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vagina vagina vagina it doesn't matter how many times you say the word it never sounds like a word you want to say it's a completely ridiculous totally un sexy word if you use it during sex trying to be politically correct darling would you stroke my vagina you kill the act right there
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them and don't call them in great neck new york they call it a pussycat a woman told me there her mother used to tell her don't wear panties dear underneath your pajamas you need to air out your pussycat
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has taken me this journey to islamabad where i have witnessed and met women with their faces melted off it has taken me to juarez mexico where i was a week ago where i have literally been there in parking lots where bones of women have washed up and been dumped next to coca cola bottles it has taken me to universities all over this country where girls are date raped and drugged i have seen terrible terrible terrible violence but i have also recognized in the course of seeing that violence that being in the face of things and seeing actually what's in front of us is the antidote to depression and to a feeling that one is worthless and has no value because before the vagina monologues i will say that percent of my consciousness was closed off to what was really going on in this reality and that closing off closed off my vitality and my life energy what has also happened is in the course of these travels and it's been an extraordinary thing is that every single place that i have gone to in the world i have met a new species and i really love hearing about all these species at the bottom of the sea and i was thinking about how being with these extraordinary people on this particular panel that it's beneath beyond and between and the vagina kind of fits into all those categories
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you're twisting your head up arching your back it's exhausting she was busy she didn't have time so i decided to talk to women about their they began as casual vagina interviews and they turned into vagina monologues
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in i said let's get women together what could we do with this information that all these women are being violated and it turned out after thinking and investigating that i discovered and the un has actually said this recently that one out of every three women on this planet will be beaten or raped in her lifetime that's essentially a gender that's essentially the resource of the planet which is women so in we got all these incredible women together and we said how can we use the play this energy to stop violence against women and we put on one event in new york city in the theater and all these great actors came from susan sarandon to glenn close to whoopi goldberg and we did one performance on one evening and that catalyzed this wave this energy and within five years this extraordinary thing began to happen one woman took that energy and she said i want to bring this wave this energy to college campuses and so she took the play and she said let's use the play and have performances once a year where we can raise money to stop violence against women in local communities all around the world and in one year it went to colleges and then it expanded and over the course of the last six years it's spread and it's spread and it's spread around the world what i have learned is two things one that the epidemic of violence towards women is shocking it's global it is so profound and it is so devastating and it is so in every little pocket of every little crater of every little society that we don't even recognize it because it's become ordinary
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learned is two things one that the epidemic of violence towards women is shocking it's global it is so profound and it is so devastating and it is so in every little pocket of every little crater of every little society that we don't even recognize it because it's become ordinary this journey has taken me to afghanistan where i had the extraordinary honor and privilege to go into parts of afghanistan under the taliban i was dressed in a and i went in with an extraordinary group called the revolutionary association of the women of afghanistan and i saw firsthand how women had been stripped of every single right that was possible to strip women of from being educated to being employed to being actually allowed to eat ice cream for those of you who don't know it was illegal to eat ice cream under the taliban and i actually saw and met women who had been for being caught eating vanilla ice cream i was taken to the secret ice cream eating place in a little town where we went to a back room and women were seated and a curtain was pulled around us and they were served vanilla ice cream and women lifted their and ate this ice cream
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there's a woman named esther who i met in juarez mexico and esther was a brilliant accountant in mexico city she was years old and she was planning to retire she went to juarez to take care of an ailing aunt and in the course of it she began to discover what was happening to the murdered and disappeared women of juarez she gave up her life she moved to juarez she started to write the stories which documented the disappeared women women have disappeared in a border town because they're brown and poor there has been no response to the disappearance and not one person has been held accountable
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women have disappeared in a border town because they're brown and poor there has been no response to the disappearance and not one person has been held accountable she began to document it she opened a center called casa amiga and in six years she has literally brought this to the consciousness of the world we were there a week ago when there were people in the street and it was truly a miracle and as we walked through the streets the people of juarez who normally don't even come into the streets because the streets are so dangerous literally stood there and wept to see that other people from the world had showed up for that particular community there's another woman named agnes and agnes for me epitomizes what a vagina warrior is i met her three years ago in kenya
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so we bought her a jeep and in the year that she had the jeep she saved girls from being cut so we said to her what else could we do for you she said well eve if you gave me some money i could open a house and girls could run away and they could be saved and i want to tell this little story about my own beginnings because it's very interrelated to happiness and agnes when i was a little girl i grew up in a wealthy community it was an upper middle class white community and it had all the trappings and the looks of a perfectly nice wonderful great life
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but like i said you cannot satisfy everyone you couldn't satisfy this guy another joke on old white males ha ha the wit it's nice i'm sure to be young and rude but some day you'll be old unless you drop dead as i wish
