Ted book by Lisa Nesbitt

e N xt the

hp te r a Annual Collective of TED Talks

Ideas worth spreading

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The History of TED

TED is owned by the Sapling Foundation, a private nonprofit foundation (a 501(c)3 organization under US tax code). The foundation was established in 1996 by publishing entrepreneur Chris Anderson. The goal of the Sapling Foundation is to foster the spread of great ideas. It aims to provide a platform for thinkers, visionaries and teachers, so that people around the globe can gain a better understanding of the biggest issues faced by the world, and feed a desire to help create a better future. Core to this goal is a belief that there is no greater force for changing the world than a powerful idea. Many factors can amplify the power of ideas: mass media, technology and market forces, to name three. In the past, Sapling supported projects that used these tools to leverage every dollar spent and create sustainable change in areas such as global public health, poverty alleviation and biodiversity. More than $10 million was granted to enlightened organizations such as the Acumen Fund, Environmental Defence, One World Health, and PATH. Sapling is no longer accepting proposals for outside grants; the foundation has turned its focus to the impact possible through TED itself. Ever since the foundation acquired TED in November 2001, it has been seeking ways to allow the extraordinary passion and inspiration created every year at our conferences to effect beneficial change in the world.

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Explore the next chapter of TED

TABLE OF CONTENTS

NATIONALS

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EDWARD SNOWDEN ZAK EBRAHIM

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TINKERERS H U G H H E R R p.20-25

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NICHOLAS NEGROPONTE

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DWELLERS

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p.26-27

BEN SAUNDERS MICHELE LABERGE

p.36-39

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LOUIE SCWARTZBERG

p.42-45

ILLUMINATORS ZIAUDDIN YOUSTAFAI OLD FRIENDS DAN GILBERT

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p.48-51

p.52

p.54-57

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MAKERS

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NA t oNa

THE

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tai

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N AT I O N A L S : The Next Chapter of Government

NA SINKING CAPITOL BUILDING

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(image making—Lisa Nesbitt

E D WA R D S N O W D E N N AT I O N A L S

O S LO e LIPs SIN K

TIONS(?) —11—

Edward Snowden speaks on Internet security and privacy

wqw

What really matters here is the kind of government we want, the kind of Internet we want, the kind of relationship between p e o p l e a n d s o c i e t i e s . A n d t h a t ’s w h a t I ’ m hoping the debate will move towards, and we’ve seen that increasing over time. If I had to describe myself, I wouldn’t use words like “hero.” I wouldn’t use “patriot,” and I wouldn’t use “traitor.” I’d say I’m an American and I’m a citizen, just like everyone else. CA: Just to give some context for those who don’t know the whole story -- (Applause) — this time a year ago, you were stationed in Hawaii working as a consultant to the NSA. As a sysadmin, you had access to their systems, and you began revealing certain classified documents to some handpicked journalists leading the way to June’s revelations. Now, what propelled you to do this?

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ES: You know, when I was sitting in Hawaii, and the years before, when I was working in the intelligence community, I saw a lot of things

that had disturbed me. We do a lot of good things in the intelligence community, things that need to be done, and things that help everyone. But there are also things that go too far. There are things that shouldn’t be done, and decisions that were being made in secret without the public’s awareness, without the public’s consent, and without even our representatives in government having knowledge of these programs. When I really came to struggle with these issues, I thought to myself, how can I do this in the most responsible way, that maximizes the public benefit while minimizing the risks? And out of all the solutions that I could come up with, out of going to Congress, when there were no laws, there were no legal protections for a private employee, a contractor in intelligence like myself, there was

a risk that I would be buried along with the information and the public would never find out. But the First Amendment of the United States Constitution guarantees us a free press for a reason, and that’s to enable an adversarial press, to challenge the government, but also to work together with the government, to have a dialogue and debate about how we can inform the public about matters of vital importance without putting our national security at risk. And by working with journalists, by giving all of my information back to the American people, rather than trusting myself to make the decisions about publication, we’ve had a robust debate with a deep investment by the government that I think has resulted in a benefit for everyone. And the risks that have been threatened, the risks that have been played up by the

CA: This is a slide of the PRISM program, and maybe you could tell the audience what that was that was revealed. ES: The best way to understand PRISM, because there’s been a little bit of controversy, is to first talk about what PRISM isn’t. Much of the debate in the U.S. has been about metadata. They’ve said it’s just metadata, it’s just metadata, and they’re talking about a specific legal authority called Section 215 of the Patriot Act. That allows sort of a warrantless wiretapping, mass surveillance of the entire country’s phone records, things like that -- who you’re talking to, when you’re talking to them, where you traveled. These are all metadata events. PRISM is about content. It’s a program through which the government could compel corporate America, it could deputize corporate America to do its dirty work for the NSA. And even though some of these companies did resist, even though some of them -- I believe Yahoo was one of them — challenged them in court, they all lost, because it was never tried by an open court. They were only tried by a secret

court. And something that we’ve seen, something about the PRISM program that’s very concerning to me is, there’s been a talking point in the U.S. government where they’ve said 15 federal judges have reviewed these programs and found them to be lawful, but what they do not tell you is those are secret judges in a secret court based on secret interpretations of law that is considered 34,000 warrant requests over 33 years, and in 33 years only rejected 11 government requests.

These aren’t the people that we want deciding what the role of corporate America in a free and open Internet should be. CA: Now, they’ve denied collaborating with the NSA. How was that data collected by the NSA? ES: Right. So the NSA’s own slides refer to it as direct access. What that means to an actual NSA analyst, someone like me who was working as an intelligence analyst

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(image making—Lisa Nesbitt

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government have never materialized. We have never seen any evidence of even a single instance of specific harm, and because of that, I am comfortable with the decisions that I made.

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E D WA R D S N O W D E N

vwqw

“I wouldn’t use ‘patriot’ and I wouldn’t use ‘traitor’. I’d say I’m an American.”

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targeting, Chinese cyber-hackers, things like that, in Hawaii, is the provenance of that data is directly from their servers. It doesn’t mean that there’s a group of company representatives sitting in a smoky room with the NSA palling around and making back-room deals about how they’re going to give this stuff away. Now each company handles it different ways. Some are ver y responsible. Some are somewhat less responsible. But the bottom line is, when we talk about how this information is given, it is coming from the companies themselves. It’s not stolen from the lines. But there’s an important thing to remember here: even though companies pushed back, even though the companies demanded, hey, let’s do this through a warrant process, let’s do this where we actually have some sort of legal review, some sort of basis for handing over these users’ data, we saw stories in the Washington Post last year that weren’t as well reported as the PRISM story that said the NSA broke in to the data center communications between Google to itself and Yahoo to itself. So even these companies that are cooperating in at least a compelled but hopefully lawful manner with the NSA, the NSA isn’t satisfied with that, and because of that, we need our companies to work very

