TED Global 2011

TED GLOBAL 2011

University College Falmouth.

Seminar A; Daphne Du Maurier Building, Tremough Campus, Penryn, Cornwall TR10 9EZ United Kingdom.

Tel: +44 (0)1326 370400.

Fax: +44 (0)1326 370450.

This venue is wheelchair friendly. www.ted.com www.falmouth.ac.uk/ted Š2010 TED / University College Falmouth.

Designed by Josh Gowen.

TED Global 2011 Cornwall

Conten Day one

Day two

Day three

nts

Localised Chaired by Stefan

Sagmeister

Sergey Brin & Larry Page; On Google Roy Forbes; Ways of seeing Cameron Sinclair; Open-source architecture Susan Blackmore; Memes and ‘Temes’

06 09 12 16

Nationalised Chaired by Larry

Page

Alex Steffen; A sustainable future David Rockwell; Building at Ground Zero James H Kunstler; Dissecting suburbia Bill Stone; Exploring the world’s deepest caves

18 21 28 32

Globalised Chaired by Alex

Steffen

Stefan Sagmeister; The power of time off Hans Rosling; The best stats you’ve ever seen Jamais Cascio; Tools for a better world Bill Joy; What I’m worried about, what I’m excited about

39 42 45 48

Globali Day three

ised

Globalised Chaired by Alex

Steffen

Stefan Sagmeister; The power of time off Hans Rosling; The best stats you’ve ever seen Jamais Cascio; Tools for a better world Bill Joy; What I’m worried about, what I’m excited about

39 42 45 48

Elizabeth Gilbert; TED Global 2009

‘The creative process does not behave rationally - it seems at times to be paranormal.’’

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Stefan

Sagmei

40

ister Biography

S

tefan Sagmeister (born 1962 in Bregenz, Austria) is a New York-based graphic designer and typographer. He has his own design firm, Sagmeister Inc in New York City.

He has designed album covers for Lou Reed, OK Go, The Rolling Stones, David Byrne, Aerosmith and Pat Metheny.

Sagmeister studied graphic design at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. He later received a Fulbright scholarship to study at the Pratt Institute in New York.

He began his design career at the age of 15 at ‘Alphorn’, an Austrian Youth magazine, which is named after the traditional Alpine musical instrument. In 1991, he moved to Hong Kong to work the Leo Burnett’s Hong Kong Design Group. In 1993, he returned to New York to work Tibor Kalman’s m&co design firm. His tenure there was short lived, as Kalman soon decided to retire from the design business to edit Colors magazine for the Benetton Group in Rome.

He then proceeded to form the New York based Sagmeister Inc. in 1993 and has since designed branding, graphics, and packaging for clients as diverse as the Rolling Stones, hbo, the Guggenheim Museum and Time Warner. Sagmeister Inc. has employed designers including Martin Woodtli, and Hjalti Karlsson and Jan Wilker, who later formed Karlssonwilker. Sagmeister is a long-standing artistic

collaborator with musicians David Byrne and Lou Reed.

He is the author of the design monograph ‘Made You Look’ which was published by Booth-Clibborn editions.

Solo shows on Sagmeister Inc’s work have been mounted in Zurich, Vienna, New York, Berlin, Japan, Osaka, Prague, Cologne, and Seoul. He teaches in the graduate department of the School of Visual Arts in New York and has been appointed as the Frank Stanton Chair at the Cooper Union School of Art, New York. He has received a Grammy Award in 2005 in Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package category for art directing Once in a Lifetime box set by Talking Heads. He would also work on the 2008 David Byrne and Brian Eno album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.

His motto is ‘Design that needed guts from the creator and still carries the ghost of these guts in the final execution.’

Sagmeister goes on a year-long sabbatical around every 7 years, where he does not take work from clients. He has just returned from one in Bali, Indonesia, he is resolute about this, even if the work is tempting, and has displayed this by declining an offer to design a poster for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Sagmeister spends the year experimenting with personal work and refreshing himself as a designer.

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The

power of ti

I

run a design studio in New York. Every seven years I close it for one year to pursue some little experiments, things that are always difficult to accomplish during the regular working year. In that year we are not available for any of our clients. We are totally closed. And as you can imagine, it is a lovely and very energetic time.

I originally had opened the studio in New York to combine my two loves, music and design. And we created videos and packaging for many musicians that you know. And for even more that you’ve never heard of. As I realized, just like with many many things in my life that I actually love, I adapt to it. And I get, over time, bored by them. And for sure, in our case, our work started to look the same. You see here a glass eye in a die cut of a book. Quite the similar idea, then, a perfume packaged in a book, in a die cut. So I decided to close it down for one year.

Also is the knowledge that right now we spend about in the first 25 years of our lives learning. Then there is another 40 years that’s really reserved for working. And then tacked on at the end of it are about 15 years for retirement. And I thought it might be helpful to basically cut off five of those retirement years and intersperse them in between those working years. (Applause) That’s clearly enjoyable for myself. But probably even more important is that the work that comes out of these years flows back

44

ime off by

into the company, and into society at large, rather than just benefiting a grandchild or two.

There is a fellow tedster who spoke two years ago, Jonathan Haidt, who defined his work into three different levels. And they rang very true for me. I can see my work as a job. I do it for money. I likely already look forward to the weekend, on Thursdays. And I probably will need a hobby as a leveling mechanism. In a career I’m definitely more engaged. But at the same time there will be periods when I think is all that really hard work really worth my while? While in the third one, in the calling, very much likely I would do it also if I wouldn’t be financially compensated for it.

I am not a religious person myself, but I did look for nature.

I had spent my first sabbatical in New York City. Looked for something different for the second one. Europe and the u.s. didn’t really feel enticing because I knew them too well.

So Asia it was. The most beautiful landscapes I had seen in Asia were Sri Lanka and Bali. Sri Lanka still had the civil war going on. So Bali it was. It’s a wonderful, very craftoriented society.

I arrived there in September 2008, and pretty much started to work right away. There is wonderful inspiration coming from the area itself. However the first thing that I needed was mosquito repellent typography because they were

Stefan Sagmeister

definitely around heavily. And then I needed some sort of way to be able to get back to all the wild dogs that surround my house, and attacked me during my morning walks. So we created this series of 99 portraits on tee shirts. Every single dog on one tee shirt. As a little retaliation with a just ever so slightly menacing message (Laughter) on the back of the shirt. (Laughter) Just before I left New York I decided I could actually renovate my studio. And then just leave it all to them.

And I don’t have to do anything. So I looked for furniture.

And it turned out that all the furniture that I really liked, I couldn’t afford. And all the stuff I could afford, I didn’t like. So one of the things that we pursued in Bali was pieces of furniture. This one, of course, still works with the wild dogs. It’s not quite finished yet. And I think by the time this lamp came about, (Laughter) I had finally made piece with those dogs. (Laughter) Then there is a coffee table. I also did a coffee table. It’s called Be Here Now. It includes 330 compasses. And we had custom espresso cups made that hide a magnet inside, and make those compasses go crazy, always centering on them. Then this is a fairly talkative, verbose kind of chair. I also start meditating for the first time in my life in Bali. And at the same time, I’m extremely aware how boring it is to hear about other people’s happinesses. So I will not really go too far into it.

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‘I’ve found that finding out about what I’m going to like in the future, my very best way is to talk to people who have actually done it much better than myself envisioning it.’

Many of you will know this tedster, Danny Gilbert, whose book, actually I got it through the ted book club. I think it took me four years to finally read it, while on sabbatical.

And I was pleased to see that he actually wrote the book while he was on sabbatical. And I’ll show you a couple of people that did well by pursuing sabbaticals.