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the new yorker is rather a sensitive environment very easy for people to get their nose out of joint and one of the things that you realize is it's an unusual environment here i'm one person talking to you you're all collective you all hear each other laugh and know each other laugh in the new yorker it goes out to a wide audience and when you actually look at that and nobody knows what anybody else is laughing at and when you look at that the subjectivity involved in humor is really interesting let's look at this cartoon discouraging data on the antidepressant
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indeed it is discouraging now you would think well look most of you laughed at that right you thought it was funny in general that seems like a funny cartoon but let's look what online survey i did generally about percent of the people liked it a hundred and nine voted it a the highest ten voted it one but look at the individual responses i like animals look how much they like them
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humor is a type of entertainment all entertainment contains a little of danger something that might happen wrong and yet we like it when there's protection that's what a zoo is it's danger the tiger is there the bars protect us that's sort of fun right that's a bad zoo
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of course many many cartoons must be rejected now we could fit more cartoons in the magazine if we removed the articles
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cartoonists come in through the magazine every week the average cartoonist who stays with the magazine does or ideas every week but they mostly are going to be rejected that's the nature of any creative activity many of them fade away some of them stay matt diffee is one of them here's one of his cartoons
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drew accounting night at the improv now is the part of the show when we ask the audience to shout out some random numbers paul noth he's all right i just wish he were a little more pro israel
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now i know all about rejection because when i quit actually i was booted out of psychology school and decided to become a cartoonist a natural segue from to i submitted cartoons to the new yorker and got cartoons rejected by the new yorker at a certain point this rejection slip in we regret that we are unable to use the enclosed material thank you for giving us the opportunity to consider it magically changed to this hey you sold one no shit you really sold a cartoon to the fucking new yorker magazine
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respect to idea drawings nowhere in the contract is the word cartoon mentioned the word idea drawings and that's the sine qua non of new yorker cartoons so what is an idea drawing an idea drawing is something that requires you to think now that's not a cartoon it requires thinking on the part of the cartoonist and thinking on your part to make it into a cartoon
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generally you get my cast of cartoon mind there is no justice in the world there is some justice in the world the world is just this is what lemmings believe
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the new yorker and i when we made comments the cartoon carries a certain ambiguity about what it actually is what is it the cartoon is it really about lemmings no it's about us you know it's my view basically about religion that the real conflict and all the fights between religion is who has the best imaginary friend
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no no definitely no several hours after lunch no get out of here
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now we do reject many many many cartoons so many that there are many books called the rejection collection the rejection collection is not quite new yorker kind of humor and you might notice the bum on the sidewalk here who is boozing and his dummy is see that's probably not going to be new yorker humor it's actually put together by matt diffee one of our cartoonists so i'll give you some examples of rejection collection humor i'm thinking about having a child
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indeed it is discouraging now you would think well look most of you laughed at that right you thought it was funny in general that seems like a funny cartoon but let's look what online survey i did generally about percent of the people liked it
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now these look like very different forms of humor but actually they bear a great similarity in each instance our expectations are defied in each instance the narrative gets switched there's an incongruity and a contrast in no thursday's out how about never is never good for you what you have is the syntax of politeness and the message of being rude that really is how humor works
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that really is how humor works it's a cognitive synergy where we mash up these two things which don't go together and temporarily in our minds exist he is both being polite and rude in here you have the propriety of the new yorker and the vulgarity of the language basically that's the way humor works so i'm a humor analyst you would say now e b white said analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog
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b white said analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog nobody is much interested and the frog dies well i'm going to kill a few but there won't be any genocide but really it makes me let's look at this picture this is an interesting picture the laughing audience there are the people up there but everybody is laughing everybody is laughing except one guy this guy who is he he's the critic
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no no no no four hours later hey that's good yeah got there office worker got a ham and swiss on no office worker okay pastrami on no office worker smoked turkey with no office worker let me look at it
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the context of the new yorker magazine t cell army can the body's immune response help treat cancer oh goodness you're reading about this smart stuff this intelligent dissection of the immune system you glance over at this and it says please help god
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you glance over at this and it says please help god so there the violation is malign it doesn't work there is no such thing as funny in and of itself everything will be within the context and our expectations one way to look at it is this it's sort of called a meta motivational theory about how we look a theory about motivation and the mood we're in and how the mood we're in determines the things we like or dislike when we're in a playful mood we want excitement
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it's sort of called a meta motivational theory about how we look a theory about motivation and the mood we're in and how the mood we're in determines the things we like or dislike when we're in a playful mood we want excitement we want high arousal we feel excited then if we're in a purposeful mood that makes us anxious the rejection collection is absolutely in this field you want to be stimulated you want to be aroused you want to be transgressed
