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and here's what i learned from laboring women their message was about staying open even when things are painful a woman's cervix normally looks like this it's a tight little muscle at the base of the uterus and during labor it has to stretch from this to this ouch if you fight against that pain you just create more pain and you block what wants to be born i'll never forget the magic that would happen when a woman stopped resisting the pain and opened
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was a lesson about time at the end of his life albert einstein concluded that our normal hamster wheel experience of life is an illusion we run round and round faster and faster trying to get somewhere and all the while underneath surface time is this whole other dimension where the past and the present and the future merge and become deep time and there's nowhere to get to albert einstein called this state this dimension only being
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if my sister made it through the near lethal chemotherapy she still would face other challenges my cells might attack her body and her body might reject my cells they call this rejection or attack and both could kill her rejection attack those words had a familiar ring in the context of being siblings my sister and i had a long history of love but we also had a long history of rejection and attack from minor misunderstandings to bigger betrayals we didn't have the kind of the relationship where we talked about the deeper stuff but like many siblings and like people in all kinds of relationships we were hesitant to tell our truths to reveal our wounds to admit our wrongdoings
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the past and the present merged we entered deep time i left the hamster wheel of work and life to join my sister on that lonely island of illness and healing we spent months together in the isolation unit in the hospital and in her home our fast paced society does not support or even value this kind of work we see it as a disruption of real life and important work we worry about the emotional drain and the financial cost and yes there is a financial cost but i was paid in the kind of currency our culture seems to have forgotten all about i was paid in love
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so in the end i begged a pack of post it notes off a nurse and from another nurse i begged a pencil pen and i didn't know what else to do so i started to write poetry that was in october of i'm not an evil man but sometimes i try to put myself in an evil man's position i'm not a glorious and fantastic looking woman who men fall down you know when she walks in a room but sometimes i try to put myself in that position
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basically rome had access to the sea which made it possible for it to import food from a very long way away this is the only way it was possible to do this in the ancient world because it was very difficult to transport food over roads which were rough and the food obviously went off very quickly so rome effectively waged war on places like carthage and egypt just to get its paws on their grain reserves and in fact you could say that the expansion of the empire was really sort of one long drawn out militarized shopping spree really
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i believe we already live in we live in a world shaped by food and if we realize that we can use food as a really powerful tool a conceptual tool design tool to shape the world differently so if we were to do that what might look like well i think it looks a bit like this i have to use this slide it's just the look on the face of the dog but anyway this is it's food at the center of life at the center of family life being celebrated being enjoyed people taking time for it
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it's one of the great questions of our time yet it's one that's rarely asked we take it for granted that if we go into a shop or restaurant or indeed into this theater's foyer in about an hour's time there is going to be food there waiting for us having magically come from somewhere but when you think that every day for a city the size of london enough food has to be produced transported bought and sold cooked eaten disposed of and that something similar has to happen every day for every city on earth it's remarkable that cities get fed at all we live in places like this as if they're the most natural things in the world forgetting that because we're animals and that we need to eat we're actually as dependent on the natural world as our ancient ancestors were
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we live in places like this as if they're the most natural things in the world forgetting that because we're animals and that we need to eat we're actually as dependent on the natural world as our ancient ancestors were and as more of us move into cities more of that natural world is being transformed into extraordinary landscapes like the one behind me it's soybean fields in mato grosso in brazil in order to feed us these are extraordinary landscapes but few of us ever get to see them and increasingly these landscapes are not just feeding us either as more of us move into cities more of us are eating meat so that a third of the annual grain crop globally now gets fed to animals rather than to us human animals and given that it takes three times as much grain actually ten times as much grain to feed a human if it's passed through an animal first that's not a very efficient way of feeding us and it's an escalating problem too by it's estimated that twice the number of us are going to be living in cities
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i fell in love with airplanes now i'm talking about the in the an airplane had two wings and a round motor and was always flown by a guy who looked like cary grant he had high leather boots an old leather jacket a wonderful helmet and those marvelous goggles and inevitably a white scarf to flow in the wind he'd always walk up to his airplane in a kind of saunter devil saunter flick the cigarette away grab the girl waiting here give her a kiss
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one is you can't accommodate everybody there are some very light people some extremely heavy people maybe people with a lot of bulk up top they begin to fall off the end of your chart but the compromise i felt was in my favor because most people don't adjust their chairs they will sit in them forever i had somebody on the bus out to the racetrack tell me about his sister calling him he said she had one of the new better chairs she said oh i love it she said but it's too high
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and of course in a way when i say romance i mean in part the aesthetics of that whole situation i think the word is the holistic experience revolving around a product the product was that airplane but it built a romance even the parts of the airplane had french names ze fuselage ze ze you know from a romance language so that it was something that just got into your spirit it did mine
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decided i had to get closer than just drawing fantasy airplanes i wanted to build airplanes so i built model airplanes and i found that in doing the model airplanes the appearance drawings were not enough you couldn't transfer those to the model itself if you wanted it to fly you had to learn the discipline of flying you had to learn about aeronautics
