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this is the the world's mechanically simplest controllable flying machine invented just a few months ago it has only one moving part a propeller it has no flaps no hinges no ailerons no other actuators no other control surfaces just a simple propeller even though it's mechanically simple there's a lot going on in its little electronic brain to allow it to fly in a stable fashion and to move anywhere it wants in space even so it doesn't yet have the sophisticated algorithms of the tail sitter which means that in order to get it to fly i have to throw it just right and because the probability of me throwing it just right is very low given everybody watching me what we're going to do instead is show you a video that we shot last night
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this last demonstration is an exploration of synthetic swarms the large number of autonomous coordinated entities offers a new palette for aesthetic expression we've taken commercially available micro each weighing less than a slice of bread by the way and outfitted them with our localization technology and custom algorithms because each unit knows where it is in space and is self controlled there is really no limit to their number hopefully these demonstrations will motivate you to dream up new revolutionary roles for flying machines that one over there for example has aspirations to become a flying on broadway
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is poised to become a multibillion dollar industry inspection environmental monitoring photography and film and journalism these are some of the potential applications for commercial drones and their are the capabilities being developed at research facilities around the world for example before aerial package delivery entered our social consciousness an autonomous fleet of flying machines built a six tower composed of bricks in front of a live audience at the centre in france and several years ago they started to fly with ropes by flying machines they can achieve high speeds and in very tight spaces they can also autonomously build tensile structures skills learned include how to carry loads how to cope with disturbances and in general how to interact with the physical world
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to show you some new projects that we've been working on their aim is to push the boundary of what can be achieved with autonomous flight now for a system to function autonomously it must collectively know the location of its mobile objects in space back at our lab at zurich we often use external cameras to locate objects which then allows us to focus our efforts on the rapid development of highly dynamic tasks for the demos you will see today however we will use new localization technology developed by verity studios a spin off from our lab there are no external cameras each flying machine uses onboard sensors to determine its location in space and onboard computation to determine what its actions should be
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i think it's safe to say that all of us here are deeply concerned about the escalating violence in our daily lives while universities are trying to devise courses in conflict resolution and governments are trying to stop skirmishes at borders we are surrounded by violence whether it's road rage or whether it's domestic violence whether it's a teacher beating up a student and killing her because she hasn't done her homework it's everywhere so why are we not doing something to actually attend that problem on a day to day basis what are we doing to try and make children and young people realize that violence is something that we indulge in that we can stop and that there are other ways of actually taking violence taking anger taking frustrations into different things that do not harm other people well here is one such way
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a one eyed monkey came into the forest under a tree she saw a woman meditating furiously the one eyed monkey recognized the woman a she was the wife of an even more famous brahmin to watch her better the one eyed monkey climbed onto the tree just then with a loud bang the heavens opened
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she's being filmed with a hidden camera this is on the train in new york city and this is the first stop along the line these are two danish guys who come in and sit down next to the hidden camera and that's me right there in a brown coat it's about degrees outside i'm wearing a hat i'm wearing a scarf and the girl's going to notice me right here
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at this point at this point she's noticed me but in new york there's weirdos on any given train car one person's not that unusual she goes back to reading her book which is unfortunately titled rape
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so she's noticed the unusual thing but she's gone back to her normal life now in the meantime i have six friends who are waiting at the next six consecutive stops in their underwear as well they're going to be entering this car one by one we'll act as though we don't know each other and we'll act as if it's just an unfortunate mistake we've made forgetting our pants on this cold january day
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i started improv everywhere about years ago when i moved to new york city with an interest in acting and comedy because i was new to the city i didn't have access to a stage so i decided to create my own in public places so the first project we're going to take a look at is the very first no pants subway ride now this took place in january of and this woman is the star of the video she doesn't know she's being filmed
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so the video won't show everything this goes on for another four stops a total of seven guys enter anonymously in their underwear at the eighth stop a girl came in with a giant duffel bag and announced she had pants for sale for a dollar like you might sell batteries or candy on the train we all very matter bought a pair of pants put them on and said thank you that's exactly what i needed today and then exited without revealing what had happened and went in all different directions
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you know as kids we're taught to play and we're never given a reason why we should play it's just acceptable that play is a good thing and i think that's sort of the point of improv everywhere it's that there is no point and that there doesn't have to be a point we don't need a reason
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now archie was a doctor so he hung around with doctors a lot and doctors suffer from the god complex a lot now i'm an economist i'm not a doctor but i see the god complex around me all the time in my fellow economists i see it in our business leaders i see it in the politicians we vote for people who in the face of an incredibly complicated world are nevertheless absolutely convinced that they understand the way that the world works and you know with the future billions that we've been hearing about the world is simply far too complex to understand in that way well let me give you an example imagine for a moment that instead of tim harford in front of you there was hans presenting his graphs you know hans the mick jagger of ted