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there's no joke no joke needed if you arouse people enough and get them stimulated enough they will laugh at very very little
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it's not always appropriate every time but the next week this was the first cartoon i thought i'd never laugh again
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the other thing the new yorker plays around with is incongruity and incongruity i've shown you is sort of the basis of humor something that's completely normal or logical isn't going to be funny but the way incongruity works is humor is humor within the realm of reality my boss is always telling me what to do okay that could happen
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i'd like to take you to another world and i'd like to share a year old love story with the poor living on less than one dollar a day i went to a very elitist snobbish expensive education in india and that almost destroyed me i was all set to be a diplomat teacher doctor all laid out then i don't look it but i was the indian national squash champion for three years
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but then i was exposed to the most extraordinary knowledge and skills that very poor people have which are never brought into the mainstream which is never identified respected applied on a large scale and i thought i'd start a barefoot college college only for the poor what the poor thought was important would be reflected in the college i went to this village for the first time elders came to me and said are you running from the police i said no
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no way not even worth it no water rocky soil i was in a bit of a spot and i said okay i'll go to the old man in village and say should i grow in this he looked quietly at me and said you build this you build this you put this and it'll work this is what it looks like today went to the roof and all the women said clear out the men should clear out because we don't want to share this technology with the men this is waterproofing the roof
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but it actually doesn't leak since it hasn't leaked this technology the women will not share with the men
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kilowatts of panels on the roof and everything works off the sun for the next years so long as the sun shines we'll have no problem with power but the beauty is that is was installed by a priest a hindu priest who's only done eight years of primary schooling never been to school never been to college he knows more about solar than anyone i know anywhere in the world guaranteed food if you come to the barefoot college is solar cooked but the people who fabricated that solar cooker are women illiterate women who actually fabricate the most sophisticated solar cooker it's a parabolic scheffler solar cooker unfortunately they're almost half german they're so precise
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she looks after goats in the morning but she's prime minister in the evening she has a cabinet a minister of education a minister for energy a minister for health and they actually monitor and supervise schools for children she got the world's children's prize five years ago and she went to sweden first time ever going out of her village never seen sweden wasn't dazzled at all by what was happening and the queen of sweden who's there turned to me and said can you ask this child where she got her confidence from she's only years old and she's not dazzled by anything and the girl who's on her left turned to me and looked at the queen straight in the eye and said please tell her i'm the prime minister
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he is my teacher he's my doctor he's my lawyer he's my donor he actually raises money solves my disputes he solves my problems in the village if there's tension in the village if attendance at the schools goes down and there's a friction between the teacher and the parent the puppet calls the teacher and the parent in front of the whole village and says shake hands the attendance must not drop these puppets are made out of recycled world bank reports
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went to afghanistan one lesson we learned in india was men are
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why because they want to leave the village and go to a city looking for a job so we came up with a great solution train grandmothers what's the best way of communicating in the world today television no telegraph no telephone no tell a woman
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i said yeah she is very beautiful what happens if she runs off with an indian man that was his biggest fear i said she'll be happy she'll ring you up on the mobile she went like a grandmother and came back like a tiger she walked out of the plane and spoke to the whole press as if she was a veteran she handled the national press and she was a star and when i went back six months later i said where's your husband oh somewhere it doesn't matter
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elders gave me some very sound and profound advice they said please don't bring anyone with a degree and qualification into your college so it's the only college in india where if you should have a ph d or a master's you are disqualified to come you have to be a cop out or a wash out or a dropout to come to our college you have to work with your hands you have to have a dignity of labor
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you have to be a cop out or a wash out or a dropout to come to our college you have to work with your hands you have to have a dignity of labor you have to show that you have a skill that you can offer to the community and provide a service to the community so we started the barefoot college and we redefined professionalism who is a professional a professional is someone who has a combination of competence confidence and belief a water is a professional a traditional midwife is a professional a traditional bone setter is a professional
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a traditional midwife is a professional a traditional bone setter is a professional these are professionals all over the world you find them in any inaccessible village around the world and we thought that these people should come into the mainstream and show that the knowledge and skills that they have is universal it needs to be used needs to be applied needs to be shown to the world outside that these knowledge and skills are relevant even today so the college works following the lifestyle and of mahatma gandhi you eat on the floor you sleep on the floor you work on the floor there are no contracts no written contracts
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you eat on the floor you sleep on the floor you work on the floor there are no contracts no written contracts you can stay with me for years go tomorrow and no one can get more than a month you come for the money you don't come to barefoot college you come for the work and the challenge you'll come to the barefoot college that is where we want you to try crazy ideas whatever idea you have come and try it it doesn't matter if you fail