This is Ferran Adria. Many people think he is right now the best chef in the world with his restaurant north of Barcelona, elBulli. His restaurant is open seven months every year. He closes it down for five months to experiment with a full kitchen staff. His latest numbers are fairly impressive. He can seat, throughout the year, he can seat 8,000 people. And he has 2.2 million requests for reservations.

If I look at my cycle, seven years, one year sabbatical, it’s 12.5 percent of my time. And if I look at companies that are actually more successful than mine, 3m, since the 1930s is giving all their engineers 15 percent to pursue whatever they want. There is some good successes. Scotch tape came out of this program, as well as Art Fry developed sticky notes from during his personal time for 3m. Google, of course, very famously gives percent for their software engineers to pursue their own personal projects.

Anybody in here has actually ever conducted a sabbatical?

That’s about five percent of everybody. So I’m not sure if

you saw your neighbor putting their hand up. Talk to them about if it was successful or not. I’ve found that finding out about what I’m going to like in the future, my very best way is to talk to people who have actually done it much better than myself envisioning it.

When I had the idea of doing one, the process was I made the decision and I put it into my daily planner book. And then I told as many, many people as I possibly could about it so that there was no way that I could chicken out later on. (Laughter) In the beginning, on the first sabbatical, it was rather disastrous. I had thought that I should do this without any plan, that this vacuum of time somehow would be wonderful and enticing for idea generation. It was not.

I just, without a plan, I just reacted to little requests, not work requests, those I all said no to, but other little requests. Sending mail to Japanese design magazines and things like that. So I became my own intern. (Laughter) And I very quickly made a list of the things I was interested in, put them in a hierarchy, divided them into chunks of time and then made a plan, very much like in grade school.

What does it say here? Monday eight to nine: story writing.

Nine to ten: future thinking. Was not very successful.

And so on and so forth. And that actually, specifically as a

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‘What came out of it? I really got close to design again. I had fun.

Financially, seen over the long term, it was actually successful. Because of the improved quality, we could ask for higher prices.’

starting point of the first sabbatical, worked really well for me. What came out of it? I really got close to design again.

I had fun. Financially, seen over the long term, it was actually successful. Because of the improved quality, we could ask for higher prices.

And probably most importantly, basically everything we’ve done in the seven years following the first sabbatical came out of thinking of that one single year. And I’ll show you a couple of projects that came out of the seven years following that sabbatical. One of the strands of thinking I was involved in was that sameness is so incredibly overrated. This whole idea that everything needs to be exactly the same works for a very very few strand of companies, and not for everybody else.

We were asked to design an identity for Casa de Musica, the Rem Koolhaas-built music center in Porto, in Portugal.

And even though I desired to do an identity that doesn’t use the architecture, I failed at that. And mostly also because I realized out of a Rem Koolhaas presentation to the city of Porto where he talked about a conglomeration of various layers of meaning. Which I understood after I translated it from architecture speech in to regular English, basically as logo making. And I understood that the building itself was a logo.

So then it became quite easy. We put a mask on it, looked

at it deep down in the ground, checked it out from all sides, west, north, south, east, top and bottom. Colored them in a very particular way by having a friend of mine write a piece of software, the Casa de Musica Logo Generator. That’s connected to a scanner. You put any image in there, like that Beethoven image. And the software, in a second, will give you the Casa de Musica Beethoven logo. Which, when you actually have to design a Beethoven poster, comes in handy because the visual information of the logo and the actual poster, is exactly the same.

So it will always fits together, conceptually, of course If Zappa’s music is performed, it gets its own logo. Or Philip Glass or Lou Reed or the Chemical Brothers who all performed there, get their own Casa de Musica logo.

It works the same internally with the president or the musical director, whose Casa de Musica portraits wind up on their business cards. There is a full-blown orchestra living inside the building. It has a more transparent identity. The truck they go on tour with. Or there’s a smaller contemporary orchestra, 12 people that remixes its own title.

And one of the handy things that came about was that you could take the logo type and create advertising out of it. Like this Donna Toney poster, or Chopin, or Mozart, or La Monte Young. You can take the shape and make

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typography out of it. You can grow it underneath the skin.

You can have a poster for a family event in front of the house, or a rave underneath the house, or a weekly program as well as educational services.

Second insight. So far, until that point I had been mostly involved or used the language of design for promotional purposes, which was fine with me. On one hand I have nothing against selling. My parents are both sales people. But I did feel that I spent so much time learning this language, why do I only promote with it? There must be something else. And the whole series of work came out of it. Some of you might have seen it. I showed some of it at earlier teds before, under the title ‘Things I’ve Learned In My Life So Far’. I’ll just show two now.

This is a whole wall of bananas at different ripenesses on the opening day in this gallery in New York. It says, ‘Self confidence produces fine results.’ This is after a week. After two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, five weeks. And you see the self confidence almost comes back, but not quite. These are some pictures visitors sent to me. (Laughter) And then the city of Amsterdam gave us a plaza and asked us to do something. We used the stone plates as a grid for our little piece. We got 250 thousand coins from the central bank, at different darknesses. So we got brand new ones, shiny

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‘Complaining is silly.

Either act or forget.’

Stefan Sagmeister

ones, medium ones, and very old, dark ones. And with the help of 100 volunteers, over a week, created this fairly floral typography that spelled, ‘Obsessions make my life worse and my work better.’

And the idea of course was to make the type so precious that as an audience you would be in between, ‘Should I really take as much money as I can? Or should I leave the piece intact as it is right now?’ While we built all this up during that week, with the hundred volunteers, a good number of the neighbors surrounding the plaza got very close to it and quite loved it. So when it was finally done, and in the first night a guy came with big plastic bags and scooped up as many coins as he could possibly carry, one of the neighbors called the police.

And the Amsterdam police in all their wisdom, came, saw, and they wanted to protect the artwork. And they swept it all up and put it into custody at police headquarters.

(Laughter) I think you see, you see them sweeping. You see them sweeping right here. That’s the police, getting rid of it all. So after eight hours that’s pretty much all that was left of the whole thing. (Laughter)

We are also working on the start of a bigger project in Bali.

It’s a movie about happiness. And here we asked some nearby pigs to do the titles for us. They weren’t quite slick enough. So we asked the goose to do it again, and hoped she would do somehow, a more elegant or pretty job. And I think she overdid it. Just a bit too ornamental. And my studio is very close to the monkey forest. And the monkeys in that monkey forest looked, actually, fairly happy. So we asked those guys to do it again. They did a fine job, but had a couple of readability problems. So of course whatever you don’t really do yourself doesn’t really get done properly.

That film we’ll be working on for the next two years. So It’s going to be a while. And of course you might think that doing a film on happiness might not really be worthwhile, then you can of course always go and see this guy.

Video: (Laughter) And I’m happy I’m alive. I’m happy I’m alive. I’m happy I’m alive.

Stefan Sagmeister: Thank you. (Applause)

2008 TED

©

Ken Robinson; TED Global 2006

‘Creativity now is as important in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status.’’

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Rosli Hans

ing Biography

H

ans Rosling is a Swedish medical doctor, academic, statistician and public speaker. He is Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institute and Director of the Gapminder Foundation, which developed the Trendalyzer software system.

As chairman of Karolinska International Research and Training Committee (1998—2004) he started health research collaborations with universities in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.

From 1967 to 1974 Rosling studied statistics and medicine at Uppsala University, and in 1972 he studied public health at St. John’s Medical College, Bangalore. He became a licenced physician in 1976 and from 1979 to 1981 he served as District Medical Officer in Nacala in northern Mozambique.