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economy is still the world's greatest economy how did it become the world's greatest economy i could give you all kinds of facts and figures about the u s economy but i think the most salient one is this ten percent of american businesses disappear every year that is a huge failure rate it's far higher than the failure rate of say americans ten percent of americans don't disappear every year which leads us to conclude american businesses fail faster than americans and therefore american businesses are evolving faster than americans and eventually they'll have evolved to such a high peak of perfection that they will make us all their pets if of course they haven't already done so
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it's the second world war a german prison camp and this man archie cochrane is a prisoner of war and a doctor and he has a problem the problem is that the men under his care are suffering from an excruciating and debilitating condition that archie doesn't really understand the symptoms are this horrible swelling up of fluids under the skin but he doesn't know whether it's an infection whether it's to do with malnutrition
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the symptoms are this horrible swelling up of fluids under the skin but he doesn't know whether it's an infection whether it's to do with malnutrition he doesn't know how to cure it and he's operating in a hostile environment and people do terrible things in wars the german camp guards they've got bored they've taken to just firing into the prison camp at random for fun on one particular occasion one of the guards threw a grenade into the prisoners' lavatory while it was full of prisoners he said he heard suspicious laughter
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four years ago we started following these at night and watching to see if we could figure out when they spawn in we got some good tips from our colleagues in florida who had seen one in one in and eventually we figured out when they spawn in and we caught it here's a female on the left with some eggs in her tissue about to release them into the seawater and here's a male on the right releasing sperm we collected this we got it back to the lab we got it to fertilize and we got baby pillar corals swimming in our lab thanks to the work of our scientific aunts and uncles and thanks to the years of practice we've had in at raising other coral species we got some of those larvae to go through the rest of the process and settle and attach and turn into corals so this is the first pillar coral baby that anyone ever saw and i have to say if you think baby pandas are cute this is cuter
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now knowing what successful systems are doing doesn't yet tell us how to improve that's also clear and that's where some of the limits of international comparisons of pisa are that's where other forms of research need to kick in and that's also why pisa doesn't venture into telling countries what they should be doing but its strength lies in telling them what everybody else has been doing and the example of pisa shows that data can be more powerful than administrative control of financial subsidy through which we usually run education systems you know some people argue that changing educational administration is like moving graveyards you just can't rely on the people out there to help you with this
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look at how the world looked in the in terms of the proportion of people who had completed high school you can see the united states ahead of everyone else and much of the economic success of the united states draws on its long standing advantage as the first mover in education but in the some countries caught up
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is an actual text that was done by a non male person of about years old not too long ago i love the font you're using thanks is being slow right now now if you think about it that's not funny no one's laughing
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we always hear that is a scourge the idea is that spells the decline and fall of any kind of serious literacy or at least writing ability among young people in the united states and now the whole world today the fact of the matter is that it just isn't true and it's easy to think that it is true but in order to see it in another way in order to see that actually is a miraculous thing not just energetic but a miraculous thing a kind of emergent complexity that we're seeing happening right now we have to pull the camera back for a bit and look at what language really is in which case one thing that we see is that is not writing at all what do i mean by that basically if we think about language language has existed for perhaps years at least years and what it arose as is speech people talked
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we're going to go on a dive to the deep sea and anyone that's had that lovely opportunity knows that for about two and half hours on the way down it's a perfectly positively pitch black world and we used to see the most mysterious animals out the window that you couldn't describe these blinking lights a world of like fireflies dr edith widder she's now at the ocean research and conservation association was able to come up with a camera that could capture some of these incredible animals and that's what you're seeing here on the screen that's all like i said just like fireflies there's a flying turkey under a tree
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the unknown world and today we've only explored about percent of what's out there in the ocean already we've found the world's highest mountains the world's deepest valleys underwater lakes underwater waterfalls a lot of that we shared with you from the stage and in a place where we thought no life at all we find more life we think and diversity and density than the tropical rainforest which tells us that we don't know much about this planet at all there's still percent and either that percent is empty or just full of surprises but i want to jump up to shallow water now and look at some creatures that are positively amazing head as a kid i knew them as calamari mostly
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this is the work of dr roger hanlon at the marine biological lab and it's just fascinating how can with their incredible eyes sense their surroundings look at light look at patterns here's an octopus moving across the reef finds a spot to settle down curls up and then disappears into the background tough thing to do in the next bit we're going to see a couple squid now males when they fight if they're really aggressive they turn white and these two males are fighting they do it by bouncing their butts together which is an interesting concept now here's a male on the left and a female on the right and the male has managed to split his coloration so the female only always sees the kinder gentler squid in him
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some of the colors are designed to hypnotize these lovely patterns and then this last one one of my favorites this design
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but they can do pretty amazing things too here we're going to see one backing into a crevice and watch his tentacles he just pulls them in makes them look just like algae
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but they can do pretty amazing things too here we're going to see one backing into a crevice and watch his tentacles he just pulls them in makes them look just like algae disappears right into the background positively amazing here's two males fighting once again they're smart enough these they know not to hurt each other but look at the patterns that they can do with their skin that's an amazing thing here's an octopus
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i want to talk to you about my kids now i know everyone thinks that their kid is the most fantastic the most beautiful kid that ever lived but mine really are