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what are you doing this is all mumbo jumbo if you can't show it on the ground so we built the first barefoot college in it was built by barefoot architects who can't read and write built on a people lived there worked there they got the aga khan award for architecture in but then they suspected they thought there was an architect behind it i said yes they made the blueprints but the barefoot architects actually constructed the college
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i asked a forester high powered paper qualified expert i said what can you build in this place he had one look at the soil and said forget it no way not even worth it no water rocky soil i was in a bit of a spot
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because the night schools of over children have gone through these night schools because it's for the convenience of the child it's not for the convenience of the teacher and what do we teach in these schools democracy citizenship how you should measure your land what you should do if you're arrested what you should do if your animal is sick this is what we teach in the night schools but all the schools are solar lit every five years we have an election between six to year old children participate in a democratic process and they elect a prime minister the prime minister is years old she looks after goats in the morning but she's prime minister in the evening
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now i agree that you have to yeah there are certain concessions and you know if you use a slide projector you're not able to have the bad type swing in from the back or the side or up or down but maybe that's an o k trade off to trade that off for a focus
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just a thought and there's something nice about slides getting stuck and the thing you really hope for is occasionally they burn up which we won't see tonight so with that let's get the first slide up here this as many of you have probably guessed is a recently emptied beer can in portugal
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it's gotten so simple that it's already starting to kind of come back the other way again and get a little more expressive but i was in milan and saw this street sign and was very happy to see that apparently this idea of minimalism has even been translated by the graffiti artist
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is for a book by metropolis i took some photos and this is a billboard in florida and either they hadn't paid their rent or they didn't want to pay their rent again on the sign and the billboard people were too cheap to tear the whole sign down so they just out sections of it and i would argue that it's possibly more effective than the original billboard in terms of getting your attention getting you to look over that way and hopefully you don't stop and buy those awful pecan things this is from my second book the first book is called the end of print and it was done along with a film working with william burroughs and the end of print is now in its fifth printing
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is working with marshall i stayed and worked with his wife and son eric and we came up with close to quotes from marshall that are just amazing in terms of being ahead of the times predicting so much of what has happened in the advertising television media world and so this book is called probes it's another word for quotes and it's a lot of them are never have never been published before and basically i've interpreted the different quotes so this was the contents page originally when i got done it was pages and then the publisher press ended up cutting it down considerably it's just under pages now but i decided i liked this contents page i liked the way it looks so i kept it
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so this is from sight a book i did on intuition i think it's not the only ingredient in design but possibly the most important it's something everybody has it's not a matter of teaching it in fact most of the schools tend to discount intuition as an ingredient of your working process because they can't quantify it it's very hard to teach people the four steps to intuitive design but we can teach you the four steps to a nice business card or a newsletter so it tends to get discounted this is a quote from albert einstein who says the intellect has little to do on the road to discovery there comes a leap in consciousness call it intuition or what you will and the solution just comes to you and you don't know from where or why
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so it tends to get discounted this is a quote from albert einstein who says the intellect has little to do on the road to discovery there comes a leap in consciousness call it intuition or what you will and the solution just comes to you and you don't know from where or why so it's kind of like when somebody says who did that song and the more you try to think about it the further the answer gets from you and the minute you stop thinking about it your intuition gives you that answer in a sense i like this for a couple of reasons if you've had any design courses they would teach you you can't read this i think you eventually can and more importantly i think it's true don't mistake legibility for communication just because something's legible doesn't means it communicates
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i got into this magazine there's something kind of disturbing and this continued on the left we see people dying we see people running for their lives and on the right we learn that there's a new way to support your breast the coveted right hand page was not given up to the whole issue look at the image of this lady who knows what she's going through and the copy says he knows just how to give me yeah he jumps out of buildings it's unfortunately this one works kind of as a spread and this continued through the entire magazine
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i'm not sure this is an improvement or a good idea because like if you don't spend quite enough time in front of your computer you can now get a plate in the keyboard so there's no more faking it that you don't really sit at your desk all day and eat and work anyway now there's a plate and it would be really really convenient to get a piece of pizza then type a little bit then i'm just not sure this is improvement if you ever doubt the power of graphic design this is a very generic sign that literally says vote for hitler it says nothing else and this to me is an extreme case of the power of emotion of graphic design even though in fact was a very generic poster at the time what's next what's next is going to be people
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what about well if if we think of as being like a square would look like this so what we need to do now is put those two pictures together in our mind something like this becomes and in the right hand corner you don't have to calculate anything four across four up and down it's so what the sum is actually asking you to do is that's a lot easier than the way that the school taught you to do math i'm sure it's the answer to the sum easy when you know how