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if you wanted it to fly you had to learn the discipline of flying you had to learn about aeronautics you had to learn what made an airplane stay in the air and of course as a model in those years you couldn't control it so it had to be self and stay up without crashing so i had to give up the approach of drawing the fantasy shapes and convert it to technical drawings the shape of the wing the shape of the fuselage and so on and build an airplane over these drawings that i knew followed some of the principles of flying and in so doing i could produce a model that would fly stay in the air and it had once it was in the air some of this romance that i was in love with well the act of drawing airplanes led me to when i had the opportunity to choose a course in school led me to sign up for aeronautical engineering
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well in years i was mostly putting out pieces of this romance and not getting a lot back in because design on call doesn't always connect you with a circumstance in which you can produce things of this nature so after years i began to feel as though i was running dry and i quit and i started up a very small operation went from people to one in an effort to rediscover my innocence i wanted to get back where the romance was and i couldn't choose airplanes because they had gotten sort of at that point even though i'd done a lot of airplane work on the interiors
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i was one of the founding members of the axis of evil comedy tour the other founding members included ahmed ahmed who is an egyptian american who actually had the idea to go to the middle east and try it out before we went out as a tour he went out solo and did it first then there was aron kader who was the palestinian american and then there was me the iranian american of the group now being iranian american presents its own set of problems as you know those two countries aren't getting along these days so it causes a lot of inner conflict you know like part of me likes me part of me hates me
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part of me thinks i should have a nuclear program the other part thinks i can't be trusted with one these are dilemmas i have every day but i was born in iran i'm now an american citizen which means i have the american passport which means i can travel because if you only have the iranian passport you're kind of limited to the countries you can go to with open arms you know syria venezuela north korea
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what happened was when the white guy flew his plane into the building i know all my middle eastern and muslim friends in the states were watching tv going please don't be middle eastern don't be hassan or hussein and the name came out jack i'm like that's not one of us but i kept watching the news in case they came back and were like before he did it he converted to islam damn it why jack why but the fact is i've been lucky to get a chance to perform all over the world and i did a lot of shows in the middle east i just did a seven country solo tour i was in oman and i was in saudi arabia i was in dubai
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but one thing i try to do with my stand up is break stereotypes and i've been guilty of stereotyping as well i was in dubai and there's a lot of indians who work in dubai and they don't get paid that well and i got it in my head that all the indians must be workers
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you can get vaccinated you can not travel to zika areas or you can cover up and apply insect repellent getting vaccinated is not an option because there isn't a vaccine yet and there probably won't be for a couple of years staying home isn't a foolproof protection either because we now know that it can be sexually transmitted covering up and applying insect repellent does work until you forget
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zika fever our newest dread disease what is it where'd it come from what do we do about it well for most adults it's a relatively mild disease a little fever a little headache joint pain maybe a rash in fact most people who get it don't even know they've had it
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this meeting has really been about a digital revolution but i'd like to argue that it's done we won we've had a digital revolution but we don't need to keep having it and i'd like to look after that to look what comes after the digital revolution so let me start projecting forward these are some projects i'm involved in today at mit looking what comes after computers this first one internet zero up here this is a web server that has the cost and complexity of an tag about a dollar that can go in every light bulb and doorknob and this is getting commercialized very quickly
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this first one internet zero up here this is a web server that has the cost and complexity of an tag about a dollar that can go in every light bulb and doorknob and this is getting commercialized very quickly and what's interesting about it isn't the cost it's the way it the internet it uses a kind of a morse code for the internet so you could send it optically you can communicate acoustically through a power line through it takes the original principle of the internet which is inter networking computers and now lets devices inter network that we can take the whole idea that gave birth to the internet and bring it down to the physical world in this internet zero this internet of devices so this is the next step from there to here and this is getting commercialized today a step after that is a project on fungible computers fungible goods in economics can be extended and traded
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they said no no it's too hot they come out later they're smart they know
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hello salaam i love coming to it's such an international place it feels like the united nations here
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not so fast because a lot of people did not agree with this way of going about it we got a lot of criticism a lot of opposition and a lot of opponents in other words what do you mean health problem what do you mean epidemic what do you mean no bad guys and there's whole industries designed for managing bad people what do you mean hiring people who have backgrounds my business friends said gary you're being criticized tremendously you must be doing something right
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a physician trained in infectious diseases and following my training i moved to somalia from san francisco and my goodbye greeting from the chief of infectious diseases at san francisco general was gary this is the biggest mistake you'll ever make but i landed in a refugee situation that had a million refugees in camps and there were six of us doctors there were many epidemics there my responsibilities were largely related to tuberculosis and then we got struck by an epidemic of cholera so it was the spread of tuberculosis and the spread of cholera that i was responsible for inhibiting
