because there are no new memories added.
You didn't change history.
And in this way, time is actually the critical variable that distinguishes a remembered self from an experienced self, and time has very little impact on that story.
Well, the reminding self makes more than remembering and telling stories.
It's actually the only thing that makes decisions, because if you have a patient who, say, had two gut reflections in two different surgeons and decides what to choose, then the one who chooses the memory, which is less bad, and this is the surgeon who's going to be selected.
The experience of self has no voice in that choice.
In fact, we don't choose between experiences. We choose between memories of experiences.
And even if we think about the future, we don't usually think about our future as experiences.
We think about our future as past memories.
And basically, you can look at this, you know, as a tyranny of the memory self, and you can think of the reminding self as one that kind of blows up through experiences that don't need the experience of self.
I have the impression that, when we're doing holidays, it's very often the case, which is, we're doing a lot of vacations in the service of the remembered self.
And that's a little hard to justify, I think.
I mean, how much do we learn from our memories?
This is one of the explanations given to the dominance of the remembered self.
And when I think about it, I think about a vacation that we've done a few years ago in Antarctica, which was clearly the best vacation I've ever had, and I think quite often about how often I think about other vacations.
And I've probably had my memory on this three-week journey, I would say for about 25 minutes in the last four years.
Well, if I ever opened the folder with the 600 images in it, I would have spent another hour.
Well, that's three weeks, and that's the highest and a half hours.
There seems to be consensus.
Well, I like to be a little extreme, you know, in how little appetit I have on the subject of memories, but even if you make more of them there's a real question. Why do we give memories so much weight in the denial of the weight we give experiences?
So I want you to think about a thought experiment.
Imagine their next vacation, you know, at the end of the vacation, all of your pictures are wiped out, and you get an amnestic drug, so you're not going to remember anything.
Well, would you choose the same vacation?
And if you were to choose another vacation, there's a conflict between your two types of self, and you have to think about how you choose that conflict, and that's really not obvious at all, because if you think in the sense of time, you get an answer, and if you think in the sense of memories, you might get a different answer.
Why we choose the vacations that we choose is a problem with a choice between the two types of self.
Well, the two kinds of self throws two terms of happiness.
There are actually two concepts of happiness that we can use, one by ourselves.
So you can ask: How happy is the experience of self?
And then you would ask: How happy are the moments in the life of the living self?
And they're all -- happiness for moments is a fairly complicated process.
What are the emotions that can be measured?
And, by the way, we're now able to get a pretty good idea of the happiness of the experiencing self over time.
If you're lucky enough to ask yourself, it's a very different thing.
It's not about how happy a person lives.
It's about how happy or happy the person is when that person thinks about their life.
Very different terms.
Anyone who doesn't separate these terms will screw up the exploration of happiness, and I'm a lot of researchers in well-being who've been messing up the study of happiness for a long time in this way.
The distinction between the happiness of the experienced self and the happiness of the remembered self has been recognized over the last few years, and now you're trying to measure the two separately.
The Gallup Organization has a global survey where more than half a million people have been asked about what they think about their lives and about their experiences, and there were other kinds of efforts going on.
So in the last few years, we've started learning about the happiness of both kinds of self.
And the main lesson that we have learned, I think, is that they're really different.
You can know how happy someone is with their lives, and that really doesn't teach them a lot about how happy he lives and vice versa.
Just to give you a sense of the correlation, the correlation is about 0.5.
What that means is, if you would meet someone and you would say, oh, his dad is a two-meter man, how much would you know about his size?
Well, you would know something about its size, but there's a lot of uncertainty.
You have so much uncertainty.
If I tell you that someone has ordered their life as eight on a scale of 10, you have a lot of uncertainty about how happy it is with your own experience.
So the correlation is very small.
We know something about happiness satisfaction.
We know money is very important, goals are very important.
We know that happiness is primarily about being satisfied with people we like to spend time with people we like.
There are other pleasures, but that's the dominant one.
So if you want to maximize happiness from both kinds of self, you're going to do very different things at the end.
The conclusion of what I've been saying here is that we should really not imagine happiness as a replacement for well-being.
It's a completely different term.
Well, just briefly, another reason that we can't think about happiness is that we're not paying attention to the same things as thinking about life and actually living.
So if you ask the simple question of how happy people are in California, you're not going to get the correct answer.
If you ask this question, you think people in California have to be happier if you say, live in Ohio.
And what happens is that when you think about life in California, you think about the difference between California and other places, and that difference is, say, climate.
Well, it turns out climate isn't very important for the experience self, and it's not even very important for the actual self that decides how happy people are.
Now, because the real self is responsible, you can end up -- some people might end up going to California.
And it's kind of interesting to see what happens to people who go to California hoping to be happier.
Well, your experience of self is not going to be happier.
We know that.
But one thing will happen. You'll think they're happier, because when they think about it, they'll be reminded of how awful the weather was in Ohio, and they'll feel they've made the right decision.
It's very hard to think clearly about well-being, and I hope I've given you a sense of how difficult it is.
Thank you.
Thank you. I have a question for you.
Thank you very much.
Now, when we spoke a few weeks ago, you told me that there was a pretty interesting result that came out of this Gallup survey.
Is this something that you can let us participate in because you've got a few minutes left?
Daniel Kahneman: Sure.
I think the most interesting result that we found in the Gallup survey is a number we didn't expect to find.
We found this in terms of the happiness of the living self.
When we looked at how feelings vary with income.
And it turns out that, under an income of 60,000 dollars a year, for Americans, that's a very large sample of Americans, about 600,000, but it's a huge representative sample, under 600,000 dollars a year.
60,000.
DK: 60,000.
60,000 dollars a year, people are unhappy, and they become increasingly unhappy, the poorer they become.
We get an absolutely flat line on that.
I mean, I've rarely seen such flat lines.
What's happening is obviously that money doesn't create an experience wave, but the lack of money certainly fills you with a misery, and we can measure this misery very, very clearly.
In the spirit of the other self, the remembering self, you get a different story.
The more money you make the more content you are.
It's not true of emotions.
But Danny, throughout American endeavor, is about life, freedom, the pursuit of happiness.
If people were to take this evidence seriously, I mean, it seems to be all upside down, everything we believe, for example, in terms of tax policy and so on.
Is there a chance that politicians, in general, would take a look at the country as being serious and policy-based?
DK: You know, I think there's a recognition of the role of scientific research in politics.
The recognition is going to be slowly in the United States, not a question, but in the United Kingdom it's happening right now, and in other countries it's happening.
People are about recognizing that they should be thinking about happiness when they think about politics.
It's going to take a while, and people will discuss whether they want to study experiences, or whether they want to study life review, so we have to have this discussion pretty soon.
How to increase happiness is very different from how you think and whether you think about the remembered self, or whether you think about the experienced self.
This is going to affect politics, I think, in the coming years.
In the United States, you have a hard time figuring out how to measure the experience of the population.
This will, I think, be part of national statistics in the next decade or two.
Well, it seems to me that this topic is going to be at least the most interesting political debate that's going to happen over the next few years.
Thank you very much for the invention of behavioral economics.
Thank you, Danny Kahneman.
I'm Jane McGonigal. I make computer games.
I've been developing online games for 10 years now, and my goal for the next decade is to make it as easy to save the world in reality as it is to save online games.
I have a plan for this. I want to convince more people, including all of you, to spend more time playing bigger and more awesome games.
We spend three billion hours a week doing online games.
Some of you might be thinking, "This is a lot of time for games."
Maybe a little too much time, given how many problems we desperately have to solve in the real world.
But in fact, according to my research at the Institute for the future, this is exactly the opposite.
Three billion hours a week are not nearly enough to solve the most pressing problems in the world.
In fact, I'm convinced that if we want to survive the next century on this planet, we need to increase that time dramatically.
I calculated that it took time at 21 billion hours a week to play.
This may first seem a little bit obvious, so I repeat it so it can work: if we want to solve problems like hunger, poverty, climate change, global conflicts and obesity, I think we need to try to play games online for at least 21 billion hours a week to the end of the next decade.
No, I mean it really seriously.
Why? This picture pretty much describes why I believe that games are so essential for human species survival in the future. Seriously.
This is a portrait by the Phil Toledano photographer.
He wanted to capture the feelings of play, so he set up a camera in front of the players.
This is one of the classic expressions of play.
If you're not a gamer, maybe you'll get some of the nuances in this picture.
You'll probably see that sense of urgency, a little bit of fear, but also extremely high concentration, deepened into the lion of a really difficult problem.
If you also play, you'll see some of the nuances here, which are drawn up, and the mouth is a sign of optimism, and the eyebrows are surprises.
This is a player standing on the edge of what's called the epic string.
Oh, you know that. OK. Prima. So we've got some players here.
A epic victory is a result that is so super positive that you didn't even know it was possible at all.
It was almost beyond imagination.
And when you get there, you're shocked to actually be able to do something like this. This is an epic victory.
This player is just about a epic victory.
And this is what we need to see on millions of faces of problems all over the world when we tackle the barriers of the next century, the face of those who are against all odds on the edge of a epic string.
Well, unfortunately, we tend to see this face in real life when we face difficult problems.
I call it "In life I'm bad," and it's actually my face, you know? Yeah? OK.
That's me making "In life I am bad."
This is a graffiti from my former home in Berkeley, California, where I studied my Ph.D. why we're better at play than we are in real life.
This is a problem that many players have.
We think in reality we're not as good as games.
And I don't mean just less successful, even though that's the case.
We're doing more in the game worlds, and I'm really interested in the relationship with motivation to do something significant, inspired to work together.
When we're in a game world, I think many of us are changing into our best version, anytime and immediately helping to solve the problem, tenaciously trying to solve it for as long as we need to try it again after the failure.
And in reality, when we fail, when we encounter obstacles, we often feel different.
We feel overwhelmed. We feel defeated. We feel threatened, maybe depressed, frustrated or cynical.
We never have those feelings when we play games, when we play games, they simply don't exist.
And that's what I wanted to study as a graduate student.
Why is it impossible in games to think, you couldn't just do anything?
How do we translate these feelings from games into reality?
So I looked at games like World of Warcraft that offers the ideal environment for collaborative problem solving.
And I've found some things that do the epic amount of online worlds as possible.
So, first of all, if you go into one of these online games, especially World of Warcraft, there are a lot of different characters that are willing to challenge you a global mission, and that's right now.
But not just any mission, but a mission that fits perfectly to your current level in the game, right?
So you can do that.
You never get a task that you can't solve.
But always at the edge of your ability, so you have to work hard, but there's no unemployment in World of Warcraft.
You're not sitting around and you're dreaming. There's always something important to do.
And there are lots and lots of collaborators.
Whereas you go, hundreds of thousands of people working with you to finish your epic mission.
We don't have that easy in real life, that feeling that there are tons and tons of employees ready for a fingernails.
There's also this epic story, this inspiring story, why we are and what we have to do.
Then we get this whole positive feedback.
You've heard about "Level high" and "+1 strength," or "+1 intelligence."
This constant feedback is not in real life.
When I leave this stage, I don't have: +1 speech and +1 crazy idea, +20 crazy idea.
I don't get that feedback in real life.
So, the issue of cooperation-based worlds like World of Warcraft is that it's so satisfying to stand at the edge of a epic record that we prefer to spend all of our time in these game worlds.
They're just better than reality.
To this day, all World of Warcraft players have spent 5.93 million years trying to solve the virtual problems of ANC.
That's not necessarily a bad thing.
It may sound silly.
But to put it in context: 5.93 million years ago, our first primates began to rise.
So the first upright primate.
OK, so when we talk about how much time we spend playing games right now, it just makes sense when we think about the scale of human development, which is extraordinary.
But it's also appropriate, because it turns out that using this whole time we're using play, we're actually changing what we're able to do as human beings.
We're developing in collaborative, spiritual creatures.
That's the truth. That's what I believe.
Consider this interesting statistic recently published by a Carnegie Mellon University researcher: The average young person today in a country with a strong game culture spends 10,000 hours online to the 21st years of life.
So, 10,000 hours is an extremely interesting number for two reasons.
First of all, for kids in the United States, 10,080 hours is the exact total amount of time they spend in school, from the fifth grade to the eighth grade -- if you never miss it.
So here we have a complete parallel education pathway where young people are learning the same way as what it means to be a good player, like everything else they're learning in school.
And maybe some of you have read the new book by Malcolm Gladwell, "Tomorrow."
So you know his theory of success, the theory of success for 10,000 hours.
It's based on the great research of cognitive science that if we spend 10,000 hours on the long-term studies of any subject to the 21st of life, we become masters in it.
We're getting so good at doing whatever the most significant people in the world are.
So what we have here is a whole generation of young people who are masters.
So the big question is, "What are the players doing most of all?"
Because if we could figure that out, we would have virtually never been available to human potential.
So many people we have in the world right now that spend at least one hour a day online games.
This is our master gamer, 500 million people who are extraordinarily good at Etwas.
And in the next decade, we have another billion players who are extraordinarily good at whatever.
If you haven't heard it yet.
The games industry are developingsols that save energy and work on mobile webs instead of broadband Internet, so players all over the world, especially in India, China, Brazil can play online.
You'd expect another billion players in the next decade.
So we have a total of 1.5 billion players.
So I started thinking about what it is that these games make us master.
Here's the four things I found. First of all, Dringlichkeit Optimism.
OK, think of this as extreme self-motivization.
Dringlichkeit Optimism is the desire to do something immediately, to master a barrier along with the belief that we have an open hope for success.
Players always believe that it's a epic victory that's always worth trying, and that's the same.
Players don't sit around.
Players are masters in the spider mites of social nets.
There's a lot of interesting studies that show that we like people more after playing with them, even though they beat us up.
The reason for that is that it requires a lot of trust to play with someone.
We trust that somebody spends time with us that the rules are held that we have the same goal and we stay there until we play.
So the interactions enable the guards of the ties, the trust and the ties.
As a result, we build stronger social relationships.
Happy productivity. Fantastic!
You know, there's a reason why the average hell of World War II players spend 22 hours a week, as part-time job.
The reason is that when we're playing, we're actually happier at working hard than when we're relaxing or doing nothing.
We know that as human beings, we work optimally when we do hard, important work.
And gamers are always ready to work hard when they get the right task.
And finally, epic meaning.
Players love to be part of awe-like missions of planetary scale.
Here's a back information to push that into the right light, and you're all familiar with Wikipedia, the world's largest Wiki.
The second largest Wiki in the world, with nearly 80,000 entries, is the World of Warcraft Wiki.
Five million people use it every month.
They've collected more information about World of Warcraft on the Internet than any other subject in any other Wiki in the world.
They create an epic story.
They create an epic source of knowledge about the World of Warcraft.
OK, so these are four superpowers that lead to a single outcome, and players are super-powerful, hopeful individuals.
It's people who believe that they can change the world as individuals.
And the only problem is they believe they can change the virtual worlds, but not the real world.
That's the problem I'm trying to solve.
Edward Castronova is a folk scientist.
His work is great. He's looking at why people spend so much time, energy and money in online worlds.
And he says, "We're going to witness less than a mass extinction in virtual worlds and online games."
And this is an economist. So he's logical.
And he says ...
Not as I do ... I design games, I'm a little overhaulous.
So he says that actually makes sense, because players can achieve more in online worlds than in real life.
You can make stronger social bonds in games than you do in real life. You get more feedback and reward in games than you do in real life.
So, he says it's now fully logical that players spend more time in the virtual world than in the real world.
I agree, that's logical.
But it's definitely not an optimal situation.
We need to start transforming the real world into a game.
My inspiration comes from an event that comes back 2,500 years.
There's this ancient cube, it's called sheep cubes. You know?
Before these fantastic game controllers, there was sheep's box.
And these were sort of the first of human beings to develop game devices.
And if you're familiar with the work of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, you may know this story, the story about how and why games have been invented.
According to Herodotus, games were invented, specifically cube games, in the Kingdom of Lydien invented during a famine.
There was such a great famine that the king of Lydien decided to be a crazy idea.
People suffered. People fought.
It was an extreme situation. You needed an extreme solution.
So they invented, according to Herodotus, the box game and agreed a national strategy, and one day you would eat, and the next day you would play.
And they'd be so deep into the cube game because games are so fascinating and surrounded us with satisfying, harrowing productivity, that they would forget there was nothing to eat.
And then the next day you would play, and the next day you would eat.
And according to Herodotus, they survived this famine for 18 years by eating them one day and playing the next.
Likewise, I think, let's put games in today.
We set games to get away from the suffering of the real world.
We set games to get everything that doesn't work in the real world, everything that isn't satisfying in real life, and we get what we need from playing.
But that doesn't have to be the end.
That's the exciting thing.
Herodotus, after 18 years, famine was not better, so the king decided to set up a last dime.
They divided the kingdom into two halves.
They played a cube game, and the owner was allowed to break up to a epic adventure.
They left Lydien and they went looking for a new home, and they just left so many people there, and they were looking for food to survive, and they were looking for a place where they could thrive.
It sounds crazy, right?
But the latest DNA sequence shows that the Etruskers who later form the Roman Empire have the same DNA as the old Lydier.
So scientists recently came to believe that Herodotus' mad history actually is.
And geologists found evidence of a global cooling operation that took nearly 20 years to explain famine.
So this crazy story could be true.
In fact, they may have saved their people by playing games by having grown up in games for 18 years, and then they had this breakdown and learned so much about joining each other that they saved the entire civilization.
So, we can do that too.
We've been playing with Warcraft since 1994.
This was the first real strategy game in the world of Warcraft, which was 16 years ago.
They were playing cube games for 18 years, and we've been playing World Wars for 16 years.
I'm saying we're ready for our own epic game.
So, they sent half their civilization to find a new world, so I'll take my 21 billion hours a week.
We should come across that half of us spend an hour a day playing with games until we've solved the real world problems.
I know you're going to ask, "How do we solve problems in the real world in games?" And that's exactly the question that I've been devoted to doing my work in the last few years at the Institute for the future.
We have this Banner in our office in Palo Alto, pushing it out of how to understand the future.
We don't want to try to say the future before.
What we want is to create the future.
We want to imagine the best possible outcome, and then empower people to implement that idea into reality.
We imagine [the] epic blessing, and we give people the opportunity to reach them.
I'm going to show you just three games that I designed to try and get people to enter their own future.
This is "World without oil."
The game is 2007.
It's an online game where you have to overcome oil scarcity.
The oil spill is invented, but we have enough online inputs to make it realistic for you, and you actually live your real life without oil. So, when you sign up to the game, tell us where you live, and then you get news movies in real time that show you how much oil it costs, what's not there, how much food supply is compromised, how much food is closed, whether there are riots, and you have to figure out how you make your real life if it's true, and we ask you to blog about it, to put up videos or photos.
We've been testing this game with 1,700 players in 2007, and we've been carrying it since over the last three years.
And I can tell you, it was a transformational experience.
Nobody wants to change their lives because it's good for the environment or because we should.
But if you're in an epic adventure and you say, "This is oil."
This is a fascinating adventure to go on.
Find out how you would survive. Most of our players have kept the habits that learn.
So we set out a bigger, bigger target for the next world than just oil scarcity.
We created the game Superstruct at the Institute for the future.
The starting point is to calculate a supercomputer that people have only 23 years left on the planet.
This supercomputer, of course, is called the "Global Extination Sensibilization System."
So the appeal of players to sign up, we've designed almost like a "Jerry-Bruckheimer" movie.
You know Jerry Bruckheimer movies where there's the "Dream team," they have the astronauts, the scientists, the Ex-Sträfer and only together they can save the world.
But in our game, instead of just five people, we say, everybody's in the dream team, and it's our job to create the future for energy, food, health, security and the future of social justice.
8,000 players played the game for eight weeks.
They found 500 incredibly creative solutions that you can read when you Google "Superstruct."
And the last game we bring out in March 3, which is a game in collaboration with the World Bank.
If you finish the game, you end up with the World Bank, you get the title of "Sociial Umgestalter" by the end of 2010.
We work with universities across sub-Saharan Africa and invite them to learn social reformers.
We have a comic book on it. We have "foil up" for regional understanding, knowledge networking, sustainability, vision and ingenuity.
I'd like to invite you all to share this game with young people all over the world, especially in developing areas that benefit from having their own social practices together to save the world.
I'll come to the end.
I want to ask you something.
What do you think happens next?
We have all these fantastic players, we have games that show us what we can do, but we haven't saved the real world yet.
Well, I hope that you agree with me that gamers are human resources that we can use to work in real life, and that games have a great meaning for change.
We have all these superpowers, harrowing productivity, the ability to make social networks, durability surgery and the desire for evocative meaning.
I really hope that we're playing significant games together to survive another century on this planet.
And I hope you will design and play with me like this.
When I look forward in the next decade, I'm sure of two things: that we can create any possible future, and that we can play all kinds of games.
So I say, let's start the world-changing games!
Thank you.
I'd like to tell you a little bit about what I noticed a couple of months ago when I was writing an article for Italian Wired.
I've always been synonymous booking, but I've been dealing with the writing of the text, and I've noticed that I've never looked into my life, which means the word "player" really.
I'm going to read you the post.
Anonymous: Gesund, strong, powerful."
I read this list to a friend of mine loud, and I had to laugh at the beginning, it was so ridiculous, but I was just coming up to "fore," and I couldn't talk to each other, and I had to stop reading, and I was first collecting myself from this kind of oversimplified word traffic and the emotional shock associated with it.
Of course, this was a well-known, old Synonymist book, and I just thought the copy must be pretty old.
But in fact, it was a copy of the early '80s when I just started elementary school and started to build and form my self-image outside of my family environment, also in relation to other children and the rest of the world around me.
And thank God I didn't use a Synonym book back then.
Would I take this brief seriously, I would be born into a world that someone like me would perceive as a person whose lives can't be positive in any way, but today I'm celebrated for the opportunities and adventures I've experienced.
So I immediately set out the line from 2009, and I expected to find a more appealing piece here.
Here's the updated version of that entry.
Unfortunately, it's not much better.
In particular, the last two words make me feel "ganz" and "function."
But it's not just words.
It's what we think about the people we describe with these words.
It's about the values that are in these words, and how we construct these values.
Our language affects our thinking and how we see the world and the people around us.
Many ancient societies, including the Greeks and the Romans, have really believed that the language of flu has a great force because what you're saying out loud can also manifest themselves.
So, what do we actually want to show -- a disabled person, or a powerful person?
Just telling a person eight without a child, could be enough to narrow them down and to impose ideas on them.
Wouldn't it be nice to open your door?
A man who opened door for me was a pediatrician at the I.I. Dupont Institute in Delaware.
It's called Dr. Pizzutillo, an Italo-American, whose name, as you can imagine, most Americans couldn't speak correctly, so he was always called Dr. P.
And Dr. P. always wore very colorful flies, and was just created for kids to work.
I found the time I spent in this hospital, just great -- to my physical therapist.
I had to repeat individual practice with this thick, elastic blob -- in different colors -- you know, to build my leg straps, and I hated these changes more than anything else. I hated them. I spread them. I hated them. I hated them.
And imagine, I've even negotiated a five-year-old Dr. P. P., and I've tried to stop these practices, absolutely without success.
And one day he saw me at one of my exercises -- these exercises were just mind-boggling and mind-boggling -- and he said to me, "Wow, Aimee, you're such a powerful, powerful and young girl, you're going to tear one of these guys one day.
And if you do, I'll give you hundreds of dollars."
This was, of course, just a simple trick by Dr. P., so I did the kind of exercise I didn't want to do with the possibility of getting the richest five-year-old girls in the second floor of the ambulance, but he actually got me to look at my daily practice hero with new eyes, and so this became a new and promising experience.
And I wonder today how much his vision of me has shaped my self-image as a powerful and powerful young girl, and I could imagine to see myself as one of nature of strong, powerful and atlethetic man.
This is just one example of many, how adults in positions of power can stimulate the imagination of a child.
But as these already quoted examples from the Synonymous dictionaries prove us, our language doesn't allow us to imagine a space to imagine what we all wish: to enable each individual to see themselves as a powerful person.
Our language follows the social changes that have caused a technological change in many cases.
From the medical point of view, of course, you can say that my legs, the laser chirurgie for eye tracking, knee joints of Titan and artificial vents for aging bodies that allow people to really use all of their opportunities and develop across the boundaries that their natural fate has set them to do not speak about social networking platforms, that allow people to define their own identity in their own way, and navigate around the world to groups that they choose themselves.
So maybe this technological change is even more clear than the fact that there's always been a different truth, which is that every human being in society can give something special and powerful and that the human ability to adapt, is our greatest one.
The human ability to adapt -- this is an interesting story, because people ask me over and over again to tell me how I deal with widrity, and I'm going to tell you something: this phrase has never appealed to me, and I've always felt very uncomfortable trying to answer the questions of people, and I think gradually I understand why.
This is a phrase about how to deal with reliability, about the idea that success or happiness depends on mastering a challenge without being shaped by the experience of being connected, as though my life would have been so successful because I could avoid the possible traps of a life with a prosthetic, or as people always perceive me with my disability.
But the truth is that we're changing. Of course we're shaped by the challenge, whether it's physical, whether it's emotional or even the two.
And I'm saying that's good.
Variousness is not an obstacle that we need to bend around to make our lives better.
Widritys are just our lives.
And I tend to see possibilities as my shadow.
Sometimes I realize it's very present, sometimes it's hard to see, but it's constantly with me.
And I don't want to cut down the impact, or the weight of a human fight.
There are humanities and challenges in life, and they're just too real, and every person is going to do it differently, but the question is not whether we're going to get it right or not, but how we're going to get it right.
So we're not just responsible for preserving the people we love to make predictions of fate, but also preparing them to come true.
And we don't admit to our children if we give them the feeling that they can't adapt.
You have to separate two things: one is the medical fact that I amputated and the other is the social argument about whether I'm disabled or not.
And to be honest, the only real and last disability I had to deal with is that the world is constantly talking about, and it can describe me with these definitions.
In our desire to protect the people who are at our heart and to tell them the cold, hard truth about their medical forecast, or even to give them a forecast of quality of life that they're expecting, we need to be careful that we don't put the basis for somebody to actually be disabled.
Maybe the current concept, which is just about what's broken in one, and how we repair that, each and every one of them is a greater disability than pathology.
If we don't treat a human wholeness, and we don't perceive and recognize all of its forces and possibilities, we're in addition to the natural struggle that they may have to lead to another disease.
We degrade a person who has value in our society.
So we have to look beyond the pathology and focus on all of the human possibilities.
But most importantly, there's a connection between the perception of our uniqueness and our great inventory spirit.
We shouldn't dismiss or prevent these challenging times, we shouldn't try to avoid them, nor should we put them under the carpet, but it's about recognizing the odds of possibility.
I think it's more about making sure that we don't necessarily have to overcome Widrity, but that we're open to hug it, put it on the wheel to even use a fight-up pressure, and maybe even dance with it.
And maybe we can think of Widrigkeit as something that is natural, coherent and useful, and feel that way through their presence, we don't feel that kind of burdened anymore.
In this year, we celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin, and when he wrote about evolution 150 years ago, Darwin, in my view, pointed to something very true in the human character.
I'd like to describe it this way: not survival of the most powerful species, not the cleverness of its kind, but the one that can adapt to the best changes.
Conflicts emerge creativity.
Not just from Darwin's work, we know that the ability of human beings to survive and flourish, is defined by the struggle of the human mind, to shift through conflict.
So, again, change and adaptation are the greatest human skills.
And maybe we only know what kind of wood we're doing when we really get tested.
Perhaps that's exactly the meaning of Widrity, a sense of self, a sense of our own power.
We can give ourselves something like this.
We can make a new meaning out of difficult times.
Maybe we can see adversity as a change.
Widrity is a change we haven't yet adapted to.
I think the biggest damage we've added to ourselves is to believe that we should be normal.
Frankly -- who's normal?
There's no normal.
There's the thing. The typeface. But not the normal. And would you really want to know this poor, gray person if they really existed?
I don't think so.
It would be great if we could change this paradigm of normality against another of the possibilities or the strength to even make it a little bit more dangerous, so we could free the forces of very many children and invite them to come up with their very special and valuable capabilities in society.
Anthropolians have found that we've always asked people from our society to be useful, to be useful and to contribute.
There are hints that already the Neanderthals had carried older people and people with severe physical injuries, and that may have happened because the experience of life in the survival of these people was valuable for society.
They didn't think of these people as being broken and useless; they were treated as something special and valuable.
A few years ago, I went to the city where I grew up in a food market in the northeast of Pennsylvania, and I was standing there in front of a sweet tomato.