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we sit and we keep banging our heads against this term achievement gap achievement gap is it really that hard to understand why these kids perform well and these kids don't i mean really i think we've got it all wrong i think we as gloria ladson billings says should flip our paradigm and our language and call it what it really is it's not an achievement gap it's an education debt for all of the foregone schooling resources that were never invested in the education of the black and brown child over time a little known secret in american history is that the only american institution created specifically for people of color is the american slave trade and some would argue the prison system but that's another topic for another ted talk
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then they'd say ms sumner where did these books come from and then i'd reply strangers from all over the country wanted you to have these and then they'd say almost suspiciously but they're brand new
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being perplexed or confused or befuddled by the achievement gap the income gap the incarceration rates or whatever socioeconomic disparity is the new it term for the moment the problems we have as a country are the problems we created as a country the quality of your education is directly proportionate to your access to college your access to jobs your access to the future until we live in a world where every kid can get a high quality education no matter where they live or the color of their skin there are things we can do on a macro level school funding should not be decided by property taxes or some funky economic equation where rich kids continue to benefit from state aid while poor kids are continuously having food and resources taken from their mouths governors senators mayors city council members if we're going to call public education public education then it should be just that otherwise we should call it what it really is poverty insurance public education keeping poor kids poor since
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at five years old i had to take an hour long bus ride to a faraway place to get a better education at five years old i thought everyone had a life just like mine i thought everyone went to school and were the only ones using the brown crayons to color in their family portraits while everyone else was using the peach colored ones at five years old i thought everyone was just like me but as i got older i started noticing things like how come my neighborhood friend don't have to wake up at five o'clock in the morning and go to a school that's an hour away how come i'm learning to play the violin while my neighborhood friends don't even have a music class why were my neighborhood friends learning and reading material that i had done two to three years prior see as i got older i started to have this unlawful feeling in my belly like i was doing something that i wasn't supposed to be doing taking something that wasn't mine receiving a gift but with someone else's name on it all these amazing things that i was being exposed to and experiencing i felt i wasn't really supposed to have i wasn't supposed to have a library fully equipped athletic facilities or safe fields to play in i wasn't supposed to have theatre departments with seasonal plays and concerts digital visual performing arts i wasn't supposed to have fully biology or chemistry labs school buses that brought me door freshly prepared school lunches or even air conditioning
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you know i'm struck by how one of the implicit themes of ted is compassion these very moving demonstrations we've just seen in africa president clinton last night and i'd like to do a little collateral thinking if you will about compassion and bring it from the global level to the personal i'm a psychologist but rest assured i will not bring it to the
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i was at a sushi restaurant a while back and i overheard two women talking about the brother of one woman who was in the singles scene and this woman says my brother is having trouble getting dates so he's trying speed dating i don't know if you know speed dating women sit at tables and men go from table to table and there's a clock and a bell and at five minutes bingo the conversation ends and the woman can decide whether to give her card or her email address to the man for follow up and this woman says my brother's never gotten a card and i know exactly why the moment he sits down he starts talking non stop about himself he never asks about the woman and i was doing some research in the sunday styles section of the new york times looking at the back stories of marriages because they're very interesting and i came to the marriage of alice charney epstein and she said that when she was in the dating scene she had a simple test she put people to the test was from the moment they got together how long it would take the guy to ask her a question with the word you in it and apparently epstein aced the test therefore the article
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now this is a it's a little test i encourage you to try out at a party here at ted there are great opportunities the harvard business review recently had an article called the human moment about how to make real contact with a person at work and they said well the fundamental thing you have to do is turn off your blackberry close your laptop end your daydream and pay full attention to the person there is a newly coined word in the english language for the moment when the person we're with whips out their blackberry or answers that cell phone and all of a sudden we don't exist the word is it's a combination of puzzled and pissed off
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there was a very important study done a while ago at princeton theological seminary that speaks to why it is that when all of us have so many opportunities to help we do sometimes and we don't other times a group of divinity students at the princeton theological seminary were told that they were going to give a practice sermon and they were each given a sermon topic half of those students were given as a topic the parable of the good samaritan the man who stopped the stranger in to help the stranger in need by the side of the road half were given random bible topics then one by one they were told they had to go to another building and give their sermon as they went from the first building to the second each of them passed a man who was bent over and moaning clearly in need
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more interesting question is did it matter they were contemplating the parable of the good samaritan answer no not at all what turned out to determine whether someone would stop and help a stranger in need was how much of a hurry they thought they were in were they feeling they were late or were they absorbed in what they were going to talk about and this is i think the predicament of our lives that we don't take every opportunity to help because our focus is in the wrong direction there's a new field in brain science social neuroscience this studies the circuitry in two people's brains that activates while they interact
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for the question absolutely i believe that these technologies are scientifically useful right now and that's why we're using them in multiple parts of our work at nasa so we're using it to improve the ways that we explore mars we're also using it for our astronauts on the space station we're even using it now to design the next generation of our spacecraft amazing ok jeff please go away thank you very much