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one is a flash of white light six is a tiny and very sad black hole the sketches are in black and white here but in my mind they have colors
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it's exactly the same event but radically different responses there is nothing either good or bad as shakespeare told us in hamlet but thinking makes it so and this has certainly been my experience as a traveler twenty four years ago i took the most mind bending trip across north korea but the trip lasted a few days what i've done with it sitting still going back to it in my head trying to understand it finding a place for it in my thinking that's lasted years already and will probably last a lifetime the trip in other words gave me some amazing sights but it's only sitting still that allows me to turn those into lasting insights and i sometimes think that so much of our life takes place inside our heads in memory or imagination or interpretation or speculation that if i really want to change my life i might best begin by changing my mind again none of this is new that's why shakespeare and the stoics were telling us this centuries ago but shakespeare never had to face emails in a day
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and when you speak of the sabbath look at the ten commandments there's only one word there for which the adjective holy is used and that's the sabbath i pick up the jewish holy book of the torah its longest chapter it's on the sabbath and we all know that it's really one of our greatest luxuries the empty space in many a piece of music it's the pause or the rest that gives the piece its beauty and its shape and i know i as a writer will often try to include a lot of empty space on the page so that the reader can complete my thoughts and sentences and so that her imagination has room to breathe now in the physical domain of course many people if they have the resources will try to get a place in the country a second home i've never begun to have those resources but i sometimes remember that any time i want i can get a second home in time if not in space just by taking a day off and it's never easy because of course whenever i do i spend much of it worried about all the extra stuff that's going to crash down on me the following day i sometimes think i'd rather give up meat or sex or wine than the chance to check on my emails
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and then almost inevitably i became a travel writer so my job and my joy could become one and i really began to feel that if you were lucky enough to walk around the temples of tibet or to wander along the in havana with music passing all around you you could bring those sounds and the high cobalt skies and the flash of the blue ocean back to your friends at home and really bring some magic and clarity to your own life
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and then almost inevitably i became a travel writer so my job and my joy could become one and i really began to feel that if you were lucky enough to walk around the temples of tibet or to wander along the in havana with music passing all around you you could bring those sounds and the high cobalt skies and the flash of the blue ocean back to your friends at home and really bring some magic and clarity to your own life except as you all know one of the first things you learn when you travel is that nowhere is magical unless you can bring the right eyes to it you take an angry man to the himalayas he just starts complaining about the food and i found that the best way that i could develop more attentive and more appreciative eyes was oddly by going nowhere just by sitting still and of course sitting still is how many of us get what we most crave and need in our accelerated lives a break but it was also the only way that i could find to sift through the of my experience and make sense of the future and the past and so to my great surprise i found that going nowhere was at least as exciting as going to tibet or to cuba and by going nowhere i mean nothing more intimidating than taking a few minutes out of every day or a few days out of every season or even as some people do a few years out of a life in order to sit still long enough to find out what moves you most to recall where your truest happiness lies and to remember that sometimes making a living and making a life point in opposite directions
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at the this is the work of design students from the royal college of arts in london that have been working together with their tutor tony dunne and with a bunch of scientists around great britain on the possibilities of for design in the future new sensing elements on the body you can grow hairs on your nails and therefore grab some of the particles from another person they seem very very obsessed with finding out more about the ideal mate so they're working on enhancing everything touch smell everything they can in order to find the perfect mate very interesting this is a typeface designer from israel who has designed he calls them he's thinking of course it's all a concept of injecting typefaces into i don't know how to say it in english in order to make them become to almost have a song or a whole poem written with every ejaculation
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i dabble in design i'm a curator of architecture and design i happen to be at the museum of modern art but what we're going to talk about today is really design really good designers are like sponges they really are curious and absorb every kind of information that comes their way and transform it so that it can be used by people like us and so that gives me an opportunity because every design show that i curate kind of looks at a different world and it's great because it seems like every time i change jobs
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if you're at all like me this is what you do with the sunny summer weekends in san francisco you build experimental kite powered capable of more than knots and you realize that there is incredible power in the wind and it can do amazing things and one day a vessel not unlike this will probably break the world speed record but kites aren't just toys like this kites i'm going to give you a brief history and tell you about the magnificent future of every child's favorite plaything so kites are more than a thousand years old and the chinese used them for military applications and even for lifting men so they knew at that stage they could carry large weights i'm not sure why there is a hole in this particular man
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in a fellow called george pocock actually pioneered the use of kites for towing buggies in races against horse carriages across the english countryside then of course at the dawn of aviation all of the great inventors of the time like hargreaves like langley even alexander graham bell inventor of the telephone who was flying this kite were doing so in the pursuit of aviation then these two fellows came along and they were flying kites to develop the control systems that would ultimately enable powered human flight so this is of course orville and wilbur wright and the wright flyer and their experiments with kites led to this momentous occasion where we powered up and took off for the first ever human flight and that was fantastic for the future of commercial aviation