It was summer, and I had Shorts.
And I hear a guy behind me saying, "Well, if that's not Aimee Mullins."
And I look around and see this older man. I had no idea who he is.
And I said, "Excuse me, sir, we know ourselves? I can't remember you."
And he said, "Well, you would barely remember me.
When I first saw you, I took you out of your mother's belly."
Oh, so the one.
And of course, then it clicked.
This was Dr. Kean, a man who I only knew from my mother's stories about this day, because, of course, I happened to be late at my birthday two weeks.
My mother's prenatal diagnostic physician was on vacation, so my parents didn't know the man who brought me to the world at all.
And because I was born without a Wadenbeine, and my feet had turned to them, and I had just a few toes on this and a few toes on the other foot, he was the overbringer, and this strangers had to get the bad news.
He said to me, "I had to tell your parents that you would never walk, and you would never be as comfortable as any other children or that you would never live an independent life, and since then you simply threw me lies."
I found it really extraordinary that he'd collected newspaper clips throughout my entire childhood, whether I'd won a letter-to-pet job in the second grade, whether I'd been out on the path path path paths at Halloween, whether I'd been a grant or any of my sports trips, and he used these clips to teach his students, medical students from the Hahnemann Medical School and the Hershey Medical School.
And he called this part of his course the X factor, the potential of the human will.
You can't just emphasize enough how critical this factor can be for a person's quality of life.
And Dr. Kean went on to tell him, he said, "I've learned that kids, if they don't always say anything else, and even if they just get a little bit of support, if you leave kids alone, kids can do a lot."
You see, Dr. Kean has changed his thinking.
He understood that medical diagnosis, and how to deal with it, are two different things.
And I've also changed my thinking during the course of time, if they'd asked me when I was 15 years old, whether I'd traded my prosthetics for meat and bones, I wouldn't have done a second.
I wanted to be normal at the time.
If you ask me this today, I'm not so sure.
And that's what happened, I saw WEIL do something with my legs and not TROTZ of those experiences.
And perhaps that change could happen, because I've come across so many people who have opened doors to me rather than encounter people who want to close me or give me an idea.
You see, it really takes just a human being to show you how you can manifest your forces, and you're done.
If you allow someone to activate their own inner forces -- the human mind is so full -- if you can do that, and open up a door for someone in a critical moment, you're a very good teacher for these people.
They teach them to open up doors.
The real meaning of the word "educate" is rooted in the word "educe."
It means producing something that's in one that's carved out the potential.
Again, what kind of potential do we want to call away?
In the '60s, there was a case study done in the U.K., and then Kenya was converted into big schools.
They call it "Streaming Trials" in the United States, we call it "tracking."
The students are divided up after grades.
And the students are getting harder and harder to check, get the better teachers and so on.
They then gave over a three-month period of students with an "exceivate," the emergency "surrently good," and they were told they were Aces that they were very smart, and after those three months they really wrote an A.
And of course, it would break your heart to hear that, in the other way, the one teacher was told, they were just sufficient.
And it was the same after the three months.
But only those who were still in school -- apart from the students who had taken the school.
What was crucial about this study was that the teachers weren't given up.
The teachers didn't know that something was changed.
They've just been told to be the one students, and the students are sufficiently enough, and they've taught them something and they're treating them.
The only real disability is a broken mind, a mind that has been broken, has no more hope. It can't find anything beautiful. It lacks our natural, secular curiosity, and our innate ability of imagination.
But if we can manage to support the human spirit to continue to hope to find ourselves and other people around us beautiful, curious and imaginatively, then we actually put our forces positively.
If a mind has these qualities, we can create a new reality and new form of existence.
I want to end with a poem written by a Persian poet called Hafiz in the 14th century, and it told me about my friend Jacques Dembois, and the poem is called "The God who only knows four words," "Every child knows God, not the God of the name, not the God of the verbote, but the God who only knows four words and repeats that over and over and over again, he just says, "Come, come with me."
Come on, come with me. Thank you very much.
How would you want to be better than you are right now?
Suppose I said that through a few changes in your genes, there could be a better memory -- more precise, more accurate and faster.
Or do you want to be more fit, have more power.
Do you want to become more attractive and confident?
How would it be to live longer in good health?
Or maybe you're one of those who've been learning more about creativity.
Which one would you like the most?
Which one would you like to have if you could only have one?
Creativity.
How many people would choose creativity?
Raise your hands. Let me see.
A few. Probably about as many as there are creative people here.
That's very good.
How many would choose for a good memory?
A few more.
How about fitness?
A few less.
What about longevity?
Ah, the majority. I like to read that as a doctor.
If you could only have one, it would be a very different world.
Is it all just an education?
Or is it possible?
Evolution has been an ongoing topic here at the TED Conference, but today I want to give you a doctor's view of it.
The great geneticist in the 20th century, T.G. Dobzhansky, who was also a communist in the Russian orthodox Church, once wrote a paper called "Nothing in biology doesn't make any sense except the light of evolution."
Now, if you're one of those who doesn't accept the evidence of biological evolution, that would be a very good time to switch off your hearing aids, take your personal communication device -- I give you permission -- and maybe you can take a look at Kathryn Schultz, which is wrong, because nothing else in the course of this talk is going to make any sense for you.
But if you accept biological evolution, consider this: is it just about the past, or is it about the future?
Is it true for others, or is it true to us?
This is another view of the tree of life.
In this picture, I've set a bush as a center of branches in all directions, because if you look at the edges of the tree of life, all the species that exist on the top of these branches have succeeded in evolutionary terms: they have survived; it has demonstrated its environment of fitness and strength.
The human part of this bush, far to the end, of course, is what we're most interested in.
We were two from a common ancestor to modern chimpanzees about six or eight million years ago.
In this period, maybe 20 or 25 different species of hominids had been around.
Some have come and gone.
We've been here for about 130,000 years.
It seems like we're right away from the other parts of the tree of life, but actually most of all, the fundamental mechanisms of our cells are quite the same.
Do you realize that we can benefit from this and require the mechanisms of a common bacteria to produce the protein of the human insulin, which is used to treat diabetics?
This is not like humaninsulin; this is the same protein that's chemically incomprehensible from what comes out of the pancreas.
And as we speak about bacteria, do you realize that each of us in our gut will lead more bacteria than cells in the rest of our bodies?
Maybe 10 times that.
I mean, do you think when Antonio Damasio asks your self-image, do you think about the bacteria?
Our gut is a wonderful gas-friendly environment for these bacteria.
It's warm, it's dark, it's bright, it's very poor.
And you're going to offer all the nutrients that they could possibly want without any effort on their part.
It's actually a lighter away for bacteria, with occasional interruptions of the unintended, ever forced shock to come off.
But otherwise, you're a wonderful environment for these bacteria, just as important to your life.
They help with the digestion of essential nutrients, and they protect you against certain diseases.
But what will happen in the future?
Are we in a kind of evolutionary balance in a species?
Or are we supposed to be something else -- something that might even be better adapted to the environment?
Let's take a step back to the time of the Big Bang 14 trillion years ago -- the Earth, the solar system, about four and a half billion years ago -- the first signs of living things, maybe three to four billion years ago on Earth -- the first multi-cellular organisms, perhaps as much as 800 or a billion years -- and then the human species, which has been forming in the last 130,000 years.
In this vast unfulfilling symphony of the universe, life on Earth is measured just briefly; the animal kingdom, like a single beat; and human life, a small notation.
We were.
This also represents the entertainment of this talk, so I hope you've enjoyed it.
Well, when I was a freshman at college, I got my first biology class.
I was fascinated by the elegance and beauty of biology.
I fell in love with the power of evolution, and I found something very basic: most of the existence of life in one-celled organisms, each cell divided, and all of the genetic information of the cell goes on in both daughter cells.
But at the time, as multicellular organisms emerged, things began to change.
Sexual reproduction enters the picture.
And what's really important is that when you introduce sexual reproduction that keeps the genome, the rest of the body becomes devout.
In fact, you could say that the inevitability of the death of our body in evolution happens at the same time as sexual reproduction.
Now, when I was a college student, I thought, okay, sex/Tod, sex/Tod, sex-tod, sex-tod -- it seemed pretty reasonable at the time, but every year, it came to my increasingly doubt.
I've come to understand the feelings of George Burns who did his show in Las Vegas in the '90s.
And one night, there's a toilet at his hotel room door.
He opens the door.
There's a beautiful, fun show girl.
She looks at him and says, "I'm here for Super-Sex."
"That's wonderful," George says, "I'm going to take the soup."
I came to the realization that as a physician, I worked on a goal that was different than the goal of evolution -- not necessarily contradictory, just different.
I tried to preserve the body.
I wanted to keep us healthy.
I wanted to restore health to disease.
I wanted us to live a long and healthy life.
Evolution is all about spreading the genome to the next generation, adapting and survival generation after generation.
From an evolutionary point of view, you and I are developing like Booster rockets to send the genetic material into the next stage of orbit and then drop into the ocean.
I think we would all understand the mood that Woody Allen expressed when he said, "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work.
I want to make it by not dying."
Evolution doesn't necessarily mean to prefer the longest life.
It doesn't necessarily encourage the biggest, the strongest, or the fastest, and not even the brightest.
Evolution deprives the creatures that adapt best to your environment.
It's just the test of survival and success.
Because of the ocean, bacteria are there, they're thermophilic, and by the way, if fish were there, it would be a vacuum of cooking fish, yet they managed to make a habitable environment for themselves.
So what that means is, if we look back at what's happening in evolution, and how we think about the place of people in evolution, and particularly how we look forward in the next phase, I would say that there are a number of possibilities.
The first is that we're not going to move forward.
We've reached some sort of balance.
And the reasons for this would be that we were able to get a lot of genes that were otherwise elated and removed from the population.
And secondly, as a species, we've configured our environment in such a way that we've managed to adapt to us just as we adapt to them.
And by the way, we're traveling and climbing and mixing so much that you can no longer say that isolation is necessary for evolution to take place.
A second possibility is that it will be an evolution of the traditional species, of course, imposes upon the forces of nature.
And the argument here would be that the wheels of evolution slowly grind, but they're implausible.
And so far, isolation is going on, as a species, if we colonize distant planets, there will be insulating and changing the environment that can produce evolution in natural ways.
But there's a third possibility, a compelling, intriguing and terrifying possibility.
I call it Neo-Evolution -- the new development that is not just natural, but driven and determined by us as individuals, in the decisions we make.
Well, how could that happen?
How could it be possible that we could do this?
Let's first look at the reality that people today make decisions about their offspring in some cultures.
They are, in some cultures, the choice of more men than women.
It's not necessarily good for society, but it's what individuals and family choose.
So think, if it wasn't just possible to choose the gender of your child, but also to adopt genetic adaptations that would cure and prevent disease.
What if you could make the genetic changes to eliminate diabetes or Alzheimer's disease or eliminate cancer risk reduction or stroke?
Wouldn't you want to make these changes in your genes?
If we look forward, these kinds of changes will be increasingly possible.
The Human Genome Project started in 1990, and it took 13 years.
It cost 2.7 billion dollars.
The following year, when it was finished in 2004, you could do the same for 20 million dollars in three to four months.
Today, you can complete a sequence of the three billion base pairs in the human genome at a cost of about 20,000 dollars and in the space of about a week.
It's not going to take long for the reality that there's going to be 1,000 dollars of human genomes, and it's going to be increasingly available for everyone.
One week ago, the National Academy of Engineering awarded the Draper Prize for Francis Arnold and Willem Stemmer, two scientists who evolved independently of techniques that encourage the natural process of evolution to work faster and lead to desirable proteins in a more efficient way -- what Frances Arnold calls "Direct Evolution."
A few years ago, the Lasker Prize for the scientist Shinya Yamanaka was awarded for his research in which he took a adult skin cell, a stainless load, and by manipulating just four genes that put the cell back to a pluripotent stem cell -- potentially a cell could be able to grow any cell in your body.
These changes are happening.
The same technology that the human insulin can produce in bacteria can make viruses that can serve not just protection itself, but also immune to other viruses.
Whether you believe it or not, it's an experimental study in gang with vaccine versus influenza that's been engineered in the cells of tobacco plant.
Can you imagine something good coming out of tobacco?
This is all reality today, and the future is going to be much more possible.
So just imagine two other small changes.
You can change the cells in your body, but what if you could change the cells of your offspring?
What if you could change sperm and egg cells or the newly fertilized egg to give your kids a better chance for a healthier life -- eliminating diabetes, eliminating hemoglobin, reduce the risk of cancer?
Who doesn't want healthier kids?
And then the analytical technology, the same engine of science that can enable the change to prevent disease, could also enable us to adopt super-attributes, hyper-categotizations -- better memory.
Why didn't a Ken Jenning's malfunction, especially if you can broaden it with the next generation of Watson's machine?
Why not have the fast muscle drivers that will allow you to run faster and longer?
Why no longer live?
These will be irresponsible.
And if we're in a position where we can pass it on to the next generation, and we can adopt the attributes that we want, we will be transformed from Alt Foundation to Neo-Evolution.
We're going to have a process that usually requires 100,000 years, and we can compress it down to thousands of years -- and maybe even the next 100 years.
These are decisions that your grandchildren, or their grandchildren, are going to have to deal with.
Are we using these decisions to form a society that is better, that is more successful, that is more friendly?
Or will we selectively choose different attributes that we want for some of us and not for others?
Are we going to form a society that's morelangy and more uniformized, or more robust and multilateral?
These are the kinds of questions we need to face.
And most of all, will we ever be able to develop the wisdom and master the wisdom that we will need to make those decisions wise?
For good and for evil, and sooner than you might think, these decisions will be on us.
Thank you.
So what I want you to imagine now is a wearable robot that gives you superhuman skills, or another, that helps wheelchair users to stand up and walk again.
We at Berkeley Bionics call this robot Exoskelette.
They're nothing but something that you put in in the morning and gives you extra strength and will increase your pace and will help you keep, for example, keeping your balance.
This is, in fact, the real meltdown of human and machine.
But not only that -- merging and connecting with the universe and other devices out there.
It's not just a crazy idea.
So to show you what we're working on, let's start talking about the American soldiers, on average, about 100 pounds on his back, and it's a question that they should carry more equipment.
Of course, this leads to some major complications -- back injuries, 30 percent of them -- chronic back injuries.
So we thought we were going to take this challenge and create an exoskelet that would help deal with this problem.
So let me introduce you to HULC -- or the Human Universal Load Carrier.
With HULC-Exoskelett, I can carry 200 pounds of different-looking terrain for hours.
It's a flexible design that allows you to reach deep, crawl and perform extremely soft movements.
It feels what I want to do where I want to go and then increase my strength and resilience.
We are so far to introduce our industrial partner to this device, this new exoskelet in this year.
So it's true.
So let's take a look at the wheelchair driver, something I'm very passionate about.
There are 68 million people in the world who are estimated to be in a wheelchair.
That's about one percent of the population population.
And that's actually a conservative estimate.
We're talking a lot about very young spinal cord injuries that were hit during the prime of their lives -- 20s, 30s, 40s -- of fate, and the wheelchair is the only option.
But it's also about the aging population, their numbers multiplied.
And so pretty much the only option -- when it comes to a stroke, or other complications -- is the wheelchair.
And so, by the way, it's been 500 years since he, as I have to say, has been a very successful introduction.
So we thought we could start writing a whole new chapter in mobility.
Now let me introduce you to eLEGS, which is carried by Amanda Boxtel, who suffered a spinal cord injury 19 years ago, which resulted that you couldn't walk for 19 years and so far.
Thank you very much.
As I said, Amanda is wearing our eLEGS.
It has sensors.
It's completely noninvasive, sensors in the crutches that send signals back to our board computer that's attached here on its back.
There's also battery packing, and the motor drive is on their hips, just like their knee joints, which they move forward in this pretty smooth and very natural gait.
I was 24 years old and in best shape, when a monstrous Purzelbaum during a ski ride was paralyzed.
In a fraction of a second, I lost every feeling and every movement beneath my pelvis.
Not long after that, a doctor walked into my hospital room, and he said, "Amanda, you can never walk again."
And that was 19 years ago.
He stalks every breath of hope from my consciousness.
I've been able to learn to ski again, climb and even drive with my hands.
But nothing was invented to let me go again until now.
Thank you very much.
As you can see, we have the technology, we have the platforms for meeting and discussing with you.
It's in our hands, and we have all the potential here to change life from future generations -- not just for the soldiers, or for Amanda here and all the wheelchair users, but for everyone.
Thank you very much.
At home in New York, I am the head of the development department of a nonprofit organization called Robin Hood.
If I'm not fighting poverty, I'm fighting a fireman in a fireman's fire in a volunteer suit.
Well, in our town, in which volunteers supported a highly skilled professional firefight, you have to be pretty early on the fireplace to be fooled.
I remember my first fire.
I was the second volunteer at the stand-up, so I had a pretty good chance to be in.
But it was still a race against the other volunteers to reach the head of influence and figure out what our tasks would be.
When I found the main man, he had a very serious conversation with the homeowner who certainly had one of the worst days of her life.
It was right in the middle of the night, and she was standing in the sleeping suit and barefoot underneath a screen out in the streaming rain while her house was in flames.
The other volunteer who had just arrived in front of me -- let's call him Lex Luther -- he reached the main man first and was asked to go to the house and save the dog from the homeowner.
The dog! I was speechless to Neid.
There was some lawyer or fortune minister who could now tell the rest of his life that he went to a burning house to save a living just because he was five seconds faster than me.
Well, I was the next one.
The main man was winning me.
He said, "Bezos, you have to go to the house.
You have to go up, the fire is over, and this woman has to get a pair of shoes."
I swear.
Well, not exactly what I hoped to do, but I went -- up the stairs, down the halls, past the firemen, who at that point were already quite ready to get into the bedroom to get a pair of shoes.
I know what you're thinking right now, but I'm not a hero.
I carried my prey back to the bottom, where I met my infancy and the beloved dog at the door of the door.
We carried our treasures out to the homeowner where, not surprisingly, he got much more attention than mine.
A few weeks later, the firewive received a letter from the homeowner where she took care of the brave ride at the rescue of her house.
One of the things that's valued is that somebody had put a pair of shoes in.
Both in my job at Robin Hood and my side job as a volunteer fireman, I'm witnessing generosity and kindness at large scale, but I also see acts of personal love and the courage of individuals.
And do you know what I've learned?
They're all important.
So if I look around in this room and see people who either have achieved a significant success or are on their way to that, I want to offer the following memory: Don't wait.
Don't wait to make a difference in another person's life until you've reached your first million.
If you have something to give, give it now.
Use a soup kitchen, clean a park in the neighborhood.
Be a mentor.
Not every day will give us a chance to save a person's life, but every day offers us an opportunity to change one.
So go ahead, save the shoes.
Thank you very much.
Mark, Mark, come back.
Thank you very much.
I'm just coming back from a community that knows the secret to the fortstand of humanity.
It's a place where women lead the messenger, and they say sex, and the game decides the day -- where fun is serious.
And no, it's not Burning Man or San Francisco.
Ladies and gentlemen, your relationships.
This is the world of wild Bonobos in the Urwald of Congo.
Bonobos are together with chimpanzees our closest living relatives.
That means we have a common ancestor, an evolutionary grandmother living around six million years ago.
Well, chimpanzees are known for their aggression.
But unfortunately, we've crossed this point in the narrative of human evolution.
But Bonobos show us the other side of the medal.
As chimpanzees are led by large, frightening fellows, the Bonobo's community is led by female females.
They've really come up with this, because this leads to an extraordinarily tolerant society that has not been seen before in lethal violence.
But unfortunately, bonobos are the least well-known among primates.
They live in the deeps of the Pacific Urwald, and the observation is just hard to get there.
Congo is a paradox -- a country of extraordinary biodiversity and beauty, but also the heart of darkness itself -- the scene of violent debate that has been struggling for decades and has asked so many lives like World War I.
It's not surprising that this destruction also threatens the survival of the Bonobo.
Heart and fall of the canopy causes you to not even fill a stadium with the sweet Bonobos -- and even we're not sure to be honest.
And yet, in this country of violence and chaos, you can hear a kind of hidden laughter that the trees heal.
Who are these relatives?
We know them as "Love instead of war," because they have frequent, bisexual sex, with changing partners, and they have conflict and social scarcity.
I'm not saying that would be the answer to all humanitarian problems -- because the lives of the Bonobo are more than the Kama Sutra.
Bonobos -- like people -- love playing their lives long.
Play doesn't just mean children's games.
For us, play is essential for bonding relationships and fostering tolerance.
We learn trust and the rules of the game.
Play increases creativity and resilience, and it's all about the creation of diversity -- diversity of interactions, diversity of behaviors, diversity of connections.
And when you watch bonobos in the game, you see the evolutionary origins of human laughter, dance and rituals.
Play is the kit that keeps us together.
Now, I don't know how you're playing, but I want to show you some unique footage from the wild right now.
First, a ball game on Bonobo art -- and I don't think about football.
So here we see a young female and male in a tracking game.
Look at what she's doing.
This could be the evolutionary origin of, "She's packing it with the eggs."
Just that I think he likes it more, not true.
Yeah!
So sex games are common, both in bonobos and in humans.
And this video is really interesting, because it shows -- and this video is really interesting, because it shows the level of ideas where you can bring new elements into play -- like the testes -- and also how the game is demanding both confidence and also promoting -- while it's simultaneously making huge fun.
But the game is a form factor.
Play is a form singer, and it can take many forms that some are a little bit quiet, imaginative, curious -- maybe discover the first one again.
And I want to show you, this is Fuku, a young female, and she plays peacefully with water.
I think, just as they play, sometimes we play alone, and we create vast boundaries of our inner and external worlds.
And it's this playful curiosity that makes us explore and interact, and the unexpected bonds that we create are the real ground of creativity.
This is just a little taster of the insights that bonobos give us in our past and present.
But they also remain a secret to our future, a future in which we need to adapt to increasing challenges, through greater creativity and druse enhanced cooperation.
The secret is that the game is the key to these skills.
In other words, play is our adaptation.
To successfully adapt to an unadulterated world, we need to play.
But are we going to make the best out of our game?
Play is not silly.
It's essential.
For Bonobos and humans, equally, life is not made up of teeth and claws alone.
Even though it doesn't seem like it's probably the best part to play.
And so, my primate cameras, let's rearm this gift of evolution and play it together while we rediscover the creativity of the crony and the wonder.
Thank you.
I want you to imagine two pairs in the middle of 1979 on the exact same day, at exactly the same moment, each one makes a baby -- okay.
So two pairs, each one makes a baby.
Now, I don't want you to spend too much time imagining the evidence, because, if you imagine the whole time of witnessing, you're not going to listen to me.
Just imagine that for a moment.
And in this scenario, you imagine that in a case, the sperm is wearing a Y homosom hitting the X chromosome of the egg cell.
And in the other case, the sperm is carrying a X chromosome hitting the X chromosome of the egg cell.
Both of them are viable, both grow.
We'll come back to these people later.
Most of my activities, I've raised two wages.
In a hat, I'm involved in the history of anatomy.
I'm a historian, and in this case, I study people with anatomy -- that is, human bodies, animal bodies -- how they deal with body fluids, with body concepts, as they thought about bodies.
The other hat that I carried in my work is the activist, as a patient innenan lawyer -- or, as I sometimes say, as an impatient lawyer -- of people who are patients of doctors.
In this case, I've worked with people who have body types challenging social norms.
So for example, I've been working with people who are Siamesian twins, two people in a body.
I worked with people with dwarfism -- so people who were less than common.
And very often, I've worked with people who are intersexual, whose sex is atypical -- so people who don't have the average male or female body types.
And in general, we can use the word "intersexuity."
Intersexuity comes in many different forms.
I'll just give you a couple of examples of the kinds of gender males that don't meet male or female standards.
In one case, you might have somebody with an XY chromosome base, and the SRY gene of the Y Chomosom, the Protogonadens that we all have to grow to honing.
And so the testes in the fetal stadium give testosterone.
But because this individual lacks the receptors to recognize testosterone, the body doesn't respond to testosterone.
And this is called the Androgen receptor detect.
So much testosterone, but no reaction to it.
As a consequence, the body evolves more of the typical female course.
When the child is born, it looks like a girl.
She's a girl. She's raised as a girl.
But it's usually until she reaches puberty and grows and develops her breasts, but she doesn't get her period until someone gets there something else.
And they do some tests, and they find that instead of having eggs and uteruses, it actually wears hodens in it, and it has a Y chromosome.
It's important to understand that you could actually think of this person as male, but they're not really.
Women, like men, have something in our bodies called adrenalines.
You're in the back part of our body.
And the byproducts make androgens, which are managing hormones.
Most women, like me -- I think I'm a typical woman -- I don't know my actual chromosomes, but I think I probably have the typical -- most women like me actually talk about androgens.
We make androgens, and we talk about androgens.
The consequence of that is that somebody like me actually had a brain that was exposed to more androgens than a woman who was born with hoden and has an androgen receptor deficiency.
So, sex is really complicated; interactivity is not just in the middle of the spectrum of sex -- in some sense, it can be spread across the entire range.
Another example: a few years ago, I received a call from a 19-year-old man who was born as a boy, dressed up as a boy, had a girlfriend, had sex with his girlfriend, lived as a man, and he had just found out that he had eggs and had a uterus.
He had an extreme form of an innate byproduct.
He's got XX chromosomes, and in the womb, his byproducts were so active that they basically created a male hormone environment.
And as a consequence, his genital male was exposed to the typical male part of the hormone spectrum.
And when he was born, he looked like a boy -- nobody knew anything.
And it wasn't until he got 19 years old that he got enough medical problems, actually because he was internally passionate about the doctors finding that he was inward at the inside.
Okay, just a quick example of one version of interactivity.
Some people with XX chromosomes are developing something called ovotestis, wherebei ovarian tissue is covered by alder tissue.
We don't know exactly why this is happening.
So sex can occur in many different varieties.
The reason why kids with these kinds of bodies -- whether it's dwarfing or siamesical twins, whether it's intersexual -- surgeons often adapted to the norm isn't because it would be advantageous to their physical health.
In many cases, these people are perfectly healthy.
The reason they have many different kinds of surgical procedures is because they threaten our social categories.
Typically, our system is based on the idea that a particular anatomic interpretation comes with a specific identity.
So we have the concept of being a woman is about having a female identity; being a black person is supposed to have an African anatomy in terms of your own story.
So we have this terribly simplistic idea.
And when we're faced with a body which is actually something very different for us, it confuses us in terms of these Kategorizations.
So we have a lot of romantic ideas in our culture about individualism.
And our nation is really based on a very romantic concept of individualism.
Now, you can imagine how amazing it is when kids are born, they're two people in a body.
Where I've seen most of the excitement recently was the South African runner in Caster Semenya last year, whose sex has been challenged by the Leichatlethik World Cup in Berlin.
Many journalists asked me the question, "Which test are you going to do that tells us whether Caster Semenya is female or male?"
And I had to explain to the journalist that there isn't this test.
We now know that gender is complicated enough that we have to admit that nature doesn't draw a line between male and female, or between male and intersexual and female and female, and in some ways, we are the ones that yield this line as natural.
So we have a situation where, as we continue our science, we have to stand up to so many more, that these categories that we've been holding for solid anatomic categories that make very simple arrangements to create permanent identity categories are much less sharper than we've anticipated.
And that's not just in terms of gender.
It's also true of race, which turns out to be much more complicated than left our terminology.
When we look at it, we have all kinds of uncomfortable areas.
For example, we know that we share at least 95 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees.
What should we do with the fact that we're just different from them by a few nucleotides?
As we move our science forward more and more, we get into a zone of awkwardness, where we have to acknowledge that the simplistic categories that we've probably had are too simple.
We see that in all sorts of areas of human life.
One of the areas we're seeing this in our modern culture, in the United States today, is fighting over the beginning and the end of life.
We have difficult conversations about what point a body becomes human, so that it's a different right than the fetal life.
We have very difficult debates today -- perhaps not as public as in medicine -- about the question of when someone is dead.
Our ancestors had never had such a hard time fighting the question when someone was dead.
They've given a feather under their nose, and when it's moving, they haven't buried it yet.
If she didn't move, you buried her.
But today, we're in a situation where we take people out of vital organs and want to put them in other people.
And as a result, we're starting to struggle with the really difficult question of when someone is dead, and that brings us to a really difficult situation where we don't have as simple categories as we used to.
Now you might think that the whole intersection of categories would make somebody like me really happy.