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my responsibilities were largely related to tuberculosis and then we got struck by an epidemic of cholera so it was the spread of tuberculosis and the spread of cholera that i was responsible for inhibiting and in order to do this work we of course because of the limitation in health workers had to recruit refugees to be a specialized new category of health worker following three years of work in somalia i got picked up by the world health organization and got assigned to the epidemics of aids my primary responsibility was uganda but also i worked in rwanda and burundi and zaire now congo tanzania malawi and several other countries and my last assignment there was to run a unit called intervention development which was responsible for designing interventions after years of working overseas i was exhausted i really had very little left i had been traveling to one country after another
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but i noticed that most of the food that i was giving my pigs was in fact fit for human consumption and that i was only scratching the surface and that right the way up the food supply chain in supermarkets bakers in our homes in factories and farms we were hemorrhaging out food supermarkets didn't even want to talk to me about how much food they were wasting i'd been round the back i'd seen bins full of food being locked and then trucked off to landfill sites and i thought surely there is something more sensible to do with food than waste it one morning when i was feeding my pigs i noticed a particularly tasty looking sun dried tomato loaf that used to crop up from time to time i grabbed hold of it sat down and ate my breakfast with my pigs
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through the data i then needed to demonstrate where that food ends up where does it end up we're used to seeing the stuff on our plates but what about all the stuff that goes missing in between supermarkets are an easy place to start this is the result of my hobby which is unofficial bin inspections
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liver lungs heads tails kidneys testicles all of these things which are traditional delicious and nutritious parts of our gastronomy go to waste consumption has halved in britain and america in the last years as a result this stuff gets fed to dogs at best or is incinerated this man in xinjiang province in western china is serving up his national dish it's called sheep's organs it's delicious it's nutritious and as i learned when i went to it symbolizes their taboo against food waste i was sitting in a roadside cafe a chef came to talk to me i finished my bowl and halfway through the conversation he stopped talking and he started frowning into my bowl i thought my goodness what taboo have i broken how have i insulted my host he pointed at three grains of rice at the bottom of my bowl and he said clean
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as a result this stuff gets fed to dogs at best or is incinerated this man in xinjiang province in western china is serving up his national dish it's called sheep's organs it's delicious it's nutritious and as i learned when i went to it symbolizes their taboo against food waste i was sitting in a roadside cafe a chef came to talk to me i finished my bowl and halfway through the conversation he stopped talking and he started frowning into my bowl i thought my goodness what taboo have i broken how have i insulted my host he pointed at three grains of rice at the bottom of my bowl and he said clean i thought my god you know i go around the world telling people to stop wasting food this guy has thrashed me at my own game
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it's unnecessary if you cook food for pigs just as if you cook food for humans it is rendered safe it's also a massive saving of resources at the moment europe depends on importing millions of tons of soy from south america where its production contributes to global warming to deforestation to biodiversity loss to feed livestock here in europe at the same time we throw away millions of tons of food waste which we could and should be feeding them if we did that and fed it to pigs we would save that amount of carbon if we feed our food waste which is the current government favorite way of getting rid of food waste to anaerobic digestion which turns food waste into gas to produce electricity you save a paltry kilograms of carbon dioxide per ton of food waste it's much better to feed it to pigs we knew that during the war
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and i started to feed them in the most traditional and environmentally friendly way i went to my school kitchen and i said give me the scraps that my school friends have turned their noses up at i went to the local baker and took their stale bread
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what this shows is a nation breakdown of the likely level of food waste in each country in the world unfortunately empirical data good hard stats don't exist and therefore to prove my point i first of all had to find some proxy way of uncovering how much food was being wasted so i took the food supply of every single country and i compared it to what was actually likely to be being consumed in each country
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unfortunately empirical data good hard stats don't exist and therefore to prove my point i first of all had to find some proxy way of uncovering how much food was being wasted so i took the food supply of every single country and i compared it to what was actually likely to be being consumed in each country that's based on diet intake surveys it's based on levels of obesity it's based on a range of factors that gives you an approximate guess as to how much food is actually going into people's mouths that black line in the middle of that table is the likely level of consumption with an allowance for certain levels of inevitable waste there will always be waste i'm not that unrealistic that i think we can live in a waste free world but that black line shows what a food supply should be in a country if they allow for a good stable secure nutritional diet for every person in that country any dot above that line and you'll quickly notice that that includes most countries in the world represents unnecessary surplus and is likely to reflect levels of waste in each country as a country gets richer it invests more and more in getting more and more surplus into its shops and restaurants and as you can see most european and north american countries fall between and percent of the nutritional requirements of their populations
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and that's what i came up with if you include not just the food that ends up in shops and restaurants but also the food that people feed to livestock the maize the soy the wheat that humans could eat but choose to fatten livestock instead to produce increasing amounts of meat and dairy products what you find is that most rich countries have between three and four times the amount of food that their population needs to feed itself a country like america has four times the amount of food that it needs