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thousands of years from now we'll look back at the first century of computing as a fascinating but very peculiar time the only time in history where humans were reduced to live in space interacting with technology as if we were machines a singular period in the vastness of time where humans communicated were entertained and managed their lives from behind a screen today we spend most of our time tapping and looking at screens what happened to interacting with each other i don't know about you but i feel limited inside this world of monitors and pixels and it is this very limitation and my desire to connect with people that inspires me as a creator put simply i want to create a new reality a reality where technology brings us infinitely closer to each other a reality where people not devices are the center of everything
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devices like this will bring holographic content right into our world enhancing the way we experience life beyond our ordinary range of perceptions now i'm not thinking about a distant future i'm talking about today we are already seeing car companies like volvo designing cars differently with universities like case western redefining the way medical students learn and my personal favorite nasa is using to let scientists explore planets now this is important by bringing holograms into our world i'm not just talking about a new device or a better computer i'm talking about freeing ourselves from the confines of traditional computing put it this way temporally adjusted we're like cave people in computer terms we've barely discovered charcoal and started drawing the first stick figures in our cave
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so every time we hit a resonant frequency we get a standing wave and that emergent sine curve of fire so let's turn that off we're indoors thank you i also have with me a flame table it's very similar to a tube and it's also used for visualizing the physical properties of sound such as so let's fire it up and see what it does ooh
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now while the table comes up to pressure let me note here that the sound is not traveling in perfect lines it's actually traveling in all directions and the a little like those waves with a line and the flame table's a little like those waves with a plane and it can show a little more subtle complexity which is why i like to use it to watch geoff farina play guitar all right so it's a delicate dance if you watch closely if you watch closely you may have seen some of the but also you may have seen that jazz music is better with fire actually a lot of things are better with fire in my world but the fire's just a foundation it shows very well that eyes can hear and this is interesting to me because technology allows us to present sound to the eyes in ways that accentuate the strength of the eyes for seeing sound such as the removal of time
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the advances that have taken place in astronomy cosmology and biology in the last years are really extraordinary to the point where we know more about our universe and how it works than many of you might imagine but there was something else that i've noticed as those changes were taking place as people were starting to find out that yeah there really is a black hole at the center of every galaxy the science writers and editors i shouldn't say science writers i should say people who write about science and editors would sit down over a couple of beers after a hard day of work and start talking about some of these incredible perceptions about how the universe works and they would inevitably end up in what i thought was a very bizarre place which is ways the world could end very suddenly and that's what i want to talk about today
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number seven particle accelerator mishap you all remember ted kaczynski the unabomber one of the things he raved about was that a particle accelerator experiment could go haywire and set off a chain reaction that would destroy the world a lot of very sober minded physicists believe it or not have had exactly the same thought this spring there's a collider at brookhaven on long island this spring it's going to have an experiment in which it creates black holes they are expecting to create little tiny black holes they expect them to evaporate
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so what do we do about that we treat biotechnology with the same scrutiny we apply to nuclear power plants it's that simple this is an amazingly unregulated field when the disaster happened there was a battle between the and the over who really had authority and over what parts of this and they didn't get it straightened out for months that's kind of crazy number five one of my favorites reversal of the earth's magnetic field believe it or not this happens every few hundred thousand years and has happened many times in our history north pole goes to the south south pole goes to the north and vice versa but what happens as this occurs is that we lose our magnetic field around the earth over the period of about years and that means that all these cosmic rays and particles that are to come streaming at us from the sun that this field protects us from are well basically we're gonna fry
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number four giant solar flares solar flares are enormous magnetic outbursts from the sun that bombard the earth with high speed subatomic particles so far our atmosphere has done and our magnetic field has done pretty well protecting us from this occasionally we get a flare from the sun that causes havoc with communications and so forth and electricity but the alarming thing is that astronomers recently have been studying stars that are similar to our sun and they've found that a number of them when they're about the age of our sun brighten by a factor of as much as doesn't last for very long and they think these are super flares millions of times more powerful than any flares we've had from our sun so far obviously we don't want one of those
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this is one of my favorite subjects i wrote a story about this in life magazine in this is rocket science but it's not hard rocket science everything that we need to make an atmosphere on mars and to make a livable planet on mars is probably there and you just literally have to send little nuclear factories up there that gobble up the iron oxide on the surface of mars and spit out the oxygen the problem is it takes years to mars minimum really more like years to do it right there's no reason why we shouldn't start now
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but galaxies are very violent places and things can be spun out of orbit and also space is incredibly vast so even if you flung a million of these things out of orbit the chances that one would actually hit us is fairly remote but it only has to get close about a billion miles away one of these things about a billion miles away here's what happens to earth's orbit it becomes elliptical instead of circular and for three months out of the year the surface temperatures go up to to for three months out of the year they go to below zero that won't work too well what can we do about this and this is my scariest
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the thing i think to remember is september we don't want to get caught flat footed again we know about this stuff science has the power to predict the future in many cases now knowledge is power the worst thing we can do is say jeez i got enough to worry about without worrying about an asteroid