I'm politically progressive, I'm greening people with unusual bodies, but I have to admit it makes me nervous.
To understand that these categories are actually much more insecure than we thought makes me flourish.
And it makes me tense in terms of reasoning for democracy.
So to tell you about this session, I have to first admit that I'm a big fan of founding fathers.
I know they were religious, I know they were sexists, but they were great.
I think they've been so brave and strong, and so radical, in what they've been doing, I've been trying to look at the weird musical 1776 every few years, and it's not because of the music that's totally forgotten.
It's because of what's happened in 1776 with the founding fathers.
The founding fathers in my view were the original anatomical activists, and that's why.
What they found was an anatomical concept, and they replaced it with another, which was radical and beautiful, and 200 years for us were custom.
As you all remember, our founding fathers rejected the concept of monarchy, and the monarchy was essentially based on a very simplified concept of anatomy.
The masters of the old world didn't have a concept based on DNA, but they had a concept of birthright.
They had a concept of blue blood.
They were the notion that people who had political power should have this political power because of the veiled bloodline of the grandfather to the father and so forth.
The founding fathers looked at this idea and replaced it with a new anatomical concept, and this concept said that all people were created equally.
They kept the play field and decided that anatomically, the commons mattered, not the differences. And that was very radical.
Now, they did this in part because they were part of an ocean system, growing two things together.
Democracy grew, but at the same time, science grew.
If you look at the history of founding fathers, many of them were very interested in science, and they were interested in a concept of a naturalist world.
They went away from explanations of supernatural species, and how things like a supernatural concept of power, back where transmission is based on a very vague concept of birthright.
They moved to a naturalist concept.
And for example, if you look at the Declaration of Independence, they talk about nature and nature's God.
They're not talking about God and the nature of God.
They're talking about the power of nature to tell us who we are.
And part of that, they gave us a concept that was about anatomical commons.
And so they've prepared the future citizenship movement in a really wonderful way.
They didn't think that way, but what they did for us was great.
So what happened years after that?
For example, women who reported voting, the concept of founding fathers, which says that anatomical commonality is more important than the anatomical difference, and said, "We have a uterus and ovaries is not significant enough that we should not have the right to vote, the right to full citizenship, the right to own property, etc., etc."
And women argued it successfully.
Next came the successful civil rights movement, where we saw people like Sojourner Truth talking about it, "Am I not a woman?"
We find men in the marching rows of the Civil Movement who say, "I'm a man."
Again, people of different skin farms, who are called on anatomic similarities, again, successfully.
We see the same thing in the disabled movement.
Of course, the problem is that as we start to look at all the similarities, we need to begin to question why we maintain certain separations.
Well, I guess I would like to maintain certain separations, anatomically, in our culture.
For example, I don't want to give a fish the same rights as a human.
I don't want to say that we should take away from anatomy.
I don't want to say that five year-olds should be right to have sex or marriage consent.
So there are some anatomical separations that make sense to me, and that I think we should retain.
But the challenge is to try to figure out which ones are and why we keep them, and whether they're meaningful.
So let's go back to these two beings who have been given to the beginning of this talk.
We have two creatures, both in the middle of 1979 on the exact same day.
Let's imagine that one of them, Maria, was born three months, so she was born on June 1, 1980.
Heinrich, on the other hand, is born at birth, so he's born on March 1, 1980.
Just because of the fact that Maria was born three months, she acquired all sorts of rights three months before Heinrich -- the right to have sex, the right to choose to drink the right.
Heinrich needs to wait for all of this, not because he actually has another biological age, just because of the time he was born.
We're finding other oddities about what their rights are.
Heinrich, because you assume he's male -- although I didn't tell you he's the one with XY -- because you assume he's male, he can now be attracted to what Maria doesn't have to worry about.
Maria, however, can't perceive the same right in all states that Heinrich has in all states, and that's the right to marry.
Heinrich can marry a woman in every state, but Maria can marry a woman in only a few states today.
So we have these permanent anatomical categories that are problematic and questionable in many ways.
And the question for me is, what are we going to do, because our science is making such progress in anatomy, that we have to reach a point where we have to admit that a democracy based on anatomy might fall apart?
I don't want to give up the science, but at the same time it feels like science is doing itself.
So where do we go?
It seems that our culture has a kind of pragmatic attitude: "Well, we have to draw a line somewhere, so we'll move it somewhere."
But a lot of people get caught in a very strange position.
So for example, Texas at one point decided that to marry a man means you don't have a Y chromosome, and marry a woman means you have a Y chromosome.
Now in practice, people aren't going to test on their chromosomes.
But it's also very bizarre, because of the story I told you about the Androgen recipe for.
If we look at one of the founding fathers of modern democracy, Dr. Martin Luther King, he offers us a kind of a solution in his "I have a dream speech."
He says we shouldn't judge people "from skin color," judge them by the quality of their character, and go beyond anatomy.
And I want to say, "Yeah, that sounds like a really good idea."
But how do you do that in practice?
How do you judge people based on their character properties?
I also want to point out that I'm not sure that we should distribute rights to people in a way, because I have to admit that I know a set of golden retrievers that probably make social benefits more than some people I know.
I'd like to say that I probably know some brighten Labradorhundes, who are more capable of meeting more intelligent and more mature decisions about their sexual relationships than some of the 40-year-olds I know.
So how do we operationalize the question of the character?
It turns out to be really difficult.
And part of me is thinking, what if the content of a personality is something that would be machineable in the future -- could be made visible by the FMRI?
Do we really want to go this way?
I'm not sure where we're going.
What I know is that it seems really important to think about the idea that the United States is going to lead to thinking about questions of democracy.
In our desire for democracy, we've done our job right, and I think we'd do our job well in the future.
We don't have the situation, for example, in Iran, where a man who's sexually attracted to other men, who's punished by death, unless he's willing to take care of a gender variation in which case he's allowed to stay alive.
These kinds of conditions don't exist for us.
I'm glad to say that we don't have these conditions -- a surgeon who I spoke to a few years ago who'd brought a few siame twins together to separate them, partly to make a name.
But when I was talking to him, and he asked him why he did these surgeries -- they were high-risk surgery -- his answer was that in his country, these kids would be treated very badly, and that's why he had to do it.
I said to him, "Well, did you draw political asylum in order to separate it from surgery?"
The United States has tremendous opportunities to allow people to be who they are without changing the government's will.
So I think we need to be a leader.
All right, just to close, I want to notice that I've talked a lot about fathers.
And I want to think about the possibilities of what democracy might look like, or looking out, if we had more involved the mothers.
And I want to say something that's radical for a feminist, which is that I think there could be different kinds of insights to come from different kinds of anatomy, intellectually when people think about group thinking.
Since years, since I've been interested in intersexuation, I've been interested in research in gender differences.
And one of the things that I found really interesting is the difference between men and women in terms of how they think and operate in the world.
What we've learned from cross-cultural studies is that women, on average -- not every, but on average -- tend to have complex social relationships and care for people who are vulnerable to giving a lot of attention within the group.
And that's why, when we think about it, we have an interesting situation in front of us.
Years ago, when I was a graduate student, one of my graduate students, who knew my interest in feminism -- I considered myself a feminist, I still do -- was a really curious question.
He said, "Tell me what is harmful about feminism."
And I thought, "Well, that's the dumbest question I've ever heard.
Feminism is about dissolving stereotypes about gender, so feminism is not harmful.
But the more I thought about his question, the more I thought there might be something useful in feminism.
That's to say, there could be something, on average, which makes women's brains different from male beings, which makes us pay attention to complex social relationships and make them pay attention to the security needs.
So where the founding fathers were extremely aware of how individuals could be protected from the state, it's possible that if we put more mothers in this concept, we put more of a concept of not just how to protect, but how to care for each other.
And maybe what we need to do in the future is to think about democracy beyond anatomy -- less to think about individual bodies about identity, and think about relationships more.
So if we as people try to make a more perfect connection, we think about what we can do for each other.
Thank you very much.
I'm Jessi, and this is my suitcase.
But before I show you what I have in it, I'm going to do a very public confession, and that is: I'm obsessed with outfits.
I love to find a different colorful, crazy outfit at any given opportunity, and also to photograph and blog for the last time.
But I don't buy anything new.
I get all my clothes from secondhand to florists and second-hand shops.
Ooh, thank you.
Second-healing gear allows me to reduce the impact of my binderob on the environment and also the impact on my wallets.
I meet all kinds of fabulous people; my dollars usually serves for good purpose; I look quite unique; and it makes purchases for my very personal treasure.
I mean, what am I going to find today?
Is it my size?
Am I going to like the color?
Does it cost less than 20 dollars?
When all the answers are yes, I feel like I've won.
I'm coming back to my suitcase, and I'm going to tell you what I've been packing for this exciting week here at TED.
I mean, what does anybody bring with so many outfits?
So I'm going to show you exactly what I brought along.
I brought along seven pairs of underwear, and that's all.
Using them for exactly one week is all I've done in my suitcase.
I made sure that I would find everything else I wanted to wear when I first came to Palm Springs.
And since you've not heard of me as the woman walking around here at TED in her underwear -- that's, I've found a few things.
And I'd like to show you my outfits for this week.
Does that sound good?
While I'm doing that, I'm also going to share with you some of the lessons that I've learned whether they believe it or not, from these adventures, are not wearing new things.
Let's start with Sunday.
I call this the shining tiger.
You don't have to spend a lot of money looking great.
You can almost always look great for less than 50 dollars.
This whole outfit, including the jacket cost me 55, and it was the most expensive piece that I carried all week.
Montag: Color is something powerful.
It's almost physiologically impossible to be bad when you're wearing bright pants.
If you're happy, you attract other happy people.
Tuesday: Adaptation is totally overrated.
I've spent a lot of time in my life trying to be myself and also adapt to myself.
Just be who you are.
If you're surrounded by the right people, they're not just going to understand it, they're going to appreciate it.
Wednesday: hug your inner child.
Sometimes people tell me I looked like I play 'Flights' or I remember her seven-year-old.
I like to read and say, "Thank you."
Thursday: Trust is key.
If you think you're looking good in something, it's almost certain.
And if you think you're not looking good in something, you're probably right.
I grew up with a mother who taught me the day for day.
But only when I turned 30, I really understood what that means.
And I'm going to sum that up for you.
If you think you're inside and you're a wonderful person, there's nothing you can't wear.
So there's no excuse for someone here in this audience.
We should be able to rock anything we want.
Thank you very much.
Friday: A universal truth -- five words: Golden Pailles adapt to everything.
And finally, Saturday: developing a unique, personal style is a great way to tell the world something about you without having to say a word at all.
It's been shown over and over and over again when people came up to me this week just because of what I wore, and I had great conversations.
Obviously, it's not all fit in my tiny suitcase.
So before I go home to Brooklyn, I'm going to do all this again.
Because the lesson that I myself try to learn this week is that it's okay to let go.
I don't have to be emotionally involved in these things, because right around the corner, there will always be another crazy, colorful, shining outfit that's just waiting for me if I have a little heart love and I like it.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Good afternoon, all together.
I have something I want to show you here.
Think of that as a point of view, as a flying point of view.
This is what we call in our lab, real design.
Let me tell you a little bit about this.
Now, if you take this picture -- I'm an Italian originally, and every boy in Italy grows up with this picture in his room, but the reason I'm going to show you this is something very interesting in the formula 1 in the last few decades.
Some time ago, if you wanted to win a formula 1 race, you would take your budget and put your money on a good driver and a good car.
And if the car and the driver were good enough, you won the race.
Now today, if you want to win a race, you actually need something like this -- something that monitors the car in real time, has a couple of thousand sensors that transmit information from the car, pass that information to the system and then process it and then use it to send back that car decisions and change things in real time as information is collected.
This is what you would call, in engineering teams, a real-time trade system.
And basically, it's a system that's made out of two parts -- a sentient part and a responsiveness.
What's interesting now is that real-time systems are starting to dive into our lives.
Our cities, over the last few years, have just been equipped with networks and electronics.
You become a computer in the open.
And when computers open, they start reacting in a different way, they're perceived and powered.
If we run cities, that's actually a big deal.
By the way, I want to mention that cities are only two percent of the world's land surface, but 50 percent of the world's population lives there.
They're 75 percent of the energy consumption -- up to 80 percent of the CO2 emissions.
So if we do something about cities, that's a big deal.
More than the cities, all of this perceivement and emergence in objects of everyday life.
This is from an exhibition organized Paola Antonelli at MoMA later during the summer.
It's called "Sprich with me."
Well, all of our objects, our environment, are starting to talk back to us.
In a certain sense, it's almost as if every atom out there becomes two, a sensor and an operator.
And this is radically changing the interaction that we humans have out there with our environment.
In a way, it's almost like the old dream of Michelangelo ...
You know, when Michelangelo formed Moses, it means he took the hammer at the end and threw it on Moses -- in fact, you can still see a little bottom-up position -- and said, "Perche nonli? Why don't you draw?"
Well, today, our environment begins the very first time to respond to us.
I'm just going to show you a couple of examples -- again, recognizing our environment and figuring out.
Let's start with being true.
So the first project I want to show you is actually one of the first of our labs.
It was born four and a half years ago in Italy.
And what we've been doing was actually using a new kind of network that's been used all over the world -- this is a mobile phone network -- and using anonymous and aggregated information from this network that's collected from the outsider to understand how the city works.
The summer was a happy summer -- 2006.
It was like Italy won the football World Cup.
Some of you will remember it was in Italy against France, and then at the end of Zidane, the headlight.
And anyway, Italy won at the end.
Now look at what happened that day, just looking at the activity that's happening in the network.
This is the city.
You can see the colossum in the middle, the outer Tiber.
In the morning before the game.
You see the timeline on the top.
Back in the afternoon, people here and there, the phone calls are working and moving.
The game begins -- silence.
France makes a gate. Italy makes a gate.
Half-time, people make a short call, go to the bathroom.
Second half-time. End of normal play time.
First extension, second.
Zidane, in a moment of head rage.
Italian wins. Yeah.
Well, that night, everybody went to the center to celebrate.
They saw the big impact.
The next day, everyone went to the center to meet the team and the prime minister at the same time.
And then everybody went down.
You can see the Circo Massimo picture, where, since the Roman times, people go to celebrate -- to have a great party, and you can see the impact at the end of the day.
Well, this is just an example of how we can feel the city today in a way we couldn't do it a few years ago.
Another quick example of things: this isn't about people, it's about things that we use and consume.
Well, today we know everything about where our stuff comes from.
This is a map that shows you all the chips, a Mac computer made of how they came together.
But we know very little about where things go.
So in this project, we actually designed some small markers to track the garbage as it goes through the system.
So we started with some volunteers who were helping us, a little over a year ago in Seattle to tag the things they were throwing away -- different kinds of things you can see -- things that they would throw away anyway.
Then we have the little chips, the little tags sticking on the trash and started tracking it.
Here's the results we just got.
From Seattle ...
after a week.
With this information, we realized that there are lots of inefficiencies in the system.
We can actually do the same things with less energy.
The data was not available before.
But there's a lot of hard-wired transportation and more complicated things going on.
The other thing is that we think that if we see every day that the cup we throw away doesn't just disappear, it's still somewhere on the planet.
And the plastic bottle we throw away every day still stays there.
And if we show that to people, then we can move forward a behavioral change.
So that's the reason for this project.
My colleague at MIT, Assaf Biderman, could tell you a lot more about being true and a lot of the other wonderful things that you can do with being true, but I'd like to come to the second part that we discussed at the beginning, and that's the empowerment of our environment.
And the first project is something we did a few years ago in Zaragoza, Spain.
It began with a question of the mayor who came to us and said that Spain and Southern Europe have a nice tradition to use water in public places as part of architecture.
And the question was, how could you bring technology, new technology together?
And one of the ideas that came out of MIT in a work cycle was, imagine these tubes and valves and magnetic valves opening and closing.
They're causing something like a water curtain with a surface of water.
If these images drop down, you can write down, you can write patterns, images, texts.
And you can get closer to him, and he's going to open up to jump through you, as you can see in this picture.
Well, we introduced the mayor Belloch.
He liked it very much.
And we got the assignment to design a building at the front of the expo.
We called it the Digital Water Pavillion.
The whole building was made of water.
There are no doors or windows, but as you get closer to him, it will open up and let you go in.
The roof was also covered with water.
And if it's windy, if you want to reduce the syringe, you can actually lower the roof.
Or you could close the building and the whole architecture, like in this case, you know, these days when you're driving down the roof, you get pictures of people who were there and say, "You've destroyed the building."
No, they didn't break the building, it's just that architecture almost disappears.
Here's how the building works.
You see the person wondering what's going on inside.
And here you see me, when I was trying to test the sensors that opened the water, not to get wet.
Well, I should tell you what happened one night when all the sensors stopped working.
But in fact, that night was even more fun.
All the children in Zaragoza came to the building, because the way they played the building was very different.
So no longer a building that would open up to leave you, but a building that would still have breaks and holes in the water, you had to jump now without getting wet.
And that was, for us, very exciting, because as architects, as engineers, as designers, we always think about how the people who use the things that we design.
But the reality is always unpredictable.
And that's the beauty of creating things that are used and interacting with people.
So here's a picture of the building with the physical spots, the image of water and the projections on it.
And that's what led us to thinking about the project that I'm going to show you now.
Imagine these points of view could actually start flying.
Imagine you could have little helicopters flying through the air, and each of you with a little spot of change light -- almost like a cloud that can move through the space.
Here's the video.
Imagine a helicopter, like the one you saw earlier that moves with other people, totally in synchrony.
You can have this cloud.
You can have a kind of flexible screen or display, like this -- a regular formation in two dimensions.
Or irregular, but in three dimensions, where what's changing is the light, not the position of the image points.
You can play with different types.
Imagine a screen could just appear in different formats or sizes in different resolutions.
But then it could be just a 3D cloud of points of image that you could go on and go through that you could look at from many, many directions.
What you're looking at here is a real Flyfire plug that's going down to form a regular V like we had before.
If you turn on the lights, it looks like this. So, just like we've seen before.
Imagine that every single person is controlled.
It could have every single point of view a impulse that comes from people, from the movement of people or whatever.
I'd like to show you a little bit about this.
We've been working with Roberto Bolle, one of the best ballet dancers of our time -- the slug at the Metropolitan Theater in New York and the Scala in Milan -- we've recorded his motions in 3D to use it as an impulse for the Flyfire.
Here you see Roberto dancing.
On the left-hand side, you see the dots, the different captures.
It's also a real-time 3D scan and a motion capture.
So you can feel the whole movement.
You can do that all the time.
But then, once we have all the images, you can play with it and play with color movement and movement.
This is what we want to use as a possible momentum for the Flyfire.
I want to show you the latest project that we're working on.
It's something we're working on for the London Olympics.
It's called the Cloud -- the cloud.
The idea is, again, imagine what we're bringing people back to do something and to change the environment -- almost as we call it, to build clouds as you move a string, but a cloud.
Imagine that anybody can give a little donation to a point of view.
I think the remarkable thing about what's been going on over the last few decades is that we've been changing from a physical to a digital world.
This has digitized everything, knowledge, and made it accessible through the Internet.
Today, for the first time -- and the Obama campaign showed this -- we can change from the digital world, from the self-organizing forces of networks to the physical world.
This can be, in our case, that we use it to create designs and a symbol.
That means something that's built in the city.
But tomorrow, it can take us to face the challenges we face -- think about climate change or CO2 emissions -- how can we then switch from the digital world to the physical.
So the idea is that we actually engage people in doing things together, collectively.
The cloud is again a cloud of points, in the same way as a real cloud is a cloud of particles.
And these particles are water, while our cloud is a cloud of points.
It's a physical structure in London, but it's covered with images.
You can move inside and do different kinds of experiences.
You can actually look at it from the bottom, sharing the most important moments for Olympics in 2012 and beyond, and using it as a kind of connection to the community.
So both, the physical cloud in the sky, and something at the top you can go like London's new mountain range.
You can go in.
And a kind of digital lighthouse at night -- but as a most important, a new kind of experience for everybody who wants to go to the top.
Thank you.
As an artist, the connection is very important to me.
Through my work, I'm trying to say that people are not separate from nature and that everything is connected to one another.
The first time I was in Antarctica about 10 years ago, I saw my first icebergs.
I understood awe.
My heart shaved, I was dizzy when I tried to do what was in front of me.
The icebergs around me raged 18 feet out of the water, and I could only joke that this was a snowlock on another snowflake, year by year.
Icebergs are born as a calf of a glacier, or they break out of ice sheets.
Every iceberg has its own individual personality.
They're interacting in a very clear way with their environment and their experiences.
Some people refuse to give up and cling to the bitter end while others stop it and collapse into dramatic passion.
When you look at an iceberg, it's easy to think that they're isolated, apart and alone, just as we humans often see us.
But the truth is far from it.
As a iceberg melts, I'm breathing its front atmosphere.
As the iceberg melts, it releases mineral-sized drinking water that feeds many forms of life.
I'm going to go through my photographs of these icebergs as if I were to make portraits of my ancestors, in the sense that they exist in these individual moments, and never exist that way again.
It's not a death when it melts; it's not a end, it's a continuation of its path along the life cycle.
One part of the ice in the icebergs that I photograph is very young -- a few thousand years old.
And part of the ice is more than 100,000 years old.
The last pictures I'd like to show you, this is an iceberg I photographed in Kekertsuatsiak in Greenland.
Very rare, you're actually witnessing a roller iceberg.
Here you see it.
On the left you see a little boat.
That's about five meters long.
Please look at the shape of the iceberg and where it is at the water line.
You can see here, he's starting to roll, and the boat has moved to the other side, the man is standing there.
This is the average size of a Greenland iceberg.
It's about 120 feet out of the water, or 40 meters.
And this video is in real time.
And just like that, the iceberg shows you a different side of his personality.
Thank you.
My life is truly extraordinary by working on some amazing projects.
But the coolest thing I've ever worked on was this guy.
His name is TEMPT.
TEMPT was one of the leading graffiti artists of the '80s.
Then, one day, he came back from running and said, "Paps, my legs crystall."
And that was the outbreak of ALS.
TEMPT is completely paralyzed today.
He can only use his eyes.
I was facing him.
I have a company that makes design and animation, so graffiti is inevitably a complex part of what we admire in the art world.
So we decided to support Tony -- TEMPT -- and his thing.
I met with his father and his brother, and I said, "We're going to give you that money.
What are you going to do with this?"
And his brother said, "I just want to talk to Tony again.
I just want to talk to him again, and I said, "Wait a minute, isn't that -- I saw Stephen Hawking -- can't all be paralyzed by people using these devices?"
And he said, "No, just when you're in the middle of a society and you've got a remarkable insurance, you can really do that.
Normal people are not available to these devices."
And I said, "How do you communicate?"
Did anybody see the movie "sclimbling and Diverglocks"?
That's how they communicate -- that's how their fingers run along.
I was like, "Well, how could that be?"
So I came up with the need to just put out a check, and instead I put out a check where I didn't have the least idea of how to fix it.
I committed myself to the location and the location of his brother and his father -- in the words, "Well, my proposal is this: Tony's going to speak, we're going to get him a device, and we're going to find a way to make his art again.
Because it's a Farce that somebody who's carrying all this can't communicate."
So I spoke at a conference a few months later.
I met these guys at GRL, Graffiti Research Lab, and they have a technology that allows them to project a light on any surface and then draw a laser pointer just to record the negative area.
So they're moving around doing art installations like this.
They say that all the things that are displayed up there will follow a life cycle.
It starts with the gender parts, then the pups, then the Bush-style changes, and then finally, people actually do art.
But there was always a life cycle in their presentations.
So I went home and I had dinner with my wife and told her about everything, and we thought, "Well, second time, if there's this technology that you can use your eyes to control things, then we should find a way for TEMPT to control a laser so he can make graffiti again, that would be awesome."
That was the beginning of the journey.
And about two years later, about a year later, after a lot of organization and a lot of back and forth of things, we've achieved a couple of things.
First of all, we introduced the insurance door, and actually got a device for TEMPT to communicate with -- a Stephen Hawking machine.
This was incredible.
And he's really, really funny -- I call him Yoda, because you talk to him, or you get an email, and he's like, "I'm so imperfect, this guy's incredible."
Also, we threw seven programmers from around the world -- literally from all the corners of the world -- back home to us.
My wife, my kids and I moved to the garage, and these hackers and programmers and conspiracy theorists and anarchists have taken over our house.
A lot of our friends thought we were pretty stupid to do this, and we'd come back, and all the images on the walls would be graffiti.
But for over two weeks, we programmed, we went to the beach cave in Venice, my kids were involved, my dog was involved, and we created this.
It's called the EyeWriter, and you can see the description.
This is a cheap sunglasses that we bought at the Venice Beach Promenade, some copper wire and some stuff from the construction market and electronics trade.
We took a PS3 camera, we pulled it apart, put it on an LED light, and now we have a device that's freely available -- you can build it yourself, we provide the code for free, the software can be downloaded for free.
So we've created a device that is completely free of constraints.
No insurance can sit down.
No hospital.
Each propeller can actually communicate alone with his eyes or draw.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, that was incredible.
So at the end of the two weeks, we went back to TEMPT's room.
I love this picture because it's the room of somebody else, and that's his room.
Now, there's all this fuss about the great unveiling.
And after about a year of planning, two weeks of programming, Nudelparties and seated nights, Tony drew again after seven years.
And this is an amazing picture, because this is his life support system, and he's looking beyond his life support system.
We counted his bed so he can see outside.
We set up a projector against a parking wall in front of the hospital.
And he drew again for the first time in his family and friends -- and you can only imagine what a feeling was like in the parking lot.
It's funny that we had to break into the parking lot, so we felt that we were comfortable with it as part of the spray.
At the end of it, he sent us an email to the following content: "For the first time I've done something for seven years.
I feel like I've been pushed under water, and finally somebody has attacked down and raised my head so I can breathe."
Isn't that overwhelming?
This is something like our scream.
It keeps us at the pole and keeps us developing.
And we've got to get a lot better at this device.
It's an amazing device, but it's got a magic chart in the same way.
And someone who has such an artistic potential deserves so much more.
So we're trying to figure out how to make it better, faster and stronger.
Since that time, we have received all sorts of recognition.
We've won some awards.
Remember, it's free, none of us deserves it.
It's all coming out of our own pockets.
So the awards were, "Oh, that's fantastic."
Armstrong tweeted about us, and then, December, the Time magazine honored us as one of the 50 best inventions in 2010, which was really great.
The coolest thing about it is -- and this includes the whole circle -- that this April, at the memorial at the inner city of Los Angeles, will give an exhibition called "Art of the Streets."
And I think there will be pretty much the toughest operators in the street scenes -- bankersy, Shepard Fairey, CAWs -- all these guys will be there.
TEMPT's going to be part of the show, which is pretty cool.
So basically what I'm saying is, if you see something that's impossible, make it possible.
Everything in this room was impossible -- this stage, this computer, this microphone, the EyeWriter -- everything was impossible at some point.
Make it possible -- all of you here.
I'm not a programmer, and I've never had anything to do with vision technology, but I just captured something and surrounded myself with amazing people so that we could put something together.
And that question would be to ask all of you, every single day that you're going to have something that needs to be done, if not now, when? And if not me, who then?
Thank you.
So, I write for children, and I'm probably America's mostly read children's books.
And I always tell people that I don't want to come as a scientist.
You can have me as a farmer, or you can have leather, but no one ever chose a farmer.
Today I want to tell you about circles and revelations.
Well, an epiphany is usually something you find because you dropped it somewhere.
You go to the block and you take it as a revelation.
This is a painting of a circle.
A friend of mine did it -- Richard Bollingbroke.
It's the kind of more complicated circle I want to tell you about today.
My circle started back in the '60s at high school in Stow, Ohio, where I was the middle school kid.
I was the one who was beaten in boys' green and blue every week until a teacher saved my life.
She saved my life using the toilet in the teacher room.
They did it secretly.
She did it for three years.
And I had to get out of town.
I had a thumb, I had 85 dollars, and it beat me up to San Francisco in California -- I found a lover -- and back in the '80s, I found it important to take on AIDS organizations.
About three or four years ago, I received a phone call from this teacher, woman Posten, who said, "I have to see you.
I'm sad that we have never learned each other as adults.
Can you please come to Ohio, and please come with the man I know you've found him now.
And I should mention that I have local cancer, and I want you to pay attention."
Well, the next day we were in Cleveland.
We looked at her, we laughed, we cried, and we knew she had to be in a hospice.