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when people talk about the need to increase global food production to feed those nine billion people that are expected on the planet by i always think of these graphs the fact is we have an enormous buffer in rich countries between ourselves and hunger we've never had such gargantuan surpluses before in many ways this is a great success story of human civilization of the agricultural surpluses that we set out to achieve years ago it is a success story it has been a success story but what we have to recognize now is that we are reaching the ecological limits that our planet can bear and when we chop down forests as we are every day to grow more and more food when we extract water from depleting water reserves when we emit fossil fuel emissions in the quest to grow more and more food and then we throw away so much of it we have to think about what we can start saving
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right now we spend three billion hours a week playing online games some of you might be thinking that's a lot of time to spend playing games maybe too much time considering how many urgent problems we have to solve in the real world but actually according to my research at the institute for the future actually the opposite is true three billion hours a week is not nearly enough game play to solve the world's most urgent problems in fact i believe that if we want to survive the next century on this planet we need to increase that total dramatically i've calculated the total we need at billion hours of game play every week so that's probably a bit of a counter intuitive idea so i'll say it again let it sink in if we want to solve problems like hunger poverty climate change global conflict obesity i believe that we need to aspire to play games online for at least billion hours a week by the end of the next decade
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i'm serious i am here's why this picture pretty much sums up why i think games are so essential to the future survival of the human species
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this is a portrait by photographer phil he wanted to capture the emotion of gaming so he set up a camera in front of gamers while they were playing and this is a classic gaming emotion now if you're not a gamer you might miss some of the nuance in this photo you probably see the sense of urgency a little bit of fear but intense concentration deep deep focus on tackling a really difficult problem if you are a gamer you will notice a few nuances here the of the eyes up and around the mouth is a sign of optimism and the eyebrows up is surprise this is a gamer who's on the verge of something called an epic win
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so when we talk about how much time we're currently investing in playing games the only way it makes sense to even think about it is to talk about time at the magnitude of human evolution which is an extraordinary thing but it's also apt because it turns out that by spending all this time playing games we're actually changing what we are capable of as human beings we're evolving to be a more collaborative and hearty species this is true i believe this so consider this really interesting statistic it was recently published by a researcher at carnegie mellon university the average young person today in a country with a strong gamer culture will have spent hours playing online games by the age of now hours is a really interesting number for two reasons first of all for children in the united states hours is the exact amount of time you will spend in school from fifth grade to high school graduation if you have perfect attendance
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now this sounds crazy right but recently evidence has shown that the etruscans who then led to the roman empire actually share the same as the ancient and so recently scientists have suggested that crazy story is actually true and geologists have found evidence of a global cooling that lasted for nearly years that could have explained the famine so this crazy story might be true they might have actually saved their culture by playing games escaping to games for years and then been so inspired and knew so much about how to come together with games that they actually saved the entire civilization that way okay we can do that
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so for the next world saving game we decided to aim higher bigger problem than just peak oil we did a game called at the institute for the future and the premise was a supercomputer has calculated that humans have only years left on the planet this supercomputer was called the global extinction awareness system of course we asked people to come online almost like a jerry bruckheimer movie you know jerry bruckheimer movies you form a dream team you've got the astronaut the scientist the ex convict and they all have something to do to save the world
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now i have a plan for this and it entails convincing more people including all of you to spend more time playing bigger and better games right now we spend three billion hours a week playing online games some of you might be thinking that's a lot of time to spend playing games
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it was almost beyond the threshold of imagination and when you get there you're shocked to discover what you're truly capable of that's an epic win this is a gamer on the verge of an epic win
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this is more of the face that we see in everyday life now as we try to tackle urgent problems this is what i call the i'm not good at life face this is actually me making it can you see yes good
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can you see yes good this is me making the i'm not good at life face this is a piece of graffiti in my old neighborhood in berkeley california where i did my on why we're better in games than we are in real life and this is a problem that a lot of gamers have we feel that we are not as good in reality as we are in games i don't mean just good as in successful although that's part of it we do achieve more in game worlds but i also mean good as in motivated to do something that matters inspired to collaborate and to cooperate
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but not just any mission it's a mission that is perfectly matched with your current level in the game right so you can do it they never give you a challenge you can't achieve
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right so you can do it they never give you a challenge you can't achieve but it is on the verge of what you're capable of so you have to try hard but there's no unemployment in world of no sitting around wringing your hands there's always something specific and important to be done there are also tons of collaborators everywhere you go hundreds of thousands of people ready to work with you to achieve your epic mission that's not something we have in real life that easily this sense that at our fingertips are tons of collaborators and there's this epic story this inspiring story of why we're there and what we're doing and we get all this positive feedback you guys have heard of leveling up strength intelligence