hard to guarantee that they’re going to represent the interests of the user, and also advocate for the rights of the users. And I think over the last year, we’ve seen the companies that are named on the PRISM slides take great strides to do that, and I encourage them to continue. CA: What more should they do? ES: The biggest thing that an Internet company in America can do today, right now, without consulting with lawyers, to protect the rights of users worldwide, is to enable SSL web encryption on every page you visit. The reason this matters is today, if you go to look at a copy of “1984” on Amazon.com, the NSA can see a record of that, the Russian intelligence service can see a record of that, the Chinese service can see a record of that, the French service, the German service, the services of Andorra. They can all see it because it’s unencrypted. The world’s library is Amazon.com, but not only do they not support encryption by default, you cannot choose to use encryption when browsing through books. This is something that we need to change, not just for Amazon, I don’t mean to single them out, but they’re a great example. CA: Ed, come with me to this part of the stage. This is a program

called Boundless Informant. Can you explain just what,exactly this program is? ES: So, I’ve got to give credit to the NSA for using appropriate names on this. This is one of my favorite NSA cryptonyms. Boundless Informant is a program that the NSA hid from Congress. The NSA was previously asked by Congress, was there any ability that they had to give a rough ballpark estimate of the amount of American communications that were being intercepted. They said no. They said, we don’t track those stats, and we can’t track those stats. We can’t tell you how many communications we’re intercepting around the world, because to tell you that would be to invade your privacy. Now, I appreciate that sentiment from them, but the reality, when you look at this slide is, not only do they have the full capability, the capability already exists. It’s already in place. The NSA has its own internal data format that tracks both ends of a communication, and if it says, this communication came from America, they can tell Congress how many of those communications they have today, right now. And what Boundless Informant tells us is more communications are actually being intercepted in America about Americans than there are in Russia about Russians. CA: Ed, there was a story broken in the Washington Post, again from your data. The headline says, “NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year.” Can you tell us about that?

ES: Well, so the first thing is, you’re giving up your rights. You’re saying hey, you know, I don’t think I’m going to need them, so I’m just going to trust that, you know, let’s get rid of them, it does not really matter, these guys are going to do the right thing. Your rights matter because you never know when you are going to need them. Beyond that, it is large a part of our cultural identity, not just in America, but in Western societies and in democratic societies around the

What does that say about the state of oversight in American intelligence when the chairman of the SIC has no idea that the rules are being broken thousands of times every year?

in Washington, D.C., by accident. What’s amazing about this, this report, that did not get that much attention, is the fact that not only were there 2,776 abuses, the head chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, had not seen this report until the Washington Post had contacted her asking for comment on the report. And she requested a copy from the NSA and received it, but she had never seen this before that time. CA: Why should we care about all

world. People should be able to pick up the phone and to call their family, people should be able to send a text message to their loved ones, people should be able to buy a book online, they should be able to travel by train, they should be able to buy an airline ticket without wondering about how these events are going to look to the government, possibly not even your government years in the future, how they’re going to be misinterpreted and what they were going to think your intentions were.

CA: Some people are furious at what you’ve done. I heard a quote recently from Dick Cheney who said that Julian Assange was a flea bite, Edward Snowden is the lion that bit the head off the dog. He thinks you’ve committed one of the worst acts of betrayal in American history. What would you say to people who think that about you? ES: Dick Cheney’s really something else. (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. (Laughter) I think it’s amazing, because at the time Julian Assange was doing some of his greatest work, Dick Cheney was saying he was going to end governments worldwide, the skies were going to ignite and the seas were going to boil off, and now he’s saying it’s a flea bite. So we should really be suspicious about the same sort of overblown claims of damage to national security from these kind of officials. But let’s assume that these people really believe this. I would argue that they have kind of a narrow conception of national security. The prerogatives of people like Dick Cheney do not keep the nation safe. The public interest is not always the same as the national interest. Going to war with people who are not our enemy in places that are not a threat does not make us safe, and that applies whether it’s in Iraq or on the Internet. The Internet is not the enemy. Our economy is not the enemy. American businesses, Chinese businesses, and any other company out there is a part of our society. It’s a part of our interconnected world. There are ties of fraternity that bond us together, and if we destroy these bonds by undermining the standards, the security, the

N AT I O N A L S

this surveillance? I mean, look, if you’ve done nothing wrong, you have got nothing to worry about. What’s wrong with that point of view?

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ES: We also heard in Congressional testimony last year, it was an amazing thing for someone like me who came from the NSA and who’s seen the actual internal documents, knows what’s in them, to see officials testifying under oath that there had been no abuses, that there had been no violations of the NSA’s rules, when we knew this story was coming. But what’s especially interesting about this, about the fact that the NSA has violated their own rules, their own laws thousands of times in a single year, including one event by itself, one event out of those 2,776, that affected more than 3,000 people. In another event, they intercepted all the calls

E D WA R D S N O W D E N

Z A K E B R A H I M A N D H I S F AT H E R

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(image making—Lisa Nesbitt

ZAK EBRAHIM

N T O NOT NOT NOT

N AT I O N A L S

FA T H E R

Zak E b r a h i m , p e a c e a c t i v i s t , is refusing to follow in the footsteps of his well known terrorist father On November 5th, 1990, a man named El-Sayyid Nosair walked into a hotel in Manhattan and assassinated Rabbi Meir Kahane, the leader of the Jewish Defense League. Nosair was initially found not guilty of the murder, but while serving time on lesser charges, he and other men began planning attacks on a dozen New York City landmarks, including tunnels, synagogues and the United Nations headquarters. Thankfully, those plans were foiled by an FBI informant. Sadly, the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center was not. Nosair would eventually be convicted for his involvement in the plot. El-Sayyid Nosair is my father.

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I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1983 to him, an Egyptian engineer, and a loving American mother and grade school teacher, who together tried their best to create a happy childhood

it was my turn to shoot, my father helped me hold the rifle to my shoulder and explained how to aim at the target about 30 yards off. That day, the last bullet I shot hit the small orange light that sat on

for me. It wasn’t until I was seven years old that our family dynamic started to change. My father exposed me to a side of Islam that few people, including the majority of Muslims, get to see. It’s been my experience that when people take the time to interact with one another, it

top of the target and to everyone’s surprise, especially mine, the entire target burst into flames. My uncle turned to the other men, and in Arabic said, “Ibn abuh.” Like father, like son. They all seemed to get a really big laugh out of that comment, but it wasn’t until a few

DESTRUCTION

new face in class, I was frequently the target of bullies. I had orignially kept my identity a secret from my classmates to avoid being targeted, but as it turns out, being the quiet, chubby new kid in class was more than enough ammunition. So for the most part, I spent my time at home reading books and watching TV or playing video games. For those reasons, my social skills were lacking, to say the least, and growing up in a bigoted household, I was not prepared for the real world. I had been raised to judge people based on arbitrary measurements, like a person’s race or religion. Growing up in a bigoted