Rosling co-founded the Gapminder Foundation together with his son Ola Rosling and daughter-in-law Anna Rosling Rönnlund. Gapminder developed the Trendalyzer software that converts international statistics into moving, interactive graphics. His lectures using Gapminder graphics to visualise world development have won awards.

On 21 August 1981, Rosling discovered an outbreak of konzo, a paralytic disease, and the investigations that followed earned him a Ph.D. degree at Uppsala University in 1986.

He spent two decades studying outbreaks of this disease in remote rural areas across Africa and supervised more than ten Ph.D. students.

The interactive animations are freely available from the Foundation’s website. On 16 March 2007 Google acquired the Trendalyzer software with the intention to scale it up and make it freely available for public statistics. In 2008 Google made available a Motion Chart Google Gadget and in 2009 the Public Data Explorer.

Rosling’s research has also focused on other links between economic development, agriculture, poverty and health in Africa, Asia and Latin America. He has been health adviser to who, unicef and several aid agencies. In 1993

Rosling is also a sword swallower, as demonstrated in the final moments of his second talk at the ted conference. In

he was one of the initiators of Médecins Sans Frontières in Sweden. At Karolinska Institutet he was head of the Division of International Health (ihcar) from 2001 to 2007.

2009 he was listed as one of 100 leading global thinkers by Foreign Policy Magazine

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The

best sta eve A

bout 10 years ago, I took on the task to teach global development to Swedish undergraduate students.

That was after having spent about 20 years together with African institutions studying hunger in Africa, so I was sort of expected to know a little about the world.

And I started in our medical university, Karolinska Institute, an undergraduate course called Global Health.

But when you get that opportunity, you get a little nervous.

I thought, these students coming to us actually have the highest grade you can get in Swedish college systems; so maybe they know everything I’m going to teach them about. So I did a pre-test when they came. And one of the questions from which I learnt a lot was this one: ‘Which country has the highest child mortality of these five pairs?’

And I put them together, so that in each pair of country, one has twice the child mortality of the other. And this means that it’s much bigger a difference than the uncertainty of the data. I won’t put you at a test here, but it’s Turkey, which is highest there, Poland, Russia, Pakistan and South Africa. And these were the results of the Swedish students. I did it so I got the confidence interval, which is pretty narrow, and I got happy, of course: a 1.8 right answer out of five possible. That means that there was a place for a professor of international health, (Laughter) and for my course.

ats you’ve er seen by

But one late night, when I was compiling the report I really realized my discovery. I have shown that Swedish top students know statistically significantly less about the world than the chimpanzees. (Laughter) Because the chimpanzee would score half right if I gave them two bananas with Sri Lanka and Turkey. They would be right half of the cases.

Hans Rosling

small family, and Third World is short life and large family.’

But the students are not there. The problem for me was not ignorance: it was preconceived ideas. I did also an unethical study of the professors of the Karolinska Institute, (Laughter) that hands out the Nobel Prize in Medicine, and they are on par with the chimpanzee there. (Laughter) This is where I realized that there was really a need to communicate, because the data of what’s happening in the world and the child health of every country is very well aware.

So this is what I could display here. I put fertility rate here: number of children per woman, one, two, three, four, up to about eight children per woman.We have very good data since 1962, 1960 about, on the size of families in all countries. The error margin is narrow. Here I put life expectancy at birth, from 30 years in some countries up to about 70 years. And 1962, there was really a group of countries here. That was industrialized countries, and they had small families and long lives. And these were the developing countries: they had large families and they had relatively short lives. Now what has happened since 1962?

We want to see the change. Are the students right? Is it still two types of countries? Or have these developing countries got smaller families and they live here? Or have they got longer lives and live up there?

We did this software which displays it like this: every bubble here is a country. This country over here is China. This is India. The size of the bubble is the population, and on this axis here I put fertility rate. Because my students, what they said when they looked upon the world, and I asked them,’ What do you really think about the world?’ Well, I first discovered that the textbook was Tintin, mainly.(Laughter) And they said, ‘The world is still ‘we’ and ‘them.’ And we is Western world and them is Third World.’ ‘And what do you mean with Western world?’ I said. ‘Well, that’s long life and

Let’s see. We stopped the world then. This is all u.n. statistics that have been available. Here we go. Can you see there? It’s China there, moving against better health there, improving there. All the green Latin American countries are moving towards smaller families. Your yellow ones here are the Arabic countries, and they get larger families, but they, no, longer life, but not larger families. The Africans are the green down here. They still remain here. This is India. Indonesia’s moving on pretty fast. (Laughter) And in the ‘80s here, you have Bangladesh still among the

African countries there. But now, Bangladesh, it’s a miracle that happens in the ‘80s: the imams start to promote family planning. They move up into that corner. And in ‘90s, we have the terrible hiv epidemic that takes down the life expectancy of the African countries and all the rest of them move up into the corner, where we have long lives and small family, and we have a completely new world.(Applause) Let me make a comparison directly between the United States of America and Vietnam. 1964: America had small families and long life; Vietnam had large families and short lives. And this is what happens: the data during the war indicate that even with all the death, there was an improvement of life expectancy. By the end of the year, the family planning started in Vietnam and they went for smaller families. And the United States up there is getting for longer life, keeping family size. And in the ‘80s now, they give up communist planning and they go for market economy, and it moves faster even than social life. And today, we have in Vietnam the same life expectancy and the same family size here in Vietnam, 2003, as in United States, 1974, by the end of the war. I think we all, if we don’t look in the data, we underestimate the tremendous change in Asia, which was in social change before we saw the economical change.

Let’s move over to another way here in which we could display the distribution in the world of the income. This is the world distribution of income of people. One dollar, 10

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dollars or 100 dollars per day. There’s no gap between rich and poor any longer. This is a myth. There’s a little hump here. But there are people all the way. And if we look where the income ends up, the income, this is 100 percent the world’s annual income. And the richest 20 percent, they take out of that about 74 percent. And the poorest 20 percent, they take about two percent. And this shows that the conceptof developing countries is extremely doubtful. We think about aid, like these people here giving aid to these people here. But in the middle, we have most the world population, and they have now 24 percent of the income.

We heard it in other forms. And who are these? Where are the different countries? I can show you Africa. This is Africa. 10 percent the world population, most in poverty.

This is oecd. The rich country. The country club of the u.n. And they are over here on this side. Quite an overlap between Africa and oecd. And this is Latin America. It has everything on this Earth, from the poorest to the richest, in Latin America. And on top of that, we can put East Europe, we can put East Asia, and we put South Asia. And how did it look like if we go back in time, to about 1970? Then there was more of a hump. And we have most who lived in absolute poverty were Asians. The problem in the world was the poverty in Asia. And if I now let the world move forward, you will see that while population increase, there are hundreds of millions in Asia getting out of poverty and some others getting into poverty, and this is the pattern we

‘Many people say data is bad. There is an uncertainty margin, but we can see the difference here: Cambodia, Singapore. The differences are much bigger than the weakness of the data.’

have today. And the best projection from the World Bank is that this will happen, and we will not have a divided world.

We’ll have most people in the middle.

was the first countryto get away with trade barriers, and they could sell their sugar. They could sell their textiles on equal terms as the people in Europe and North America.