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and then september happened and i thought ah god i can't go to the ted conference and talk about how the world is going to end nobody wants to hear that not after this and that got me into a discussion with some other people other scientists about maybe some other subjects and one of the guys i talked to who was a neuroscientist said you know i think there are a lot of solutions to the problems you brought up and reminds me of michael's talk yesterday and his mother saying you can't have a solution if you don't have a problem so we went out looking for solutions to ways that the world might end tomorrow and lo and behold we found them
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not after this and that got me into a discussion with some other people other scientists about maybe some other subjects and one of the guys i talked to who was a neuroscientist said you know i think there are a lot of solutions to the problems you brought up and reminds me of michael's talk yesterday and his mother saying you can't have a solution if you don't have a problem so we went out looking for solutions to ways that the world might end tomorrow and lo and behold we found them which leads me to a videotape of a president bush press conference from a couple of weeks ago can we run that andrew president george w bush whatever it costs to defend our security and whatever it costs to defend our freedom we must pay it i agree with the president he wants two trillion dollars to protect us from terrorists next year a two federal budget which will land us back into deficit spending real fast but terrorists aren't the only threat we face there are really serious calamities staring us in the eye that we're in the same kind of denial about that we were about terrorism and what could've happened on september
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i would propose therefore that if we took billion dollars from that trillion dollar budget which is two one hundredths of that budget and we doled out a billion dollars to each one of these problems i'm going to talk to you about the vast majority could be solved and the rest we could deal with so i hope you find this both fascinating i'm fascinated by this kind of stuff i gotta admit to me these are richard's cockroaches but i also hope because i think the people in this room can literally change the world i hope you take some of this stuff away with you and when you have an opportunity to be influential that you try to get some heavy duty money spent on some of these ideas so let's start number we lose the will to survive we live in an incredible age of modern medicine we are all much healthier than we were years ago
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pills alone don't do it especially in clinically depressed people you ought to be able to go to a psychiatrist or a psychologist and put down your and get treated just like you do when you got a cut on your arm it's ridiculous
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number nine don't laugh aliens invade earth ten years ago you couldn't have found an astronomer well very few astronomers in the world who would've told you that there are any planets anywhere outside our solar system we found three the count now is up to we're finding about two or three a month all of the ones we've found by the way are in this little teeny tiny corner where we live in the milky way there must be millions of planets in the milky way and as carl sagan insisted for many years and was laughed at for it there must be billions and billions in the universe in a few years nasa is going to launch four or five telescopes out to jupiter where there's less dust and start looking for earth like planets which we cannot see with present technology nor detect it's becoming obvious that the chance that life does not exist elsewhere in the universe and probably fairly close to us is a fairly remote idea and the chance that some of it isn't more intelligent than ours is also a remote idea
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you've got it you've got the job number eight the ecosystem collapses last july in science the journal science published a very very unusual article it wasn't really a research report it was a screed they said we've been looking at the oceans for a long time now and we want to tell you they're not in trouble they're near collapse
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it wasn't really a research report it was a screed they said we've been looking at the oceans for a long time now and we want to tell you they're not in trouble they're near collapse many other ecosystems on earth are in real real danger we're living in a time of mass that exceeds the fossil record by a factor of we have lost percent of the unique species in hawaii in the last years california is expected to lose percent of its species in the next years somewhere in the amazon forest is the marginal tree you cut down that tree the rain forest collapses as an ecosystem there's really a tree like that out there
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sorry so i borrowed it i don't think they noticed ok
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of the things that the brain does is indulge in micro sleeps this involuntary falling asleep and you have essentially no control over it now micro sleeps can be sort of somewhat embarrassing but they can also be deadly it's been estimated that percent of drivers will fall asleep at the wheel at least once in their life and in the us the statistics are pretty good accidents on the freeway have been associated with tiredness loss of vigilance and falling asleep a hundred thousand a year it's extraordinary at another level of terror we dip into the tragic accidents at chernobyl and indeed the space shuttle challenger which was so tragically lost and in the investigations that followed those disasters poor judgment as a result of extended shift work and loss of vigilance and tiredness was attributed to a big chunk of those disasters when you're tired and you lack sleep you have poor memory you have poor creativity you have increased and you have overall poor judgment but my friends it's so much worse than that
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people need less sleep not true the sleep demands of the aged do not go down essentially sleep fragments and becomes less robust but sleep requirements do not go down and the fourth myth is early to bed early to rise makes a man healthy wealthy and wise well that's wrong at so many different levels
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there is no evidence that getting up early and going to bed early gives you more wealth at all there's no difference in socioeconomic status in my experience the only difference between morning people and evening people is that those people that get up in the morning early are just horribly smug
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is talk about one of my favorite subjects and that is the neuroscience of sleep now there is a sound ah it worked a sound that is desperately familiar to most of us and of course it's the sound of the alarm clock and what that truly ghastly awful sound does is stop the single most important behavioral experience that we have and that's sleep if you're an average sort of person percent of your life will be spent asleep which means that if you live to then years will have been spent entirely asleep