We found one for them, we took them, and we took care of them, and we gave eight to their family because it was necessary.
It was something we knew how to do.
And just as the woman who wanted to know me as an adult got to know me, she turned to a box full of asche and was placed in my hands.
What happened was the circle had closed, it had become a circle -- and the revelation that I talked about was coming.
The revelation is that death is part of life.
She saved my life, and my partner and I saved her.
And you know, that part of life needs everything the rest of life needs.
It needs truth and beauty, and I'm so happy that this has been mentioned so many times today.
It needs just as much -- it needs dignity, love and pleasure, and it's up to us to give these things.
Thank you very much.
Imagine a big explosion as you go up to 1,000 meters.
Imagine a plane full of smoke.
Imagine a plant that's sticking, cacking, cacking, cacking, cacking, cacking, cacking, cacking.
That sounds like fear.
Well, I had a unique place on that day; I was sitting on oneD.
I was the only one who could talk to the glider.
So I looked at her and they said, "No problem, we've probably caught some birds."
The pilot had run the machine already, and we weren't that far away.
You could see Manhattan.
Two minutes later, three things happened at the same time.
The pilot ran the machine to the Hudson River.
That's not usually the road.
He turns off the drives.
Imagine a soundless airplane.
And then he said three words -- the most emotional words I've ever heard.
He says, "Streaction to the crash."
I didn't have to talk to the people on the board anymore.
I could see it in her eyes, there was horror, life was over.
I want to share with you three things that I've learned about myself this day.
I learned that in a moment everything is different.
We have this plan of life, we have these things that we want to do in life, and I was thinking about all the people that I wanted to reach a hand and didn't do it, all the fences that I wanted to do, all the experiences that I wanted to do and never did.
As I was thinking about this later, a saying came to me, which is, "I collect bad wines."
Because if the wine is there, and the person is there, then I open it up.
I never want to move anything in life.
And that urgency, that goal, really changed my life.
The second thing I learned about this day -- and this was when we missed the George Washington Bridge, kind of like hair-screated -- I thought, man, there's one thing that I really regret.
I had a good life.
In my own humanity and in my own mistakes, I was struggling to become better in everything I was packing.
But in my humanity, I also gave my ego room.
And I regretted the time that I had wasted meaningless things with people who mean things.
And I was thinking about the relationship with my wife, with my friends, with people.
And after that, when I thought about it, I decided to burn negative energy from my life.
It's not perfect, but it's much better.
I didn't come into my wife for two years.
It feels great.
I don't try to be right anymore; I decide to be happy.
The third thing I learned -- while the internal clock is starting to say, "15, 14, 13, ..."
You can see the water coming.
I said, "Please fly into the air."
I don't want this thing to break into 20 parts, as you know from documents.
As we fall down, I had this sense of dying, human being, is not scary.
It's almost like we were preparing for our lives.
But it was very sad.
I didn't want to go; I love my life.
And that sadness really formed in a thought, which is that I only wish for one thing.
I just wish I could see my children grow up.
About a month after that, I went to see a performance of my daughter -- first-grader, not much artistic talent ...
... not yet.
And I'm partying, I'm crying like a little kid.
And in the world, it made all a sense for me.
I realized at the time by connecting the dots together, that life is all about being a great father.
More than anything, everything else, is my only goal in life to be a good father.
I was told by the wonder that I didn't die that day.
I got another gift, which is to look into the future and come back and live differently.
My call to all of you who are flying today is, imagine the same thing happening on your flight -- please not -- but imagine it; and how would you change?
What would you do to push you up because you think you'd be there forever?
How would you change your relationships and the negative energy in it?
And more than anything else, are you the best parents you can only be?
Thank you.
The idea behind the Stuxnet computer system is quite simple.
We don't want Iran to build the bomb.
The most important postals there for the development of nuclear weapons is the Uran enrichment facility in Natanz.
The gray boxes that you see here are real-time trade systems.
So if we can actually co-procise the systems, control the volumes and the valves, we can actually cause a lot of problems with the centrifuge.
These gray boxes don't run Windows software; they're based on a completely different technology.
But if we can create an effective Windows virus on a laptop that's used by a waiting engineer to come up with this gray box, we're in the business.
And this is the planning behind Stuxnet.
So we start with a Windows Dropper.
The inputs are transferred to the gray box, the centrifuges and the Iranian nuclear energy program are triggered -- mission.
This is a children's game, right?
I want to tell you how we found that.
When we started our research on Stuxnet six months ago, it was completely unknown what the meaning and purpose of this construct was.
The only thing we knew is very, very complicated in terms of the Windows part, the Dropper part, making countless zero-Day choices.
And it seemed to be involved with these gray boxes, these real-time control systems.
That excited our attention, and we started a lab project where we infected our environment with Stuxnet, and we looked at this convergence.
And then something weird happened.
Stuxnet went on like a laboratory bench that didn't like our cheese -- snucked away, but didn't want to eat it.
It didn't make sense in my eyes.
And after experimenting with different types of cheese, I realized this is a targeted attack.
Totally focused on a particular goal.
Dropper is actively drifting around the gray box when a special configuration has been discovered, even if the special program that's trying to infuse it on this goal.
And if not, then Stuxnet doesn't do anything.
So, that really resonated with me, and we started working with it, almost around the clock, because I thought, well, we don't know what the goal is.
It could be, for example, a U.S. power plant, or a chemical plant in Germany.
So we should soon find out what the target is.
So we extracted and decomposed the attack code, and we found that it's structured in two digital warheads -- a smaller one and a bigger one.
And we also noticed that they were very professionally constructed by people who obviously had all the insider information available.
They knew all the bits and bits that they needed to attack.
In fact, they probably knew the size of the machine service.
So they knew everything.
And if you've figured out that the builder of Stuxnet is complex and high-tech, let me tell you, the feed data is a science for itself.
It's much more sophisticated than anything we've ever seen.
Here's a clip from this attack code.
We're talking about -- about 15,000 lines of code.
Looks pretty much like the old-fashioned assemble language.
And I want to tell you how we were able to get out of that code.
So after what we were looking for first was system function, because we know what that does.
And then we looked for timings and data structures and tried to connect them to the real world -- with potential goals in the real world.
So we needed theories of these goals that we could prove or unproven.
To put these theories, let's remind ourselves that it's definitely high-quality sabotage, it has to be a high-quality goal, and it's very likely to be in Iran, because most of the infections have been reported.
Well, there are not many thousands of targets in this area.
It basically runs out to the bush of nuclear power plants and to the uranium enrichment plant in Natanz.
So I said to my assistant, "Get me a list of all the experts on centrifuges and power plants from our client tribe."
And I called them up, and I triggered their knowledge to compare their expertise to what we found in the code and the data.
And that worked really well.
So it was possible for us to connect the little digital warhead with the rotationary.
The rotor is this moving part within the centrifuge, this black object that you see.
And when you manipulate the speed of these rotors, you're actually able to crack the rotor and, eventually, explode the centrifuge.
What we also found is that the goal of the attack was actually to make it slowly and creepy -- obviously, in trying to dispossessify engineers so that they wouldn't be able to go very quickly.
The big digital warhead -- we got a glimpse from looking at very precise data and data structures.
So for example, the number 164 points out a lot from this code; you can't miss it.
I started working through scientific literature about how these centrifuges are built in Natanz, and found that they're structured in what's called cascaden, and each caskade contains 164 centrifuges.
So that made sense, it fitted together.
And it got even better.
These centrifuges in Iran are divided into 15 so-called levels.
And guess what we found in the attack code?
A nearly identical structure.
So again, that's really cool together.
And this gave us great confidence in what we studied here.
Now, don't get me wrong, that wasn't the way it was.
These results were achieved by several weeks of hard work.
And many times we just ran into a snack and had to reboot.
Anyway, what we found was that both digital warheads were actually pointing at one and the same goal, but from different directions.
The little warhead takes over a caskade and flips the rotors and slows them down and the big warhead comes with six cascadrons in interaction and manipulated ventile.
So, by and large, we're very confident that we actually have what the goal is.
It's Natanz, and it's just Natanz.
So we don't have to worry about other goals being hit by Stuxnet.
Here's some really cool stuff that we discovered -- it really blew me out of the stuff.
Down there is the gray box, and on top you see the centrifuges.
Well, what this thing does is it subverts the inputs of sensors -- so for example, pressure sensors and vibration sensors -- and it provides the legitimate code that's still running through the attack, with fake data.
And in fact, this false input of Stuxnet has already been recorded before.
So it's just like in Hollywood movies where the tracking camera is fed with previous video recordings.
That's cool, right?
The idea here, obviously, is not just to overlist the machine guns in the control room.
In fact, it's much more dangerous and more aggressive.
The idea is to overlist a digital safety system.
We need digital safety systems where a human machine station can't respond quickly enough.
So, for example, in a power station, if the big steam turbines get too fast, you have to open delasting gases within milliseconds.
Of course, this can't be done by a human machine guide.
So this is where we need digital safety systems.
And if they're at risk, then really bad things can happen.
The power plant can explode.
And neither the engine leaders, nor the security system will notice.
This is frightening.
But it gets worse.
And what I'm saying now is very important.
Think about it. This attack is generic.
He doesn't have much to do with centrifuges, with uranium enrichment.
So, for example, it would work just as well -- in a power station or in a car factory.
It's generic.
And you don't have to -- as the attacker -- you don't have to put the data on a USB stick, as we saw in Stuxnet.
You could also use ordinary worm technology to spread.
You just have to spread it as far as you can.
And when you do that, eventually you get a cyber weapons of mass destruction.
That's the consequence that we have to face.
So unfortunately, the biggest number of goals for those attacks are not in the Middle East.
They're in the United States, Europe and Japan.
So all these green areas, these are the most important environments.
We have to face the consequences, and we're starting to prepare better.
Thank you.
I have a question.
Ralph, it's been reported a lot that people assume that the Mossad is the main organization behind it.
Is that also your opinion?
Okay, you really want to know?
Yeah. Okay.
I think the Mossad is involved, but the driving force is not Israel.
So the driving force behind this is the cyber superpower.
There's only one, and that's the United States -- fortunately, happiness.
Because otherwise our problem would be even bigger.
Thank you for having given us a midwive. Thank you, Ralph.
I've spent the last few years setting myself up in situations that are usually very difficult and at the same time somewhat dangerous.
I went to prison -- difficult.
I worked in a coal miner -- dangerous.
I photographed in war zones -- difficult and dangerous.
And I've spent 30 days eating nothing but this -- at the beginning, a little difficult in the middle, very dangerous at the end.
In fact, I've been exposed to most of my career looking at terrible situations, and this is all for trying to study social ways that they're compelling and interesting, and hopefully in a way understandable what makes them entertaining and accessible to the audience.
So when I knew I was going to come here to look at the world of branding and sponsoring in a TEDTalk, I knew I was going to do something a little different.
Some of you may have heard that a couple of weeks ago I switched an ad on eBay.
I sent some Facebook tools, some Twitter tools, and I gave people a chance to get the name rights to my TEDTalk in 2011.
Really, some happy people and companies, for-profit and for-profit, have been given the opportunity -- because I'm sure Chris Anderson will never let this happen again -- buy the name rights to the talk you're just seeing, which at the time didn't have a title that had a lot of content, and didn't give a lot of clues about what the subject would actually be.
So what you got was this: This is your name presented here: My TEDTalk, which you have no idea what the subject will be, and which eventually will fly you to the ears, especially if I let your company be stupid for their participation.
But apart from that, it's a very good media opportunity.
You know how many people watch these TEDTalks?
A lot.
This is actually just the work title.
So despite this warning, I knew anybody would buy the name rights.
Now if you had asked me this a year ago, I wouldn't have been able to tell you this with certainty.
But in the new project that I'm working on, my new film, we're looking at the world of marketing, advertising.
As I said, I've given myself in some pretty horrible situations over the years, but nothing could prepare me, nothing could help me go to something as difficult and as dangerous as these guys in a room.
You know, I had the idea for a movie.
What I'd like to do is take a film around Product Placement, marketing and advertising, where the whole film is funded by Product Placement, marketing and advertising.
And the film is called "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold."
So what happens in "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold" is that everything, from top to bottom, from beginning to end, is completely labeled with a brand -- from the editor you're going to see in the movie, that's the brand X.
Now this brand, the Qualcomm stadium, the Staples Center ...
These people will be connected to the film forever -- forever.
And so the film will study this whole idea -- that's what? In perpetuity, forever?
I'm a redundant person.
This was more concrete.
It was "In perpetuity, forever."
But we're not just going to have the brand X as the title card, but we're going to make sure we're going to sell every possible category in the movie.
So maybe we sell a shoe, and it becomes the greatest shoe you've ever worn ...
The greatest car you've ever driven Sind, from "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold," the greatest drink you've ever had, an awareness of "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold."
So the idea is, besides showing that brands are part of life, really, to get them to finance the film?
And we actually show the whole process of how it works.
The goal of the entire film is transparency.
You're going to see the whole thing going on in the movie.
So this is the whole concept, the whole film, from beginning to end.
And I'd be happy if CEG would help do this.
You know, it's funny, because when I first heard it, it's the ultimate respect for the audience.
I don't know how amazing people are going to be.
Do you have a perspective -- I don't want to use a click angle, because that has a negative distinction -- but do you know how this is going to evolve?
How much money does it take to realize that?
One and a half million.
I think it's going to be hard to meet them, but I think it's definitely worth saying to some really famous brands.
Who knows when the movie comes out, we might look like a hot spot.
What do you think the answer will be?
The answer is likely to be no.
But is it a difficult thing to do about the film or a difficult thing to do about me?
JK: Both of them.
... So it doesn't sound so optimistic.
So, sir, can you help me? I need help.
I can help.
Okay.
Fantastic.
We need to think about what brands are.
Yeah.
If you look at the people you've got to do with ...
There are some places we can turn to.
So, imagine the camera.
I thought, "Get the camera out," meaning we wanted to have a job interview.
It turns out it really meant, "We don't want to do anything with your film."
And just as all of these companies disappeared, one by one.
No one wanted to have something to do with the film.
I was amazed.
They didn't want to have anything to do with the project.
And I was confused because I thought the whole concept of advertising was to present your product to as many people as possible, let so many people see it as possible.
Especially in today's world, at this interface of new and old media and the fragmented media -- it's not the idea of being in this new exciting medium that mass brings that message.
No, that was what I thought.
But look, the problem was that my idea had a fatal mistake, and that was a result.
Actually no, that was not the mistake at all.
That would have been no problem at all.
That would have been fine.
But what this picture represents is a problem.
You see, if you put transparency in Google search, this is -- this is one of the first images that appears.
I really like your species, Sergey Brin. Now.
That was the problem: transparency -- free of deception and leaks, just to explore and look through; instantly understandable; characterized by perspective and access to information, especially in terms of business practices -- the last line is certainly the biggest problem.
You know, we're currently hearing a lot about transparency.
Our politicians say it, our president says it, even our CEOs say it.
But when it comes to being done, something changes.
But why? Well, transparency is fear -- like this weird bear that's still shining.
It's unpredictable -- like this strange land road.
And it's also very risky.
What else is risky?
A whole bowl of cool Whip eats.
This is very risky.
So when I started talking to the companies and telling them that we wanted to tell this story, they said, "No, we want you to tell a story.
We want you to tell a story, but we just want you to tell our story."
You see, when I was a kid, and my father caught me lying -- and he's sitting there looking at me -- he would say, "My son, there are three versions in each story.
There's your version, there's my version, and there's the real version."
So you can see, with this film, we wanted to tell the actual version.
But there was only one company that was willing to help us -- and that's because I've known John Bond and Richard Kirshenbaum for years -- I realized that I had to do it alone, I had to deal with the middleman and go straight to my team to companies.
So what you suddenly started to understand -- or what I started to understand -- was that when you start talking to these companies, the idea of how your brand gets understood is a profound problem.
I have friends who make big, giant Hollywood movies, and I have friends who make little Independent movies like me.
And my friends who make big, giant Hollywood movies say that the reason their films are so successful is because of the brand partners they have.
And then my friends, who make little Independent movies, say, "Well, how do we compete with these big, giant Hollywood movies?"
And the movie is called "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold."
So how exactly are we going to see Ban in the movie?
Every time I go on the way, and every time I open up the doctor's disease, you'll see Ban Deodorant.
And every time I interview somebody, I can say, "Are they fresh enough for this interview?
Are you there? You look a little nervous.
I want to help you calm down.
So maybe you should put some of this before the interview."
And then we offer one of these great gifts.
Either "Floral Fusion" or "Paradi Winds," they will have the choice.
We will be both equipped for men and women -- solid, roll-on, or a stick, whatever.
That's the short story.
Now I can answer all of their questions and give you a cool shot.
We're a smaller brand.
As you've been talking about the smaller films, we're a maker as a brand.
So we don't have a budget like other brands.
So doing these things -- you know, remind people of Ban -- that's kind of why we're interested.
In which words would you describe Ban?
Ban is blank.
That's a great question.
I mean, think about technology.
Technology is not the way you want to describe something that someone does under the axis.
We're talking about bold, fresh.
I think "fuse" is a great word that this category actually makes something positive, as opposed to "fuse odor and humidity."
It keeps you fresh.
How can we keep you fresher -- better fresher, more fresher, three-time fresher.
These things have a more positive effect.
And this is a million-conzer.
What about me? What about the drugtype?
I have to talk to the man in the street, who are like me, Otto Normal smoker.
You're supposed to tell me something about my brand.
How would you describe your brand?
Hmmm, my brand?
I don't know.
I really like beautiful clothes.
1980's Revival meets Skaterpunk, except for the day of the day.
All right, what is brand Gerry?
Amazing.
I think the gener, the style I have is probably "dark glamour."
I like lots of black colors, lots of grayness and stuff like that.
But usually I have an accessories like sunglasses, or a jewelry and stuff like that.
If Dan was a brand, he would probably be a classic Mercedes Cabrio.
The brand I'm is, I would say, a smooth fly.
Woman 2: Part hippie, went to Yogi, went to Brooklyn girls -- I don't know.
Man 3: I'm the smuse guy.
I sell foods all over the country, all over the world.
So I think that's my brand.
This is my brand in my little distorted industry.
Man 4: My brand is FedEx because I deliver wars.
Man 5: Market trained alcohol's appointing writer.
Is that true?
A lawyer: I'm a lawyer's brand.
I'm Tom.
Now, we can't all be the Tom brand, but I often see myself at the interface of dark glamour and the light fly.
And what happened was I needed an expert.
I needed somebody who could go into my head, somebody who could really help me understand what they call "consciousness."
And so I found a company called Olson Zaltman in Pittsburg.
They've helped companies like Nestle, Febreze, Hallmark, discover these branding skills.
If they could do it for them, surely they could help me.
You brought your pictures with me, right?
I have that. The first picture is a picture of my family.
Just tell me a little bit about how this is connected to your thoughts and feelings about yourself.
These are the people who shape my worldview.
Tell me about this world.
MD: This world? I think your world is the world you live in -- like people around you, the friends, the family, the way you live your life, the work and so forth.
All of these things come and start from a place, and for me they come and start with my family in West Virginia.
What's the next thing you want to talk about.
Next. This was the most beautiful day of my life.
What is the context of the thoughts and feelings about yourself?
It's the way I'd like to be.
I like things that are different.
I like things that are weird. I like weird things.
Tell me about why -- what does it bring us?
What's the dot? What's the doll?
Why is it important to reboot? What does red represent?
Tell me a little bit about that part.
A little bit more about you, you're not.
What more metadamorphosen have you gone through?
... It doesn't have to be fear. What kind of rollercoaster are you in?
EEEEEE! No, thank you.
Thank you very much for your patience.
Yeah. All right.
Yes, I don't know what's going to happen.
There were a lot of crazy things going on.
The first thing I saw was this idea that your brand-newkti has separated two, but it has complementary pages -- the Morgan Spurlock brand is an eight-ame brand.
That adds up very well.
And I think there's almost a contradiction with that.
And I think some companies will only focus on one strength rather than both.
A lot of companies tend to -- and this is human nature -- to avoid things that you're not sure about, to avoid fear, these elements, and that you want to be called them, and you're actually turning them into something positive for yourself, and that's a very fancy way of doing it.
What other brands do they do?
The first one is a classic, Apple.
And you can also see here, Target, Wii, Mini from Mini Coopers and JetBlue.
Well, there are brands and eight-ame brands, these things that come and go, but a playful, eight-ame brand is a pretty strong thing.
An eight-year-old brand. How is your brand?
If someone asked you to describe your brand identity, your brand personality, how about it?
Are you an up attribute? Are you something that makes blood flow in walls?
Or are you more of a Down attribute?
Are you something a little quiet, reserved, conservative?
Up attributes are things that are playful, fresh like the Fresh Prince, in time, irresponsibly, eclaimous and indifferentious like Erol Flynnn, slender and agil, teacher, hertic, magic and mystical like Gandalf.
Or are you more like a Down attribute?
Are you mindful and mondrous like 007?
Are you established, traditional, nurturing, protective, compassionate like Oprah?
Are you reliable, stable, family, safe, drinking, sacred, contemplative and wiser like the Dalai Lama or Yoda?
Over the course of the film, we had over 500 companies who were up and down companies saying no, because they didn't want to be part of the project.
You didn't want to have anything to do with this film, because you didn't have control, you didn't have control of the finished product.
But they found 17 brand partners who were willing to take control of those who wanted to do business in such an eight-time game as I did, and who eventually empowered us to tell stories that we wouldn't normally have told -- stories that wouldn't usually support an ad.
They empowered us to tell the story of neuromarketing, as we tell the story in this film, that today you use MRIs to press the pleasure centers of the brain, both to make ads and to make movies.
We went to Sao Paulo, where foreigners have been banned.
In the entire city, for five years, no billboards, no posters, no Flyer, nothing.
And we went to school districts where companies are taking their way to poor schools, across America.
The incredible thing for me is that the projects that I got the most feedback from, or where I had the biggest success, are where I interacted directly with things.
And that's what these brands have done.
Because they went around the middle man, they went around the agents, and said that the agency might not really have their interest in mind.
I'm going to negotiate with the artist directly.
I'm going to work with him and create something completely different, something that makes people think that our world is challenging.
And what was it for them? What was it successful?
Well, since the Sundance Film Festival was first, we can look at this.
The first one was in January, and since then -- and this isn't even the whole thing -- there were 900 million calls from this film.
In fact, this is just a two-and-a-half-week period.
This is just online -- no press, no television.
The film was not delivered yet.
It's not even online. It's no streaming.
He hasn't come out in other countries.
Well, the film eventually acquired a very large moment.
And that's not bad for a project where almost every ad agency we talked to recommended their customers to get their fingers out of it.
One of the things that I believe is that if you take your chance to take risks, you're going to be risked by those risks.
I think if you stop people from that, you get them closer to failure.
I think if you train your employees to avoid taking risks, you're preparing the whole company to gain a profit.
I feel like we have to encourage people to take risks.
We need to encourage people not to be afraid of the possibilities that they may be afraid of.
Finally, in advance, we should be called the fear.
We should put the bear in the cage.
Get the fear. Get the risk.
Let's face a big gap, so we're willing to take the risk.
And finally, let's call for transparency.
Today, more than ever before, a little bit of honesty takes us very far.
And that said, with honesty and transparency, my entire talk, "If you want transparency," was presented to you by my good friends at EMC, who paid $7100 for the name rights in eBay.
Big data is being transformed for organizations around the world into large opportunities.
EMC presents, "You want to get transparency."
Thank you very much.
Now, Morgan, in the name of transparency, is this: What has happened to the $7100?
That's a great question.
I have a check in my pocket, displayed on the top organization of the TED Organization, the Sapling Foundation -- a $7100 check to fund my TED show next year.
My name is Amit.
So, 18 months ago, I did something different with Google, and I applied to doing something with museums and art, and my boss, who's here today, gave me some green light.
And it took 18 months.
A lot of fun negotiations and stories, I can tell you, with 17 very interesting museums from nine countries.
But I'm going to focus on performance.
There's a lot of stories about why we did this.
I think my personal view is very simple in explaining to this slide and access to it.
I grew up in India.
I was given a great education -- I don't worry -- but I didn't have access to many museums and these works of art.
So when I went and went to visit these museums, I started learning a lot.
And while I was working for Google, I tried this desire to make art more accessible -- to bring technology together.
We formed a team, a great team, and we started with this.
I'm going to start with the demo, and tell you some interesting things that have happened since the beginning.
So you just go to GoogleArtProject.com.
You can look around all these museums here.
There's the Uffizi, the MoMA, the Hermitage, the Rijks, Van Gogh.
In fact, I come to one of my favorites, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
You come in two ways -- very simple.
Click, and lo and behold, you're in this museum.
It doesn't matter where you are -- Bombay, Mexico, it doesn't make any difference.
You go around and you get used.
You want to orient in the museum?
Open the map, and jump with a click.
Drin are you, you want to get to the end of the gang.
Go ahead. Good fun.
Go ahead.
Thank you, but the best part is still.
So, I'm in front of one of my favorite paintings, Pieter Breugel harvesters in the Met.
I see this feature.
If the museum gave us the picture, click on it.
So this is one of the images.
These are all metadata.
Those of you who are really interested in art can click on this -- but I click this away now.
This is one of the images that we've captured with what's called the gigapixe technology.
For example, this image has about 10 billion points of view, I think.
And a lot of people ask me, "What do you get for 10 billion points of picture?"
So this is what I'm going to show you.
You can zoom in very easily and zoom out.
You see something funny there.
I love this guy; his expression is unzahlable.
But then you really want to go deep.
And so I started playing around, and I noticed there was something going on.
And I thought, "Wait a minute, that sounds interesting."
I went too close, and I slowly noticed these kids actually beat something.
I was laughing a little bit, talking to some people at the Met, and actually finding out that this is a game called Squail, where a Gans is beaten by a stick with a stick.
It was pretty popular.
I don't know why they did it, but I learned something about it.
To really get close, you can go all the way to the cracks.
Just to give you a perspective, I'm zooming out so you can see what you get.
Here we were, and this is the painting.
But the best part is -- in a second.
So let's fast jump to MoMA, back in New York.
Another favorite picture of me, starsnaults.
For example, it was about finding details.
But what if you want to see the paintbrushes?
And what if you want to see how Van Gogh created this masterpiece?
You zoom in. You can actually go in.
I'm going to zoom into one of my favorite parts of this picture, until I really get to the pillow.
This is stars, probably never seen before.
Now I'm going to show you my favorite function.
There are many more, but I don't have time.
This is the really cool part, it's called collections.
Each of you, each -- as rich or poor as you have a great house -- doesn't matter.
You can go out and create your own museum online -- all of these pictures you can draw your own collection.
Just, you go in -- and I've created this, it's called the power of the zoo -- you can zoom around.
This is 'The Gesandten' in National Geographic.
You can put it all by remarks, send your friends, and so a conversation begins about what you feel when you look at these masterpieces.
I think, finally, for me, the main thing is that all the wonderful things aren't going to come from Google.
They don't even come from the museums, I think.
I shouldn't say that.
They come from the artists.
And that was a humbling experience for me.
I mean, I hope that we will be just right with this digital medium of art, and represent it properly online.
The biggest question I get asked recently is, "Did you do this to replicate the experience of a museum visit?"
The answer to that is no.
It's to supplement the experience.
That's what it's about. Thank you.
Thank you.
This is a representation of your brain, and your brain can be divided into two halves.
This is the left half, which is the logical side and then the right half, which is the intuitive side.
If we had a scale to measure the aptitute of each hemisphere, we could represent their brain.
For example, that would be somebody who's completely logical.
This would be somebody who's completely intuitive.
Now, where would you position your brain on this scale?
Some of us might have settled for one of these extremes, but I think for most people in the audience, your brain looks something like this -- with a high aptitute that's in both hemispheres at the same time.
It's not as though they're both exclusive or whatever.
You can be logical and intuitive.
And so I think of myself as one of the people, along with most other experimental quantum physicists, who need good measure of logic to bring together the complex ideas.
But at the same time, we need a good measure of intuition to actually do the experiments.
How do we develop this intuition? Well, we love playing with things.
So we go out and play with it, and then we look at how it responds, and then we start to develop our intuitions there.
Basically you do the same thing.
So one of the intuitions they've developed over the years is probably that one thing at the same time can only be in one place.
I mean, it can sound strange to think that one thing is at the same time in two different places, but you weren't born with this idea, you developed it.
I remember watching a kid play on a floor floor.
He was another child, not very good at it, and he kept falling.