Of course it’s a logarithmic scale here, but our concept of economy is growth with percent. We look upon it as a possibility of percentile increase. If I change this, and I take gdp per capita instead of family income, and I turn these individual data into regional data of gross domestic product, and I take the regions down here, the size of the bubble is still the population. And you have the oecd there, and you have sub-Saharan Africa there, and we take off the Arab states there, coming both from Africa and from Asia, and we put them separately, and we can expand this axis, and I can give it a new dimension here, by adding the social values there, child survival. Now I have money on that axis, and I have the possibility of children to survive there. In some countries, 99.7 percent of children survive to five years of age; others, only 70. And here it seems there is a gap between oecd, Latin America, East Europe, East Asia, Arab states, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The linearity is very strong between child survival and money.

There’s a huge difference between Africa. And Ghana is here in the middle. In Sierra Leone, humanitarian aid.

Here in Uganda, development aid. Here, time to invest, there, you can go for a holiday. It’s a tremendous variation within Africa which we rarely often make, that it’s equal everything. I can split South Asia here. India’s the big bubble in the middle. But a huge difference between Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. I can split Arab states. How are they? Same climate, same culture, same religion. Huge difference. Even between neighbors. Yemen, civil war.

United Arab Emirate, money which was quite equally and well used. Not as the myth is. And that includes all the children of the foreign workers who are in the country.

Data is often better than you think. Many people say data is bad. There is an uncertainty margin, but we can see the difference here: Cambodia, Singapore. The differences are much bigger than the weakness of the data. East Europe: Soviet economy for a long time, but they come out after ten years very, very differently. And there is Latin America.

Today, we don’t have to go to Cuba to find a healthy country in Latin America. Chile will have a lower child mortality than Cuba within some few years from now. And here we have high-income countries in the oecd.

But let me split sub-Saharan Africa. Health is there and better health is up there. I can go here and I can split sub-Saharan Africa into its countries. And when it burst, the size of his country bubble is the size of the population.

Sierra Leone down there. Mauritius is up there. Mauritius

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‘Now that’s dangerous, to use average data, because there is such a lot of difference within countries.’

And we get the whole pattern here of the world,which is more or less like this. And if we look at it, how it looks, the world, in 1960, it starts to move. 1960. This is Mao Tse-tung.

He brought health to China. And then he died. And then Deng Xiaoping came and brought money to China, and brought them into the mainstream again. And we have seen how countries move in different directions like this, so it’s sort of difficult to get an example country which shows the pattern of the world. I would like to bring you back to about here at 1960. I would like to compare South Korea, which is this one, with Brazil, which is this one. The label went away for me here. And I would like to compare Uganda,which is there. And I can run it forward, like this.

And you can see how South Korea is making a very, very fast advancement, whereas Brazil is much slower.

And if we move back again, here, and we put on trails on them, like this, you can see again that the speed of development is very, very different, and the countries are moving more or less in the same rate as money and health, but it seems you can move much faster if you are healthy first than if you are wealthy first. And to show that, you can put on the way of United Arab Emirate. They came from here, a mineral country. They cached all the oil,they got all the money, but health cannot be bought at the supermarket. You have to invest in health. You have to get kids into schooling. You have to train health staff. You have to educate the population. And Sheikh Sayed did that

in a fairly good way. And in spite of falling oil prices, he brought this country up here. So we’ve got a much more mainstream appearance of the world, where all countries tend to use their money better than they used in the past.

Now, this is, more or less, if you look at the average data of the countries. They are like this.

Now that’s dangerous, to use average data, because there is such a lot of difference within countries. So if I go and look here, we can see that Uganda today is where South Korea was 1960. If I split Uganda, there’s quite a difference within Uganda. These are the quintiles of Uganda. The richest 20 percent of Ugandans are there. The poorest are down there. If I split South Africa, it’s like this. If I go down and look at Niger, where there was such a terrible famine, lastly, it’s like this. The 20 percent poorest of Niger is out here, and the 20 percent richest of South Africa is there, and yet we tend to discuss on what solutions there should be in Africa. Everything in this world exists in Africa. And you can’t discuss universal access to hiv [medicine] for that quintile up here with the same strategy as down here. The improvement of the world must be highly contextualized, and it’s not relevant to have it on regional level. We must be much more detailed. We find that students get very excited when they can use this.

And even more policy makers and the corporate sectors would like to see how the world is changing. Now, why

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‘The data is hidden down in the databases.

And the public is there, and the Internet is there, but we have still not used it effectively. All that information we saw changing in the world does not include publicly-funded statistics.’

doesn’t this take place? Why are we not using the data we have? We have data in the United Nations, in the national statistical agencies and in universities and other nongovernmental organizations. Because the data is hidden down in the databases. And the public is there, and the Internet is there, but we have still not used it effectively.

All that information we saw changing in the world does not include publicly-funded statistics. There are some web pages like this, you know, but they take some nourishment down from the databases,but people put prices on them, stupid passwords and boring statistics. (Laughter)(Applause) And this won’t work. So what is needed? We have the databases. It’s not the new database you need. We have wonderful design tools, and more and more are added up here. So we started a nonprofit venture which we called, linking data to design, we call it Gapminder, from the London underground, where they warn you, ‘mind the gap.’

So we thought Gapminder was appropriate. And we started to write software which could link the data like this. And it wasn’t that difficult. It took some person years, and we have produced animations.You can take a data set and put it there.

We are liberating u.n. data, some few u.n. organization.

Some countries accept that their databases can go out on the world, but what we really need is, of course, a search function. A search function where we can copy the data up to a searchable formatand get it out in the world. And what

do we hear when we go around? I’ve done anthropology on the main statistical units. Everyone says, ‘It’s impossible.

This can’t be done. Our information is so peculiar in detail, so that cannot be searched as others can be searched.

We cannot give the data free to the students, free to the entrepreneurs of the world.’ But this is what we would like to see, isn’t it? The publicly-funded data is down here. And we would like flowers to grow out on the Net. And one of the crucial points is to make them searchable, and then people can use the different design tool to animate it there.

And I have a pretty good news for you. I have a good news that the present, new Head of u.n. Statistics, he doesn’t say it’s impossible. He only says, ‘We can’t do it.’(Laughter) And that’s a quite clever guy, huh? (Laughter) So we can see a lot happening in data in the coming years. We will be able to look at income distributions in completely new ways. This is the income distribution of China, 1970. the income distribution of the United States, 1970. Almost no overlap. Almost no overlap. And what has happened? What has happened is this: that China is growing, it’s not so equal any longer, and it’s appearing here, overlooking the United States. Almost like a ghost, isn’t it, huh? (Laughter) It’s pretty scary. But I think it’s very important to have all this information. We need really to see it. And instead of looking at this, I would like to end up by showing the

Internet users per 1,000. In this software, we access about 500 variables from all the countries quite easily. It takes some time to change for this, but on the axises, you can quite easily get any variable you would like to have. And the thing would be to get up the databases free, to get them searchable, and with a second click, to get them into the graphic formats, where you can instantly understand them. Now, statisticians doesn’t like it, because they say that this will not show the reality; we have to have statistical, analytical methods. But this is hypothesis-generating.

I end now with the world. There, the Internet is coming.

The number of Internet users are going up like this. This is the GDP per capita. And it’s a new technology coming in, but then amazingly, how wellit fits to the economy of the countries. That’s why the 100 dollar computer will be so important. But it’s a nice tendency. It’s as if the world is flattening off, isn’t it? These countries are lifting more than the economy and will be very interesting to follow this over the year, as I would like you to be able to dowith all the publicly funded data.

Thank you very much. (Applause)

Stephen Fry; TED Global 2009

‘What we call intellectual inquiry is often the pursuit of the abstract over the real and tangible.’’

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Casc

Jamais

cio

s

Biography

J

amais Cascio is a San Francisco Bay Area-based writer and ethical futurist specializing in design strategies and possible outcomes for future scenarios.

transparent society where information is available to the many and not concentrated in an act of holding power in the hands of a few.