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what do we do in the century about sleep well of course we use thomas edison's light bulb to invade the night and we occupied the dark and in the process of this occupation we've treated sleep as an illness almost we've treated it as an enemy at most now i suppose we tolerate the need for sleep and at worst perhaps many of us think of sleep as an illness that needs some sort of a cure and our ignorance about sleep is really quite profound why is it why do we abandon sleep in our thoughts well it's because you don't do anything much while you're asleep it seems you don't eat you don't drink
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if we flip the brain on its back i love this little bit of spinal cord here this bit here is the and right under there is a whole raft of interesting structures not least the biological clock the biological clock tells us when it's good to be up when it's good to be asleep and what that structure does is interact with a whole raft of other areas within the the lateral the nuclei all of those combine and they send projections down to the brain stem here
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the first is sort of the restoration idea and it's somewhat intuitive essentially all the stuff we've burned up during the day we restore we replace we rebuild during the night and indeed as an explanation it goes back to aristotle so that's what years ago it's gone in and out of fashion it's fashionable at the moment because what's been shown is that within the brain a whole raft of genes have been shown to be turned on only during sleep and those genes are associated with restoration and metabolic pathways so there's good evidence for the whole restoration hypothesis
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so sleep and memory consolidation is also very important however it's not just the laying down of memory and recalling it what's turned out to be really exciting is that our ability to come up with novel solutions to complex problems is hugely enhanced by a night of sleep
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take a closer look at how we can build this first let's start with the core it's a tiny capsule that contains the chemotherapy drug this is the poison that will actually end the tumor cell's life around this core we'll wrap a very thin thin blanket of sirna this is our gene blocker because sirna is strongly negatively charged we can protect it with a nice protective layer of positively charged polymer the two charged molecules stick together through charge attraction and that provides us with a protective layer that prevents the sirna from degrading in the bloodstream we're almost done
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cancer affects all of us especially the ones that come back over and over again the highly invasive and drug resistant ones the ones that defy medical treatment even when we throw our best drugs at them engineering at the molecular level working at the smallest of scales can provide exciting new ways to fight the most aggressive forms of cancer cancer is a very clever disease there are some forms of cancer which fortunately we've learned how to address relatively well with known and established drugs and surgery but there are some forms of cancer that don't respond to these approaches and the tumor survives or comes back even after an onslaught of drugs we can think of these very aggressive forms of cancer as kind of in a comic book
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this was the first picture i took it was kind of amazing i thought it looked kind of a little bit like the moon which is sort of interesting now the way my microscopes work is normally in a microscope you can see very little at one time so what you have to do is you have to refocus the microscope keep taking pictures and then i have a computer program that puts all those pictures together into one picture so you can see actually what it looks like and i do that in so there you can see is a left eye view there's a right eye view so sort of left eye view right eye view now something's interesting here this looks very different than any sand on earth that i've ever seen and i've seen a lot of sand on earth believe me
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little bit about seeing the world from a totally unique point of view and this world i'm going to talk about is the micro world i've found after doing this for many many years that there's a magical world behind reality and that can be seen directly through a microscope and i'm going to show you some of this today so let's start off looking at something rather not something that we can see with our naked eye and that's a bee so when you look at this bee it's about this size here it's about a centimeter but to really see the details of the bee and really appreciate what it is you have to look a little bit closer
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it happened years ago it was actually a terrible disaster for princeton the town was burned down it was in the middle of winter and it was a very very severe winter and about a quarter of all the people in princeton died that winter from hunger and cold but nobody remembers that what they remember is of course the great triumph that the brits were beaten and we won and that the country was born and so i agree very emphatically that the pain of childbirth is not remembered it's the child that's remembered and that's what we're going through at this time i wanted to just talk for one minute about the future of biotechnology because i think i know very little about that i'm not a biologist so everything i know about it can be said in one minute
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these people will be empowered with biotech and that will be an enormous positive step to acceptance of biotechnology that will blow away a lot of the opposition when people have this technology in their hands you have a do biotech kit grow your own grow your dog grow your own cat
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you take that's a canadian expression if you happen to want to hunt animals at night you take a miner's lamp which is a pit lamp you strap it onto your forehead so you can see the reflection in the eyes of the animal so if you go out at night you shine a flashlight the animals are bright you see the red glow in their eyes which is the reflection of the flashlight and then if you're one of these characters you shoot the animals and take them home and of course that spoils the game for the other hunters who hunt in the daytime so in canada that's illegal in new zealand it's legal because the new zealand farmers use this as a way of getting rid of rabbits because the rabbits compete with the sheep in new zealand so the farmers go out at night with heavily armed jeeps and shine the headlights and anything that doesn't look like a sheep you shoot
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and you will have then a great competition amongst species darwinian evolution so there'll be a huge advantage to the species which is able to jump from one place to another without having to wait for a collision and there'll be advantages for spreading out long sort of kelp like forest of vegetation i call these creatures sunflowers they look like maybe like sunflowers they have to be all the time pointing toward the sun and they will be able to spread out in space because gravity on these objects is weak so they can collect sunlight from a big area so they will in fact be quite easy for us to detect so i hope in the next years we'll find these creatures and then of course our whole view of life in the universe will change if we don't find them then we can create them ourselves