But I bet that he taught the playing with the floor a very valuable lesson, which is that great things don't just let you pass along, and that they stay in a position.
And this is a great conceptual model of the world, so long as you're not a particle physicist.
It would be a horrible model for a particle physicist, because they're not playing with the soil, they're playing with these little strange particles.
And when they play with their particles, they find all kinds of weird things -- like they fly directly through walls, or they can be in two different places at the same time.
And so they wrote all these observations, and they called the theory of quantum mechanics.
This was the state of physics a few years ago; you needed quantum mechanics to describe the little, tiny particles.
But it didn't take them to describe the big everyday objects around us.
This didn't like my intuition, and maybe just because I don't play with particles so many times.
Well, I sometimes play with them, but not very often.
And I've never seen it.
I mean, nobody's ever seen a particle.
But my logical side hasn't liked it either.
Because if all things are made up of particles and all these particles follow the rules of quantum mechanics, shouldn't it just follow the rules of quantum mechanics?
I don't see why it shouldn't be that way.
So I'd feel a lot better about the whole thing if we could somehow show that everyday objects also follow the rules of quantum mechanics.
So a couple of years ago, I started doing exactly this.
I created one.
This is the first object you can see that was in the quantum superposition.
So what we're looking at here is a tiny computer chip.
And you can see this green dot there in the middle.
This is the piece of metal that I'm going to talk about in a moment.
This is a picture of the object.
Here I'll zoom in. We're looking right at the center.
And here's a really, really big close-up of this little piece of metal.
So what we're looking at is a little piece of metal, it's shaped like a springboard, and it's above the edge.
So I did this thing in a similar way that you make a computer chip.
I went to a clean room with new silicones, and took 100 hours to all these large devices.
For the last little bit, I had to build my own machine -- to get this thing shaped like a swimming pool and that thing.
This thing has the ability to be in the quantum superposition, but it takes a little bit of help to do it.
Look, let me give you an analogy.
You know how uncomfortable it is to be in a full suit?
I mean, if I'm alone in the elevator, I do all kinds of weird things, but then I add other people, and I'm going to stop doing all these things because I don't want to hurt them, or, frankly, scare them.
So quantum mechanics says that inevitable objects feel the same way.
The riders for non-track objects are not just people, but the light that shines on them, and the wind that shines on them, and the heat of the space.
And so we knew that if we wanted to see this piece of metal behaves quantum mechanically, we had to pull out all the passengers.
And that's what we did.
We turned off the lights, we put it in a vacuum, and we poured all the air out, and cooled it down to almost now, all by itself in the elevator, the piece of metal was free to behave like it always wanted.
So we measured its motion.
We found that it was really strange to move.
Instead of just being quiet there, it was shaking. The way it was vibrating was sort of like this -- like a sprawling and contracting bubblebalg.
In which we gave him a little push, we could vibrate at the same time and not vibrate -- something which is just allowed in quantum mechanics.
So what I'm going to tell you about is what's truly fantastic.
What does it mean to vibrating for an object at the same time and not vibrating?
Let's think about atoms.
So the first case: All the trillions of atoms that make the piece of metal are still there, and at the same time the same atoms are moving up and down.
Only at precise times they agree.
The rest of the time they're delocalized.
That means that every atom at the same time is in two different places, which means that the entire piece of metal is in two different places.
I think that's really cool.
Really.
It was worth letting me close this year into the clean room, because, check this out, the scale difference between one atom and that piece of metal is about the same as the difference between the piece of metal and you.
So if a single atom can be in two different places at the same time, that piece of metal can be in two different places, why not you?
I mean, that's just what my logical side says.
So, imagine you're at the same time in multiple places, how would that feel?
How would your consciousness handle that your body is delocalized in the room?
There's another aspect of the story.
When we warmed it up, turned the light on and looked at the box, we saw that the piece of metal was always there in a piece.
And so I had to develop this new intuition that it looks like all the objects in the elevator are actually just quantum objects that are crammed together in a small room.
You hear a lot of talk about how quantum mechanics says everything is connected to everything.
Well, that's not quite right.
There's more to it, there's more to it.
It's that these connections, your connections to all the things around you, literally define who you are, and that's the profound and strange thing about quantum mechanics.
Thank you very much.
In 2007, I've decided that we should redesign how we think about economic development.
It should be our goal that if families are thinking about where they live and work, they've given them a chance to choose between at least one hand of many different cities that are all competing for new residents.
Right now, we're far from this goal.
There are billions of people in the developing world who don't even have a single city available to them.
But the amazing thing about cities is they're worth so much more than building them.
So we could take the world very easily, maybe even hundreds of new cities.
Now this may sound absurd to you if you've never thought about new cities.
Just swap the building out of homes for cities.
Imagine half the people who want to live indoors are doing this already; the other half aren't doing it yet.
You could try and expand the capacity of existing apartments.
But you know what you're going to let yourself in those homes and their environment govern law to avoid complaints and to defy the mining.
So it turns out it's very hard to get all these extensions out.
But you could go to a completely new place, build a completely new housing block, anticipate that the laws there would support such a building and not derrière it.
So I proposed that governments create new lands that provide enough space for a city and gave them a name: charter Villes.
Later, I found that about the same time, Javier and Octavio were thinking about the challenge of reform in Honduras.
They knew that every year about 75,000 Hondurans left their country to go out to the United States, and they wanted to know what they could do to make sure that these people could stay in their country and do exactly the same in Honduras.
So at this point, Javier said to Octavio, "What happens if we take an unparalled area of our country -- what if we just give them a message -- a piece of the American message -- a piece of the Canadian message -- and if people then want to work under the Canadian rules, or the United States, they can work there, and they can do everything on the surface of these messages that they usually have to go to Canada or America?"
In the summer of 2009, Honduras suffered from a violent constitutional crisis.
In the next run-up election, Pepe Lobo won in a recurrent whose program prescribed both renews and relication.
He asked Octavio to become a leader.
In the meantime, I was preparing for a talk at TEDGlobal.
Through improvement, probation and by studying consumers, I tried to reduce this complicated concept of charter City to the essential elements.
The first point is the importance of laws, laws that determine that you can't disturb existing residential owners.
We pay a lot of attention to new technologies, but for progress, it requires technologies and laws, and it's usually the laws that keep us back.
In the fall of 2010, a friend from Guatemala sent Octavio the link to the TEDTalk.
And then he showed him Javier.
Both of them called me.
And they said, "Let's present this to the head of our country."
So we met in December at a hotel meeting room in Miami.
I tried to make it clear how valuable cities are, how much more valuable they are than they cost.
And I used this graph to show you how valuable Rohland is in a place like New York. Think of a land in some cases worth thousands of dollars per square meter.
But it was a pretty abstract discussion in a moment when there was a pause, Octavio said, "Paul, maybe we could look at the TEDTalk."
So the TEDTalk suggested in a very simple form that a charter city is a place that is beginning to be unused country, a founding contract that imposes the laws that govern there, and the people are willing to decide whether to live under those rules or not.
That's why I was asked by the President of Honduras who said that we have to do this project, that it's important, and that this is the way to move our country forward.
I was asked to come to Tegucigalpa and give a talk on the fourth and fifth of January.
So I've given another talk full of facts, which have a graph like this, which tries to highlight that if you want to create a lot of value in a city, it has to be a very large city.
This is a picture of the city of Denver, and the sketches represent the new airport that was built in Denver.
Just this airport has a hundred square kilometers area.
So I tried to convince Hondurans of this, if you want to build a new city, you have to start with an area of at least 1,000 square kilometers.
That's over 250 thousand acres.
So everybody applauded.
The audience's faces were very serious and attentive.
The head of Congress came onto the stage and said, "Professor Romer, thank you very much for your talk, but maybe we could look at the TEDTalk.
I have it on my laptop here."
So I sat down, and they played the TEDTalk.
And I've come to the conclusion that a new city offers people new possibilities.
There would be a chance to live in a city that would be in Honduras, instead of hundreds of miles away in the north.
And a new city also includes new opportunities for leaders.
The government leaders in Honduras would depend on foreigners' aid, they could benefit from their shareholders who would support them by making the law for this charter and by doing so that everybody can trust that the charter is actually being conducted.
And the insight of President Lobo was that the confidence of the sequel I thought about as a way to get the foreign investors to come and build this city could be equivalent to all parties in Honduras who have suffered from fear and mistrust for many years.
We went to an area.
This picture is from this place.
It's about a thousand square kilometers.
And shortly after that, on January 19th, they voted for a constitutional change in Congress to have a constitutional policy that is considered for special development areas.
In a country which has just faced a fierce crisis, Congress elected for this constitutional change with 124 to a voice.
All parties, all reformations of society, backed this.
To be part of the constitution, it has to be approved twice by Congress.
On February 17th, the second time it was approved at a voice of 114.
Unmittelable after that election, between the 21st and the 24th of February, a delegation of about 30 dogrs traveled to the two places in the world that were most interested in getting into the housing market.
The one place is South Korea.
This is a picture of a big, new city center that was built in Southern Korea big as the city center of Boston.
Everything you can see in this picture was built within four years after it took four years to get the permits.
The other place that was very interested in building cities is Singapore.
There have been two cities built in China already, and the third one is in preparation.
So if you're basically thinking about this, this is where we are today.
They've already got a building block, and they're already looking at that area for the second city.
It's already been working on a legal system that managers are allowed to participate, and it's also been working on an external legal system.
A country has already offered its Supreme Court as a court for the occupational occupation of the courtship system there.
Cities designers and builders are very interested.
They even raise funding.
One of the things you already know has been cracked; there's a lot of tenants.
There's a lot of businesses that would like to inhabit in America, especially in a place where there's a free trade zone, and there's a lot of people who would like to live there.
Around the world, there are 700 million people who report that they want to live in a different place.
One million people are leaving Latin America every year and moving into the United States.
A lot of them are dads who are forced to let their families go back and look for work -- sometimes they're single moms who need to make enough money to make food and clothing.
Unfortunately, sometimes it's kids who are trying to find their parents that they haven't seen in some cases for a decade.
So what is it for an idea to think about, in Honduras, building a completely new city?
Or even managing these cities, or building hundreds of them around the world?
So what is it for an idea to make sure that every family has a choice between several cities that are competing for new residents?
This is an idea worth spreading.
My friends from Honduras asked me to say, thank you TED.
You know how many decisions do you make on a typical day?
You know how many decisions do you make in a typical week?
I recently did a survey of over 2,000 Americans, and the average number of decisions that make, according to a typical American on a day is 70.
And also, recently, a study of CEOs, where they studied CEOS for a week.
And these scientists have just documented the various themes that these CEOs have engaged in, and how much time they've spent making decisions about the themes.
And what they've found is that the average CEO is busy at 139 tasks a week.
Each one of these subjects, of course, was made up of many, many smaller decisions.
Fifty percent of their decisions were made in nine minutes or less.
Only for about 12 percent of their decisions they needed an hour or more of their time.
Think about your own decisions.
Do you know how many decisions do you make in the nine-minute category against those in the one-hour category?
How good are you thinking about making decisions about this?
Today I want to talk about one of the biggest decision-making problems in our modern time, the decision-making problem.
I want to talk about the problem and some possible solutions.
Now, when I talk about this problem, I'm going to ask you some questions, and I want to know your answers.
If I ask you a question, raise, because I'm blind, just your hand if you want to burn some calories.
So first of all, if I ask you, if I ask you a question, and their answer is yes, So my first question today is: Are you ready to hear something about the decision-making problem?
Thank you very much.
When I was a graduate student at Stanford University, I went to this very, very exclusive grocery store, at least at the time, it was really exclusive.
It was a store called Draeger's.
This business, it was almost like a amusement park.
They had 250 different kinds of mustard and dining, and over 500 different kinds of fruits and vegetables, and more than two dozen different kinds of water -- and that was at a time when we actually drank the litation water.
I loved going to this business, but at one point I asked myself, well, how come you never buy anything?
Here's the olive oil.
They had over 75 different kinds of olive oil, including those that were embedded in chains that came from a thousand years of old olive trees.
So one day I decided to go to the Filialleiter, and I asked the director, "Is this model that you really offer people all these options?"
And he showed the bus loads of tourists who would come every day and usually have their cameras on them.
We decided to do an experiment, and we chose mastcom for our experiment.
Here's her Marmeladen Gang.
They had 348 different kinds of Marmlade.
We created a little disc of coordination directly at the entrance to the business.
We've put six different flavors there, or 24 different flavor directions, and we've looked at two things: One, I guess what would be more people to stand up and try Marmlade?
There are more people left when they were 24, about 60 percent than if they were six, about 40 percent.
And after that, we looked at what case people were more like buying a glass of marble.
Now we saw the reverse effect.
Of the people who stayed when they were 24, only three percent of them actually bought a glass of marble.
Of the people who are left when they were six, well, now we saw that 30 percent of them actually bought a glass of marble.
Well, if you do the math, the people bought six times more of a glass of marble, they had six choices than if you had 24 choices.
Now, deciding not to buy a glass of marble is probably good for us -- at least it's good for our waist -- but it turns out that the decision-making problem also affects us in very meaningful decisions.
We don't choose to decide, even if it's against our own best interests.
So the theme of the day: financial savings.
I'm going to describe to you a study that I did with Gur Huberman, Emir Kamenica, Wei Jang, where we looked at savings plans for retirement from almost a million Americans from about 650 plans all across the United States.
And what we looked at was whether the number of fundraisers that were possible for a 401 plan, the 401 plan, the probability of saving more for tomorrow.
And what we found was that there was actually a context.
So in these plans, we had about 657 plans that would offer people something between two and 59 different funds.
And what we found was that the more fund was offered that, in fact, participation rates were lower.
Now if you look at the extremes, the plans that offered two funds had a participation rate in the '70s -- still not as high as we want.
In the plans that offered nearly 60 funds, the participation rate now dropped to about the most powerful percentage.
Now it turns out that even if you get close to participate, if there are more choices available, even then, there are negative consequences.
So the people who decided to participate more tend to have the more choices available to them, the more they chose to vote for stock and fund.
The more choices available to them, the more they put all their money into pure money market accounts.
None of those extreme decisions are part of the decisions someone would recommend if we care about their future financial well-being.
Well, in the last 10 years, we've seen three essential negative consequences with people getting more choices and more choices.
They make the decision -- they make the decision, even if it's against their own best interest.
They make worse decisions -- worse financial decisions and worse medical decisions.
They're more likely to decide for things that make them less satisfied, even if they make it objectively better.
The main reason for this is that maybe we enjoy looking at these giant shelves full of Mayonaise, mustard, itsig and it's sticky, but we can't really draw the comparisons and the distinctions and actually choose something out of the fantastic deal.
So what I want to suggest to you today is four simple techniques -- techniques that we've been testing on different types and different research sites -- that you can just apply to your business.
First of all, limit.
You've heard it before, but it's never been more true than today, it's less.
People are always worried when I say, "Close."
You're always worried that you lose shelf space.
But in fact, we're seeing it more and more, that if you're willing to narrow down, and the relevant opportunities are going to go, well, there's an increase in sales, it's going to cut the costs, and there's an improvement in decision-making.
When Proctor and Gamble cut the different heads and the different species of 26 down to 15, you saw an increase in sales by 10 percent.
When the Golden Cat Corporation released her 10 of the worst selling catflowers, you saw that the profits increase by 87 percent -- a score of both, the increase in sales and the reduced cost.
You know, the average superpower today offers you 45,000 products.
A typical Walmart today offers you 100,000 products.
But the ninth biggest supermarket, which is now the ninth biggest supermarket in the world, is Aldi, and they only offer you 1,400 products -- a kind of tomato sauce in doses.
Now in the saving world, I think one of the best examples that came out of the market recently, about how to best use choice, was something that David Laibson has done very well with, it's a program that's offered at Harvard.
Every single Harvard employee is automatically participating in a lifetime fund.
Those who really want to make a choice are offered 20 funds, not 300 or more funds.
You know, people often say, "I don't know how to limit it.
It's all important opportunities."
And the first thing I ask the employees is, "Tell me how the possibilities are different from each other.
And if your employees can't stand them apart, your customers can't be."
Well, before we started today, I had a conversation with Gary.
And Gary said that he would be willing to offer an all-powerful vacation to the world's finest road.
Here's a description of the street.
And I'd like to read it to you.
And now I'm going to give you a couple of seconds to read them, and then I'm going to ask you to clap if you're willing to take Gary's offer.
Okay. Everybody who's ready to take Gary's offer.
Are they all?
All right, let me show you a little bit more about this.
They knew it was a trick to do?
Well, who is ready for this journey.
I think I may have heard more hands.
Good.
The fact is that you saw objectively, the first time you had more information than the second time, but I would like to make a guess that you felt more real than the second time you were.
Because the images made it real for you.
Which brings me to the second technology that helps you deal with the problem of decision-making, is convergence.
It's about people, in order to understand the difference between possibilities, understand what the consequences are associated with the individual possibilities, and that those consequences have to be vivid and concrete.
Why do people spend an average of 15 to 30 percent more if you use an EC card or a credit card than you do in cash?
Because it doesn't feel real money.
And it turns out that when you make it feel concrete, it's a very good tool for people to save more.
So in a study I did with Shlomo Benartzi and Alessandro Previtero, we did a study with the people at ING -- employees who all worked for ING -- and these people were all in a gathering where they signed their participation for their 401 plan.
And during that meeting, we've let that meeting just as it was always, we've added a small thing.
The small thing we added was we asked people to just think about all the positive things that would happen in their lives if they were going to save money.
In which we did this simple thing, there was a rise in participation by 20 percent, and there was a rise in the number of people who were willing to save or a four percent increase in the amount that they were willing to pay for the savings account.
Third technology: Categorization.
We can handle more categories than we can handle more choices.
Here's, for example, a study we did in a magazine.
It turns out that in the Middle Worlds, up and down in the northeastern area, the number between 331 different types of magazines goes up to 664 magazines.
But you know what?
If I show you 600 magazines and I share them in 10 categories, or I show you 400 magazines and I share them in 20 categories, you think I gave you more choice and better choice experience than I gave you the 400 to the one if I gave you the 600.
Because the categories tell me how to put them apart.
Here's two different jewelry clips.
One is called "Jazz," and the other is called "swing."
If you think the one on the left is Swing, and the one on the right is Jazz, you clap your hands.
Okay, there's a couple.
If you think the one on the left is Jazz and the one on the right is Swing, please clap.
Okay, a couple more.
Well, it turns out you're right.
The one on the left is Jazz, and the one on the right is Swing, but you know what?
This is a high-resolution cemeterma.
The categories have to tell you something, not the set of choices.
And you often see this problem when you look at the long lists of this whole fund.
Who do you want to tell?
My fourth technology: conditions for complexity.
It turns out that we can actually deal with more information than we think we just have to simplify you.
We need to increase complexity.
Let me show you an example of what I mean.
Let's take a very, very complicated decision: buying a car.
Here's a German car manufacturer that gives you the opportunity to completely reconfigure your car.
You have to make 62 different decisions to design your car completely.
Now these decisions are different in the number of choices that they provide for choice.
Car colors, outside the car -- I have 56 choices.
Movements, gears -- four possibilities.
So what I do now is I change the order in which the decisions appear.
Half the customers are going to go from the many possibilities, 56 car colors, to the slightest possibilities, four gears.
The other half of the customers are going from the low power, four gears, to the 56 car colors, lots of possibilities.
What do I look at?
How interested you are.
If you're constantly using the standard choice in the decision, that means you're being overwhelmed, that's called, I'll leave you.
What you're finding is that the people who go from many to the few choices they can make, over and over again, choose the standard choice.
We lose them.
Go from the few choices to the many, they remain there.
It's the same information. It's the same number of possibilities.
The only thing I've done is I've changed the order in which this information is presented.
When I start with the simple one, I learn how to choose.
Even though the gears are picking, there's nothing to tell me about my own preferences at the interior, it's still preparing to pick me up.
I'm also really excited about the big product that I'm putting together, and so I'm willing to motivate myself to be interested in doing that.
Let me summarize.
I've told you about four techniques that reduce the problem of decision-making -- limit -- get rid of the extra alternatives; specific -- do it real; categorize -- we can handle more categories, less possibilities; prepare for complexity.
Every one of these techniques that I'm going to describe to you today is to help you manage the opportunities -- good for you, you can use for yourself, good for the people you offer services.
Because I think the key to the best choice is that you're selectively choosing.
And the more we are at choosing, the better we will be able to practice the art of choosing.
Thank you very much.
Hi. I'm Kevin Allocca, the trends manager on YouTube. I professionally watch YouTube videos.
That's right.
Today we want to talk about how video is becoming viral, and then why this is really important.
We all want to be stars -- celebrities, singers, comedians -- when I was young, it seemed so infinitely difficult.
But Web videos have allowed us all to become insanely famous to all of our creative activities in some of the culture of our world.
Every single one of you could be famous on the Internet to the next Saturday.
But on YouTube, over 48 hours of video is uploaded every minute.
Again, just a tiny percentage ever gets viral and is looked at thousands of times, and that's the cultural moment.
So how does this work?
Three things: Tastemaker, participation participation and the unexpected.
Well, here we go.
Oh my God. Oh my God.
Oh my God!
Whoa!
Ohhhhh, wow.
Last year, Bear Vasquez sent this video that he had filmed before his house in Yosemite National Park.
In 2010, it had been viewed 23 million times.
This chart shows what it looked like when the video was first popular last summer.
In fact, we didn't want to make a viral video for ours.
He just wanted to share a rainbow.
Because you can do that when you're called Yosemite Mountain Bear.
He had uploaded a lot of natural video.
And this video was actually already aired in January.
What happened here?
There was Jimmy Kimmel coming.
Jimmy Kimmel sent the tweet that made the video so popular in the end.
Because Tastemaker like Jimmy Kimmel introduces us to new and interesting things, and they show you a big audience.
It's vendredi, vendredi. Goda goes down vendredi. Everybody's looking forward to the weekend, weekend, weekend. Freitag, Friday. Gettin' down vendredi. You wouldn't have thought we'd have this conversation without talking about this video, I hope.
Rebecca Black's "Friday" is one of the most popular videos of the year.
It's been viewed nearly 200 million times this year.
This is what the graph looked like.
Just like "Double Rainbow," it seems to have come out of nowhere.
What happened that day?
Well, it was Friday, right.
If you want to know this, these other spikes are also Fridays.
But what about that day, that particular Friday?
Well, Tosh.0 set it up, lots of blogs started writing about it.
Michael J. Nelson, from the Mystery Science Theater, was a first one to make a joke on Twitter.
What's important is that a single person or group of keymakers took a position, shared with a large audience and began to accelerate the process.
Then this community of people who shared this big insiderwitz started talking about it and playing around with it.
Now there are 10,000 parodias of "Friday" on YouTube.
Already in the first seven days, there was a parody for every single week.
Unlike the one-page conversation of the 20th century, the participation of the community is to become part of this phenomenon -- either by spreading it or making something new out of it.
"Nyan Cat" is animation and music in endless loop.
That's it, very simple.
This year it's been viewed almost 50 million times.
And if you think that's crazy, you should know that there's a three-hour version of this that's been viewed four million times.
Even cats watch this video.
Cats look at cats looking at this video.
What's important is the creativity that exists in the Internet culture of the techies and the geeks.
There were remixes.
Someone made an old-fashioned version of it.
And then it became international.
A whole remix community shot out of the ground that made it from a stupid joke to something that we can all participate in.
Today we don't just find pleasure in something we do.
Who could have predicted all this?
Who could have predicted "Double Rainbow" or Rebecca Black or "Nyan Cat"?
What scripts could you have written in which it's all in?
In a world where every minute, two days of video is uploaded, only really unique and unexpected can come out of the way that the videos were mentioned.
I admit I was not particularly interested when a friend said I should look at this great video of a guy protesting bicycle tickets in New York.
I got a ticket because I didn't drive on the wheel, but often there's disability that doesn't make you very well on the wheel.
Since this was completely surprising and humorous, Casey Niestats' idea was viewed five million times.
This approach is for all new things that we do creatively.
And all of this leads to a big question ...
What does that mean?
Ohhhh.
What does that mean?
Tastemaker, creative participants, completely unexpected, are the characteristics of a new kind of media and culture that each has access to and determines the audience's popularity.
As I said, one of the biggest stars right now -- Justin Bieber -- was starting at YouTube.
No one has to give your ideas green light.
And today we all feel as owners of our pop culture.
And these are not the characteristics of old media, and they're barely tapping into the media of today, but they're going to determine the entertainment of the future.
Thank you very much.
How can I talk in 10 minutes about the connection between women over three generations, and how the astonishing strength of this connectedness manifested in the lives of a four-year-old girl, when she was more than 30 years ago with her little sister, her mother and her grandmother, five days and nights, sitting together in a small boat in the sea of China, a connection that stuck in the life of this little girl, and never disappeared -- this little girl who lives now in San Francisco and talks to you today?
The story is not over.
It's a puzzle that's added.
I want to tell you about some of the puzzle pieces.
Imagine the first piece: a man who burns his life's work.
He's a poet, a writer, a man whose whole life has been held together by the simple hope of unity and freedom of his home.
Keep him in the community's march in Saigon, and he has to confess that his life has been a single waste.
The words, as long as his friends, were now aware of his.
He moved back into silence.
He died, broken by history.
He's my grandfather.
I never met him personally.
But our lives are so much more than our memories.
My grandmother has never let me forget his life.
I had to make sure that it wasn't free, and it was my job to learn that history didn't really try to crush us, but we overlay it.
The next piece of the puzzle is how a boat comes out in the early dawn on the sea.
My mother Mai was 18 when her father died -- already in an arranged marriage, already with two little girls.
For her, her life had challenged her: the escape of her family and a new life in Australia.
It was completely disconnected that she could fail with.
After a four-year-old and filming Saga, a boat is still on the sea as a fishing boat.
Every adult was aware of the risks.
They were terrified of pirates, rape and death.
Like most adults on the boat, my mother wore a little poison bottle.
Once I had a chance, my sister and I would have drunk them and my grandmother.
My first memories are of this boat -- the steady mill of the engine, the sting of any wave on the Bug, the soft and empty horizon.
I don't remember the pirates who came many times, but have been fooled by the death penalty of the men on our boat, or the failure of the engine, who didn't want to start six hours.
But I remember the lights of the oil rig off the coast of Malays, and the young man who collapsed and died, the end of the journey was too much for him, and the taste of the first apple that gave me one of the men on the platform.
No apple ever cried that way again.
After three months in a refugee camp, we landed in Melbourne.
And the next puzzle is four women in three generations who are building a new life together.
We went down to Footscray, one of the working-class suburbs whose population consists of immigrants.
In those ancient middle-class suburbs whose existence was completely unknown to me, there was no claim in Footscray.
The smells of the shop doors came out of the rest of the world.
And the cracks in broken English were exchanged between people who had one thing in common: they started again.
My mother worked on farms, then on a assembly line in a car factory, six days, double layers.
She somehow managed to find the time to express herself English and IT qualifications.
We were poor.
Every dollar was separated, put in more English and math education, no matter what we had to do for it, and usually the new things that came from secondhand.
Two pairs of trips to school, each to detect the holes in the other.
A school uniform to the ankles, because it had to reach six years.
And there were the rare but painful whispers of "succe" and "succe" and "success" and "success," and "successives," "success, go home."
Back home where?
Something drifted in me.
There was a meeting of reconciliation, and a quiet voice said, "I'm going to walk you out of the way."
My mother, my sister and I slept in the same bed.
My mother was exhausted every night, but we told each other about our day, and we heard about the movements of our grandmother in the house.
My mother suffered from nightmares from the boat.
And it was my task to stay awake every night until their nightmares came to wake them up.
She opened up a computer business, then did a cosmetic, and she opened up a business.
And the women came with their stories about men who didn't build the change, angry and implausible, and troubled kids caught between two worlds.
Lests and sponsors were seeking.
Centers were built.
I lived in parallel worlds.
In one of them, I was the classic Asian student who introduced unobtrusive demands to himself.
In the other hand, I was involved in unsafe life, which was the tragic scars of violence, abuse of drugs and insulating.
But so many people got help over the years.
And for that help, I was raised in law school last year as a young Australian of the year.
And I was catapulted from one puzzle piece to the next, and the edges didn't fit together.
Tan Le, anonymous residents from Footscray, was now Tan Le, refugee and social activist who was invited to lectures in places they had never heard of, and in homes whose existence they could never have imagined.
I wasn't familiar with labels.
I didn't know how to use the best thing.