In the 1990s, Cascio worked for the futurist and scenario planning firm Global Business Network. In 2003, with Alex Steffen he co-founded the popular environmental website Worldchanging, where he wrote the plurality of the site’s content, covering topics including urban design, climate science, renewable energy, open source models, emerging technologies, social networks, “leapfrog” global development, and ethical strategies which include a “bright green” apprach.

He speaks and writes frequently on the use of future studies as a tool for anticipating and managing environmental and technological crises. His strategies include possible scenarios of Pandemic, Meteor impact, climate refugees, geoengineering, nanotechnology, AI, and the emerging global cultures created and maintained virtually all with ready at hand bright green solutions that merge the technological and the ecological with modern collaborative media.

From 2003 to 2006 Cascio helped found and shape the popular bright green sustainability blog and online magazine about sustainability and social innovation Worldchanging. com. At Worldchanging, he covered a broad variety of topics, from energy and climate change to global development, open source, and bio- and nanotechnologies.

In 2009 Cascio was selected as Foreign Policy Global top 100 thinkers #72 and cited as a “guru of all things on the horizon.”

Cacsio specializes in “Big Picture Thinking”, systems thinking, and foresight methodologies. Carefully crafting scenarios of possible future outcomes Cascio is constantly examining emerging social trends in design, technology and ecological whole systems thinking in order to elucidate and amplify the possible benefits of an open and

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Tools fo better w T

he future that we will create can be a future that we’ll be proud of. I think about this every day; it’s quite literally my job. I’m co-founder and senior columnist at Worldchanging.com. Alex Steffen and I founded Worldchanging in late 2003, and since then we and our growing global team of contributors have documented the ever-expanding variety of solutions that are out there, right now and on the near horizon.

In a little over two years, we’ve written up about 4,000 items, replicable models, technological tools, emerging ideas, all providing a path to a future that’s more sustainable, more equitable and more desirable. Our emphasis on solutions is quite intentional. There are tons of places to go, online and off, if what you want to find is the latest bit of news about just how quickly our hellbound handbasket is moving. We want to offer people an idea of what they can do about it. We focus primarily on the planet’s environment, but we also address issues of global development,international conflict, responsible use of emerging technologies, even the rise of the so-called Second Superpower and much, much more.

The scope of solutions that we discuss is actually pretty broad, but that reflects both the range of challenges that need to be met and the kinds of innovations that will allow us to do so. A quick sampling really can barely scratch the

or a

world by

surface, but to give you a sense of what we cover: tools for rapid disaster relief, such as this inflatable concrete shelter; innovative uses of bioscience, such as a flower that changes colour in the presence of land mines; ultrahigh efficiency designs for homes and offices; distributed power generation using solar power, wind power, ocean power, other clean energy sources; ultra, ultra-high efficiency vehicles of the future; ultra-high-efficiency vehicles you can get right now; and better urban design, so you don’t need to drive as much in the first place; bio-mimetic approaches to design that take advantage of the efficiencies of natural models in both vehicles and buildings; distributed computing projects that will help us model the future of the climate. Also, a number of the topics that we’ve been talking about this week at ted are things that we’ve addressed in the past on Worldchanging: cradle-to-cradle design, mit’s Fab Labs, the consequences of extreme longevity, the One Laptop Per Child project, even Gapminder.

As a born-in-the-mid-1960s Gen X-er, hurtling all too quickly to my fortieth birthday, I’m naturally inclined to pessimism. But working at Worldchanging has convinced me, much to my own surprise, that successful responses to the world’s problems are nonetheless possible. Moreover, I’ve come to realise that focusing only on negative outcomes can really blind you to the very possibility of

Jamais Cascio

success. As Norwegian social scientist Evelin Lindner has observed, ‘Pessimism is a luxury of good times ... In difficult times, pessimism is a self-fulfilling, self-inflicted death sentence.’ The truth is, we can build a better world, and we can do so right now. We have the tools: we saw a hint of that a moment ago, and we’re coming up with new ones all the time. We have the knowledge, and our understanding of the planet improves every day.Most importantly, we have the motive: we have a world that needs fixing, and nobody’s going to do it for us.

Many of the solutions that I and my colleagues seek out and write up every day have some important aspects in common: transparency, collaboration, a willingness to experiment, and an appreciation of science, or, more appropriately, science! (Laughter) The majority of models, tools and ideas on Worldchanging encompass combinations of these characteristics, so I want to give you a few concrete examples of how these principles combine in world-changing ways.

We can see world-changing values in the emergence of tools to make the invisible visible, that is, to make apparent the conditions of the world around us that would otherwise be largely imperceptible. We know that people often change their behaviour when they can see and understand the impact of their actions. As a small example,

71

‘For many of us, cellphones have really become almost an extension of ourselves, and we’re really now beginning to see the social changes that mobile phones can bring about.’

many of us have experienced the change in driving behaviour that comes from having a realtime display of mileage showing precisely how one’s driving habits affect the vehicle’s efficiency. The last few years have all seen the rise of innovations in how we measure and display aspects of the world that can be too big, or too intangible, or too slippery to grasp easily. Simple technologies, like wall-mounted devices that display how much power your household is using, and what kind of results you’ll get if you turn off a few lights, these can actually have a direct positive impact on your energy footprint. Community tools, like text messaging, that can tell you when pollen counts are up or smog levels are rising or a natural disaster is unfolding, can give you the information you need to act in a timely fashion. Data-rich displays like maps of campaign contributions, or maps of the disappearing polar ice caps, allow us to better understand the context and the flow of processes that affect us all.

We can see world-changing values in research projects that seek to meet the world’s medical needs through open access to data and collaborative action. Now, some people emphasise the risks of knowledge-enabled dangers, but I’m convinced that the benefits of knowledge-enabled solutions are far more important. For example, openaccess journals, like the Public Library of Science, make cutting-edge scientific research free to all, everyone in

the world. And actually, a growing number of science publishers are adopting this model. Last year, hundreds of volunteer biology and chemistry researchers around the world worked together to sequence the genome of the parasite responsible for some of the developing world’s worst diseases: African sleeping sickness, leishmaniasis and Chagas disease. That genome data can now be found on open-access genetic data banks around the world, and it’s an enormous boon to researchers trying to come up with treatments. But my favourite example has to be the global response to the sars epidemic in 2003, 2004, which relied on worldwide access to the full gene sequence of the sars virus. The us National Research Council in its follow-up report on the outbreak specifically cited this open availability of the sequence as a key reason why the treatment for sars could be developed so quickly.

And we can see world-changing values in something as humble as a cellphone. I can probably count on my fingers the number of people in this room who do not use a mobile phone, and where is Aubrey, because I know he doesn’t? (Laughter) For many of us, cellphones have really become almost an extension of ourselves, and we’re really now beginning to see the social changes that mobile phones can bring about. You may already know some of the big-picture aspects: globally, more camera phones were sold last year than any other kind of camera, and a

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‘It would highlight the changes that are underway, but would more importantly give voice to the people who are willing to work to see a new world, a better world, come about.’

growing number of people live lives mediated through the lens, and over the network, and sometimes enter history books. In the developing world, mobile phones have become economic drivers. A study last year showed a direct correlation between the growth of mobile phone use and subsequent gdp increases across Africa. In Kenya, mobile phone minutes have actually become an alternative currency. The political aspects of mobile phones can’t be ignored either, from text message swarms in Korea helping to bring down a government, to the Blairwatch Project in the uk, keeping tabs on politicians who try to avoid the press. (Laughter) And it’s just going to get more wild. Pervasive, always-on networks, high quality sound and video,even devices made to be worn instead of carried in the pocket, will transform how we live on a scale that few really appreciate. It’s no exaggeration to say that the mobile phone may be among the world’s most important technologies. And in this rapidly evolving context, it’s possible to imagine a world in which the mobile phone becomes something far more than a medium for social interaction.