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one of the most impressive knowledge workers in recent memory is a guy named ken jennings he won the quiz show jeopardy times in a row took home three million dollars that's ken on the right getting beat three by watson the jeopardy playing supercomputer from so when we look at what technology can do to general knowledge workers i start to think there might not be something so special about this idea of a generalist particularly when we start doing things like hooking siri up to watson and having technologies that can understand what we're saying and repeat speech back to us now siri is far from perfect and we can make fun of her flaws but we should also keep in mind that if technologies like siri and watson improve along a moore's law trajectory which they will in six years they're not going to be two times better or four times better they'll be times better than they are right now so i start to think a lot of knowledge work is going to be affected by this and digital technologies are not just impacting knowledge work they're starting to flex their muscles in the physical world as well i had the chance a little while back to ride in the autonomous car which is as cool as it sounds
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there are some optimistic answers to this question so some people will bring up the age of exploration and the opening up of the world others will talk about intellectual achievements in disciplines like math that have helped us get a better handle on the world and other folk will talk about periods when there was a deep flourishing of the arts and sciences so this debate will go on and on it's an endless debate and there's no conclusive single answer to it but if you're a geek like me you say well what do the data say and you start to do things like graph things that we might be interested in the total worldwide population for example or some measure of social development or the state of advancement of a society and you start to plot the data because by this approach the big stories the big developments in human history are the ones that will bend these curves a lot so when you do this and when you plot the data you pretty quickly come to some weird conclusions you conclude actually that none of these things have mattered very much
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me give you a couple examples economies don't run on energy they don't run on capital they don't run on labor economies run on ideas so the work of innovation the work of coming up with new ideas is some of the most powerful most fundamental work that we can do in an economy and this is kind of how we used to do innovation we'd find a bunch of fairly similar looking people
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as i look around at all the evidence and i think about the room that we have ahead of us i become a huge digital optimist and i start to think that this wonderful statement from the physicist freeman dyson is actually not hyperbole this is an accurate assessment of what's going on our technologies are great gifts and we right now have the great good fortune to be living at a time when digital technology is flourishing when it is broadening and deepening and becoming more profound all around the world so yeah the are taking our jobs but focusing on that fact misses the point entirely the point is that then we are freed up to do other things and what we're going to do i am very confident what we're going to do is reduce poverty and drudgery and misery around the world i'm very confident we're going to learn to live more lightly on the planet and i am extremely confident that what we're going to do with our new digital tools is going to be so profound and so beneficial that it's going to make a mockery out of everything that came before i'm going to leave the last word to a guy who had a front row seat for digital progress our old friend ken jennings i'm with him i'm going to echo his words i for one welcome our new computer overlords
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as it turns out when tens of millions of people are unemployed or underemployed there's a fair amount of interest in what technology might be doing to the labor force and as i look at the conversation it strikes me that it's focused on exactly the right topic and at the same time it's missing the point entirely the topic that it's focused on the question is whether or not all these digital technologies are affecting people's ability to earn a living or to say it a little bit different way are the taking our jobs and there's some evidence that they are the great recession ended when american resumed its kind of slow steady march upward and some other economic indicators also started to rebound and they got kind of healthy kind of quickly corporate profits are quite high in fact if you include bank profits they're higher than they've ever been
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the great recession ended when american resumed its kind of slow steady march upward and some other economic indicators also started to rebound and they got kind of healthy kind of quickly corporate profits are quite high in fact if you include bank profits they're higher than they've ever been and business investment in gear in equipment and hardware and software is at an all time high so the businesses are getting out their checkbooks what they're not really doing is hiring so this red line is the employment ratio in other words the percentage of working age people in america who have work and we see that it cratered during the great recession and it hasn't started to bounce back at all but the story is not just a recession story the decade that we've just been through had relatively anemic job growth all throughout especially when we compare it to other decades and the are the only time we have on record where there were fewer people working at the end of the decade than at the beginning
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the story is not just a recession story the decade that we've just been through had relatively anemic job growth all throughout especially when we compare it to other decades and the are the only time we have on record where there were fewer people working at the end of the decade than at the beginning this is not what you want to see when you graph the number of potential employees versus the number of jobs in the country you see the gap gets bigger and bigger over time and then during the great recession it opened up in a huge way i did some quick calculations i took the last years of growth and the last years of labor productivity growth and used those in a fairly straightforward way to try to project how many jobs the economy was going to need to keep growing and this is the line that i came up with is that good or bad this is the government's projection for the working age population going forward so if these predictions are accurate that gap is not going to close