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it started with experiments that showed in a recent number of studies about growing that animals old mice that share a blood supply with young mice can get rejuvenated this is similar to what you might see in humans in siamese twins and i know this sounds a bit creepy but what tom rando a stem cell researcher reported in was that old muscle from a mouse can be rejuvenated if it's exposed to young blood through common circulation this was reproduced by amy wagers at harvard a few years later and others then showed that similar rejuvenating effects could be observed in the pancreas the liver and the heart but what i'm most excited about and several other labs as well is that this may even apply to the brain so what we found is that an old mouse exposed to a young environment in this model called shows a younger brain and a brain that functions better and i repeat an old mouse that gets young blood through shared circulation looks younger and functions younger in its brain so when we get older we can look at different aspects of human cognition and you can see on this slide here we can look at reasoning verbal ability and so forth and up to around age or these functions are all intact and as i look at the young audience here in the room we're all still fine
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as mice get older like us humans they have memory problems it's just harder to detect them but i'll show you in a minute how we do that but we wanted to take this one step further one step closer to potentially being relevant to humans what i'm showing you now are unpublished studies where we used human plasma young human plasma and as a control saline and injected it into old mice and asked can we again rejuvenate these old mice can we make them smarter and to do this we used a test it's called a barnes maze this is a big table that has lots of holes in it and there are guide marks around it and there's a bright light as on this stage here the mice hate this and they try to escape and find the single hole that you see pointed at with an arrow where a tube is mounted underneath where they can escape and feel comfortable in a dark hole so we teach them over several days to find this space on these cues in the space and you can compare this for humans to finding your car in a parking lot after a busy day of shopping
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this is a painting from the century from lucas the elder it shows the famous fountain of youth if you drink its water or you bathe in it you will get health and youth every culture every civilization has dreamed of finding eternal youth there are people like alexander the great or ponce de len the explorer who spent much of their life chasing the fountain of youth they didn't find it
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but it's scary to see how all these curves go south and as we get older diseases such as alzheimer's and others may develop we know that with age the connections between neurons the way neurons talk to each other the they start to deteriorate neurons die the brain starts to shrink and there's an increased susceptibility for these diseases one big problem we have to try to understand how this really works at a very molecular mechanistic level is that we can't study the brains in detail in living people we can do cognitive tests we can do imaging all kinds of sophisticated testing but we usually have to wait until the person dies to get the brain and look at how it really changed through age or in a disease
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great creativity in times of need we need great creativity discuss great creativity is astonishingly absurdly rationally irrationally powerful great creativity can spread tolerance champion freedom make education seem like a bright idea
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creativity can turn a spotlight on deprivation or show that deprivation ain't necessarily so great creativity can make politicians electable or parties unelectable it can make war seem like tragedy or farce creativity is the maker that puts slogans on our t shirts and phrases on our lips it's the pathfinder that shows us a simple road through an impenetrable moral maze science is clever but great creativity is something less more magical
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okay now there's a lot of these it's been estimated that two thirds of the melodies dylan used in his early songs were borrowed this is pretty typical among folk singers here's the advice of dylan's idol woody guthrie the worlds are the important thing don't worry about tunes take a tune sing high when they sing low sing fast when they sing slow and you've got a new tune
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is the first ever slide that is all there is to it apple has patented this it's a software patent but i will summarize what it covers spoiler alert unlocking your phone by sliding an icon with your finger
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i mean picasso had a saying he said good artists copy great artists steal and we have you know always been shameless about stealing great ideas okay so that's in here's in i'm going to destroy android because it's a stolen product
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we're going to begin in bob dylan is years old and his career is just reaching its pinnacle he's been christened the voice of a generation and he's churning out classic songs at a seemingly impossible rate but there's a small minority of dissenters and they claim that bob dylan is stealing other people's songs brian burton aka danger mouse takes the beatles' white album combines it with jay z's the black album to create the grey album the grey album becomes an immediate sensation online and the beatles' record company sends out countless cease letters for unfair competition and dilution of our valuable property now the grey album is a
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the grey album is a it is new media created from old media it was made using these three techniques copy transform and combine it's how you you take existing songs you chop them up you transform the pieces you combine them back together again and you've got a new song but that new song is clearly comprised of old songs but i think these aren't just the components of i think these are the basic elements of all creativity i think everything is a and i think this is a better way to conceive of creativity
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and that meant that journalists had to deal with fakes so we had to deal with old photos that were being we had to deal with composite images that were merging photos from previous storms we had to deal with images from films like the day after tomorrow
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and that's changed because we've had a huge shift in the balance of power from the news organizations to the audience and the audience for such a long time was in a position where they didn't have any way of affecting news or making any change
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nowadays this idea has a dramatic name spaceship earth and the idea there is that outside the spaceship the universe is hostile and inside is all we have all we depend on and we only get the one chance if we mess up our spaceship we've got nowhere else to go now the second thing that everyone already knows is that contrary to what was believed for most of human history human beings are not in fact the hub of existence as stephen hawking famously said we're just a chemical scum on the surface of a typical planet that's in orbit around a typical star which is on the outskirts of a typical galaxy and so on now the first of those two things that everyone knows is kind of saying that we're at a very un typical place uniquely suited and so on and the second one is saying that we're at a typical place and especially if you regard these two as deep truths to live by and to inform your life decisions then they seem a little bit to conflict with each other but that doesn't prevent them from both being completely false