I didn't know how to talk about wine.
I didn't know how to talk about anything.
I wanted to go back to the routine and personality of the life of an unknown suburb -- a grandmother, a mother and two daughters who locked up every day for 20 years by telling each other the stories of their day and telling each other, we still have three in the same bed.
I told my mother, I wouldn't do that.
She reminded me that now I was as old as she was when we climbed the boat.
No had never been an option.
"Just do it," she said. "and be not what you are not."
So I talked about youthfulness and education, and the neglect of marginalization and disrespecting.
And the more open I talk, the more I should talk.
I met people in all walks of life, so many of them did what they loved, lived on the limits of what they could do.
And even though I graduated from that, I realized that I couldn't pursue a career in law.
There had to be another puzzle.
And I realized at the same time that it's okay to be an outsider, a freshman, new in the picture -- not just okay, but something you have to be grateful for, maybe a gift of the boat.
Because listening can be so easy to collapse the horizons, it can be so easy to accept the assumptions of the environment.
I have now gone out of my comfort zone to know that, yes, the world is going to break apart, but not the way you fear it.
The possibilities that were not allowed were extraordinarily encouraged.
There was an energy, an relentless optimism, a strange mixture of humility and scales.
So I followed my gut feeling.
I collected a small team of people around me for which the "Don't go" set up a compelling challenge.
For a year we didn't have a cent.
At the end of a day, I was cooking a huge pot of soup that we shared.
We worked late at night.
Most of our ideas were crazy, but they were a few brilliant people, and we made the breakthrough.
I made the decision to make in the United States.
Just after a trip there.
My gut feeling again.
Three months later, I was moved, and the adventure continued.
Before I finish the talk, I want to tell you about my grandmother.
She grew up at a time when Confucius was the social norm and the local Mandarin was the most important person.
Life hadn't changed for centuries.
Her father died soon after she was born.
Her mother moved her alone.
When she was 17, she became a Mandarin woman whose mother beat her.
Without her husband's support, she caused a Senate by putting him in front of the court and being an acclimate in her own case, and a much larger sensation than she won.
"Don't go," it's like unwahr.
I was sitting in a hotel room in Sydney when she died, a thousand kilometers away in Melbourne.
I looked through the shower wall and saw it standing on the other side.
I knew she had come to pass.
My mother called me a few minutes later.
A few days later, we went to a Buddhist temple in Footscray and we sat around her sarg.
We told her stories, and we assured her we were still with her.
At midnight the monk came and said he had to close the sarg.
My mother asked us to touch her hand.
She asked the monk, "Why is her hand so warm, and the rest of her is so cold?"
"Because you've been giving them tomorrow," he said.
"You didn't let them go."
If there's a band in our family, it's going through women.
If you look at who we were and how life shaped us, we can now see that the men who might have come to our lives would have come to the conclusion.
The defeat would have been too simple.
Now I'd like to have my own children, and I'm thinking about the boat again.
Who would ever want one?
Yes, I'm afraid of privilege, of ease, of justice.
Can I give them a bug in their lives that defuses each wave, the unconserved, steady mill of the engine, the wide horizon that doesn't guarantee anything?
I don't know.
But if I could give this, and I could make it safe, I would do it.
Moreover, Tan's mother is here in the fourth or five row.
I'm here to share my photography with you.
Is it photography?
Because this is, of course, a picture you can't take with your camera.
Yet, my interest in photography started when I received my first digital camera at age 15.
I combined it with my previous taste of drawing, but it was a little bit different, because using the camera, the process was more about planning.
And when you take a picture with a camera, the process ends when you press the trigger.
So for me, photography seemed more about being in the right place at the right time.
I believed everybody could.
So I wanted to create something else, something where the process starts when the triggers are crushed.
Photos like this: a construction site along a much moving street.
But it has an unexpected twist.
And yet remain a realistic level.
Or photos like this -- dark and colorful at the same time, but all with the shared goal of keeping a realistic level.
When I say reality, I mean photo reality.
Because, of course, it's not something you can really capture, but I want to make it look like it could have been on a photo.
Photos where you have to think for a brief moment in order to figure out the trick.
So it's more about capturing an idea than really a moment.
But what is the trick that makes it look realistic?
Is it about the details or the colors?
Is it about light?
What creates the illusion?
Sometimes the perspective is the illusion.
But in the end, it's about how we interpret the world, and how it can be made in a two-dimensional space.
It's not about what is realistic, but what we think is realistic.
So I think the basics are very simple.
I see it as a puzzle of reality where you can take different pieces and put them together to create an alternative reality.
And let me show you a simple example.
We have three perfectly imaginable physical objects that we can all relate to in a three-dimensional world.
But combined in a certain way, they can create something that still looks three-dimensional than it could exist.
But at the same time, we know that's not possible.
So we overlist our brains, because our brain simply doesn't accept that it doesn't really make sense.
And I see the same process in combining photographs.
It's really just about combining different realities.
So the things that make a picture realistic, I think it's the things that we don't think about, the things around us in our daily lives.
But when we combine pictures, it's really important to think about it, because otherwise they just kind of look wrong.
So I would say that there are three simple rules to follow a realistic result.
As you can see, these are not three special images.
But they can create something special like this.
So the first rule is that combined pictures should have the same perspective.
Secondly, combined photos should have the same lighting art.
And these two pictures meet these two requirements -- from the same height and the same lighting.
Third, it's about making it impossible to tell where the individual images start and end by connecting them seamlessly.
It's impossible to tell you how the photo was actually put together.
So, by combining color, contrast and brightness on the edges, the individual frames add up, photographic threads, like field depths, distinguished colors and disturbances, we bend the boundaries between the different images and make them look like a single photo, even though a picture can basically contain hundreds of layers.
Here's another example.
You might think that's just a landscape picture, and it's been manipulated under the ground.
But this picture is actually completely composed from photographs of different locations.
I personally find that it's easier to create a place than to find a place, because you don't have to compromise the ideas in your head.
But it requires a lot of planning.
And when I had this idea in the winter, I knew that I needed several months to plan them to find the different places for the pieces of the puzzle.
For example, the fish had been recorded on an aerial flight.
The waterfront comes from another place.
The underwater camp comes from a quarry.
And yeah, I actually moved the house up on the island red to make it look like a Swedish one.
In order to achieve a realistic result, I've seen this work, so let's move beyond planning.
I always start with a sketch, an idea.
And then it's about the combination of different images.
And here's every piece that's very well planned.
And then if you do good images, the result can be quite beautiful, and also quite realistic.
So it's all available tools, and the only thing that limits us is our imagination.
Thank you very much.
I'd like to talk to you about why so many electronic health projects fail.
And I think the most important point is that we stopped talking to our patients.
And one of the things that we introduced to the Radboud universe was to have a major audience.
She's not particularly scientific about this -- she puts a cup of coffee or tea and asks the patients, the families, the relatives, "What's going on?
How can we help you?"
And we think we want to think that this is one of the main problems of why everyone -- maybe most of the electronic health projects failed, because we stopped listening.
This is my WLANWaage. It's a very simple thing.
She's got a button, an hour off.
And every morning I jump on it.
And yeah, I have a task, as you might recognize.
I put my task at 95 kilos.
It works quite simply: every time I jump on the scale, it sends my data to Google Health as well.
And they're also called there by my general physician so that he can see where my weight problem is, not just in the moment that I need kardiologic support or something, but also looking into the past.
There's something else.
You might know, I have over 4,000 followers on Twitter.
So every morning I jump to my WLANWaage, and people talk to me before I sit in the car, "To lunch rather than a little salad today, Lucien."
But that's the latest thing that can happen, because that's the band-tail; it's group-tailed; it can help patients because that could be used against obesity, or it could prevent patients from smoking.
But it could also be used to get people out of their chairs, and get them to play together some kind of game in order to control their health better.
Next week, this is the market.
There's going to be this little blood pressure machine that you decide on an iPhone or something.
And it's going to allow people to measure their blood pressure from home, send it to their doctor and share it with others for something more than 100 dollars.
At this point, patients come into play. They can't just take control again, be captains on their own ship, but they can also help us with healthcare in the face of the challenges we face, and the cost explosion of health care, double demand, and so on.
Do the methods that are easy to use and begin to arm patients in the team.
And you can do that by doing that, but also by crowdsourcing.
And one of the things we did, I want to share with you through a short video.
We all have navigation systems in our cars.
Maybe even in our cell phones.
We know exactly where all the ATMs are around Maastricht.
We know one more thing about all the gas stations.
And sure enough, we can find fast food chains.
But where would the next AED be to help this patient?
We fought around, and nobody knew.
No one knew where to find the next life-saving AED at that moment.
So, what did we do? We did crowdsourcing in the Netherlands.
We set up a website and asked a crowd of people, "If you see an AED, please share where it is, when it's on," because sometimes it's closed during business times, of course.
And over 10,000 AEDs have already been registered in the Netherlands.
The next step was to find the apps for this.
And we created an iPad app.
We've developed an app for Layar, augmented reality to find these AEDs.
And if you're in a city like Maastricht and someone collapses, you can use your iPhone, and in the next weeks also your Microsoft sandwich to find the next AED that can save lives.
And today, we would like to do this not just as an AED4U, as the product is called, but as an AED4US.
And we want to take this to a global level.
And we ask our colleagues around the world, from other universities, to help us behave like nodes to crowdsource these AEDs around the world.
And if you're on vacation and someone collapses, whether it's your own connection or anyone else, you can find an AED like this.
The other thing that we'd like to ask is that companies around the world are helping us do this AED.
These could be creative services, or technicians, for example, just to make sure that the signed AED is still in its place.
Please help us take care of this and try to take health care of not just a little bit better, but put it in your hand.
Thank you very much.
Today I'm going to talk about unexpected discoveries.
I work in solar technology business.
And my little startup would like us to do something about conservation by ...
... it's paying attention to crowdsourcing.
Here's a short video of what we do.
Oh. One moment.
It might take it until it's charged.
Now -- we can just skip over this -- I'm just going to skip the video instead ...
No.
This is not ...
Okay.
Solar technology is ...
Oh, my time is over?
Okay. Thank you very much.
So a few years ago, I started a program to get the stars in technology and design to take a year out of time and work in an environment that's pretty much everything they really hate, we let them work in government.
The program is called "Code for America," and it's kind of like the Peace Corps for Computerfreaks.
We select a number of membres every year and we let them work with city administrators.
Instead of sending them to the Third World, we send them to Rathauss.
And they developed great apps, working with urban employees.
But what they really do is show what is possible with technology today.
So meet Al.
Al is a fire hydrant in the city of Boston.
Here's what it looks like he's looking for a date, but what he's really looking for is somebody who's messing up when he's messing up, because he knows he's not very good at fire control when he's covered by a meter of snow.
How did he get to look for help in this particular way?
We had a team of Fellows in Boston last year doing the "Code for America."
They were there in February, and it hurt a lot last February.
And they realized that the city would never lift these fire hydrants.
But one particular fellow, a guy named Erik Michaels-Ober, he noticed something else, and that was that the residents were taking the sidewalks out in front of these parts.
So he did what any good developer would do, he wrote an app.
It's a nice little app where you can adopt a fire hydrant.
You toss him open when he's screaming.
If you do that, you can give him a name, and he called the first Al.
If you don't do that, someone can take it away.
So there's a nice little game dynamic.
This is a modest little app.
It's probably the smallest of the 21 apps that the Fellows have written in the last year.
But it does something that no other government technology does.
It spreads out quickly.
There's this guy in the I.T. Department of the city of Honolulu who saw that he could use this app, not for snow, but for the citizens of the tsunami to adopt.
It's very important that these tsunamis work, but people steal the batteries.
So he got citizens to check them.
And then Seattle decided to use the app to get the citizens to clean the clogged gullys.
And Chicago just introduced it to people who are the geeks when they're screaming.
We now know nine cities that are planning to use this app.
And it's spread, organically, of course.
If you know something about government technology, you know it doesn't usually work that way.
Software extraction is usually a few years.
We had a team that worked on a project in Boston last year that took three people two and a half months.
It was about a method where parents can figure out which ones are the right public schools for their children.
We were told later that if it were to go on the normal channels, it would have taken over two years and it would have cost over two million dollars.
And that's nothing yet.
There's a project right now in California justiz that's costing the taxpayer two billion dollars, and it doesn't work.
And there are projects like this on every level of government.
So an app that's written in a couple of days, and then spread out from the waist, is sort of a suss before the Bug in the government's institution.
It shows how the government could work better -- no more like a private company, how many people think it should work.
Not even like a tech company, but rather like the Internet itself.
And that means free access, that means open and productive.
And that's important.
But more importantly, this app is that it represents a new generation that tackles the problem of government -- not as the problem of a curved institution, but as a problem of collective action.
And that's a very good news, because it turns out we're very good in collective action with digital technology.
Now there's a large community of people who make the tools that we need to put things together effectively.
It's not just "Code for America" Fellows; there are hundreds of people all over the country who stand up and write government apps every day in their own communities.
They didn't give up the government.
They're awfully frustrated with her, but they don't complain about it, they fix it.
And these people know something that we've lost out of our eyes.
And that's when you're all aware of your feelings about politics and the snake at work, and all the other things that we're really excited about are government, at the core, in the words of Tim O'Reilly, "What we're doing together that we can't do alone."
Today, a lot of people have given up the government.
And if you're one of those people, I want you to think about it because things change.
Politics don't change; the government is in change.
And because, ultimately, the government removes the power from us -- remember, "We the people?" -- as we think about it, it's going to affect how this change happens.
I didn't know very much about government when I started this program.
And like a lot of people, I thought the government was mainly about choosing people in an office.
Now, after two years, I've come to the conclusion that it's mostly about communics, about thylacines.
This is the call center for service and information.
You usually get out when you call into your town 311.
If you ever have the chance to work in your city center, like our fellow Scott Silverman as part of the program -- in fact, they all do -- you'll see that the people who call the government for many different problems, including that there's a bag in their house.
So Scott gets this call.
He typed "Beutelratte" into the official database.
And he doesn't really have an idea. He starts with the veterinarian.
And finally, he says, "Look, can you just open up all the doors in your house and play very loud music and see if the livestock is going up?"
And that worked. Give Scott a hand.
But that wasn't the end of the Tasmanian devil.
Boston doesn't just have a call center.
It has an app, a web and cell phone app, called "Citizens Connect."
We didn't write this app.
This is the work of very smart people at the New Urban Mechanics office in Boston.
One day -- this is an actual report -- this came in: "Beutelratte in my garbage can't tell if she's dead.
How do I get them removed?"
But what happened with "Citizens Connect" is different.
Scott went from being human to being.
But in "Citizens Connect" it's all public, so everyone can see it.
And in this case, he saw a neighbor.
And the next entry we got was, "I went over there, found the garbage can behind the house.
Any of you? Yes. Any of you? Yap.
Turned the trashcan on the side. Go home.
Good night, sweet lady."
Pretty simple.
That's great. Here's the digital hit the physical.
And it's also a good example of how to get the government to crowdsourcing.
But it's also a great example of government as a platform.
And I don't mean necessarily a technical definition of the platform here.
I'm talking more about a platform for people to help themselves and to help others.
A citizen helped a different citizen, but the government played a central role here.
They connect these two people.
And you could have associated them with state performance if they would have been needed, but a neighbor is a far better and cheaper alternative to state services.
If a neighbor helps the other, we strengthen our communities.
Let's call it the veterinarian, it costs a lot of money.
One of the most important things we need to think about is that government is not the same as politics.
And most people understand that, but they believe that one is the input of the other.
That our contribution to the system is choices.
How many times did we choose a political leader -- and sometimes we use a lot of energy to choose a new political leader -- and then we lean back and we expect the government to reflect our values and fulfill our needs, and then hasn't changed much?
That's because the government is like an ocean and politics is the top 15th.
And what's below that is what we call bureaucracy.
And we use that word with that contempt.
But it's this contempt that this thing that we have, and that we pay for, it's something that's working against us, something else, and then we turned on ourselves.
People seem to think politics is sexy.
If we want this institution to work for us, we need to make bureaucracy sexy.
Because that's where the actual government is taking place.
We need to get ourselves into the machinery of government.
So the OccupytheSEC movement has done it.
Did you see these guys?
It's a group of concerned citizens who've written a very detailed 325-page report that's an answer to the SEC master about the courtship of finance reform.
This is not politically active, this is bureaucratically active.
Well, for those of us who have given up the government, it's time for us to think about the world we want to leave our children.
You have to imagine the enormous challenges that they have to face.
Do we really believe that we're going to achieve what we need to do without improving an institution called all of us?
A government is absolutely necessary, but it has to get more efficient.
The good news is that technology makes it possible to fundamentally reframe the function of government in a way that can actually achieve something by strengthening society.
And there's a generation that's grown up with the Internet, and they know that it's not that hard to do things together, you just have to build the right systems.
Now the average age of our fellows is 28, so I'm, unfortunately, nearly a generation older than most of them.
This is a generation that grew up seeing her voice for granted.
They're not fighting this battle that we're all fighting to talk about, they're all allowed to speak.
They can make their opinion, on every channel at any time, and they do it.
So when they're faced with the government problem, they're not so concerned about using their voices.
They use their hands.
They use their hands to write applications that improve government work.
And these apps let us use our hands to improve our communities.
This could be to put a fire hydrant out there, throw a trashcan out of it, turn it upside down.
And sure enough, we could have rid of those fire hydrants all the time, and a lot of people do.
But these apps are like little digital memories that we're not just consumers, and we're not just consumers of the government who pay taxes and receive services.
We are more than that, we are citizens.
And we're not going to make government better until we improve citizenship.
So the question I have for all of you here: If it's about the big, important things that we need to do together, all together, we're going to be just a lot of voices, or are we going to be a lot of hands?
Thank you.
Normally, my role in explaining to people how wonderful the new technologies that are going to happen are going to be, and I thought, since I'm here among friends, I would tell you what I really think, and also trying to look back and understand what's really going on here, with these incredible jumps forwards that are so quick that we can barely maintain.
I'm going to start by showing you just one boring slide.
... Could you just give the slide a little bit.
This is a slide I randomly picked out of my folder.
I'm not talking about the details of the slide here, but rather the general shape.
This slide shows you data from an analysis of us about the performance of RISC processors versus the performance of a local area network.
The interesting thing here is that this slide, like the other one that we often find in our field, is a sort of straight line on a semi-log curve.
In other words, every step here corresponds to a potency in the performance scale.
And that's a new thing that we need to use this guy scale on semi-logarithmic curves in technology.
Something very odd happens here.
This is basically what I'm going to talk about here.
So, if you could turn on the lights again.
A little bit brighter, because I'm going to draw something on the paper right here.
Now, why do we draw graphs in technology on semi-log curves?
The reason for that is, if I drew it on a normal curve, where, say, this is years, the timeline of a kind, and this is a random piece of technology that I want to do with a graph, the graph is going to be silly.
They look like this.
And that doesn't tell us much.
Now, if I wanted to record another technology, let's say a transportation technology, then on the semi-logarithmic scale it would come very incomprehensible, in the form of a flat line.
But if something like this happens, it changes qualitative conditions.
So if transportation technology could go as fast as the microprocessor technology would go, we could go into a taxi, and in 30 seconds we would be in Tokyo.
But it's not that fast.
There's never been before in the history of technology development, this kind of recursive growth, which is increasing in scale every few years.
So the question I want to ask you now is, if you look at these exponential curves, you see, they don't go on forever.
It's not possible that everything evolves for forever and forever as quickly as it is now.
There are two possibilities.
Either it's a classic Scurve like this, until something completely new comes out of it, or it's going to happen here.
That's kind of what it is.
Well, I'm an optimist, so I think something like this is going to happen.
Is that really, then that means we're right here in the middle of a transition.
We are here on this line, in a transition from the world to a new kind of world.
So the question I want to ask, and I often ask myself, is how is this new world going to be?
What is this new state that is beginning to take the world slowly?
Because the transition seems to be very, very confusing when you're in the middle of it.
When I was a kid, there was the future somewhere in the year 2000, and people often talked about what would happen in the year 2000.
Now we have a conference where people talk about the future, and you realize that the future is still in the year 2000.
Again, we're not going to go.
So in other words, the future has shrunk to a year every year since I'm in the world.
I think the reason for that is that we realize there's something going on.
The transition is happening. We can all feel it.
And we know right now that it just doesn't make sense to try to look 30 or 50 years into the future, because everything is so different that a simple bill of what we're doing just doesn't make sense at all.
So I want to talk about what that might be, that transition that we're in right now.
So to do that, I'm going to talk first about a couple of other things that really don't have to do with technology or computers.
Because I think in order to really understand this, we have to step back and look at the thing on a longer time scale.
And that's what I want to look at at at the time scale of Earth's life.
I think the whole picture makes sense when you divide it into a few billion steps.
So let's go back about two and a half billion years, and the Earth was a big, sterile rock with lots of chemicals floating on it.
Now if you look at the way these chemicals were organized, it gives us a pretty good picture of how they did it.
I also believe there are theories that begin to understand how everything started with RNA, but I'm going to tell you a simplified story of what it was that, at that time, little oil droplets woven around, which have different kinds of recipes for chemicals.
Some of these oil droplets had a particular combination of chemicals that allowed them to integrate and grow other chemicals.
All of them were like, they started to divide.
These little oil droplets were, in the sense, the most primitive form of cells.
However, these oil droplets weren't alive in the modern sense, because every single one of them was just a small, random recipe of chemicals.
And every time it divided, it spreads to unequal quantities of chemicals in it.
So each of these guys was a little bit different.
In fact, the droplets that were growing for the growth of optimal composition were faster than others and more integrated and more chemicals from one another and divided faster.
So these tended to survive longer, and they grew larger.
So this is just a very simple chemical form of life, but interestingly, when these droplets learned a trick about abstraction.
In any way that we don't fully understand, these droplets have learned the ability to write down information.
They've learned to store the cell's recipe as information, and that's in a particular chemical form we call DNA.
In other words, they found a path in this kind of un-regulated, evolutionary way that allowed them to write down what they were made, so that this information could be stored and copied.
The amazing thing about this is that this kind of information saves over the period of 2.5 billion years where it was born.
In fact, the recipe for us is our genes, exactly the same code and the same type of writing.
In fact, every living thing uses exactly the same letters and the same code.
We're so far that we can, just for the purpose of the code ourselves.
And I've got a 100 microgram here of a white powder that I try to keep in airports from security people.
There's -- what I've done is, I've taken this code -- the code is made out of regular letters that we use to symbolize -- and I've written my Visiten card on a piece of DNA, and I've amplified it 10 ^ 22 times.
So if anyone wants a hundred million copies of my business card, I have enough for everyone in this room and even everyone in this world, and it's right here.
If I really had been an egoist, I would have written it on a virus and released it in the room.
So what's the next step?
The kidney writing of DNA was an interesting step.
And that's what these cells did -- it made them happy for another billion years.
But then another very interesting step happened where things got completely different, which was that these cells started to communicate and exchange information, so that communities came from cells.
I don't know if you knew that, but bacteria can actually exchange their DNA.
That's also why, for example, the durability of antibiotics is growing.
Some bacteria figured out how to stay away from penicillin, and put that information together with other bacteria in the DNA, and now we have a lot of bacteria that are resistant to penicillin, because the bacteria communicate with each other.
This communication now allowed the reasons for communities that were in a certain sense in the same boat; they were syneratic.
So they either survive together, or they went down together, which meant that if a community was successful, all the individuals of the community were repeated more often and preferred to evolution.
The transition site is now where these communities are so close together that they are determined to write the recipe for the whole community into a string on the DNA.
And the next interesting phase took about another billion years.
At this point, we have multicellular communities, communities of many different cell types that act together as individual organisms.
In fact, we're a social community like this.
We have lots of cells that are no longer self-assembled.
Your skin cells are useless without heart cells, muscle cells, brain cells and so on.
So these communities began to develop further, so the layer upon which evolution took place was no longer the individual cell, but the whole cell community that we call organism.
The next step is happening within these communities.
The pools of cells started abstracting information again.
And they developed special structures that did nothing but process information within the organism.
And these are the neural structures.
So the neurons are the information processing apparatus that these cells have built up.
They began to train specialists within the community, special structures that were responsible for learning, understanding and maintaining information.
And this was the brain and the nervous system of these communities.
This gave them an evolutionary advantage.
Because at that point, an individual -- learning now happened within the period of a single organism's lifespan, instead of over that evolutionary period.
So, for example, an organism could learn not to eat a particular cloth because it tasted badly and made it sick the last time it ate it.
This could happen within the lifetime of a single organism, whereas hundreds of thousands of years ago, because this information had to be learned evolutionarily from the individuals who died because of this gulf, because these information processing structures weren't there yet.
So the nervous system has the process of evolution using these special information structures because evolution could now take place within an individual.
It could happen within a time frame of learning.
What happened after that is that the individual organisms found a way to communicate with each other.
So for example, the most sophisticated version of this communication is the human language.
It's a pretty amazing invention when you think about it.
I have a very complicated, messy and confused idea in my head.
I'm sitting here giving basically grumpy sounds from me hoping to create a similar confused idea in your head that kind of resembles my original idea.
So we take something very complicated, we turn it into sound, a sequence of sound, and we produce something very complicated in the minds of others.
So this allows us to work again as a unified organism.
And what we've actually done, we, humanity, is we've started abstracting.
We go through the same steps that multicellular organisms have gone through -- the abstraction of our methods of holding data, of presenting.
So the invention of language, for example, was a small step in this direction.
Telephony, computers, video bands, CD-ROMs and so on are all of our specialized mechanisms that we've built in our community to be able to provide that information.
And it all connects us to something that is much bigger, and also able to evolve faster than we have been.
So today, evolution can happen in the time of microseconds.
You've also seen Tys little evolutionary play where he showed some evolution in the Convolution program right in front of your eyes.
So now we've relocated the time scales again.
The first steps of the story I told you about took a billion years per piece.
The next steps, like the nervous system and the brain, took a few hundred million years.
Then the next steps, like language and so on, took less than a million years.
And these next steps, like electronics, seem to take just a few decades.
The process is feeding on itself, and so, I think, auto-calytic is the word for it -- when something reinforces its change speed.
The more it changes, the faster it changes.
And I think that's what we're seeing here in this explosion-like curve.
We see the process that feeds itself.
I live professionally from building computers, and I know that I couldn't use the mechanisms I use to build computers without the recent advances in computer technology.
My current activity is to design objects with such high complexity that it's impossible for me to design them in the traditional sense.
I don't know what every single transistor in the assembly machine is doing.
It has billions of them.
What I'm doing instead, and what the designers of Thinking Machines are doing, we're thinking at a certain level of abstraction, letting this machine and the machine do something that extends our capabilities far better and faster than we could ever do.
And it's partly done with methods that we don't even really understand yet.
One method which is particularly interesting, and which I've used a lot lately, is evolution itself.
And what we're doing is we're installing a process of evolution in the machine that's going on in microseconds.
To give you an example, in the most extreme cases, we can create a program that develops from random injections.
We say, "Computer, please form a hundred million randomly chosen sequences of instructions.
Now, please take all of these random instructions, run all the programs, and then finally choose the ones that I give to the next ones."
So in other words, I define first what I want.
Let's say I want to type in numbers, that would be a simple example that I've used to.
So let's find programs that can sort out the latest number.
Of course, the chance of random injections is very small, that by chance they're going to type numbers, so I don't think they're going to actually do that.
But one of them might be lucky to add two numbers to the right order.
Now I say, "Computer, now take the 10 percent of the sequences that I've come to the next.
Turn that off, clean the rest.
Now reproducing all the rest that the numbers have bested.
It's a way of combining, analogous to reproduction."
Take two programs, and they produce children through the exchange of their subroutines, and the children denies the characteristics of the subroutines of the two programs.
So now I have a new generation of programs that have come through combinations of programs that have come a little bit closer to the ones than others.
Say, "Please repeat this process."
Relate it.
Maybe some mutations happen.
And try this again with another generation.
All these generations need just a few milliseconds.
And so I can go through evolution over millions of years in the computer in a few minutes, or in more complicated cases, for hours.
Finally, I'll get programs that can perfect numbers.
In fact, these programs are so much more efficient than any program I could have ever written by hand.
So if I look at these programs, I can't tell you how they work.
I tried to understand them.
They're confused and weird programs.
But they do the job.
I know and I'm sure they do the job because they come from a series of hundreds of thousands of programs that did the job.
Because their lives depended on doing the job right.
I once sat in a 747 with Marvin Minsky, and he pulled up a card and said, "Oh look. Look at this.