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doesn’t take long to realize that for the most part, we all want the same things out of life. However, in every religion, in every population, you will find a small percentage of people who hold so fervently to their beliefs that they feel they must use any means necessary to make others live as they do. A few months prior to his arrest, he sat me down and explained that for the past few weekends, he and some friends had been going to a shooting range on Long Island for target practice. He told me I’d be going with him the next morning. We arrived at Calverton Shooting Range, which unbeknownst to our group was being watched by the FBI. When

years later that I fully understood what they thought was so funny. They thought they saw in me the same destruction my father was capable of. Those men would later be convicted of placing a van filled with 1,500 pounds of explosives into the sub-level parking lot of the World Trade Center’s North Tower, causing an explosion that killed six people and injured over 1,000. These were the men I looked up to. These were the men I called ammu, which means uncle. By the time I turned 19, I had already moved 20 times in my life. Each time I would begin to feel comfortable around someone, it was time to pack up and move to the next town. Being the perpetual

household, I wasn’t prepared for the real world. I’d been raised to judge people based on arbitrary measurements, like a person’s race or religion. So what opened my eyes? One of my first experiences that challenged this way of thinking was during the 2000 presidential elections. Through a college prep program, I was able to take part in the National Youth Convention in Philadelphia. My particular group’s focus was on youth violence, and having been the victim of bullying for most of my life, this was a subject in which I felt particularly passionate. The members of our group came from many different walks of life. One day toward the

TERRORISM

ZAK EBRAHIM

it comes very unnaturally to me to treat people who are kind in any other way than how I would want to be treated. Because of that feeling, I was able to contrast the stereotypes I’d been taught as a child with real life experience and interaction. I don’t know what it’s like to be gay, but I’m well acquainted with being judged for something that’s beyond my control. Then there was “The Daily Show.” On a nightly basis, Jon Stewart forced me to be fully intellectually honest with myself about my own bigotry and helped me to realize that a person’s race, religion or

long as I live. She looked at me with the weary eyes of someone who had experienced enough dogmatism to last a lifetime, and said, “I’m tired of hating people.” In that instant, I realized how much negative energy it takes to hold that hatred inside of you. Zak Ebrahim is not my real name. I changed it when my family decided to end our connection with my father and start a new life. So why would I out myself and also potentially put myself in danger? Well, that’s simple. I do it in the hopes that perhaps someone someday who is compelled to use

N AT I O N A L S

end of the convention, I found out that one of the kids I had befriended was Jewish. Now, it had taken several days for this detail to come to light, and I realized that there was no natural animosity between the two of us. I had never had a Jewish friend before, and frankly I felt a sense of pride in having been able to overcome a barrier that for most of my life I had been led to believe was insurmountable. Another major turning point came when I found a summer job at Busch

DEATH TERROR T E R R O R I S M E R R O RT IESRMR O RTD EE RA RT O HDRE A H R TR HO R DT ETE A DEATH

EVAS T A T I O N DEVASTATION ASTATION DEVASTATION

(image making—Lisa Nesbitt

sexual orientation had nothing to do with the quality of one’s character. He was in many ways a father figure to me when I was in desperate

violence may hear my story and realize that there is a better way, that although I had been subjected to this violent,intolerant ideology, that I did not become fanaticized. Instead, I choose to use my personal

need of one. Inspiration can often come from an unexpected place, and the fact that a Jewish comedian had done more to positively influence my world view than my own extremist father is not lost on me. I had a conversation with my mother about how my worldview was starting to change, and she said something to me that I will hold dear to my heart for as

experience to fight back against terrorism, against the bigotry. I do it for the victims of terrorism and their loved ones, for the terrible pain and loss that terrorism has forced upon their lives. For the victims of terrorism, I will speak out against these senseless acts and condemn my father’s actions. And with that simple fact, I stand here as proof that violence isn’t inherent in one’s

DEVASTATION

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Gardens, an amusement park. There, I was exposed to people from all sorts of faiths and cultures. Most of my life, I had been taught that homosexuality was a sin, and by extension, that gay people were a negative influence. and that experience proved to be extremely fundamental to the development of my character. As chance would have it, I had the opportunity to work with some of the gay performers at a show there,and soon found that many were some of the kindest, least judgmental people I had ever met. Being bullied as a kid created a sense of empathy in me toward the suffering of others, and

TERRORIST DESTRUCTION

TiNK

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THE

KE e N r r

TINKERERS: The Next Chapter of Technology

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A D R I E N N E H A S L E T- D A V I S (image making—Lisa Nesbitt

HUGH HERR TINKERERS

MMOOTTI IOONN BBLLUURR

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Hugh Herr, bionics designer, takes the dynamic leap to put bionic technology on a uniquely human level.

To d a y I w i l l t e l l h u m a n s t o r i e s o f b i o n i c integration, how electromechanics are beginning to bridge the gap between disability and ability

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Bionics has defined my physicality. In 1982, both of my legs were amputated due to tissue damage from frostbite incurred during a mountain climbing accident. At that time, I didn’t view my body as broken. I reasoned that a human being can never be broken. Rather, technology is broken. Technology is inadequate. This simple but powerful idea was a call to arms to advance technology for the elimination of my own disability and ultimately the disability of others. I began by developing specialized limbs that allowed me to return to the vertical world of rock and ice climbing. I quickly realized that the artificial part of my body is malleable, able to take on any form, any function, a blank slate through which to create perhaps structures that could extend beyond biological capability. I made my height adjustable. I could be as short as five feet or as tall as I’d like. (Laughter) So when I was feeling badly about myself, insecure, I would jack my height up, but when I was feeling confident and suave, I would knock my height down a notch just to give the competition a chance. (Laughter) (Applause) Narrow, wedged feet allowed me

to climb steep rock fissures where the human foot cannot penetrate, and spiked feet enabled me to climb vertical ice walls without ever experiencing muscle leg fatigue. Through technological innovation, I returned to my sport stronger and better. Technology had eliminated my disability and allowed me a new climbing prowess. As a young man, I imagined a future world where technology so advanced could rid the world of disability, a world in which neural implants would allow the visually impaired to see, a world in which the paralyzed could walk via body exoskeletons.Sadly, because of deficiencies in technology, disability is rampant in the world. This gentleman is missing three limbs. As a testimony to current technology, he is out of the wheelchair, but we need to do a better job in bionics to allow one day full rehabilitation for a person with this level of injury. At the MIT Media Lab, we’ve established the Center for Extreme Bionics. The mission of the center is to put forth fundamental science and technological capability that will allow the biomechatronic and regenerative repair of humans across a broad range of brain and

body disabilities. In the area of design, we still do not understand how to attach devices to the body mechanically. It’s extraordinary to me that in this day and age, one of the most mature, oldest technologies in the human timeline, the shoe, still gives us blisters. How can this be? We have no idea how to attach things to our bodies. This is the beautifully lyrical work of Professor Neri Oxman at the MIT Media Lab, that is showing the spatially varying exoskeletal impedances, shown here by color variation in this 3D-printed model. Imagine a future where clothing is stiff and soft where you need it, when you need it, for optimal support and flexibility, without causing discomfort. My bionic limbs are attached to my biological body via synthetic skins with these stiffness variations that mirror my underlying tissue biomechanics. To achieve that mirroring, we first developed an accurate mathematical model of my biological limb. To that end, we used imaging tools such as MRI to look inside my body to figure out the geometries and locations of various tissues. We also took robotic tools. Here’s a