I’ve long admired the Witness project, and Peter Gabriel told us more details about it on Wednesday, in his profoundly moving presentation. And I’m just incredibly happy to see the news that Witness is going to be opening

up a Web portal to enable users of digital cameras and camera phones to send in their recordings over the Internet, rather than just hand-carrying the videotape.

Not only does this add a new and potentially safer avenue for documenting abuses, it opens up the program to the growing global digital generation.

Now, imagine a similar model for networking environmentalists: imagine a Web portal collecting recordings and evidence of what’s happening to the planet: putting news and data at the fingertips of people of all kinds, from activists and researchers to business people and political figures. It would highlight the changes that are underway, but would more importantly give voice to the people who are willing to work to see a new world, a better world, come about. It would give everyday citizens a chance to play a role in the protection of the planet.It would be, in essence, an ‘Earth Witness’ project. Now, just to be clear, in this talk I’m using the name ‘Earth Witness’ as part of the scenario, simply as a shorthand, for what this imaginary project could aspire to, not to piggyback on the wonderful work of the Witness organisation. It could just as easily be called, ‘Environmental Transparency Project,’ Smart Mobs for Natural Security’, but Earth Witness is a lot easier to say.

Now, many of the people who participate in Earth Witness would focus on ecological problems, human-caused

or otherwise, especially environmental crimes and significant sources of greenhouse gases and emissions.

That’s understandable and important. We need better documentation of what’s happening to the planet if we’re ever going to have a chance of repairing the damage. But the Earth Witness project wouldn’t need to be limited to problems. In the best Worldchanging tradition, it might also serve as a showcase for good ideas, successful projects and efforts to make a difference that deserve much more visibility. Earth Witness would show us two worlds: the world we’re leaving behind, and the world we’re building for generations to come.

And what makes this scenario particularly appealing to me is, we could do it today. The key components are already widely available. Camera phones, of course, would be fundamental to the project. And for a lot of us, they’re as close as we have yet to always-on, widely available information tools. We may not remember to bring our digital cameras with us wherever we go, but very few of us forget our phones. You could even imagine a version of this scenario in which people actually build their own phones. Over the course of last year, open-source hardware hackers have come up with multiple models for usable, Linux-based mobile phones, and the Earth Phone could spin off from this kind of project. At the other end of the network, there’d be a server for people to send photos

‘That’s enough right there to start to build a compelling chronicle of what’s now happening to our planet, but we could do more.’

and messages to, accessible over the Web, combining a photo-sharing service, social networking platforms and a collaborative filtering system. Now, you Web 2.0 folks in the audience know what I’m talking about, but for those of you for whom that last sentence was in a crazy moon language, I mean simply this: the online part of the Earth Witness project would be created by the users, working together and working openly. That’s enough right there to start to build a compelling chronicle of what’s now happening to our planet, but we could do more.

An Earth Witness site could also serve as a collection spot for all sorts of data about conditions around the planet picked up by environmental sensors that attach to your cellphone. Now, you don’t see these devices as add-ons for phones yet, but students and engineers around the world have attached atmospheric sensors to bicycles and handheld computers and cheap robots and the backs of pigeons, that being a project that’s actually underway right now at uc Irvine, using bird-mounted sensors as a way of measuring smog-forming pollution. It’s hardly a stretch to imagine putting the same thing on a phone carried by a person. Now, the idea of connecting a sensor to your phone is not new: phone-makers around the world offer phones that sniff for bad breath, or tell you to worry about too much sun exposure. Swedish firm Uppsala Biomedical, more seriously, makes a mobile phone add-on that can process blood tests

in the field, uploading the data, displaying the results. Even the Lawrence Livermore National Labs have gotten into the act,designing a prototype phone that has radiation sensors to find dirty bombs.

Now, there’s an enormous variety of tiny, inexpensive sensors on the market, and you can easily imagine someone putting together a phone that could measure temperature, co2 or methane levels, the presence of some biotoxins, potentially, in a few years, maybe even h5n1 avian flu virus. You could see that some kind of system like this would actually be a really good fit with Larry Brilliant’s instedd project. Now, all of this data could be tagged with geographic information and mashed up with online maps for easy viewing and analysis. And that’s worth noting in particular.The impact of open-access online maps over the last year or two has been simply phenomenal. Developers around the world have come up with an amazing variety of ways to layer useful data on top of the maps, from bus routes and crime statistics to the global progress of avian flu. Earth Witness would take this further, linking what you see with what thousands or millions of other people see around the world.

It’s kind of exciting to think about what might be accomplished if something like this ever existed. We’d have a far better, far better knowledge of what’s happening

78

‘And as we say at Worldchanging, another world isn’t just possible; another world is here. We just need to open our eyes.’

on our planet environmentally than could be gathered with satellites and a handful of government sensor nets alone. It would be a collaborative, bottom-up approach to environmental awareness and protection, able to respond to emerging concerns in a smart mobs kind of way, and if you need greater sensor density, just have more people show up. And most important, you can’t ignore how important mobile phones are to global youth. This is a system that could put the next generation at the front lines of gathering environmental data. And as we work to figure out ways to mitigate the worst effects of climate disruption, every little bit of information matters. A system like Earth Witness would be a tool for all of us to participate in the improvement of our knowledge and, ultimately, the improvement of the planet itself.

to handle the biggest crisis our civilisation has ever faced.

We can save the planet, but we can’t do it alone -- we need each other. Nobody’s going to fix the world for us, but working together, making use of technological innovations and human communities alike, we might just be able to fix it ourselves. We have at our fingertips a cornucopia of compelling models, powerful tools, and innovative ideas that can make a meaningful difference in our planet’s future. We don’t need to wait for a magic bullet to save us all; we already have an arsenal of solutions just waiting to be used. There’s a staggering array of wonders out there, across diverse disciplines, all telling us the same thing:success can be ours if we’re willing to try. And as we say at Worldchanging, another world isn’t just possible; another world is here. We just need to open our eyes.

Now, as I suggested at the outset, there are thousands upon thousands of good ideas out there,so why have I spent the bulk of my time telling you about something that doesn’t exist? Because this is what tomorrow could look like: bottom-up, technology-enabled global collaboration

Thank you very much.

Gordon Brown; TED Global 2009

‘Imagine if we could combine the power of a global ethic with our new power to communicate and organize globally.’’

82

Bill

Joy

Biography

W

illiam Nelson Joy (born November 8, 1954), commonly known as Bill Joy, is an American computer scientist. Joy co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealyand Andy Bechtolsheim, and served as chief scientist at the company until 2003.

He is widely known for having written the essay ‘Why the future doesn’t need us’, where he expresses deep concerns over the development of modern technologies.

Joy was born in the Detroit suburb Farmington Hills, Michigan to William Joy, a school vice-principal and counselor, and Ruth Joy. Joy received his b.s. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan and his m.s. in eecs from uc berkeley in 1979. Joy’s PhD advisor was Bob Fabry.

weekend. Joy denies this assertion. Some of his most notable contributions were the vi editor, nfs, and csh.