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and at this point we've come light years from here but we're still nowhere near a typical place in the universe to get to a typical place you've got to go times as far as that into space and so what does that look like typical what does a typical place in the universe look like well at enormous expense ted has arranged a high resolution immersion virtual reality rendering of the view from space can we have the lights off please so we can see it well not quite not quite perfect you see space is completely dark pitch dark it's so dark that if you were to be looking at the nearest star to you and that star were to explode as a supernova and you were to be staring directly at it at the moment when its light reached you you still wouldn't be able to see even a glimmer that's how big and how dark the universe is and that's despite the fact that a supernova is so bright so brilliant an event that it would kill you stone dead at a range of several light years
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it's also very cold out there less than three degrees above absolute zero and it's very empty the vacuum there is one million times less dense than the highest vacuum that our best technology on earth can currently create so that's how different a typical place is from this place and that is how un typical this place is so can we have the lights back on please thank you now how do we know about an environment that's so far away and so different and so alien from anything we're used to well the earth our environment in the form of us is creating knowledge well what does that mean well look out even further than we've just been i mean from here with a telescope and you'll see things that look like stars they're called originally meant quasi stellar object which means things that look a bit like stars
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they're not stars and we know what they are billions of years ago and billions of light years away the material at the center of a galaxy collapsed towards a super massive black hole and then intense magnetic fields directed some of the energy of that gravitational collapse and some of the matter back out in the form of tremendous jets which illuminated lobes with the brilliance of i think it's a trillion suns now the physics of the human brain could hardly be more unlike the physics of such a jet we couldn't survive for an instant in it language breaks down when trying to describe what it would be like in one of those jets it would be a bit like experiencing a supernova explosion but at point blank range and for millions of years at a time
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and then thirdly less tangible but just as essential for the open ended creation of knowledge of explanations is evidence now our environment is inundated with evidence we happen to get round to testing let's say newton's law of gravity about years ago but the evidence that we used to do that was falling down on every square meter of the earth for billions of years before that and will continue to fall for billions of years afterwards and the same is true for all the other sciences as far as we know evidence to discover the most fundamental truths of all the sciences is here just for the taking on our planet our location is saturated with evidence and also with matter and energy out in space those three prerequisites for the open ended creation of knowledge are at their lowest possible supply as i said it's empty it's cold and it's dark out there or is it now actually that's just another parochial misconception
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10,779
now the lesson of that seems clear to me and i don't know why it isn't informing public debate it is that we can't always know when we know of an impending disaster and how to solve it at a cost less than the cost of the disaster itself then there's not going to be much argument really but no precautions and no precautionary principle can avoid problems that we do not yet foresee hence we need a stance of problem fixing not just problem avoidance and it's true that an ounce of prevention equals a pound of cure but that's only if we know what to prevent if you've been punched on the nose then the science of medicine does not consist of teaching you how to avoid punches
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so that's how different a typical place is from this place and that is how un typical this place is
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10,782
and if that weren't amazing enough the with which the one structure resembles the other is increasing with time that is the growth of knowledge
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10,786
so is a polluted earth and the limiting factor there and here is not resources because they're plentiful but knowledge which is scarce
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10,787
i think he's going to talk about that later in the conference now i don't think that probability is the right category to discuss this issue in but i do agree with him about this we can survive and we can fail to survive
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i don't think that probability is the right category to discuss this issue in but i do agree with him about this we can survive and we can fail to survive but it depends not on chance but on whether we create the relevant knowledge in time the danger is not at all unprecedented species go extinct all the time civilizations end the overwhelming majority of all species and all civilizations that have ever existed are now history and if we want to be the exception to that then logically our only hope is to make use of the one feature that distinguishes our species and civilization from all the others namely our special relationship with the laws of physics our ability to create new explanations new knowledge to be a hub of existence so let me now apply this to a current controversy not because i want to advocate any particular solution but just to illustrate the kind of thing i mean
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10,789
so let me now apply this to a current controversy not because i want to advocate any particular solution but just to illustrate the kind of thing i mean and the controversy is global warming now i'm a physicist but i'm not the right kind of physicist in regard to global warming i'm just a layman and the rational thing for a layman to do is to take seriously the prevailing scientific theory and according to that theory it's already too late to avoid a disaster because if it's true that our best option at the moment is to prevent emissions with something like the kyoto protocol with its constraints on economic activity and its enormous cost of hundreds of billions of dollars or whatever it is then that is already a disaster by any reasonable measure and the actions that are advocated are not even purported to solve the problem merely to postpone it by a little so it's already too late to avoid it and it probably has been too late to avoid it ever since before anyone realized the danger