14-actuator circle that goes around the biological limb. The actuators come in, find the surface of the limb, measure its unloaded shape, and then they push on the tissues to measure tissue compliances at each anatomical point. We combine these imaging and robotic data to build a mathematical description of my biological limb, shown on the left. You see a bunch of points, or nodes. At each node, there’s a color that represents tissue compliance. We then complete a mathematical transformation to the design of the synthetic skin shown on the right, and we’ve discovered optimality is where the body is stiff, the synthetic skin should be soft, where the body is soft, the synthetic skin is stiff, and this mirroring occurs across all tissue compliances. With this framework, we produced bionic limbs that are the most comfortable limbs I’ve ever worn. Clearly in the future, our clothing, our shoes, our braces, our prostheses, will no longer be designed and manufactured using artisan strategies, but rather data-driven quantitative frameworks. In that future, our shoes will no longer give us blisters. We’re also embedding sensing and smart materials into the synthetic skins. This is a material developed by SRI International, California. Under electrostatic effect, it changes stiffness. So under zero

voltage, the material is compliant. It’s floppy like paper. Then the button’s pushed, a voltage is applied, and it then becomes stiff as a board. We embed this material into the synthetic skin that attaches my bionic limb to my biological body. When I walk here, it’s no voltage. My interface is soft and compliant. The button’s pushed, voltage is applied, and it stiffens, offering me a greater maneuverability of the bionic limb. How does it work? At heel strike, under computer control, the system controls stiffness to attenuate

to do something everyone should be able to do, go up and down their steps at home. Bionics also allows for extraordinary athletic feats. Here’s a gentleman running up a rocky pathway. This is Steve Martin, not the comedian, who lost his legs in a bomb blast in Afghanistan. We are also building exoskeletal structures using these same principles that wrap around a biological limb. This gentleman does not have any leg condition, any disability. He has a normal physiology, so these exoskeletons are applying muscle-like torques and powers so that his own muscles need not apply those torques and powers. This is the first exoskeleton in history that actually augments human walking. It significantly reduces metabolic cost. It’s so profound that when a normal, healthy person wears the device for 40 minutes and then takes it off, their own biological legs feel ridiculously heavy and awkward. We’re beginning the age in which machines attached to our bodies will make us stronger and faster and more efficient. Moving on to electrical interface, how do my bionic limbs communicate with my nervous system? Across my residual limb are electrodes that measure the electrical pulse of my muscles. That’s communicated to the bionic limb, so when I think about moving my phantom limb, the robot tracks

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HUGH HERR

B O M B B L A S T S In 3.5

seconds

the shock of the limb hitting the ground. Then at mid-stance, the bionic limb outputs high torques and powers to lift the person into the walking stride, comparable to how muscles work in the calf region. This bionic propulsion is very important clinically to patients. So, on the left you see the bionic device worn by a lady -- on the right a passive device worn by the same lady that fails to emulate normal muscle function -- enabling her

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the criminals and cowards took Adrienne off the dance floor

have synthetic limbs that move like flesh and bone, but actually feel like flesh and bone. I’d like to finish up with one more story, a beautiful story, the story of Adrianne Haslet-Davis. Adrianne lost her left leg in the Boston terrorist attack. I first met Adrianne when this photo was taken at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital. Adrianne is a professional dancer, a ballroom dancer. Adrianne breathes and lives dance. It is her expression. It is her art form. Naturally, when she lost her limb in the Boston terrorist attack, she wanted to return to the dance floor. After meeting her and driving home in my car, I thought, I am an MIT professor. I have resources. Let’s build her a bionic limb to enable her to go back to her life of dance. I brought in MIT scientists with strong expertise in prosthetics, robotics, machine learning and biomechanics, and over a 200-day research period, we studied dance. We brought in dancers with biological limbs, and we studied how do they move, what forces do they apply on the dance floor, and we took those data and we put forth fundamental principles of dance, reflexive dance capability, and we embedded that intelligence into the bionic limb. Bionics is not only about making people stronger and faster. Our expression, our humanity can be embedded into electromechanics. It was 3.5 seconds between the bomb blasts in the Boston terrorist attack. In 3.5 seconds, the criminals and cowards took Adrianne off the dance floor. In 200 days, we put her back. We will not be intimidated, brought down, diminished, conquered or stopped by acts of violence.

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HUGH HERR

TINKERERS (image making—Lisa Nesbitt

L e t ’s b u i l d h e r a b i o n i c l i m b t o e n a b l e h e r to go back to her life of dance

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A D R I E N N E H A S L E T- D A V I S DANCES FOR THE FIRST TIME

HUGH HERR

visit

from the

FUTURE

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Nicholas Negroponte reflects on his predictions for technology over the last 30 years and offers what he believes is to come.

NICHOLAS NEGROPONTE TINKERERS (image making—Lisa Nesbitt

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NICHOLAS NEGROPONTE AND HIS PREDICTIONS

I can tell you with great C O N F I D E N C E I have been to the

F U T U R E

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So I’m going to characterize the years and I’m even going to go back to some very early work of mine, and this was the kind of stuff I was doing in the ‘60s: very direct manipulation, very influenced as I studied architecture by the architect Moshe Safdie, and you can see that we even built robotic things that could build habitat-like structures. And this for me was not yet the Media Lab, but was the beginning of what I’ll call sensory computing, and I pick fingers partly because everybody thought it was ridiculous. Papers were published about how stupid it was to use fingers. Three reasons: One was they were lowresolution. The other is your hand would occlude what you wanted to see, and the third, which was the winner, was that your fingers would get the screen dirty, and hence, fingers would never be a device that you’d use. And this was a device we built in the ‘70s, which has never even been picked up. It is not just touch sensitive, it is pressure sensitive. Entebbe happened. 1976,

Air France was hijacked, taken to Entebbe, and the Israelis not only did an extraordinary rescue, they did it partly because they had practiced on a physical model of the airport, because they had built the airport, so they built a model in the desert, and when they arrived at Entebbe, they knew where to go because they had actually been there. The U.S. government asked some of us, ‘76, if we could replicate that computationally, and of course somebody like myself says yes. Immediately, you get a contract, Department of Defense, and we built this truck and this rig. We did sort of a simulation, because you had video discs, and again, this is ‘76. And then many years later, you get this truck, and so you have Google Maps. Still people thought, no, that was not serious computer science, and it was a man named Jerry Wiesner, who happened to be the president of MIT, who did think it was computer science. And one of the keys for anybody who wants to start something in life:

Make sure your president is part of it. So when I was doing the Media Lab, it was like having a gorilla in the front seat. If you were stopped for speeding and the officer looked in the window and saw who was in the passenger seat, then, “Oh, continue on, sir.” And so we were able, and this is a cute, actually, device, parenthetically. This was a lenticular photograph of Jerry Wiesner where the only thing that changed in the photograph were the lips. So when you oscillated that little piece of lenticular sheet with his photograph, it would be in lip sync with zero bandwidth. It was known as zero-bandwidth teleconferencing system at the time. So this was the Media Lab’s — this is what we said we’d do, that the world of computers, publishing, and so on would come together. Again, not generally accepted, but very much part of TED in the early days. And this is really where we were headed. And that created the Media Lab. One of the things about age is that I can tell you with great confidence,

NICHOLAS NEGROPONTE

“

experiment happened in Ethiopia. And here’s the experiment. The experiment is, can learning happen where there are no schools. And we dropped off tablets with no instructions and let the children figure it out. And in a short period of time, they not only turned them on and were using 50 apps per child within five days, they were singing “ABC” songs within two weeks, but they hacked Android within six months. And so that seemed sufficiently interesting. This is perhaps the best picture I have. The kid on your right has sort of nominated himself as teacher. Look at the kid on the left, and so on. There are no adults involved in this at all. So I said, well can we do this at a larger scale? And what is it that’s missing? The kids are giving a press conference at this point, and sort of writing in the dirt. And the answer is, what is missing? And I am going to skip over my prediction here, actually, because I’m running out of time, and here’s the question, is what’s going to happen?

TINKERERS

became much more involved with computers and learning and influenced by Seymour, but then particularly looking at learning as something that is best approximated by computer programming. When you write a computer program, you have got to not just list things out and sort of take an algorithm and translate it into a set of instructions, but when there’s a bug, and all programs have bugs, you’ve got to de-bug it. You’ve got to go in, change it, and then re-execute, and you iterate, and that iteration is really a very, good approximation of learning. So that led to my own work with Seymour in places like Cambodia and the starting of One Laptop per Child. Enough TED Talks on One Laptop per Child, so I’ll go through it very fast, but it did give us the chance to do something at a relatively large scale in the area of learning, development and computing. Very few people know that One Laptop per Child was a $1 billion project, and it was, at least

I think the challenge is to connect

the last billion people

over the seven years I ran it, but even more important, the World Bank contributed zero, USAID zero. It was mostly the countries using their own treasuries, which is very interesting, at least to me it was very interesting in terms of what I plan to do next. So these are the various places it happened. then tried an experiment, and the

“

I think the challenge is to connect the last billion people, and connecting the last billion is very different than connecting the next billion, and the reason it’s different is that the next billion are sort of low-hanging fruit, but the last billion are rural. Being rural and being poor are very different. Poverty tends to be created by our society, —31—

I’ve been to the future. I’ve been there, actually, many times. And the reason I say that is, how many times in my life have I said, “Oh, in 10 years, this will happen,” and then 10 years comes. And then you say, “Oh, in five years, this will happen.” And then five years comes. So I say this a little bit with having felt that I’d been there a number of times, and one of the things that is most quoted that I’ve ever said is that computing is not about computers, and that didn’t quite get enough traction, and then it started to. It started to because people caught on that the medium wasn’t the message. And the reason I show this car in actually a rather ugly slide is just again to tell you the kind of story that characterized a little bit of my life. This is a student of mine who had done a Ph.D. called “Backseat Driver.” It was in the early days of GPS, the car knew where it was, and it would give audio instructions to the driver, when to turn right, when to turn left and so on. Turns out, there are a lot of things in those instructions that back in that period were pretty challenging, like what does it mean, take the next right? Well, if you’re coming up on a street, the next right’s probably the one after, and there are lots of issues, and the student did a wonderful thesis, and the MIT patent office said “Don’t patent it. It will never be accepted. The liabilities are too large. There will be insurance issues. Don’t patent it.” So we didn’t, but it shows you how people, again, at times, do not really look at what is happening. And then something for me changed pretty profoundly. I

W E D

THE

—32—

E S R

—33—

DWELLERS: The Next Chapter of Environment

GO BEN SAUNDERS ON HIS POLAR TREK

—34—

(image making—Lisa Nesbitt

BEN SAUNDERS DWELLERS

OUTSIDE —35—

Ben Saunders, polar explorer, speaks to why going outside and experiencing the world first hand is so vitally important for us all.

—36—

C H A L L

that responds to the E N G E of this

there is something in man

M O U N T A I N I’m usually introduced as a polar explorer. I’m not sure that’s the most progressive or 21st-century of job titles, but I’ve spent more than two percent now of my entire life living in a tent inside the Arctic Circle, so I get out of the house a fair bit. And in my nature, I guess, I am a doer of things more than I am a spectator or a contemplator of things, and it’s that dichotomy, the gulf between ideas and action that I’m going to try and explore briefly. The pithiest answer to the question “why?” that has been dogging me for the last 12 years was credited certainly to this chap, the rakish-looking gentleman standing at the back, second from the left, George Lee Mallory. Many of you will know his name. In 1924 he was last seen disappearing into the clouds near the summit of Mt. Everest. He may or may not have been the first person to climb Everest, more than 30 years before Edmund Hillary. No one knows if he got to the top. It’s still a mystery. But he was credited with coining the phrase, “Because it’s there.” Now I’m not actually sure that he did say that. There’s very little evidence to suggest it, but what he did say is actually far nicer, and again, I’ve printed this. I’m going to read it out. “The first question which you will ask and which I must try to answer is this: What is the use of climbing Mt. Everest? And my answer must at once be, it is no use. There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behavior of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of

aviation, but otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, and not a gem, nor any coal or iron. We shall not find a single foot of earth that can be planted with crops to raise food. So it is no use. If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy, and joy, after all, is the end of life. We don’t live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to enjoy life. That is what life means, and that is what life is for.” Mallory’s argument that leaving the house, embarking on these grand adventures is joyful and fun, however, does not tally that neatly with my own experience. The furthest I’ve ever got away from my front door was in the spring of 2004. I still don’t know exactly what came over me, but my plan was to make a solo and unsupported crossing of the Arctic Ocean. I planned essentially to walk from the north coast of Russia to the North Pole, and then to carry on to the north coast of Canada. No one had ever done this. I was 26 at the time. A lot of experts were saying it was impossible, and my mum certainly wasn’t very keen on the idea. The journey from a small weather station on the north coast of Siberia up to my final starting point, the edge of the pack ice, the coast of the Arctic Ocean, took about five hours, and if anyone

BEN SAUNDERS DWELLERS

Arctic Ocean. NASA had described conditions that year as the worst since records began. I was dragging 180 kilos of food and fuel and supplies, about 400 pounds. The average temperature for the 10 weeks was minus 35. Minus 50 was the coldest. So again, there was not really an awful lot of joy or fun to be had. One of the magical things about this journey, however, is that because I’m walking over the sea, over this floating, drifting, shifting crust of ice that’s floating on top of the Arctic Ocean is it’s an environment that’s in a constant state of flux. The ice is always moving, breaking up, drifting around, refreezing, so the scenery that I saw for nearly 3 months was unique to me. No one else will ever, could ever, possibly see the views, the vistas, that I saw for 10 weeks. And that, I guess, is probably the finest argument for leaving the house. I can try to tell you what it was like, but you will

BEN SAUNDERS ON HIS POLAR TREK

(image making—Lisa Nesbitt

never know what it was like, and the more I try to explain that I felt lonely, I was the only human being in 5.4 million square-miles, it was cold, nearly minus 75 with windchill on a bad day, the more words fall short, and I’m unable to do it justice. And it seems to me, therefore, that the doing, you know, to try to experience, to engage, to endeavor, rather than to watch and to wonder, that’s where the real meat of life is to be found, the juice that we can suck out of our hours and days.