It says, 'This plane consists of hundreds of thousands of pieces of smallness working together to make your flight safer, can you not make it more confident?"
We know that a process of development is not optimal when it's too complicated.
So we're starting to rely on computers for a process that's very different from classical engineering.
It allows us to create things with a much higher complexity than it would allow us to produce the normal methods.
And yet, we don't fully understand the possibilities of it.
So what we need to do is to get the technology out of the way.
So we're using these programs now to make the computer much faster, so that we're able to do these processes even faster.
So it creates feedback.
It gets faster and faster, and I think that's why it seems so confusing.
Because all of these new technologies today are feeding on themselves.
We're going to pick up.
We've come to a point where the analog is at the time when single-celled orchestras developed multicellular orchestras.
So we're the amoebas, and we can't really make any sense of what the hell we're doing here.
We are in the middle of this transition point.
But I really believe that something else comes after us.
I think it's very humbling to say that we are the end product of evolution.
And I think all of us here are part of the creation of whatever comes next.
Well, lunch is before, and I think I'm listening to it now before I get out.
My story starts right here in Rajasthan about two years ago.
I was in the desert, along with the Sufi singer Mukhtiar Ali.
We talked about how nothing has changed since the time of the ancient Indian Epos "Mahabharata."
If we wanted to travel Indians back then, we jumped into a car and we swived above the sky.
Now we're going to do that with airplanes.
In those days when the great Indian warprinz Arjuna Durst, he took a bow, he shot off the ground and water emerged.
Now we do this with drills and machines.
We came to the conclusion that magic and magic were replaced by machines.
That made me really sad.
I got a little scared of technology.
It was frightening to me that I could lose the ability to enjoy the sunset without a camera and without tweeting to my friends.
I found technology should make magic happen and not kill.
When I was a little girl, my grandfather gave me his little silver glove.
This piece of 50 years old technology became the most magical thing for me.
It became a golden access to a world full of pirates and robbed ships and images in my imagination.
It occurred to me that our email clocks and cameras stopped us from dreaming.
They kept us from being inspired.
And so I went into the technology world to see how I could use it to make magic rather than kill.
When I was 16, I started to illustrate books.
When I saw the iPad, I saw it as a device to tell stories that reader can connect all over the world.
It can know how to hold it.
It can know where we are.
It brings images and text together, and animation, sounds and touch.
Stories always need more senses.
But what do we do with it?
I'm just going to Khoya, an interactive iPad App.
Here it says, "Take your finger to every light."
And so -- Here it says, "This box belongs." I write my name.
And out of me, a figure in the book.
Again, a letter falls down for me -- and the iPad knows GPS where I live -- that's right to talk to me.
The kid in me is really excited about these kinds of possibilities.
I've talked a lot about magic.
I don't mean magicians and dragons, but the magic of childhood, the ideas that we all have as children.
When I was in a glass, I always thought it was exciting.
So here you have to flip the iPad and throw out the fireflies.
And they light up the path through the rest of the book.
Another idea that fascinated me as a child is that a whole galaxy can be contained in a single marble.
And so every book, and every world, there's a little marble that I drag here to the magic device in the device.
And this opens up a map.
Fantasy books always had maps, but these maps were static.
This map grows and lights up and tracks the rest of the book.
It also shows up in other parts of the book.
I'm going in here.
It's also important for me to create something that's native to it, but also very time-consuming.
This is the Apsaras.
We've all heard of beans and beans, but how many people outside of India know their Indian colleagues, the Apsaras?
The poor Apsaras had caught thousands of years in Indra's chambers in an old muffy book.
And we bring them back to a contemporary story for children.
A story about new issues, like the environmental crisis.
On the environmental crisis, a big problem over the last 10 years is that kids are sitting in their rooms, on their computers, without getting out.
But now, with mobile technology, we can take our children to the natural world with their technology.
In an interaction of the book, you're sent to a search. You have to go out and collect the camera of the iPad with natural objects.
As a child, I had collections of sticks, stones, kies and shells.
Somehow the kids don't do it anymore.
This childhood noise is being brought back. You have to go out to make a picture of a flower in a chapter and tag.
In another chapter, you have to photograph a piece of treerine and tag.
So you actually create a digital collection of photographs that you can then put online.
A child in London shows the picture of a fox and says, "Oh, I saw a fox today."
A child in India says, "I saw a monkey."
This creates a kind of social network around a digital collection of photographs that you've actually taken.
There's a variety of possibilities for magic to connect the world and technology together.
In the next book, we're planning an interaction where you can use the video of the iPad, and through augmented reality, we see an animation of luggage appearing on a plant outside the house.
In one place, the screen filled with leaves.
You have to make the sound of the wind, blow it away and read the rest of the book.
We all move to a world where the natural forces of technology can come closer, and magic and technology can join.
We use the energy of the sun.
We bring our children and closer to the natural world and the magic and fun and the love of our childhood through the simple medium of a story.
Thank you very much.
This is really an extraordinary honor for me.
I spend most of my time working with people in the prison or in the death row.
I spend most of my time in social growth in social growth and places where there's a lot of hopelessness.
To be here at TED, to see and hear how stimulating this is, has given me a lot of power.
In the short time here, one cleared me: TED has an identity.
You can say things that have influence in the world.
And sometimes, when something comes to TED, it becomes a meaning and a force that it wouldn't have otherwise.
I say that because I believe identity is very important.
We've seen some fantastic presentations.
I think we've learned that the words of a teacher matter, but that the words of an engaged teacher are especially meaningful.
If you're a doctor, you can do good. If you're a doctor, you can do more.
And so I want to talk about the power of identity.
I didn't learn that in my work as a lawyer, by the way.
I learned this from my grandmother.
I was raised in a family, a traditional African American household, dominated by a matriarchin, and that matriarchin was my grandmother.
She was a tough, strong woman, she had an effect.
She had the last word in every family meeting.
It was also the beginning of many differences in our family.
She was the daughter of a slave family.
Their parents were born in the 1840s in Virginia as a slave.
It was born in 1880, and the experience of slavery was very strong in the world.
My grandmother was strong, but she was also loving.
When I met her as a young boy, she came up to me and hugged me.
She hit me so hard that I could barely breathe, and then she let me go.
One or two hours later, when I met her, she came up to me and she said, "Bryan, do you feel my embrace yet?"
And if I said no, they hugged me. If I said, "Yes, they left me alone.
She was something that made you always want to be close to her.
The only problem was she had 10 children.
My mother was the youngest of her 10 children.
Sometimes when I wanted to spend time with her, it was hard to get her attention.
My cousins were walking around everywhere.
I remember I had to have been eight or nine that I woke up one morning and walked into the living room, all my cousins walked around.
My grandmother was sitting at the end of the room staring at me.
First of all, I thought this was a game.
I looked at her and smiled, but she looked very serious.
It was 15 or 20 minutes. And then she stood up and she came over to me. She took me by the hand and she said, "Come, Bryan. You and I, we have to talk."
I still remember it as though it was yesterday.
I'll never forget it.
She took me outside and said, "Bryan, I'm going to tell you something, but you have to promise you're not going to continue."
I said, "Nope. Grandma."
She said, "What the answer?" I said, "Yes."
She sat me down and she looked at me. She said, "I want you to know I've been watching you."
She said, "I think you're special."
She said, "I think you can do anything you want to do."
I'll never forget that.
Then she said, "You just have to promise me three things, Bryan."
I said, "Okay, Grandma."
She said, "First, tell me that you will always love your mom."
She said, "Deine Ma is my baby, and you have to promise you will always take care of them."
I adored my mother, so I said, "Yes, Grandma, I'm going to do that."
Then she said, "Als next to me that you will always do the right thing," even though it's hard to do the right thing."
I thought, "Yes, Grandma. I promise."
After all, she said, "The last thing you've got to promise me is you're never going to drink alcohol."
Well, I was nine years old, so I said, "Yes, Grandma. I promise it."
I grew up in the land, in the old, rural South, and I have a brother who's a year older and a year younger sister.
When I was about 14 or 15, my brother came home one day and brought this six-pack of beer and grabbed my sister and I and went to the forest with us.
We stayed there just like we could.
Then he took a shot of beer, and he offered my sister one, and she took it, and then she offered me one.
I said, "No, no, no. All right. Just power it. I don't want a beer."
My brother said, "Well, go ahead. Today we're doing this, you're doing everything else we're doing.
I had what your sister had. Go ahead and drink a beer."
I said, "I don't want to. Just power you. Just power you."
My brother looked at me.
He said, "What's going on with you? Well, forget what."
Then he looked at me, and he said, "Oh no, you're not going to get crazy about the conversation with grandmother?"
I said, "What are you talking about?"
He said, "Oma tells all the grandkids that they are special."
I was devastated.
I'm going to tell you something.
I should probably not do that.
This is probably going to be broadcast publicly.
I'm 52 years old, and I realize I've never drunk a drop of alcohol.
I don't say that because I think it's virtuous. I say that because identity means power.
If we can create the right kind of identity, we can tell the people around us things they don't initially believe.
We can get them to do things that they thought they couldn't do.
Of course, my grandmother would tell all their grandchildren they were special.
My grandfather was in prison during the prosecution.
My uncles died of infectious diseases.
And she believed that these were the subjects that we needed to take care of.
I tried to say something about our judicial system.
This country is different from 40 years ago.
1972, 300,000 people were in prison and prison.
Today it's 2.3 million.
The United States today has the highest incarceration rate in the world.
Seven million people are released on care, or treated with conditional punishment.
My view is that mass incarceration has fundamentally changed our world.
In socially weak and black parts of the population, despair and hopelessness, because of these changes.
One in three black men between 18 and 30 is in prison, released on care, or treated with a conditional sentence.
In urban communities all over the country -- from Los Angeles, in Philadelphia, Baltimore to Washington -- 50 to 60 percent of all black men are either in prison, in prison, released on care, or treated with conditional punishment.
But our system is not only shaped by the questions that have to do with race, it's also developed by poverty.
We have a judicial system in this country that treats you much better if you're rich and guilty than poor and innocent.
Power, not ridicule, affects the outcome.
Yet we seem to be very content with this.
A policy of fear and anger has convinced us that these problems are not our problems.
We have lost touch.
I think that's interesting.
There are some very interesting developments.
My home state of Alabama is raising you permanently the right to vote when you're sentenced to yourself.
Here and today in Alabama, 34 percent of the male black population have permanently lost their election rights.
We predict that in 10 years the quota is going to be as high as the judgment of civic rights is going to be before the judgment of the rule of voting.
The silence is unclear.
I grow children.
Many of my clientes are very young.
The United States of America is the only country in the world to sentence three-year-old children to death in prison.
In this country in our country, there are children's lives's prisons without any conditional crime.
We've done a lot of procedures.
The only country in the world.
I grow people in death cells.
The death penalty question is an interesting question.
We believe that because it's taught us that the real question is: Did a human deserve to die for one of his committed crime?
That's a very sensitive question.
But you can think differently about it, depending on how we see our identity.
The other point of view is not, did anyone deserve death for a crime, but, did we deserve to kill?
I find that fascinating.
The death penalty in America is defined by mistake.
In nine people we have executed, one that we've found for innocent people who's been discharged and released from the death row.
An amazing error rate. One out of nine innocent.
I find that fascinating.
We would never let somebody fly on an airplane if for nine planes to pick up, one would fly off.
But somehow we can get rid of this problem.
It's not our problem.
It's not our burden.
It's not our struggle.
I talk a lot about these questions.
I'm talking about race, and the question is, are we right to kill?
And it's exciting because I teach my students African American history. I talk about slavery.
I'm talking about terrorism, the time against the end of reconstruction, until the beginning of World War II.
We don't really know a lot about it.
But for African-Americans in this country, it was a time of terror.
In many areas, people had to be scared of Lynchmobs.
Or bombs.
It was the fear of terror that shaped her life.
These older people are now coming to me and saying, "Mr, Stevenson, you're talking, you're giving talks. They're telling people that they should stop saying that for the first time in our nation's history, we have to do terrorism after 9/11."
They say, "No -- tell the people that we grew up with this."
And, of course, after terrorism, the race race and decades of racially motivated submission and apartheid came.
And yet, there is a dynamic in our country -- we don't like to talk about our problems.
We don't like to talk about our history.
And so we don't really understand what meanings our actions are in the historical context.
We're constantly bumping into each other.
We're always creating new tensions and conflicts.
We have a hard time talking about race, and I think that's because we're not willing to get closer to the process of truth and reconciliation.
In South Africa, people understood that the race race is not to overcome without the willingness to truth and reconciliation.
Even after the genocide in Rwanda, there was this will, but not in this country.
I gave some talks in Germany about the death penalty.
It was fascinating, because one of the scientists stood up after my talk and said, "You know, it's deeply troubling to hear you speak like this."
He said, "There is no death penalty in Germany.
And of course, it can never be more in Germany."
It got all the time. Then a woman said, "In our history, it's impossible that we've ever come back to the systematic killing of people.
It would be that we are conscious and targeted to people."
I thought about it.
How it would feel to live in a world where the German state set people, especially if there were disproportionately many Jews.
It would be unbearable.
It would be odd.
And yet, here in this country, in the state of the ancient South, we're putting people -- here's the risk of being sentenced to death 11 times higher if the victim is white than if it's black, 22 times higher, when the defender is black and the victim knows -- in the same states where the Earth is the bodies of people who are widling.
And yet, there's this mental disconnect.
I think our identity is threatened.
If we're not dealing with these hard issues, then the positive and wonderful things are also affected.
We love innovation.
We love technology and creativity.
We love entertainment.
But ultimately, these realities are overcome by suffering, abuse, inhibition, settlement.
I think it's important to unite both.
Because we're ultimately talking about having more hope, more engagement, more commitment, to be able to fit into a complex world.
For me, time is spent, thinking and talking about the poor, the underdogs, the ones that are never going to be at TED.
But think about it in a way that is integrated in our own life.
We all have to believe in the last thing that we can't see.
We do that. It's as rational as we are, as much as we value intelligence.
Innovation, creativity, development is not just coming out of our minds.
They come from ideas that are driven by the belief in our hearts.
It's this head-to-head connection that I believe is driving us, not just to be open to all the bright and exciting things, but to the dark and problematic.
Vaclav Havel, the great rhetorical politicians, once said.
"When we fought in Eastern Europe for oppression, we wanted all kinds of things, but what we needed most was hope, a spiritual orientation, the willingness to be sometimes in hopeless places and be witnesses."
This mental orientation is the core of what I believe the TED community also needs to be involved in.
There's no limit to technology and design that allows us to be fully human, as long as we don't have eyes and ears for poverty, forgeance and injustice.
I want to warn you. This kind of identity demands a lot more of us than if we didn't care about it.
It will deeply touch you.
As a young lawyer, I have the great privilege to meet Rosa Parks.
Women Parks came back again to Montgomery, where she met two of her oldest friends, these older women, Johnnie Carr, who organized Montgomery-Busboykottt -- an amazing African American woman -- and Virginia Durr, a white woman, her husband, Clifford Durr, Dr. King.
So these women met, and they just sat down.
Then I got a call from the woman Carr, and she said, "Bryan, Women Parks come to the city. We want to have a conversation.
Do you want to come and listen?"
And I said, "Yeah, that's nice."
She said, "And what are you going to do if you're here?"
I said, "I'm going to listen."
And I went over and I just heard.
It was always so inspirational, so winging.
One day I was sitting there listening to these women, and after a few hours, the woman Parks turned to me and said, "Well Bryan, tell me what the authority is for the same law.
What are you trying to do?"
I started with my usual talk.
I said, "We're trying to go against injustice.
Wr want to help people who were convicted of innocent people.
We want to fight bias and discrimination in the criminal justice system.
We want to have life support without causing child crimes.
We want to do something about death penalty.
We want to reduce the number of prisoners.
We want to create mass incarceration."
I gave my usual talk, and then she looked at me and she said, "Mhm. Mhm. Mhm."
She said, "That's going to make you very, very tired."
Then Mr. Carr leaned forward to me, put a finger on my face and said, "So you have to be very, very brave."
And so I think the TED community should be tapped.
We need to find ways. We need to face these challenges: these problems, this suffering.
Because ultimately, our humanity depends on our all humanity.
I learned very simple things in my work.
I learned some very simple things.
We're all more than the worst thing we've ever done.
I think that's true for every human on the planet.
When someone's lying, it's not just a liar.
If someone takes something that doesn't belong to them, it's not just a thug.
Even who kills someone is not just a murderer.
And because of that, there's a basic human dignity that has to respect the law.
I also believe that in many parts of this country, and certainly in many parts of the world, the opposite of poverty is not wealth.
I don't think so.
I think in many places the opposite of poverty is justice.
And finally, I think that although it's so dramatic, so beautiful and inspiring, and so exhilarating, we're not ultimately measured by our technology, not by the things that we develop, not by our intellect and mind.
Finally, a society is not measured by how it deals with its rich and the powerful and the privilege, but how it deals with the poor, the judges, the incarcerated.
Because in that context, we begin to understand the truly amazing things that make us feel.
Sometimes I lose the balance. I leave a story to the end.
Sometimes I push too much.
I'm getting tired, like all of us.
Sometimes these ideas advance our thinking in a very important way.
I made these kids who were convicted of too hard punishment.
I go to research and study a client who may be 13 or 14 years old and should be on trial as an adult.
Then I ask myself, how could this happen?
How can a judge turn somebody into something they're not?
The judge looks at him as an adult, but I see a child.
One night, I stayed too long, and I thought, my goodness, if a judge can turn us into something else, then he must have some wizards.
Right, Bryan, the judge has some powers.
You should want something as well.
And because it was late, and I couldn't think right anymore, I started working on a post.
I had a 14-year-old, poor black boy as a messenger.
And I started with this proposal. The headline said, "Acception, my poor, 14 year-old black mandants like a privileged white, 75 year-old Topmanager."
In my post, I explained that misconceptions of the prosecution and the police and the trial and the trial were misconceptive.
There was a crazy line about that in this country, there's nothing more right about it, that there's nothing wrong about it.
The next morning, I woke up and I didn't know if I'd even dreamed this crazy post or actually written it.
And to my dismay, I had not only written him, but I also sent him to the court.
A few months went by, and I just forgot about everything.
But I finally decided, my God, I have to go to the court and this crazy case.
I got in the car, and I was really overwhelmed -- overwhelmed.
So I went to the court.
And I thought, this is going to be so hard, so painful.
I eventually got out of my car, and I walked up the stairs to the court.
When I walked up the stairs to the court, there was an older black man, the janitors in the court.
When he saw me, he came over to me and he said, "Who are you?"
I said, "I'm a lawyer." He said, "You're a lawyer?" I said, "Yes."
He came up to me and hugged me.
Then he whispered into my ear.
He said, "I'm so proud of you."
And I have to say, there was power to me.
It touched something deep within me, identity, the ability of each individual to contribute to a community, to a perspective of hope.
Well, I went into the courtroom.
As soon as the judge saw me.
He said, "Mr. Stevenson, have you put this crazy post?"
I said, "Yes." And then we started talking.
More and more people came in, just because they were angry.
I had written these crazy things.
Police officers came in and deputyed statesmen and office workers.
Turning on the side of the courtroom was filled with people who were angry that we talked about skin color, about poverty, about inequality.
From my angle of view, I saw the janitors go up and down.
He kept looking through the window, and he could hear all the tohuwabohu.
He went up and down.
After all, this older black man came with a very concerned facialuck in the courtroom and sat right behind me, almost on the Defense Bank.
Ten minutes later, the judge gave a pause.
During the break, a police officer came in and bothered that the janitor was in the courtroom.
This deputy ran across to the older black.
He said, "Jimmy, what do you do in the courtroom?"
The older black man stood up. He looked at the deputy, and he looked at me, and he said, "I've come here to tell this young man, don't forget the goal from his eyes. Don't give up."
I've come to TED because I think many of you have come to understand that the moral compass of the universe is widening, but that it is justice.
That, as humans, we're not fully developed, as long as we don't care about human rights and basic values.
That is our survival of every single one connected to survival.
That we need to connect our visions of technology and design, entertainment and creativity with humanity, compassion and justice.
And most of all, I want those of you who also see it just to say, don't forget the goal from your eyes. Don't give up.
You've seen an obvious wish in this audience, and you've heard this community help you and do something.
What else can we do?
Bryan Stevenson: Well, there are opportunities everywhere.
If you're living in California, there's a referendum in this spring where it's actually about trying to take something out of the money stream that's used to run into the politics of punishment.
Here, for example, in California, you're going to spend a billion dollars on death row in the next five years, a billion dollars.
And yet, 46 percent of all poetry doesn't end with a promise.
56 percent of rape cases don't come to court.
Here's the opportunity to do something.
Thisferendum is going to suggest to invest in more security and more security forces.
I think there are possibilities everywhere.
Over the last three decades, the crime rate has declined in America.
This is a fact that's often put into a context of increased incarceration.
What would you say to someone who believes that?
Well, in fact, the number of violence hasn't changed very much.
Most of mass incarceration in this country didn't really occur in the class of violence.
It was the misguided crucover against drugs.
That's why the dramatic high numbers come into prison clubs.
We have to tear down the rhetoric of punishment.
Now we have "Dir-flight laws," which get people behind the grid forever, for a bicycle leg, for theft low-cost good, rather than forcing them to give back the sacrifices.
I think we need to do more to help people who have become victims of a crime, not less.
And I think our philosophical punishment right now doesn't help.
I think that's what we need to change.
Bryan, you've really brought a shading out here.
They're an inspiring person.
Thank you for being at TED. Thank you very much.
Bin Laden's death brings an increased risk of risk.
Great famine in Somalia.
4: Böss-like cartel. 5: dangerous cruise ships.
Audience: Seven: 65 dead.
Eight: tsunami. Nine: Cyber-Attacken.
Verschiedene speakers: drug war. Mass destruction weapons. tornado.
Reception. Prevention. Egypt. Syria.
Construction. Death. Construction.
Oh my God.
So these are just a few of the clips I collected over the last six months -- but they could have been the last six days, or the last six years.
In fact, the media prefers it to show us negative subjects because our minds pay attention to these issues.
And there's also a very good reason for that.
Every second every day our senses start a lot more information than our brain can ever process.
And because we have nothing more important than our survival, the first stop for all the information is part of our temporal lobe, the amygdala.
So Amygdala is our early warning system, our risk detector.
It sort of ties and crosses all of the information looking for any kind of danger in our environment.
So when we see the news, we prefer to look for negative news.
And the old saying, "If it bleeds, demand rises," is very true.
Now, with all of our digital devices that we have seven days a week, 24 hours a day, all of these negative news stories, it's not a miracle that we're pessimistic.
It's not a miracle that everybody thinks the world is getting worse.
But maybe that's not the case.
Maybe that's the reality.
Perhaps the tremendous amount of progress that we've made in the last century is accelerating by a series of forces so strongly that it's going to make us possible in the next three decades to create a world of abundance.
Well, I'm not saying that we don't have a lot of problems -- climate crisis, species extinctions, water and energy problems -- we already have that.
And as humans, we're much better at predicting problems in the long run, but ultimately, they're about to overcome problems.
Let's see what we've achieved in the last century so we can anticipate the development.
Over the last 100 years, average life expectancy has doubled, which has tripled the inflationary average income of the world's population.
Child mortality is down by a tenth.
The point is that the diet, electricity, transportation and communication costs have reduced dramatically.
Steve Pinker showed us that we currently live in a very peaceful time in human history.
And according to Charles Kenny, the literacy rate has gone from 25 percent to 80 percent in the past 130 years.
We live in a truly extraordinary time.
And many people forget this.
And we keep increasing our expectations forever.
In fact, we've redefined poverty.
Remember that a lot of Americans who live under the poverty line have access to electricity, water, toilets, refrigerators, televisions, mobile phones, air conditioning and cars.
The richest capitalists of the last century, the empires of the Earth, could never have dreamed of those luxury goods.
The basis for many of these technologies are creating, and these are growing exponentials.
My good friend Ray Kurzweil showed us that every tool that becomes information technology, on the curve of Moore's Law, has doubled the price performance rate every 12 to 24 months.
That's why the mobile phone in your pocket costs about a million times less, and it's a thousand times faster than a supercomputer from the '70s.
Now look at this curve.
This is Moore's Law for the last hundred years.
Notice two things about this curve.
First, how smooth it goes -- in good times, in war or peace, in recession, depression and high-confidenture.
This is the result of faster computers building faster computers.
It doesn't slow down for any of our big problems.
Also, despite their logarithmic trajectory on the left, it's upwards.
So growth rate itself is accelerating.
And on this curve, on the back of Moore's Law, we find a series of extraordinary technologies available to all of us.
"Cloud-Computing," which my friends at Autodesk call "Infinite Computing," sensors and networks, robots, 3D printers, that allow personal production on our planet to democratize synthetic biology, fuels, vaccines and food, digital medicine, nano-Materials and artificial intelligence.
How many of you have seen the victory of IBM's supercomputer Watson in "Risiko"?
It was big.
I went through the papers looking for the best headlines I could find.
I love this one: "Watson defeats human adversaries."
"Risiko" is not a simple game.
It's about understanding the nuances of language.
Imagine that this artificial intelligence was available to every owner of a mobile phone.
Four years ago, Ray Kurzweil and I started a new university at TED called Singularity University.
We bring all of these technologies to our students with special focus on how they can be used to solve the grand challenges of humanity.
And every year we ask students to create companies, products and services that in a decade can impact billions of people's lives.
Think about a group of students today being able to affect the lives of billions of people.
30 years ago, that would have sounded ridiculous.
Today, we can point out to dozens of companies that have done exactly this.
If I think about creating abundance, I don't mean a life of luxury for everyone on the planet; it's about creating a life of opportunities.
It's about creating a surplus of goods.
Because scarcity is contextual, and technology is a free-source resource.
Here's an example.
This is the story of Napoleon III in the middle of the 18th century.
He's the guy on the left.
He invited the king of Siam to dinner.
Napoleons' military got silver sac, Napoleon himself got gold sac.
The king of Siam, though, was given aluminum besteck.
aluminum at that time was the most valuable metal on the planet, more valuable than gold and platin.
This is why the dome of Washington was made out of aluminum.
Even though aluminum is eight.3 percent of the Earth's mass, it doesn't appear to be pure metal.
It's connected to oxygen and silicate.
But then the technology of electrolysis was developed and made aluminum production so cheap that we use it with our throwaway mentality.
Then let's project this analogy into the future.
We're thinking today about energy scarcity.
Ladies and gentlemen, we live on a planet that's filled with 5,000 times more energy than we use every year.
16 terawatt energy spans all 88 minutes to the Earth's surface.
It's not about scarcity; it's about compliance.
And there's good news.
This year, for the first time, we managed to reduce the cost of solar power in India to 50 percent of the throne boom -- 8.8 rupees versus 17 rupees.
The cost of solar energy was 50 percent in the last year.
Last month, MIT published a study showing that by the end of this decade, in the sunny areas of the United States, solar power will cost 6 cents a rate, compared to 15 cents per national average.
And if we have a surplus of energy, we'll also have plenty of water.
Let's talk about the water wars.
Do you remember when Carl Sagan turned the Voyager Spacecraft in 1990, when it was moved by Saturn, back to Earth?
He took a famous photograph. What was it?
"A Pale Blue Dot."
Because we live on a water planet.
We live on a planet that's 70 percent covered with water.
Yes, it's 97.5 percent saltwater, two percent are lost, and we're fighting about 0.5 percent of the water on the planet, but there's hope as well.
And there are new technologies, not in 10 or 20 years, but now.
It's new nanotechnology along the way, nano-materials.
And from a conversation this morning with Dean Kaman, one of the innovators of the Do It Yourself, I want to share with you -- he gave me permission -- his technology called "Slingshot," and many of you may have heard about it. It's the size of a refrigerator in the home of the students.
It can create a thousand liters of clean drinking water a day from different sources -- water water, polluted water, latrine -- and all that for less than two cents a liter.
The head of Coca-Cola has just agreed to launch a big test project with hundreds of units in the developing world.
And if everything is fine, and I'm very confident, Coca-Cola is going to apply this technology to 206 countries around the planet.
This is technology-based innovation that we have today.
And we've seen this in mobile phones as well.
Oh my goodness, we're going to reach the 70 percent reduction rate of mobile phones in developing countries by the end of 2013.
Just consider that a Maasai warrior with a mobile phone in the middle of Kenya has a better mobile communication than President Reagan did 25 years ago.