In 2000 Joy gained notoriety with the publication of his article in Wired Magazine, ‘Why the future doesn’t need us’, in which he declared, in what some have described as a ‘neo-Luddite’ position, that he was convinced that growing advances in genetic engineering and nanotechnology would bring risks to humanity. He argued that intelligent robots would replace humanity, at the very least in intellectual and social dominance, in the relatively near future. He advocates a position of relinquishment of gnr (Genetics, Nanotechnology, and Robotics) technologies, rather than going into an arms race between negative uses of the technology and defense against those negative uses (good nano-machines patrolling and defending against Grey Goo ‘bad’ nano-machines).

As a uc berkeley graduate student, Joy worked for Fabry’s Computer Systems Research Group csrg in managing the

Despite this he is a venture capitalist, investing in gnr

support and rollout where many claim he was largely responsible for managing the authorship of bsd unix, from which sprang many modern forms of unix, including freebsd, netbsd, and openbsd. Apple Inc. has based much of the mac os x kernel and os services on the bsd technology.

technology companies. He has also raised a specialty venture fund to address the dangers of Pandemic diseases, such as h5n1 Avian influenza and biological weapons. In 2006, he was awarded the Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award for developing this biosafety venture fund and other actions.

bsg

Joy’s prowess as a computer programmer is legendary, with an oft-told anecdote that he wrote the vi editor in a

84

worried what I’m excite

What I’m

What technology can we really apply to reducing global poverty? And what I found was quite surprising. We started looking at things like death rates in the 20th century, and how they’d been improved, and very simple things turned out. You’d think maybe antibiotics made more difference than clean water, but it’s actually the opposite. And so very simple things, off-the-shelf technologies that we could easily find on the then-early Web, would clearly make a huge difference to that problem.

But I also, in looking at more powerful technologies and nanotechnology and genetic engineering and other new emerging kind of digital technologies, became very concerned about the potential for abuse. If you think about it, in history, a long, long time ago we dealt with the problem of an individual abusing another individual. We came up with something, the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt not kill. That’s a, kind of a one-on-one thing. We organised into cities. We had many people. And to keep the many from tyrannising the one, we came up with concepts like individual liberty. And then, to have to deal with large groups, say, at the nation-state level, and we had to have mutual non-aggression, or through a series of conflicts, we eventually came to a rough international bargain to largely keep the peace.

But now we have a new situation, really what people call an

about ed about by

asymmetric situation, where technology is so powerful that it extends beyond a nation-state. It’s not the nation-states that have potential access to mass destruction, but individuals.

And this is a consequence of the fact that these new technologies tend to be digital. We saw genome sequences.

You can download the gene sequences of pathogens off the Internet if you want to, and clearly someone recently, I saw in a science magazine, they said, well, the 1918 flu is too dangerous to FedEx around. If people want to use it in their labs for working on research, just reconstruct it yourself, because, you know, it might break in FedEx. So that this is possible to do this is not deniable.

So individuals in small groups super-empowered by access to these kind of self-replicating technologies, whether it be biological or other, are clearly a danger in our world.

And the danger is that they can cause roughly what’s a pandemic.And we really don’t have experience with pandemics, and we’re also not very good as a society at acting to things we don’t have direct and sort of gut-level experience with. So it’s not in our nature to pre-act. And in this case, piling on more technology doesn’t solve the problem, because it only super-empowers people more.

So the solution has to be, as people like Russell and Einstein and others, imagine in a conversation that existed in a much stronger form, I think, early in the 20th century, that

Bill Joy

the solution had to be not just the head but the heart. You know, public policy and moral progress. The bargain that gives us civilisation is a bargain to not use power. We get our individual rights by society protecting us from others not doing everything they can do but largely doing only what is legal. And so to limit the danger of these new things, we have to limit, ultimately, the ability of individuals to have access, essentially, to pandemic power. We also have to have sensible defence, because no limitation is going to prevent a crazy person from doing something. And you know, and the troubling thing is that it’s much easier to do something bad than to defend against all possible bad things, so the offensive uses really have an asymmetric advantage.

So these are the kind of thoughts I was thinking in 1999 and 2000, and my friends told me I was getting really depressed, and they were really worried about me. And then I signed a book contract to write more gloomy thoughts about this and moved into a hotel room in New York with one room full of books on the Plague, and you know, nuclear bombs exploding in New York where I would be within the circle, and so on. And then I was there on September 11th, and I stood in the streets with everyone. And it was quite an experience to be there. I got up the next morning and walked out of the city, and all the sanitation trucks were parked on Houston Street and ready to go down and start taking the rubble away. And I walked

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‘ It was always a surprise that it happened then and there, but it wasn’t a surprise that it happened at all.’

down the middle, up to the train station, and everything below 14th Street was closed. It was quite a compelling experience, but not really, I suppose, a surprise to someone who’d had his room full of the books. It was always a surprise that it happened then and there, but it wasn’t a surprise that it happened at all.

And everyone then started writing about this. Thousands of people started writing about this. And I eventually abandoned the book, and then Chris called me to talk at the conference. I really don’t talk about this any more because, you know, there’s enough frustrating and depressing things going on. But I agreed to come and say a few things about this. And I would say that we can’t give up the rule of law to fight an asymmetric threat, which is what we seem to be doing because of the present, the people that are in power, because that’s to give up the thing that makes civilisation. And we can’t fight the threat in the kind of stupid way we’re doing,because a million-dollar act causes a billion dollars of damage, causes a trillion dollar response which is largely ineffective and arguably, probably almost certainly, has made the problem worse. So we can’t fight the thing with a million-to-one cost, one-to-a-million benefit ratio.

So after giving up on the book, and I had the great honour to be able to join Kleiner Perkins about a year ago, and to

work through venture capital on the innovative side, and to try to find some innovations that could address what I saw as some of these big problems. Things where, you know, a factor of ten difference can make a factor of a thousand difference in the outcome. I’ve been amazed in the last year at the incredible quality and excitement of the innovations that have come across my desk. It’s overwhelming at times. I’m very thankful for Google and Wikipedia so I can understand at least a little of what people are talking about who come through the doors.

But I wanted to share with you three areas that I’m particularly excited about and that relate to the problems that I was talking about in the Wired article. The first is this whole area of education, and it really relates to what Nicholas was talking about with a hundred dollar computer. And that is to say that there’s a lot of legs left in Moore’s Law. The most advanced transistors today are at 65 nanometers, and we’ve seen, and I’ve had the pleasure to invest in, companies that give me great confidence that we’ll extend Moore’s Law all the way down to roughly the ten nanometer scale. Another factor of, say, six in dimensional reduction,which should give us about another factor of 100 in raw improvement in what the chips can do. And so, to put that in practical terms, if something costs about 1,000 dollars today, say, the best personal computer you can buy, that might be its cost, I think we can have that in 2020 for

10 dollars. Okay? Now, just imagine what that hundred dollar computer will be in 2020 as a tool for education.

I think the challenge for us is, I’m very certain that that will happen, the challenge is, will we develop the kind of educational tools and things with the net to let us take advantage of that device? I’d argue today that we have incredibly powerful computers,but we don’t have very good software for them. And it’s only in retrospect, after the better software comes along, and you take it and you run it on a ten-year-old machine, you say, God, the machine was that fast? I remember when they took the Apple Mac interface and they put it back on the Apple II.The Apple II was perfectly capable of running that kind of interface, we just didn’t know how to do it at the time. So given that we know and should believe, because Moore’s Law’s been, like, a constant, I mean, it’s just been very predictable progress over the last 40 years or whatever. We can know what the computers are going to be like in 2020. It’s great that we have initiatives to say, let’s go create the education and educate people in the world,because that’s a great force for peace. And we can give everyone in the world a hundred-dollar computer or a 10 dollar computer in the next 15 years.