—37—

watched fearless Felix Baumgartner going up, rather than just coming down, you’ll appreciate the sense of apprehension, as I sat in a helicopter thundering north, and the sense, I think if anything, of impending doom. I just sat there wondering what on Earth I had gotten myself into. There was a bit of fun, a bit of joy. I was 26. I remember sitting there looking down at my sledge. I had my skis ready to go, I had a satellite phone, a pump-action shotgun in case I was attacked by a polar bear. I just remember looking out of the window and seeing the second helicopter. We were both thundering through this incredible Siberian dawn, and part of me felt a bit like a cross between Jason Bourne and Wilfred Thesiger. Part of me felt quite proud of myself, but mostly I was just utterly terrified. And that journey lasted 10 weeks, 72 days. I didn’t see anyone else. We took this photo next to the helicopter. Beyond that, I didn’t see anyone for 10 weeks. The North Pole is slap bang in the middle of the sea, so I’m traveling over the frozen surface of the

GENERAL FUSION FUSION REACTOR

—38—

(image making—Lisa Nesbitt

MICHELE LABERGE DWELLERS

o i e l s x v p e discoveries

—39—

Michele Laberge explains why fusion is the greatest source of energy yet.

n b a g!

AND, N O T S I P E H T T YOU HI all the energy is done

ba ff

Y L T N A I N S T Now we know of two ways of making nuclear energy: fission and fusion. Now in fission, you take a big nucleus, you break it in part, in two, and it makes lots of energy, and this is how the nuclear reactor today works. It works pretty good. And then there’s fusion. Now, I like

—40—

fusion. Fusion’s much better. So you take two small nuclei, you put it together, and you make helium, and that’s very nice. It makes lots of energy. This is nature’s way of producing energy. The sun and all the stars in the universe run on fusion. Now, a fusion plant would actually be quite cost-effective and it also would be quite safe. It only produces short term radioactive waste, and it can not melt down. Now, the fuel from fusion comes from the ocean. In the ocean, you can extract the fuel for about one thousandth of a cent per kilowatt-hour, so that is very, very cheap. And if the whole planet would run on fusion, we could extract the fuel from the ocean. It would run for billions and billions of years to come. Now, if fusion is so great, why don’t we have it? Where is it? Well, there’s always a bit of a catch. Fusion is really, really hard

to do. So the problem is, those two nuclei, they are both positively charged, so they don’t want to fuse. They go like this. They go like that. So in order to make them fuse, you have to throw them at each other with great speed, and if they have enough speed, they will go against the repulsion, they will touch, and they will make energy. Now, the particle speed is a measure of the temperature. So the correct temperature required for fusion is 150 billion degrees C. This is rather warm, and this is why fusion is so hard to do. Now, so the first thing I did is I looked into the literature and I see, how does fusion work? So the physicists have been working on fusion for a while, and one of the ways they do it is with something called a tokamak. It’s a big ring of magnetic coil, super conducting coil, and it makes a magnetic field in a ring like this, and the hot gas in the middle, which is called a plasma, is trapped. The particles go round and round and round the circle at the wall. Then they throw a huge amount of heat in there to try to cook that to fusion temperature. So this is the inside of one of those donuts, and

on the right side you can see the fusion plasma in there. Now, a second way of doing this is by using laser fusion. Now in laser fusion, you have a little ping pong ball, you put the fusion fuel in the center, and you

zap that with a whole bunch of laser around it. The lasers are very strong, and it squashes the ping pong ball really, really quick. And if you squeeze something hard enough, it gets hotter, and if it gets really, really fast, and they do that in one billionth of a second, it makes enough energy and enough heat to make fusion. So this is the inside of one such machine. You see the laser beam and the pellet in the center. Now if you look at the graph, you will notice that those two dots are a little bit on the right of the curve. We kind of have fallen off the progress. Actually, the science to make those machines was really in time to produce fusion during that curve. However, there has been a bit of politics going on, and the will to do it was not there, so it drifted to the right. ITER, for example, could have been built in 2000 or 2005, but because it’s a big international collaboration, the politics got in and it delayed it a bit. For example, it took them about three years to decide where to put it.

MICHELE LABERGE DWELLERS

plasma much faster. So I decided, okay, this is good, let’s make that. Okay, we also built this injector, so this injector makes the plasma to start with. It makes the plasma at about a temperature of three million degrees C. Unfortunately, it doesn’t last quite long enough, so we need to extend the life of the plasma a little bit, but last month it got a lot better, so I think we have the plasma compressing now. Then we built a small sphere, about this big, 14 pistons around it, and this will compress the liquid. However, plasma is difficult to compress. When you compress it, it tends to go a little bit crooked like that, so you need the timing of the piston to be very good, and for that we use several control systems, which was not possible in 1970, but we now know we can do that with nice, new electronics. So finally, most people think that fusion is in the future and will never happen, but as a matter of fact, fusion is getting very close. We are almost there. The big labs have shown that fusion is doable, and now there are small companies that are thinking about that, and they say, it’s not that it cannot be done, but it’s how to make it cost-effectively. General Fusion is one of those small companies, and hopefully, very soon, somebody, someone, will crack that nut, and perhaps it will be General Fusion.

—41—

just so I can take a selfie and put it on Facebook. Then when my dad sees that, he’ll be very proud. We also spend about 650 billion dollars a year in subsidies for oil and gas and renewable energy. Now, we spend one half of a percent of that on fusion. So me, personally, I don’t think it’s too expensive. I think it’s actually been shortchanged, considering it can solve all our energy problems cleanly for the next couple of billions of years. Now magnetic and laser fusion are pretty good machines. They are awesome pieces of technology, wonderful machines, and they have shown that fusion can be done. However, as a power plant, I don’t think they’re very good. They’re way too big, way too complicated, way too expensive, and also, they don’t deal very much with the fusion energy. When you make fusion, the energy comes out as neutrons, fast neutrons comes out of the plasma. Those neutrons hit the wall of the machine. It damages it. And also, you have to catch all of the heat from those neutrons and run some steam to spin a turbine somewhere, and on those machines, it was all a bit of an afterthought. So I decided that surely there must be a better way of doing that.