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the problem is i don't think these projections are accurate in particular i think my projection is way too optimistic because when i did it i was assuming that the future was kind of going to look like the past with labor productivity growth and that's actually not what i believe because when i look around i think that we ain't seen nothing yet when it comes to technology's impact on the labor force just in the past couple years we've seen digital tools display skills and abilities that they never ever had before and that kind of eat deeply into what we human beings do for a living let me give you a couple examples throughout all of history if you wanted something translated from one language into another you had to involve a human being now we have multi language instantaneous automatic translation services available for free via many of our devices all the way down to
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it was written by an algorithm and it's not decent it's perfect a lot of people look at this and they say ok but those are very specific narrow tasks and most knowledge workers are actually generalists
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they can't do very much but they're getting better quite quickly and darpa which is the investment arm of the defense department is trying to accelerate their trajectory so in short yeah the are coming for our jobs
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the work of innovation is becoming more open more inclusive more transparent and more merit based and that's going to continue no matter what mit and harvard think of it and i couldn't be happier about that development i hear once in a while ok i'll grant you that but technology is still a tool for the rich world and what's not happening these digital tools are not improving the lives of people at the bottom of the pyramid and i want to say to that very clearly nonsense
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now even if we get to miles per gallon by which is our desire imagine only miles per gallon cars would be on the road that is an cent gallon an cent gallon means if the entire pacific would convert to crude oil and we'd let any oil company bring it out and refine it they still can't compete with two cents a mile that's a new economic factor which is fascinating to most people now this would have been a wonderful paper that's how i solved it in my head it was a white paper i handed out to governments and some governments told me that it's fascinating that the younger generation actually thinks about these things
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we then decided to scale it up we went to other countries as i said we went to denmark and denmark set this beautiful policy it's called the test it's inversely proportional to taxes they put percent tax on gasoline cars and zero tax on zero emission cars so if you want to buy a gasoline car in denmark it costs you about if you buy our car it's about if you fail the test they ask you to leave the country
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we then were sort of coined as the guys who run only in small islands i know most people don't think of israel as a small island but israel is an island it's a transportation island if your car is driving outside israel it's been stolen
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cars and trucks add up to about percent of the world's emissions we have to come and attack this problem with a focus with an effort that actually says we're going to go to zero before the world ends i actually shared that with some legislators here in the u s i shared it with a gentleman called bobby kennedy jr who is one of my idols i told him one of the reasons that his uncle was remembered is because he said we're going to send a man to the moon and we'll do it by the end of the decade we didn't say we're going to send a man percent to the moon and there will be about a percent chance we'll recover him
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without oil that's the question that sort of hit me in the middle of a davos afternoon about four years ago it never left my brain and i started playing with it more like a puzzle the original thought i had this must be ethanol so i went out and researched ethanol and found out you need the amazon in your backyard in every country
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and i started playing with it more like a puzzle the original thought i had this must be ethanol so i went out and researched ethanol and found out you need the amazon in your backyard in every country about six months later i figured out it must be hydrogen until some scientist told me the unfortunate truth which is you actually use more clean electrons than the ones you get inside a car if you use hydrogen so that is not going to be the path to go and then sort of through a process of wandering around i got to the thought that actually if you could convert an entire country to electric cars in a way that is convenient and affordable you could get to a solution now i started this from a point of view that it has to be something that scales en masse not how do you build one car but how do you scale this so that it can become something that is used by percent of the population the thought that came to mind is that it needs to be as good as any car that you would have today so one it has to be more convenient than a car
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and then sort of through a process of wandering around i got to the thought that actually if you could convert an entire country to electric cars in a way that is convenient and affordable you could get to a solution now i started this from a point of view that it has to be something that scales en masse not how do you build one car but how do you scale this so that it can become something that is used by percent of the population the thought that came to mind is that it needs to be as good as any car that you would have today so one it has to be more convenient than a car and two it has be more affordable than today's cars affordable is not a dollar sedan right alright that's not something that we can finance or buy today and convenient is not something that you drive for an hour and charge for eight so we're bound with the laws of physics and the laws of economics and so the thought that i started with was how do you do this still within the boundary of the science we know today no time for science fair no time for playing around with things or waiting for the magic battery to show up
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so we're bound with the laws of physics and the laws of economics and so the thought that i started with was how do you do this still within the boundary of the science we know today no time for science fair no time for playing around with things or waiting for the magic battery to show up how do you do it within the economics that we have today how do you do it from the power of the consumer up and not from the power of an edict down on a random visit to tesla on some afternoon i actually found out that the answer comes from separating between the car ownership and the battery ownership in a sense if you want to think about it this is the classic batteries not included now if you separate between the two you could actually answer the need for a convenient car by creating a network by creating a network before the cars show up the network has two components in them