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i happen to live in a little town princeton in new jersey which every year celebrates the great event in princeton history the battle of princeton which was in fact a very important battle it was the first battle that george washington won in fact and was pretty much of a turning point in the war of independence it happened years ago it was actually a terrible disaster for princeton the town was burned down it was in the middle of winter and it was a very very severe winter
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i want to talk about something quite different which is what i know about and that is astronomy and i'm interested in searching for life in the universe and it's open to us to introduce a new way of doing that and that's what i'll talk about for minutes or whatever the time remains
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the asteroids are a substantial amount of real estate but not very large and it's not very promising for life since most of it consists of rock and metal mostly rock it's not only cold but very dry
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and that makes it extraordinarily interesting as a place to explore ocean probably the most likely place for life to originate just as it originated on the earth so we would love to explore europa to go down through the ice find out who is swimming around in the ocean whether there are fish or seaweed or sea monsters whatever there may be that's exciting or
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go out a bit further you'll find that beyond the orbit of neptune way out far from the sun that's where the real estate really begins you'll find millions or trillions or billions of objects which in what we call the kuiper belt or the cloud these are clouds of small objects which appear as comets when they fall close to the sun mostly they just live out there in the cold of the outer solar system but they are biologically very interesting indeed because they consist primarily of ice with other minerals which are just the right ones for developing life so if life could be established out there it would have all the essentials chemistry and sunlight everything that's needed so what i'm proposing is that there is where we should be looking for life rather than on mars although mars is of course also a very promising and interesting place but we can look outside very cheaply and in a simple fashion and that's what i'm going to talk about there is a imagine that life originated on europa and it was sitting in the ocean for billions of years it's quite likely that it would move out of the ocean onto the surface just as it did on the earth
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there is a imagine that life originated on europa and it was sitting in the ocean for billions of years it's quite likely that it would move out of the ocean onto the surface just as it did on the earth staying in the ocean and evolving in the ocean for billion years finally came out onto the land and then of course it had great much greater freedom and a much greater variety of creatures developed on the land than had ever been possible in the ocean and the step from the ocean to the land was not easy but it happened now if life had originated on europa in the ocean it could also have moved out onto the surface there wouldn't have been any air there it's a vacuum it is out in the cold but it still could have come you can imagine that the plants growing up like kelp through cracks in the ice growing on the surface
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why is it important to attract those who believe what you believe something called the law of diffusion of innovation if you don't know the law you know the terminology the first of our population are our innovators the next of our population are our early the next are your early majority your late majority and your laggards the only reason these people buy touch tone phones is because you can't buy rotary phones anymore
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they showed up for themselves it's what they believed about america that got them to travel in a bus for eight hours to stand in the sun in washington in the middle of august it's what they believed and it wasn't about black versus white of the audience was white dr king believed that there are two types of laws in this world those that are made by a higher authority and those that are made by men and not until all the laws that are made by men are consistent with the laws made by the higher authority will we live in a just world it just so happened that the civil rights movement was the perfect thing to help him bring his cause to life we followed not for him but for ourselves by the way he gave the i have a dream speech not the i have a plan speech
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as we assume or better how do you explain when others are able to achieve things that seem to defy all of the assumptions for example why is apple so innovative year after year after year they're more innovative than all their competition and yet they're just a computer company they're just like everyone else
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about three and a half years ago i made a discovery and this discovery profoundly changed my view on how i thought the world worked and it even profoundly changed the way in which i operate in it as it turns out there's a pattern as it turns out all the great inspiring leaders and organizations in the world whether it's apple or martin luther king or the wright brothers they all think act and communicate the exact same way and it's the complete opposite to everyone else all i did was codify it and it's probably the world's simplest idea i call it the golden circle
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so your calculator is smarter than you are in arithmetic already your is smarter than you are in spatial navigation bing are smarter than you are in long term memory and we're going to take again these kinds of different types of thinking and we'll put them into like a car the reason why we want to put them in a car so the car drives is because it's not driving like a human it's not thinking like us that's the whole feature of it it's not being distracted it's not worrying about whether it left the stove on or whether it should have majored in finance it's just driving
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so the third aspect of this is that when we take this ai and embody it we get robots and robots are going to be they're going to be doing many of the tasks that we have already done a job is just a bunch of tasks so they're going to redefine our jobs because they're going to do some of those tasks but they're also going to create whole new categories a whole new slew of tasks that we didn't know we wanted to do before they're going to actually engender new kinds of jobs new kinds of tasks that we want done just as automation made up a whole bunch of new things that we didn't know we needed before and now we can't live without them so they're going to produce even more jobs than they take away but it's important that a lot of the tasks that we're going to give them are tasks that can be defined in terms of efficiency or productivity if you can specify a task either manual or conceptual that can be specified in terms of efficiency or productivity that goes to the productivity is for robots what we're really good at is basically wasting time
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in fact you didn't even have the internet yet compared to what we're going to have years from now there are no ai experts right now there's a lot of money going to it there are billions of dollars being spent on it it's a huge business but there are no experts compared to what we'll know years from now so we are just at the beginning of the beginning we're in the first hour of all this we're in the first hour of the internet we're in the first hour of what's coming the most popular ai product in years from now that everybody uses has not been invented yet that means that you're not late thank you