The second area that I’m focusing on is the environmental problem, because that’s clearly going to put a lot of

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‘These new materials bring such incredible innovations that there’s a strong basis for hope that these things will be so profitable that they can be brought to the market.’

pressure on this world. We’ll hear a lot more about that from Al Gore very shortly. The thing that we see as the kind of Moore’s Law trend that’s driving improvement in our ability to address the environmental problem is new materials. We have a challenge, because the urban population is growing in this century from two billion to six billion in a very short amount of time. People are moving to the cities. They all need clean water, they need energy, they need transportation, and we want them to develop in a green way. We’re reasonably efficient in the industrial sectors. We’ve made improvements in energy and resource efficiency, but the consumer sector, especially in America, is very inefficient. But these new materials bring such incredible innovations that there’s a strong basis for hope that these things will be so profitable that they can be brought to the market.

And I want to give you a specific example of a new material that was discovered 15 years ago. If we take carbon nanotubes, you know, Iijima discovered them in 1991, they just have incredible properties. And these are the kinds of things we’re going to discover as we start to engineer at the nano scale. Their strength: they’re almost the strongest material, tensile strength material known.They’re very, very stiff. They stretch very, very little.In two dimensions, if you make, like, a fabric out of them, they’re 30 times stronger than Kevlar. And if you make a three-dimensional

structure, like a buckyball, they have all sorts of incredible properties. If you shoot a particle at them and knock a hole in them, they repair themselves; they go zip and they repair the hole in femtoseconds, which is not, is really quick. (Laughter) If you shine a light on them, they produce electricity. In fact, if you flash them with a camera they catch on fire. If you put electricity on them, they emit light.

If you run current through them, you can run 1,000 times more current through one of these than through a piece of metal. You can make both p- and n-type semiconductors, which means you can make transistors out of them. They conduct heat along their length but not across, well, there is no width, but not in the other direction if you stack them up; that’s a property of carbon fibre also. If you put particles in them, and they go shooting out the tip, they’re like miniature linear accelerators or electron guns. The inside of the nanotubes is so small, the smallest ones are 0.7 nanometers, that it’s basically a quantum world. It’s a strange place inside a nanotube.

And so we begin to see, and we’ve seen business plans already, where the kind of things Lisa Randall’s talking about are in there. I had one business plan where I was trying to learn more about Witten’s cosmic dimension strings to try to understand what the phenomenon was going on in this proposed nano material. So inside of a nanotube, we’re really at the limit here. So what we see is

with these and other new materials that we can do things with different properties, lighter, stronger, and apply these new materials to the environmental problems. New materials that can make water, new materials that can make fuel cells work better, new materials that catalyse chemical reactions, that cut pollution and so on. Ethanol, new ways of making ethanol. New ways of making electric transportation. The whole green dream, because it can be profitable. And we’ve dedicated, we’ve just raised a new fund, we dedicated 100 million dollars to these kinds of investments. We believe that Genentech, the Compaq, the Lotus, the Sun, the Netscape, the Amazon, the Google in these fields are yet to be found, because this materials revolution will drive these things forward.

The third area that we’re working on, and we just announced last week, we were all in New York.We raised 200 million dollars in a specialty fund to work on a pandemic in biodefense. And to give you an idea of the last fund that Kleiner raised was a 400 million dollar fund, so this for us is a very substantial fund. And what we did, over the last few months, well, a few months ago, Ray Kurzweil and I wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about how publishing the 1918 genome was very dangerous. And John Doerr and Brook and others got concerned, [unclear], and we started looking around at what the world was doing about being prepared for a pandemic. And we saw a lot of gaps.

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‘If we let an unlimited amount of power loose, then we will, a very small number of people will be able to abuse it. We can’t fight at a million-to-one disadvantage.’

And so we asked ourselves, you know, can we find innovative things that will go fill these gaps? And Brooks told me in a break here, he said he’s found so much stuff he can’t sleep, because there’s so many great technologies out there, we’re essentially buried. And we need them, you know.We have one antiviral that people are talking about stockpiling that still works, roughly. That’s Tamiflu.

But Tamiflu, the virus is resistant. It is resistant to Tamiflu.

We’ve discovered with aids we need cocktails to work well so that the viral resistance, we need several antivirals. We need better surveillance. We need networks that can find out what’s going on. We need rapid diagnostics so that we can tell if somebody has a strain of flu which we have only identified very recently. We’ve got to be able to make the rapid diagnostics quickly. We need new antivirals and cocktails. We need new kinds of vaccines. Vaccines that are broad spectrum. Vaccines that we can manufacture quickly.

Cocktails, more polyvalent vaccines. You normally get a trivalent vaccine against three possible strains. We need, we don’t know where this thing is going. We believe that if we could fill these 10 gaps, we have a chance to help really reduce the risk of a pandemic. And the difference between a normal flu season and a pandemic is about a factor of 1,000 in deaths and certainly enormous economic impact.

So we’re very excited because we think we can fund 10, or speed up 10 projects and see them come to market in the next couple years that will address this.

So if we can address, use technology, help address education, help address the environment, help address the pandemic, does that solve the larger problem that I was talking about in the Wired article? And I’m afraid the answer is really no, because you can’t solve a problem with the management of technology with more technology. If we let an unlimited amount of power loose, then we will, a very small number of people will be able to abuse it. We can’t fight at a million-to-one disadvantage. So what we need to do is, we need better policy. And for example, some things we could do that would be policy solutions which are not really in the political air right now but perhaps with the change of administration would be, use markets.

Markets are a very strong force. For example, rather than try to regulate away problems, which probably won’t work, if we could price into the cost of doing business, the cost of catastrophe, so that people who are doing things that had a higher cost of catastrophe would have to take insurance against that risk. So if you wanted to put a drug on the market you could put it on. But it wouldn’t have to be approved by regulators; you’d have to convince an actuary that it would be safe. And if you apply the notion of insurance more broadly, you can use a more powerful force, a market force, to provide feedback. How could you keep the law? I think the law would be a really good thing to keep. Well, you have to hold people accountable. The

‘It’s especially hard for the scientists to accept who still remember, you know, Galileo essentially locked up, and who are still fighting this battle against the church. But that’s the price of having a civilisation. The price of retaining the rule of law is to limit the access to the great and kind of unbridled power.’

law requires accountability. Today scientists, technologists, businessmen, engineers don’t have any personal responsibility for the consequences of their actions.So if you tie that, you have to tie that back with the law.

And finally, I think we have to do something that’s not really, it’s almost unacceptable to say this, which, we have to begin to design the future. We can’t pick the future, but we can steer the future. Our investment in trying to prevent pandemic flu is affecting the distribution of possible outcomes. We may not be able to stop it, but the likelihood that it will get past us is lower if we focus on that problem.

So we can design the future if we choose what kind of things we want to have happen and not have happen, and steer us to a lower-risk place. Vice President Gore will talk about how we could steer the climate trajectory into a lower probability of catastrophic risk.

But above all, what we have to do is we have to help the good guys, the people on the defensive side, have an

advantage over the people who want to abuse things. And what we have to do to do that is we have to limit access to certain information.And growing up as we have, and holding very high the value of free speech, this is a hard thing for us to accept, for all of us to accept. It’s especially hard for the scientists to accept who still remember, you know, Galileo essentially locked up, and who are still fighting this battle against the church. But that’s the price of having a civilisation. The price of retaining the rule of law is to limit the access to the great and kind of unbridled power.

Thank you.(Applause)

Alain de Botton; TED Global 2009

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