One way in particular attracted my attention, and it’s called magnetized target fusion, or MTF for short. Now, in MTF, what you want to do is you take a big vat and you fill that with liquid metal, and you spin the liquid metal to open a vortex in the center, a bit like your sink. When you pull the plug on a sink, it makes a vortex. And then you have some pistons driven by pressure that goes on the outside, and this compresses the liquid metal around the plasma, and it compresses it, it gets hotter, like a laser, and then it makes fusion. So it is a bit of a mix between a magnetized fusion and the laser fusion. So those have a couple of very good advantages. The liquid metal absorbs all the neutrons and no neutrons hit the wall, and therefore there’s no damage to the machine. The liquid metal gets hot, so you can pump that in a heat exchanger, make some steam, spin a turbine. So that’s a very convenient way of doing this part of the process. And finally, all the energy to make the fusion happen comes from steam-powered pistons, which is way cheaper than lasers or superconducting coils. So then I thought about impact. What about if we use a big hammer and we swing it and we hit the nail like this, in the place of putting the hammer on the nail and pushing and try to put it in? That won’t work. So what the idea is is to use the idea of an impact. So we accelerate the pistons with steam, that takes a little bit of time, but then, bang! you hit the piston, and, baff!, all the energy is done instantly, down instantly to the liquid, and that compresses the

It can solve all our energy problems cleanly for the next couple of billions of years.

Now, fusion is often criticized for being a little too expensive. Yes, it did cost a billion dollars or two billion dollars a year to make this progress. But you have to compare that to the cost of making Moore’s Law. That cost way more than that. The result of Moore’s Law is this cell phone here in my pocket. This cell phone, and the Internet behind it, cost about one trillion dollars,

—42—

THE

M A

s r k —43—

MAKERS: The Next Chapter of Design

—44—

Louie Schwartzberg, film maker, captures what the world cannot see.

L O U I E S C H WA R T Z B E R G MAKERS

CAPTURING THE UNSEEN

MYSTERIES of the

WORLD

SCENE FROM “MYSTERIES OF THE UNSEEN WORLD”

—45—

(image making—Lisa Nesbitt

There is

oe vm em e tn t mm ov en

which is too for our eyes to detect

S L O W

and time lapse makes us discover and broaden our perspective of life. We can see how o r g a n i s m s e m e r g e a n d g r o w, h o w a v i n e s u r v i v e s by creeping from the forest floor to look at the sunlight. And at the grand scale, time lapse allows us to see our planet in motion. We can view not only the vast sweep of nature, but the restless movement of humanity.

—46—

What is the intersection between technology, art and science? Curiosity and wonder, because it drives us to explore, because we’re surrounded by things we can’t see. And I love to use film to take us on a journey through portals of time and space, to make the invisible visible, because what that does, it expands our horizons, it transforms our perception, it opens our minds and it touches our heart. So here are some scenes from my 3D IMAX film, “Mysteries of the Unseen World.” There is movement which is too slow

for our eyes to detect, and time lapse makes us discover and broaden our perspective of life. We can see how organisms emerge and grow, how a vine survives by creeping from the forest floor to look at the sunlight. And at the grand scale, time lapse allows us to see our planet in motion. We can view not only the vast sweep of nature, but the restless movement of humanity. Each streaking dot represents a passenger plane, and by turning air traffic data into time-lapse imagery, we can see something that’s above

us constantly but invisible: the vast network of air travel over the United States. We can do the same thing with ships at sea. We can turn data into a time-lapse view of a global economy in motion. And decades of data give us the view of our entire planet as a single organism sustained by currents circulating throughout the oceans and by clouds swirling through the atmosphere, pulsing with lightning, crowned by the aurora borealis. It may be the ultimate time-lapse image: the anatomy of Earth brought to life.

L O U I E S C H WA R T Z B E R G MAKERS

crawling over your skin at night. Can you guess what this is? Shark skin. A caterpillar’s mouth. The eye of a fruit fly. An eggshell. A flea. A snail’s tongue. We think we know most of the animal kingdom, but there may be millions of tiny species just waiting to be discovered. A spider also has great secrets, because spider’s silk thread is pound for pound stronger than steel but completely elastic. This journey will take us all the way down to the nano world. The silk is 100 times thinner than human hair. On there is bacteria, and near that bacteria, 10 times smaller, a virus. Inside of that, 10 times smaller, three strands of DNA, and nearing the limit of our most powerful microscopes, single carbon atoms.

repair DNA. We are on the threshold of extraordinary advances, born of our drive to unveil the mysteries of life. So under an endless rain of cosmic dust, the air is full of pollen, micro-diamonds and jewels from other planets, and supernova explosions. People go about their lives surrounded by the unseeable. Knowing that there’s so much around us we can see forever changes our understanding of the world, and by looking at unseen worlds, we recognize that we exist in the living universe, and this new perspective creates wonder and inspires us to become explorers in our own backyards.

we’re G I A N T S

and we’re unaware of With the tip of a powerful small microscope, we can actually move atoms and begin to create amazing nano devices. Some could one day patrol our body for all kinds of diseases and clean out clogged arteries along the way. Tiny chemical machines of the future can one day, perhaps,

that are too

the things

for us to see.

—47—

At the other extreme, there are things that move too fast for our eyes, but we have technology that can look into that world as well. With high-speed cameras, we can do the opposite of time lapse. We can shoot images that are thousands of times faster than our vision. And we can see how nature’s ingenious devices work, and perhaps we can even imitate them. When a dragonfly flutters by, you may not realize, but it’s the greatest flier in nature. It can hover, fly backwards, even upside down. And by tracking markers on an insect’s wings, we can visualize the air flow that they produce. Nobody knew the secret, but high speed shows a dragonfly can move all four wings in different directions at the same time. And what we learn can lead us to new kinds of robotic flyers that can expand our vision of important and remote places. We’re giants, and we are unaware of things that are too small for us to see. The electron microscope fires electrons which creates images which can magnify things by as much as a million times. This is the egg of a butterfly. And there are unseen creatures living all over your body, including mites that spend their entire lives dwelling on your eyelashes,

THE

—48—

L uM aN

I L L U M I N AT O R S : The Next Chapter of Education —49—

t O

N O T

WILL

S I

M A L A L A A N D H E R F AT H E R

—50—

(image making—Lisa Nesbitt

Z I A U D D I N Y O U S TA F Z A I I L L U M I N AT O R S

L E N C E D

—51—

Z i a u d d i n Yo u s t a f z a i , f a t h e r o f M a l a l a Yo u s t a f z a i , s p e a k s a b o u t education for women and the pride he feels from being known b y h i s d a u g h t e r ’s b r a v e r y.

the story of women is the story of

I N J U S T I C E , I N E Q U A L I T Y VIOLENCE and daughter, when she grows exploitation old, she suffers too. At