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this occurred a couple of months ago one of our security researchers was looking at a new android application that we had discovered it was called in a post she positioned as a new inexpensive and beta alternative to the much more advanced that was commonplace in the criminal underground this review did not sit well with the authors of so they wrote her this very email pleading their case and making the argument that they felt she had evaluated an older version they asked her to please update her with more accurate information and even offered to do an interview to describe to her in detail how their attack software was now far better than the competition so look you don't have to like what they do but you do have to respect the entrepreneurial nature of their endeavors
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so if you watch the evening news you would think that most of this is espionage or nation state activity and well some of it is espionage you see is an accepted international practice but in this case it is only a small portion of the problem that we're dealing with how often do we hear about a breach followed by it was the result of a sophisticated nation state attack well often that is companies not being willing to own up to their own lackluster security practices there is also a widely held belief that by blaming an attack on a nation state you are putting regulators at bay at least for a period of time
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alright time's up so if you think the first poem was written by a human put your hand up ok and if you think the second poem was written by a human put your hand up we have more or less a split here it was much harder the answer is the first poem was generated by an algorithm called that was created back in the and the second poem was written by a guy called frank o'hara who happens to be one of my favorite human poets
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10,799
the poem we just saw before poem the one that you all thought was human it was fed a bunch of poems by a poet called emily dickinson it looked at the way she used language learned the model and then it regenerated a model according to that same structure but the important thing to know about is that it doesn't know the meaning of the words it's using the language is just raw material it could be chinese it could be in swedish it could be the collected language from your feed for one day it's just raw material and nevertheless it's able to create a poem that seems more human than gertrude stein's poem and gertrude stein is a human so what we've done here is more or less a reverse turing test so gertrude stein who's a human is able to write a poem that fools a majority of human judges into thinking that it was written by a computer therefore according to the logic of the reverse turing test gertrude stein is a computer
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10,802
can a computer write poetry this is a provocative question you think about it for a minute and you suddenly have a bunch of other questions like what is a computer what is poetry what is creativity but these are questions that people spend their entire lifetime trying to answer not in a single ted talk so we're going to have to try a different approach so up here we have two poems one of them is written by a human and the other one's written by a computer i'm going to ask you to tell me which one's which have a go poem little fly thy summer's play my thoughtless hand has away
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hands up if you think poem was written by a human ok most of you hands up if you think poem was written by a human very brave of you because the first one was written by the human poet william blake the second one was written by an algorithm that took all the language from my feed on one day and then regenerated it according to methods that i'll describe a little bit later on so let's try another test
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i was swimming around in the islands in norway just inside the arctic circle and the water was hovering right at freezing the air a brisk with windchill and i could literally feel the blood trying to leave my hands feet and face and rush to protect my vital organs it was the coldest i've ever been but even with swollen lips sunken eyes and cheeks flushed red i have found that this place right here is somewhere i can find great joy now when it comes to pain psychologist brock bastian probably said it best when he wrote pain is a kind of shortcut to it makes us suddenly aware of everything in the environment it brutally draws us in to a virtual sensory awareness of the world much like meditation if shivering is a form of meditation then i would consider myself a monk
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was blown away by the natural beauty of the landscape but most importantly i couldn't believe we were finding perfect waves in such a remote and rugged part of the world at one point we got to the beach only to find massive chunks of ice had piled on the shoreline they created this barrier between us and the surf and we had to weave through this thing like a maze just to get out into the lineup and once we got there we were pushing aside these ice chunks trying to get into waves it was an incredible experience one i'll never forget because amidst those harsh conditions i felt like i stumbled onto one of the last quiet places somewhere that i found a clarity and a connection with the world i knew i would never find on a crowded beach i was hooked i was hooked
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and one of my favorite things about these places was simply the challenge and the creativity it took just to get there hours days weeks spent on earth trying to pinpoint any remote stretch of beach or reef we could actually get to and once we got there the vehicles were just as creative snowmobiles six wheel soviet troop carriers and a couple of super sketchy helicopter flights
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so if i told you that this was the face of pure joy would you call me crazy i wouldn't blame you because every time i look at this arctic i shiver just a little bit i want to tell you a little bit about this photograph i was swimming around in the islands in norway just inside the arctic circle and the water was hovering right at freezing the air a brisk with windchill and i could literally feel the blood trying to leave my hands feet and face and rush to protect my vital organs
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so surf photographer right i don't even know if it's a real job title to be honest my parents definitely didn't think so when i told them at i was quitting my job to pursue this dream career blue skies warm tropical beaches and a tan that lasts all year long i mean to me this was it life could not get any better sweating it out shooting surfers in these exotic tourist destinations but there was just this one problem
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10,812
sweating it out shooting surfers in these exotic tourist destinations but there was just this one problem you see the more time i spent traveling to these exotic locations the less gratifying it seemed to be i set out seeking adventure and what i was finding was only it was things like fi tv fine dining and a constant cellular connection that to me were all the trappings of places heavily in and out of the water and it didn't take long for me to start feeling suffocated i began craving wild open spaces and so i set out to find the places others had written off as too cold too remote and too dangerous to surf and that challenge intrigued me i began this sort of personal crusade against the mundane because if there's one thing i've realized it's that any career even one as seemingly glamorous as surf photography has the danger of becoming monotonous so in my search to break up this monotony i realized something there's only about a third of the earth's oceans that are warm and it's really just that thin band around the equator so if i was going to find perfect waves it was probably going to happen somewhere cold where the seas are notoriously rough and that's exactly where i began to look