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but there's actually a large aspect of technology that's much more predictable and that's because technological systems of all sorts have leanings they have they have tendencies and those tendencies are derived from the very nature of the physics chemistry of wires and switches and electrons and they will make patterns again and again and so those patterns produce these tendencies these leanings you can almost think of it as sort of like gravity
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you can almost think of it as sort of like gravity imagine raindrops falling into a valley the actual path of a raindrop as it goes down the valley is unpredictable we cannot see where it's going but the general direction is very inevitable it's downward and so these baked in tendencies and in technological systems give us a sense of where things are going at the large form so in a large sense i would say that telephones were inevitable but the was not the internet was inevitable but was not so we have many ongoing tendencies right now and i think one of the chief among them is this tendency to make things smarter and smarter
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so we have many ongoing tendencies right now and i think one of the chief among them is this tendency to make things smarter and smarter i call it also known as artificial intelligence or ai and i think that's going to be one of the most influential developments and trends and directions and drives in our society in the next years so of course it's already here we already have ai and often it works in the background in the back offices of hospitals where it's used to diagnose x rays better than a human doctor it's in legal offices where it's used to go through legal evidence better than a human it's used to fly the plane that you came here with human pilots only flew it seven to eight minutes the rest of the time the ai was driving
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but for us the continuity between nerve and babble was not just the life stage thing which is of course relevant but it was really more about our desire to speak very honestly about subjects that people have difficulty speaking honestly about it seems to us that when people start dissembling people start lying about things that's when it gets really interesting that's a subject that we want to dive into and we've been surprised to find as young parents that there are almost more taboos around parenting than there are around sex it's true so like we said the early years were really wonderful but they were also really difficult and we feel like some of that difficulty was because of this false advertisement around parenting
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this picture is from literally a few seconds after the baby was placed in my hands and i brought him over and you can see our eyes were glistening i was overwhelmed with love and affection for my wife with deep deep gratitude that we had what appeared to be a healthy child and it was also of course surreal i mean i had to check the tags and make sure i was incredulous are you sure this is our child and this was all quite remarkable but what i felt towards the child at that moment was deep affection but nothing like what i feel for him now five years later and so we've done something here that is heretical we have charted our love for our child over time
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you're not allowed to chart love the reason you're not allowed to chart love is because we think of love as a binary thing you're either in love or you're not in love you love or you don't love and i think the reality is that love is a process and i think the problem with thinking of love as something that's binary is that it causes us to be unduly concerned that love is fraudulent or inadequate or what have you and i think i'm speaking obviously here to the father's experience but i think a lot of men do go through this sense in the early months maybe their first year that their emotional response is inadequate in some fashion well i'm glad rufus is bringing this up because you can notice where he dips in the first years where i think i was doing most of the work but we like to joke in the first few months of all of our children's lives this is uncle rufus
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we were at the time running a very different kind of website it was a website called nerve com the tagline of which was literate smut it was in theory and hopefully in practice a smart online magazine about sex and culture that spawned a dating site but you can understand the jokes that we get sex begets babies
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these are our three sons and of course they're not always crying and screaming but with three boys there's a decent probability that at least one of them will not be himself exactly as he should
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or i i'm sorry misuse of the pronoun was very generously in the process of giving birth to our first child thank you and i was there with a catcher's mitt and i was there with my arms open
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i can donate three water heaters but someone needs to come pick them up my car is in my living room my troop would like to rebuild mailboxes my puppy is missing and insurance doesn't cover chimneys my church group of would like housing and meals for a week while we repair properties you sent me to that place on washington street yesterday and now i'm covered in poison ivy
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get our authority from the board of or the emergency management director or the united way we just started answering questions and making decisions because someone anyone had to and why not me i'm a campaign organizer i'm good at and there's two of me
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pulling trees from the ground shattering windows taking the roofs off of homes o'neill that was me in front of our house in monson massachusetts last june after an tornado ripped straight through our town and took parts of our roof off i decided to stay in massachusetts instead of pursuing the master's program i had moved my boxes home that afternoon for so on june we weren't disaster experts but on june we started faking it this experience changed our lives and now we're trying to change the experience
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we walked to the church because we heard they had hot meals but when we arrived we found problems there were a couple large sweaty men with chainsaws standing in the center of the church but nobody knew where to send them because no one knew the extent of the damage yet as we watched they became frustrated and left to go find somebody to help on their own so we started organizing why it had to be done we found pastor bob and offered to give the response some infrastructure
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well does anything like that happen with human beings this is all on behalf of a cause other than one's own genetic fitness of course well it may already have occurred to you that islam means surrender or submission of self interest to the will of allah well it's ideas not worms that hijack our brains now am i saying that a sizable minority of the world's population has had their brain hijacked by parasitic ideas no it's worse than that most people have
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