And when they're looking for their smartphone on Google, they have more access to knowledge and information than President Clinton 15 years ago.
They live in a world that has information and communication in abundance that no one would ever predict.
And it's even better, the things that you and I have spent several thousand dollars -- GPS, HD video and photography, libraries of books and music, technology to medical diagnostics -- are literally becoming dematerialized and cheaper in your cell phone.
And perhaps the best part about this is what we expect in health.
Last month, I had the pleasure of announcing the Qualcomm Foundation the so-called "$10 million Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE."
We demand teams all over the world to connect all these technologies to one another in a cell phone, so that you can talk to the device, because it's equipped with KI, you can clean it up or test its blood values.
And in order to win, the device has to do better diagnosis than a team of highly skilled doctors.
Imagine this device. In the middle of a developing country where there are no doctors, but 25 percent of the disease burden and 1.3 percent of the health care workers.
If this device sequences an RNA virus or DNA virus that's not known, it calls the FDA and prevents a pandemic from its outbreak.
But now the greatest power that will lead us to a world of abundance.
I call them "the next billion."
The white lines are for the population.
We've just crossed the 7 billion marks.
And by the way, the biggest prevention against a population explosion is better education and diet around the world.
In 2010, we had just connected under two billion people online.
By 2020, we're moving forward from two to five billion Internet users.
Three billion new minds that we've never heard of before are going to link to global communication.
What do these people need?
What will they consume? What will they desire?
And instead of economic gridlock, I see one of the greatest economic benefits in history.
These people represent several trillion dollars that are going to go into the global economy.
And they're getting healthier by using the Tricoder, and they're getting better educated by the Khan Academy, and by using 3D printers and Infinite Computing, they're going to be much more productive than they've ever been before.
So what can three billion growing, healthy, educated, productive members of the human community bring us?
How about a sentence of new, never heard heard heard heard before.
How about giving the oppressed, wherever they are, a voice to pay attention and to create change, for the very first time?
What will these three billion people bring?
How about contributions that we can't even predict?
One of the things I learned from the X PRIZE is that small teams that are motivated by passion and focus can create extraordinary things, things that big companies and governments could only create in the past.
I want to end with a story that really got me excited.
There's a program some of you may know.
It's a game called Foldit.
It was developed at the University of Washington in Seattle.
And it's a game where people can take a sequence of amino acids and explore how that protein will evolve.
For his behavior, we can predict the structure and function.
And this is very important in medical research.
So far this was a problem for supercomputers.
And this game was played by university professors and so on.
And there are hundreds of thousands of people who have played the game online now.
And it showed that, today, human pattern recognition is better at protein than the best supercomputer.
And when these people came and looked at who's the best protein operator in the world, this wasn't a MIT professor, it wasn't a CalTech student, it was a guy from England, Manchester, a woman who worked as a business assistant during the day in a rehab Clinic and at night was the best protein physicist in the world.
Ladies and gentlemen, what gives me enormous confidence in our future is the fact that we now have more power than individuals to make us the big challenges of our planet.
We have access to tools with exponential technology.
We have the passion of a DIY innovator.
We have the capital of technologists.
And we have three billion new minds that we can work with online to meet the new challenges and to do what we need.
We expect a few extraordinary decades.
Thank you.
I think we need to do something about a transformational piece of medical culture.
And I think it starts with a medical student, and that's me.
And maybe I've been in the business for a long time to allow me to give up a piece of my own false prestige in order to do that.
But before I get to the actual theme of my talk, let's start with a little bit of baseball.
Hey, why not?
We're near the end of the season and we're moving to the World Cup.
We all love baseball, right?
Baseball is full of great statistics.
And there are hundreds of them.
"Moneyball" appears soon, and it's about statistics, and to use them a great baseball team.
I'm going to refer to a statistic that I hope most of you have heard.
It's the average power of the bat.
We're talking about a 300 if a bat is 300.
That means that the player is going to beat three out of 10 beats.
That means beating the ball in the field, it's coming up, it's not caught, and who tried to throw the ball at the front base, didn't do it in time, and the runner was safe.
Three out of 10.
Do you know what they call a 300th in Major League Baseball?
All right, really good, maybe an All-Star.
Do you know what you call a 400th?
This is somebody who, by the way, meets four out of 10.
Legendary -- as Ted Williams legendary -- the last Major League Baseball player who met over 400 times during a regular season.
Let's go back to my medical world where I feel a lot more comfortable, or maybe a little less good after I've talked to you about it.
Suppose you have a blind treatment, and you're transferred to an operator whose average power is 400 in terms of blindness.
Somehow it doesn't work, right?
Suppose you live in a certain remote area, and you have a loved person with congested heart disease vessels and your doctor calls them to a cardiologist whose average job is 200 vessels.
But, but you know what?
It's much better this year. It's on the rise up.
And she's hitting a 257.
Somehow it doesn't work.
But I'm going to ask you a question.
What do you think the average power for a cardiologist or a nurse or a nurse or a local shop, a birth officer, should be a rescue assistant?
1,000, very good.
The truth is that no one in all medicine knows what a good surgeon or a doctor or a bribe should be.
What we do though is that every single one of you, including myself, is going to be perfect in the world with the claim.
Never make a mistake, but nobody is thinking about the details of how this should be done.
And this is the message that I took in medical school.
I was a forcedly obsessional student.
A high school student once said that Brian Goldmann would learn for a blood test.
And so it was.
And I learned in my little paddle in the nurses' "Residenz" at the Toronto General Hospital, just over here.
I learned everything.
In my anatomy case, I learned about the origins and procedures of every muscle, every branch of every artery, which takes away from the aorta, obskure and ordinary differential diagnostics.
In fact, I knew the differentialiation in how to classify renal tubular acidose.
And all the time, I collected more and more.
And I was good, I closed it down with cum laude.
And I left medical school with the impression that if I knew everything and knew everything, or at least as much as possible, as close to completeness as possible that I was immune to making mistakes.
And it worked for a while, until I met female printers.
I moved to a teaching hospital here in Toronto, as a woman printer, to me, to the emergency department of the hospital.
At this point, I was referring to the cardiological layer in the cardiological service.
And it was my mission to study when the emergency cardiological council was looking for emergency patients.
And I'm going to give you some feedback from my graduate student.
I studied female printers, and she was in a breath.
And when I listened to her, she made groan sound.
And when I took her chest off with the stethoscope, I could hear a cracking sound on both sides, which told me that she was suffering from kongestive heart failure.
This is a state where the heart fails, instead of pumping all the blood further, a part of the blood is stuck in the lung, and gradually filling that up, and that's how short it came.
And that wasn't a hard diagnostic.
I put them in, and I took care of the treatment.
I gave her aspirin. I gave her medicine to take the heart pressure.
I gave her medicine, which we call diuretics, water tablets, so that she dragged out the liquid.
And over a period of one and a half to two hours, she started feeling better.
I felt really good.
And I made my first mistake; I sent her home.
Actually, I made two mistakes.
I sent her home without speaking to my doctor.
I didn't take up the listener and do what I should have done, which would have been a phone call to my doctor to explain it to him, so that he would have had a chance to take his own picture.
And he knew her that he would have been able to contribute more information to her.
Maybe I did it with a good reason.
Maybe I didn't want to be the helpy doctor.
Maybe I wanted to be so successful and so capable of taking responsibility that I was acting like this, and so I could be concerned about my patients without having to contact them.
My second mistake was worse.
By the time I sent her home, I made a quiet voice in me trying to say, "Goldman, not a good idea. Don't do that."
In fact, I was so lacking self-security that I asked the nurse who was taking care of the woman printer, "Do you think it's okay when she goes home?"
And the nurse thought about it and said in a Factical way, "Yeah, I think you'll do well."
I remember it as though it was yesterday.
So I signed the dismalsing documents and a hospital car and a rescue assistant and brought them home.
And I went back to work.
The rest of the day, the night I had this swimming feeling in my stomach.
But I kept working.
And at the end of the day, I grabbed my stuff, left the hospital and went to the parking lot to drive home with the car when I did something that I otherwise didn't do.
I went home through the emergency department.
And there was another nurse, not the nurse who had seen after female printers, but another three words to me, and those three words fear most emergency dentists I know.
Other medical professionals fear this too, but emergency care is especially because we see the patients just so addicted.
The three words say, remember?
"Do you remember the patient you sent home?"
She asked the nurse.
"Now she's back," she said in that particular tone.
So she was back.
She was back and dying.
About an hour after she got home, after I sent her home, she collapsed, and the family called 911, and the rescue assistants brought her back to the emergency room with a blood pressure of 50, which is a dangerous shock state.
She hardly breathed and ran blue.
The emergency people all moved.
They gave her blood pressure level.
They made it into the delivery machine.
I was shocked, and I fell inside.
And I lived through this rollercoaster because she came to the intensive care unit after it came in, and I hoped that she would recover.
And after two, three days, you realized that you would never win again.
She had suffered an unparalleled brain damage.
Her family gathered.
And over the course of the next eight or nine days, they're doing what's going on.
On the very last day, they read her -- woman printers, woman, mother and grandmother.
It's said that you never forget the names of the dead.
And that was the first time I learned this myself.
The next few weeks I proposed, and for the first time, I learned the unsolicited shame that exists in our medical culture -- I felt myself isolated, not the kind of healthy shame that you need to think about, because you can't talk to your colleagues about it.
You all know the healthy shame when you give up a secret to the best friend, even though this one's imprinting and you're caught and the best friend is confronted with it and leads me to a terrible debate when you end up with a bad conscience and you're swearing that you never make such a mistake again.
If you do reciprocity and you never make the mistake again.
This is the kind of educational shame.
The unhealthy way I'm talking about is the one who makes you sick.
It's the one who tells you that it's not what you've done wrong, but that you're bad at yourself.
And that was what I felt.
And it wasn't because of my Ph.D., he was very drunk.
He was talking to the family, and I'm sure he glited the wores and made sure that I wouldn't be sued.
But I kept asking these questions.
Why didn't I ask the doctor? Why did I send her home?
And then in my worst moments, how could I make such a stupid mistake?
Why did I go to medicine?
But it certainly took place.
I started feeling better.
And then on a hot day, there was a hole in the clouds and the sun burst, and I said maybe I could feel better again.
And I was worried that if I doubled my efforts to perfection, and never made a mistake again that the voice could recurre.
And she did.
And I kept working.
And then it happened again.
Two years later, I had served in the emergency unit in a community hospital north of Toronto, and I served a 25-year-old man with arseed lawn.
It was a lot going on, and I'm in a hurry.
He always showed up here.
I looked into the rakes, and it was a little pink.
And I gave him a prescription for Penicillin, and I sent him off.
And again, when he came out of the door, he showed up his rake.
Two days later, I came to my next emergency service, and my chief teacher asked me to talk to her office.
And she said the three words: Do you remember?
"Do you remember the patient with the fermented rake?"
It turns out it's a string eptococton infringement.
He had a potentially life-threatening illness called empiglottitis.
You can clean that up, but it's not an infection of the sky, it's the upper respiratory and it's caused by the breathing lanes.
And fortunately, he didn't die.
He got intravenish anti-botica and recovered a few days later.
And I went back through the same door of Schande and self-doubt, feeling freed and went to work until it happened again and again and again.
In an emergency room room, I missed a blind ding.
There's a couple of things that are heard about, especially if you think you're working in a hospital that at that time only had 14 patients a night.
In both cases, I didn't send them home, and there were no cords in their treatment.
I thought he had kidney stones.
I put on the X-ray of the kidneys, and when this was under construction, my colleague, at the end of the patient's recurrence, he fested in the lower right sector, called the operator.
The other one was severe diarrhea.
I wrote fluides to rehydrate him, and I asked my colleagues to examine him as well.
And he did, and when he discovered a repression in the right lower sector, he called the operators.
In both cases, surgery was done, and they were fine.
Both of these cases were nagating me, paying attention to me.
And I would be happy to tell you that my worst mistakes only happened in the first five years, which many of my colleagues say, but total nonsense.
Some of my colleagues have happened over the last five years.
Only, shame and support.
Here's the problem: If I can't finish up with my mistakes and talk about them, if I can finish the silent voice that tells me what really can't happen, how can I share it with my colleagues?
How can I teach them my mistakes so that they don't go the same?
If I walked into a room -- like right now, I have no idea what you're thinking about me.
When did they hear the last time of someone who talked about miscarriage about miscarriage?
Oh yeah, they go to a cocktail party, and you like to hear about any other doctor, but you're not going to hear somebody talk about their own mistakes.
If I went to a room full of colleagues and asked their immediate support and began to tell them what I just told you, I probably wouldn't reach the end of the second story before it really would be uncomfortable for anyone to put in a joke, they would change the topic and forget the rest.
And in fact, if I or my colleagues knew that a local hospital had taken someone off the wrong leg, they would tell me I had trouble looking at him.
This is the system that we live in.
It's a total denial of mistakes.
It's a system where there are two basic positions -- those who make mistakes and those who don't make a mistake -- those who infuse the sleep and those who don't have a limitation, those who have bad results and those who have good results.
It's almost an ideological reaction like antibodies attacking a human being.
And there's the idea that if we line those who make mistakes out of medicine, it remains a safe system.
But there are two problems.
In my mind, about 20 years of medical training and journalism, I did a personal medical study of medical errors and false treatments to learn as much as I could for one of my first papers I wrote for the Toronto Star to my show, "White Coat, Black Art."
And what I learned is that mistakes are absolutely imperfect.
We're working in a system where errors happen every day, where one out of 10 meditators is either wrong or wrong, in hospital-acquired infections, getting more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more.
In that state, there are about 24,000 Canadians who die of common errors.
In the United States, the Institute of Medicine refers to 100,000.
Both are strong understatements because we don't think about the problem as much as we should.
And it's the crux.
In a hospital system where medical knowledge doubles every two to three years, we can't keep up.
Sleep deprivation is ubiquitous.
We can't get rid of it.
We have a cognitive error so that we can take a perfect disease tracking for a patient with chest pain.
And then I take the same patient with heartbreak, and I sweat it, and I grab a mild breath, and all of a sudden the story is consumed with contempt.
I'm not taking the same course.
I'm not a robot; I don't always do things the same way.
And my patients are not cars; they don't always tell me their symptoms in the same way.
All of this in summary, mistakes are inevitable.
So if you take the system the way I was taught it, and you put all the mis-requivalent health experts out there, at the end, there's no one left.
And do you know the people who don't want to talk about their worst cases?
In my show, "White Coat, Black Art." I have the habit of saying, "This is my worst mistake," I would say to everyone by the rescue assistant to the cartoonist's chief, "This is my worst mistake," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, "What about yours?" And then I'll show you the microphone.
And then their pupilles expand, they bounce off the head, and then they look down and get really sick, and they start telling their stories.
You want to tell your stories. You want to share your stories.
They want to be able to say, "Look, don't make the same mistake I made."
What they need is an environment that puts them in.
What they need is a new medical culture.
And it starts with a doctor.
The redefined physician is a human, knows for his humanity, accepts them, is not proud of making mistakes, but lets all learn from them so that it can be passed on.
She shares her experience with others.
It supports when others talk about their mistakes.
And it shows others their mistakes, not just to put it, but in a loving, supportive way that all of them benefit.
And she works in a medical culture that recognizes that people fill the system with life, and if that's it, then people make mistakes of time to time.
So that the system develops backups, which make it easier to detect mistakes that make people inevitable and also allows for loving, supportive spaces where anyone who sees health care can actually respond to things that are potential mistakes and that are actually rewarded for them, and that should be rewarded specifically for people like me to make mistakes and to encourage that reward.
My name is Brian Goldman.
I'm the redefined physician.
I'm a human. I make mistakes.
I'm painting this, but I'm trying to get the best I can to learn to pass it on to others.
I don't know what you think of me, but I can live with that.
So let me close with three of my own words: I remember.
I'm going to talk about a tiny, little idea.
It's about changing norms.
And because you can explain this idea in a minute, I'm going to tell you three stories earlier to use time.
The first story is about Charles Darwin, one of my heroes.
You know, he was 1835 here.
You might think he's chasing Finland, but that's not true.
He actually collected fish.
He described one as very unusual.
It was a grouper.
Up until the '80s, he was fished in great style.
It's now on the Red List.
This story we've heard many times from the Galapagos Islands or other places, and it's not very special.
However, we're still coming to the Galapagos Islands.
We still think they're original.
The buddies still describe them as pristine.
What happened here?
The second story is about a different concept that illustrates the shifting range.
Because I experienced it when I was a Lagune in West Africa in 1971.
I went there because I grew up in Europe and wanted to work later in Africa.
I thought I could integrate.
And I got a bad sunburn, and I was convinced I really didn't come from there.
It was my first sunburn.
As you can see, the lagoon of palms and some mangroves were empty.
There were bulldozers of about 20 centimeters, black-kin-maulbs, a subset of the Buntbarsches.
The fishing grounds of these Buntbarsche were very productive, and the fishermen lived well on top of this, and they were earning well on average in Ghana.
When I returned there 27 years later, the fish had shrunk to half its size.
They grew up to about five centimeters.
They were genetically depressed.
There were still fishes.
People were still happy.
And the fish were also lucky to be there.
So it hasn't changed, and yet it has changed everything.
My third little story is told by my co-worker in the introduction of trawling in Southeast Asia.
In the '70s -- rather at the beginning of the '60s -- Europe promoted a lot of development projects.
Fish funding meant countries that had already started 100,000 fish, the industrial fishfang, this rather ugly ship is called Mutiara 4.
I went along, and we did surveys all over the southern South China Sea, and especially in the Java Sea.
We didn't have words for what we started there.
I now know it was the cause of the sea.
90 percent of our time has been swarms, other animals that are connected to the bottom.
The biggest part of the fish, the small dots there on the rubble, the debris pile, were coral reefs.
So basically the bottom line of the ocean came out, and then it was thrown back.
These images are extraordinary, because the transition is very fast.
Within a year, you go through a survey and then start with the commercial fishing.
The reason is going to change. From -- in this case -- a hard reason or soft coral is going to suck up.
This is a dead turtle.
They didn't eat, they threw them away because they were dead.
Once upon a time, we started a life.
She wasn't drowned yet.
Then they wanted to kill them, because you could eat them well.
In fact, this mountain is accumulated from fishers every time they go into areas that have never been fished.
It's not going to be documented.
We change the world, but we don't remember it.
We adapt our norms to the new level, and we don't remember what was there.
If you generalize it, this is what happens.
There are some good things on the y-axis: biodiversity, number of orca, the green of your country, the water supply.
Over time, it's changing. It's changing because people are of course their actions.
Every generation looks at the images that they take at the beginning of their conscious lives, as a standard, and it's going to initiate all of them.
The difference is then seen as a loss.
But they don't perceive the previous losses.
There can be a sequence of changes.
And in the end, you just want to get the inherited remains.
That's where our goal is farthest.
We want to preserve things that are gone or things that are no longer the way they were.
Now, you might think that the problem was facing people who certainly died when they lived in Roman societies, killing animals, and who only realized after a few generations what they had done.
Because obviously, an animal that has been very common has been rarely once before it's gone.
So you don't lose conventional animals.
You always lose rare animals.
And so it's not seen as a big loss.
Over time, we're focused on the large animals and the ocean, and that's the big fish.
They get less rare because we start them.
There isn't a lot of fish left over, and we think that's the norm.
The question is why people accept that.
Well, because they don't know it was different.
Of course, a lot of people, scientists, will say it was really different.
You will confirm it, because the evidence that they display in an earlier form is not as much as they would like to demonstrate the evidence.
For example, there's an anecdote that the report of a captain's son who's been watching a lot of fishes in this area can't be used, or is not used by fishing scientists, because he's not "scientific."
So we have a situation that people don't know the past, even though we live in educated societies, because they don't trust the sources of the past.
This shows the enormous role that a marine protected area can play.
Because in marine protected areas, we're basically re-creating the past.
We rebuild the past that people can't understand because the norms have changed and are very low.
So people who see a marine protected area can benefit from the insight that it allows them to put back their norms.
What about the people who can't do that, because they have no access -- people in the Middle West, for example?
Here, I think art and film might fill the gap, and simulation.
This is the simulation of Chesapeake Bay.
A long time ago there were gray whales -- 500 years ago.
And the color tones and whistles might remind you of "Avatar."
If you think about "Avatar," if you think about why people were so touched by this -- except for the Pocahontas story, why were they so touched by the visual world?
Because it appeals to something that's been lost in a certain way.
So my recommendation, the only one I'm going to give, is for Cameron to turn "Avatar II" underwater.
Thank you very much.
In the '80s, in the communist Eastern Germany, when you had a typewriter, you had to register it in the government.
They also had to register a piece of text from this typewriter.
The reason for that is that the government was able to trace back where a text came from.
If they wanted an article with the wrong idea, they could track the creators of this thought.
And we in the West couldn't understand how anybody could do that and how much that would restrict freedom of speech.
We would never do that in our own countries.
But if you buy a new color printer today, in 2011, from the leading laser printers and print a page, this page has bright yellow blobs on each page in a pattern that clearly lets the page go back to you and your printer.
This is what's happening to us today.
And nobody seems to be upset about that.
And this was an example of how our own governments are using technology against us, civil society.
And this is one of the three main sources of existing online problems today.
Let's take a look at what's really happening in the world: we can divide the attacks into categories.
We have three main groups.
There's online crime.
For example, this is Mr. Dimitry Golubow from Kiew in Ukraine.
And the online criminals are very easy to understand.
These people deserve money.
They use online attacks to make a lot of money, a huge amount of money.
There are several well-known cases of online billionaires, multi-millionaires who have made their money from attacks.
This is Wladimir Tsastsin from Tartu in Estonia.
This is Alfred Gonzalez.
Stephen Watt.
Björn Sundin.
This is Matthew Anderson, Tariq Al-Daour and so on and so forth.
These people have grown up online, but they've acquired it illegal by using trojans, for example, to steal money from our bank accounts while we're doing our online banking, or Keyloggers, who've collected our card details on the keyboard while we're buying over an infected computer online.
The U.S. intelligence agency, two months ago, joined the Swiss account by Mr. Sam Jain here, and in that account, there were 14.9 million U.S. dollars when it was frozen.
Mr. Jain himself is at a free foot, the forefather is unknown.
And I claim to you that it's more likely today that we are becoming victims of an online crime than a crime in the real world.
And it's very obvious that this will only get worse.
In the future, most crime will be online.
The second largest group we can see today is not motivated by money.
They're motivated by something else -- protests, or opinion, or audiences.
Groups like Anonymous have come up over the last 12 months and have become one of the main players in the field of online attacks.
So these are the three main groups: criminals who are doing it because of the money, hacktivists like Anonymous who are doing it for resistance, but the last group are nations, governments who are running attacks.
We have cases like DigiNotar.
It shows unprecedented what happens when governments are attacking their own citizens.
DigiNotar is a full-energy produce from the Netherlands -- or was it.
Last fall, it had to sign insolvent because DigiNotar had been hacked.
Someone was broken, and they hacked the system thoroughly.
And last week, in a meeting with Dutch government officials, I asked one of the people to come up with the question of whether he thought it was possible because of the DigiNotar Hawaiian people had died.
And his answer was yes.
Now, how do people die in the aftermath of such a hack?
DigiNotar is a certification site.
They sell certificates.
What do you do with certificates?
Well, a certificate is required when you have a website with HTTPS, with SSL key services, for example, Gmail.
Now we all use, or many of us, Gmail or one of their competitors, but these services are especially common in totalitarian states like Iran, where dissidents use foreign suppliers like Gmail because they know that they can trust them more than local operators, and they're encrypted over SSL bonds, so the local government can't whine in their conversations.
But can you, if you're in a foreigner?
Certification agencies hack and do fake certificates.
And that's exactly what happened in the case of DigiNotar.
How about the Arab Spring and the things that happened, for example, in Egypt?
Well, in Egypt, the Dutch people in April 2011 had a secret police headquarters for the Egyptian secret police, and they found a lot of them.
In these acts were a folder called FINFISHER.
And in that folder were notes from a company in Germany that the Egyptian government had sold a few programs that they could -- in a very large scale -- get all the communication of the Egyptian citizens.
They had sold this program for 280,000 euros to the Egyptian government.
The company company company is right here.
So Western governments are providing totalitarian governments with tools to run against their own citizens.
But Western governments are also helping themselves.
For example, in Germany, just a few weeks ago, the so-called statestrojan, which was a trojan that was used by German government officials to tap their own citizens.
If you are suspicious in a criminal case, your phone will be pretty safe.
But today we are far beyond that.
They tap into your Internet connection.
They use tools like the state of thetrojans to play your computer with a trojan that allows them to monitor all your communication, listen to your online discourse, collect your passwords.
So if we keep thinking about things like this, then people's obvious answer would be, "Okay, that sounds bad, but I'm not in trouble because I'm a good citizen.
I don't have to worry.
I have nothing to hide."
And that argument doesn't make any sense.
Privacy must be given.
Privacy is not a debate.
It's not a matter of choice between privacy and security.
It's a decision between freedom and control.
And while today, 2011, our governments may trust us, every right we give away is given away forever.
And do we trust, do we blindly trust a future government, a government that we may have in 50 years?
Those are the questions we have to deal with over the next 50 years.
It may seem strange to you, but I'm a big fan of concrete blocks.
The first concrete blocks were made in 1868, and they came up with a simple idea: modules of cement with set-up measures that fit together.
concrete blocks became the dominant building unit in the world very quickly.
They made us capable of building things that were bigger than us, buildings, bridges, one brick after another.
Basically, the concrete block had become the building block of our time.
Almost a hundred years later, in 1947, LEGO came out with this.
It was called the automatic connective stone.
And within a few years, LEGO moved in every household.
It's estimated that over 400 billion stones were produced -- or 75 stones for each person on the planet.
You don't have to be an engineer to create beautiful houses, beautiful bridges, beautiful buildings.
LEGO made it possible for everyone.
LEGO basically took the concrete block, the building block of the world, and made it a building block for our imagination.
In the meantime, in the same year at Bell Labs, the next revolution was announced, the next building block.
The transistor was a little plastic unit that would take us from a world of static, stacked tiles to a world where everything was interactive.
Like the concrete block, the transistor allows us to build much larger, more complex loops, one stone at a time.
But there's a big difference: The transistor was just for experts.
I personally don't accept that the building block of our time is reserved for experts, and so I decided to change that.
Eight years ago, I was at the Media Lab, and I started exploring this idea of how to put the power of engineers into the hands of artists and designers.
A few years ago, I started developing littleBits.
Let me show you how they work.
LittleBits are electronic modules that have specific function.
They're ready to be light, sound, motors and sensor.
And the best part is they connect with magnets.
So you can't put them in the wrong way.
The stones are colored.
Green is output, blue is electricity, pink is input and orange is wire.
So all you have to do is connect a blue one and a green one together, and they can create bigger cycles very quickly.
They add a blue to a green one, and they can make light.
You can put a switch in between, and that's how they created a little dimmer.
Take the switch out to add a pulse module that's here, and you've made a little linker.
Add that Buzzer for an extra effect, and you've made a noise machine.
I'm going to stop that.
Beyond simple play, littleBits is actually quite powerful.
Instead of having to program, wire or read, littleBits allow you to code with simple, intuitive gestures.
So to accelerate or slow the link, you just turn on this button and it makes the momentum faster or slower.
The idea behind littleBits is that it's a growing library.
We want to put every single interaction in the world into a used stone.
Lights, sounds, solar elements, motors -- everything should be available.
We've distributed littleBits to kids and we see them play with it.
And it was an incredible experience.
The coolest thing is, how do they begin to understand the electronics that surround them in everyday life that they don't learn in school?
Like a nightlight works, or why the doors of the elevator remain open, or how an iPod responds to touch.
We also brought littleBits to design schools.
So for example, we had designers with no experience in electronic things that started playing with littleBits as materials.
Here we see, with Filz, paper and water bottles, like Geordie ...
A few weeks ago, we brought littleBits to RISD, and we gave them some designers who had no technical experience -- just cardboard, wood and paper -- and told them, "Make something."
Here's an example of a project that they did, a motion-driven confetti box.
But wait, this is really my favorite project.
It's a Hummer of Playe that's afraid of darkness.
For this non-Ingeniator, littleBits became another material, electronics became just another material.
And we want to make this material available to everyone.
So littleBits is open source.
You can go to the website, download all the design templates and make them themselves.
We want to encourage the world of creators, the inventors, the contributors, because this world that we live in, this interactive world, belongs to us.
So, go ahead and start inventing.
Thank you very much.