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so this is the place where some of the largest the most violent storms in the world send huge waves smashing into the coastline we were in this tiny remote fjord just inside the arctic circle it had a greater population of sheep than people so help if we needed it was nowhere to be found i was in the water taking pictures of surfers and it started to snow and then the temperature began to drop and i told myself there's not a chance you're getting out of the water
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so this is a vending machine for crows over the past few days many of you have been asking how did you come to this how did you get started doing this it started as with many great ideas or many ideas you can't get rid of anyway at a cocktail party about years ago i was at a cocktail party with a friend of mine we were sitting there and he was complaining about the crows that were all over his yard and making a big mess and he was telling me we ought to eradicate these things kill them because they're making a mess i said that was stupid maybe we should just train them to do something useful and he said that was impossible and i'm sure i'm in good company in finding that tremendously annoying when someone tells you it's impossible so i spent the next years reading about crows in my spare time
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and after years of this my wife said you've got to do this thing you've been talking about and build the vending machine so i did but part of the reason i found this interesting is i started noticing that we're very aware of all the species that are going extinct on the planet as a result of human habitation expansion and no one seems to be paying attention to all the species that are actually living they're surviving and i'm talking specifically about species which have adapted specifically for human species like rats and cockroaches and crows and as i started looking at them i was finding that they had hyper adapted they'd become extremely adept at living with us and in return we just tried to kill them all the time
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but the researchers had a problem they messed up and left just a stick of wire in there and she hadn't had the opportunity to do this before you see it wasn't working very well so she adapted now this is completely she had never seen this done before no one taught her to bend this into a hook or had shown her how it could happen but she did it all on her own so keep in mind she's never seen this done
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all right so that's the part where the researchers freak out
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it turns out we've been finding more and more that crows are really intelligent their brains are in the same proportion as chimpanzee brains are there's all kinds of anecdotes for the different kinds of intelligence they have for example in sweden crows will wait for fishermen to drop lines through holes in the ice and when the fishermen move off the crows fly down reel up the lines and eat the fish or the bait it's pretty annoying for the fishermen on an entirely different tack at university of washington a few years ago they were doing an experiment where they captured some crows on campus some students went out netted some crows brought them in weighed and measured them and let them back out again and they were entertained to discover that for the rest of the week whenever these particular students walked around campus these crows would caw at them and run around and make their life kind of miserable
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they were significantly less entertained when this went on for the next week and the next month and after summer break until they finally graduated and left campus and glad to get away i'm sure came back sometime later and found the crows still remembered them
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so the moral being don't piss off crows so now students at the university of washington that are studying these crows do so with a giant wig and a big mask
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and in doing so we were breeding them for we were giving them all sorts of reasons to adapt new ways so for example rats are incredibly responsive breeders and cockroaches as anyone who's tried to get rid of them knows have become really immune to the poisons that we're using so i thought let's build something that's mutually beneficial something that we can both benefit from and find some way to make a new relationship with these species so i built the vending machine
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10,830
story of the vending machine is a little more interesting if you know more about crows it turns out crows aren't just surviving with human beings they're actually thriving they're found everywhere on the planet except for the arctic and the southern tip of south america and in all that area they're only rarely found breeding more than five kilometers away from human beings so we may not think about them but they're always around and not surprisingly given the human population growth more than half of the human population is living in cities now and out of those nine tenths of the human growth population is occurring in cities
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and not surprisingly given the human population growth more than half of the human population is living in cities now and out of those nine tenths of the human growth population is occurring in cities we're seeing a population boom with crows so bird counts are indicating that we might be seeing up to exponential growth in their numbers so that's no great surprise but what was really interesting to me was to find out that the birds were adapting in a pretty unusual way and i'll give you an example of that this is betty she's a new caledonian crow
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10,832
yeah pretty interesting what's significant about this isn't that crows are using cars to crack nuts in fact that's old hat for crows this happened about years ago in a place called city at a driving school in the suburbs of tokyo and since that time all the crows in the neighborhood are picking up this behavior now every crow within five kilometers is standing by a sidewalk waiting to collect its lunch
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so they're learning from each other and research bears this out parents seem to be teaching their young they learn from their peers they learn from their enemies if i have a little extra time i'll tell you about a case of crow infidelity that illustrates that nicely the point being they've developed cultural adaptation and as we heard yesterday that's the pandora's box that's getting human beings in trouble and we're starting to see it with them
0