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now if you separate between the two you could actually answer the need for a convenient car by creating a network by creating a network before the cars show up the network has two components in them first component is you charge the car whenever you stop ends up that cars are these strange beasts that drive for about two hours and park for about hours if you drive a car in the morning and drive it back in the afternoon the ratio of charge to drive is about a minute for a minute and so the first thought that came to mind is everywhere we park we have electric power now it sounds crazy but in some places around the world like scandinavia you already have that if you park your car and didn't plug in the heater when you come back you don't have a car it just doesn't work
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secondly the new machine age is exponential computers get better faster than anything else ever a child's playstation today is more powerful than a military supercomputer from but our brains are wired for a linear world as a result exponential trends take us by surprise i used to teach my students that there are some things you know computers just aren't good at like driving a car through traffic
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thirdly the new machine age is the view is that ideas get used up like low hanging fruit but the reality is that each innovation creates building blocks for even more innovations here's an example in just a matter of a few weeks an undergraduate student of mine built an app that ultimately reached million users he was able to do that so easily because he built it on top of and was built on top of the web and that was built on top of the internet and so on and so forth now individually digital exponential and would each be game changers put them together and we're seeing a wave of astonishing breakthroughs like robots that do factory work or run as fast as a cheetah or leap tall buildings in a single bound you know robots are even revolutionizing cat transportation
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but perhaps the most important invention the most important invention is machine learning consider one project watson these little dots here those are all the champions on the quiz show jeopardy at first watson wasn't very good but it improved at a rate faster than any human could and shortly after dave ferrucci showed this chart to my class at mit watson beat the world jeopardy champion at age seven watson is still kind of in its childhood recently its teachers let it surf the internet unsupervised the next day it started answering questions with damn
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we do to create shared prosperity the answer is not to try to slow down technology instead of racing against the machine we need to learn to race with the machine that is our grand challenge the new machine age can be dated to a day years ago when garry kasparov the world chess champion played deep blue a supercomputer the machine won that day and today a chess program running on a cell phone can beat a human grandmaster it got so bad that when he was asked what strategy he would use against a computer jan donner the dutch grandmaster replied i'd bring a hammer
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growth is not dead let's start the story years ago when american factories began to electrify their operations igniting the second industrial revolution the amazing thing is that productivity did not increase in those factories for years thirty years that's long enough for a generation of managers to retire
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the amazing thing is that productivity did not increase in those factories for years thirty years that's long enough for a generation of managers to retire you see the first wave of managers simply replaced their steam engines with electric motors but they didn't redesign the factories to take advantage of flexibility it fell to the next generation to invent new work processes and then productivity soared often doubling or even tripling in those factories electricity is an example of a general purpose technology like the steam engine before it general purpose technologies drive most economic growth because they unleash cascades of complementary innovations like lightbulbs and yes factory redesign is there a general purpose technology of our era sure it's the computer
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is there a general purpose technology of our era sure it's the computer but technology alone is not enough technology is not destiny we shape our destiny and just as the earlier generations of managers needed to redesign their factories we're going to need to reinvent our organizations and even our whole economic system we're not doing as well at that job as we should be as we'll see in a moment productivity is actually doing all right but it has become from jobs and the income of the typical worker is stagnating these troubles are sometimes misdiagnosed as the end of innovation but they are actually the growing pains of what andrew mcafee and i call the new machine age let's look at some data
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let's look at some data so here's per person in america there's some bumps along the way but the big story is you could practically fit a ruler to it this is a log scale so what looks like steady growth is actually an acceleration in real terms and here's productivity you can see a little bit of a slowdown there in the but it matches up pretty well with the second industrial revolution when factories were learning how to electrify their operations after a lag productivity accelerated again so maybe history doesn't repeat itself but sometimes it rhymes
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if you think about the arguments we have most of the time it's shouting matches on cable television ideological food fights on the floor of congress i have a suggestion look at all the arguments we have these days over health care over bonuses and bailouts on wall street over the gap between rich and poor over affirmative action and same sex marriage lying just beneath the surface of those arguments with passions raging on all sides are big questions of moral philosophy big questions of justice but we too rarely articulate and defend and argue about those big moral questions in our politics so what i would like to do today is have something of a discussion first let me take a famous philosopher who wrote about those questions of justice and morality give you a very short lecture on aristotle of ancient athens aristotle's theory of justice and then have a discussion here to see whether aristotle's ideas actually inform the way we think and argue about questions today so are you ready for the lecture according to aristotle justice means giving people what they deserve that's it that's the lecture
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but what about walking from hole to hole it doesn't matter it's not part of the game walking the course is not part of the game of golf not in my book it isn't all right stay there charlie
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warren are you a golfer i am not a golfer and i am ms okay
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