—52—

Malala started her campaign for education and stood for her rights in 2007, and when her efforts were honored in 2011, and she was given the national youth peace prize, and she became a very famous, very popular young girl of her country. Before that, she was my daughter, but now I am her father. Ladies and gentlemen, if we glance to human history, the story of women is the story of injustice, inequality, violence and exploitation. It is one that cannot be overlooked by the world, it needs tending to. You see, in patriarchal societies, right from the very beginning, when a girl is born, her birth is not celebrated. She is not welcomed, neither by father nor by mother. The neighborhood comes and commiserates with the mother, and nobody congratulates the father. And a mother is very uncomfortable for having a girl child. When she gives birth to the first girl child, first daughter, she is sad. When she gives birth to the second daughter, she is shocked, and in the expectation of a son, when she gives birth to a third daughter, she feels guilty like a criminal. Not only the mother suffers, but the daughter, the newly born

the age of five, while she should be going to school, she stays at home and her brothers are admitted in a school. Until the age of 12, somehow, she has a good life. She can have fun. She can play with her friends in the streets, and she can move around in the streets like a butterfly. But when she enters her teens, when she becomes 13 years old, she is forbidden to go out of her home without a male escort. She is confined under the four walls of her home. She is no more a free individual. She becomes the so-called honor of her father and of her brothers and of her family, and if she transgresses the code of that socalled honor, she could even be killed. And it is also interesting that this so-called code of honor, it does not only affect the life of a girl, it also affects the life of the male members of the family. I know a family of seven sisters and one brother, and that one brother, he has migrated to the Gulf countries, to earn a living for his seven sisters and parents, because he thinks that it will be humiliating if his seven sisters learn a skill and they go out of the home and earn some livelihood. So this brother, he sacrifices the joys of his life and the happiness of his sisters at

the altar of so-called honor. And there is one more norm of the patriarchal societies that is called obedience. A good girl is supposed to be very quiet, very humble and very submissive. It is the criteria. The role model good girl should be very quiet. She is supposed to be silent and she is supposed to accept the decisions of her father and mother and the decisions of elders, even if she does not like them. If she is married to a man she doesn’t like or if she is married to an old man, she has to accept, because she does not want to be dubbed as disobedient. If she is married very early, she has to accept. Otherwise, she will be called disobedient. And what happens at the end? In the words of a poetess, she is wedded, bedded, and then she gives birth to more sons and daughters. And it is the irony of the situation that this mother, she teaches the same lesson of obedience to her daughter and the same lesson of honor to her sons. And this vicious cycle goes on, goes on. Dear brothers and sisters, when Malala was born, and for the first time, believe me, I don’t like newborn children, to be honest, but when I went and I looked into her eyes, believe me, I got extremely honored. And long before she was born, I thought about her name, and I was fascinated with a heroic legendary freedom fighter in Afghanistan. Her name was Malalai of Maiwand, and I named my daughter after her. A few days after Malala was born, my daughter was born, my cousin came -- and it was a coincidence -- he came to my home and he brought a family tree, a family tree of the Yousafzai family, and when I looked at the family tree, it traced back to 300 years of our ancestors. But when I looked, all were men, and I picked my

Z I A U D D I N Y O U S TA F Z A I

because her facial nerve was cut down, I used to see a dark shadow spreading on the face of my wife. But my daughter never complained. She used to tell us, “I’m fine with my crooked smile and with my numbness in my face. I’ll be okay. Please don’t worry.” She was a solace for us, and she consoled us. People ask me, what special is in my mentorship which has made Malala so bold and so courageous and so vocal and poised? I tell them, don’t ask me what I did. Ask me what I did not

I L L U M I N AT O R S

were flogged and singers were killed. Millions were suffering, but few spoke, and it was the most scary thing when you have all around such people who kill and who flog, and you speak for your rights. It’s really the most scary thing. At the age of 10, Malala stood, and she stood for the right of education. She wrote a diary for the BBC blog, she volunteered herself for the New York Times documentaries, and she spoke from every platform she could. And her voice was the most powerful voice. It then spread like a crescendo all around the world. And that was the reason the Taliban could not tolerate her campaign, and on October 9 2012, she was shot in the head at point blank range. It was a doomsday for my family and for me. The world turned into a big black hole. While my daughter was on the verge of life and death, I whispered into the ears of my wife, “Should I be blamed for what happened to my daughter and your daughter?” And she abruptly told me, “Please don’t blame yourself. You stood for the right cause. You put your life at stake for the cause of truth, for the cause of peace, and for the cause of education, and your daughter in inspired from you and she joined you. You both were on the right path and God will protect her.” When Malala was in the hospital, and she was going through the severe pains and she had had severe headaches

do. I did not clip her wings, and that’s all.

I DID NOT CLIP HER

WINGS

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pen, drew a line from my name, and wrote, “Malala.” And when she grow old, when she was four and a half years old, I admitted her in my school. You will be asking, then, why should I mention about the admission of a girl in a school? Yes, I must mention it. It may be taken for granted in Canada, in America, in many developed countries, but in poor countries, in patriarchal societies, in tribal societies, it’s a big event for the life of girl. Enrollment in a school means recognition of her identity and her name. Admission in a school means that she has entered the world of dreams and aspirations where she can explore her potentials for her future life. I have five sisters, and none of them could go to school, and you will be astonished, two weeks before, when I was filling out the Canadian visa form, and I was filling out the family part of the form, I could not recall the surnames of some of my sisters. And the reason was that I have never, never seen the names of my sisters written on any document. That was the reason that I valued my daughter. What my father could not give to my sisters and to his daughters, I thought I must change it. Dear brothers and sisters, we were striving for more rights for women, and we were struggling to have more, more and more space for the women in society. But we came across a new phenomenon. It was lethal to human rights and particularly to women’s rights. It was called Talibanization. It means a complete negation of women’s participation in all political, economical and social activities. Hundreds of schools were lost. Girls were prohibited from going to school. Women were forced to wear veils and they were stopped from going to the markets. Musicians were silenced, girls

AND

OUR

D L O

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R i F

OLD FRIENDS: The Top Speakers of All Time Return

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eN DS

TTHHEE OONNLY LY TTHH

TTHHAT AT IISS TANNTT IISS CCOONNSSTA

CHANGE DAN GILBERT

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(image making—Lisa Nesbitt

DAN GILBERT

Dan Gilbert, Happiness Expert Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you’ve ever been. The one constant in our life is change.

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OLD FRIENDS

HIINNGG

M Y FAV O R I T E T H I N G S

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(image making—Lisa Nesbitt

Now, I think one of the reasons -- I’ll try to convince you today — is that we have a fundamental misconception about the power of time. Every one of you knows that the rate of change slows over the human lifespan, that your children seem to change by the minute but your parents seem to change by the year. But what is the name of this magical point in life where change suddenly goes from a gallop to a crawl? Is it teenage years? Is it middle age? Is it old age? The answer, it turns out, for most people, is now, wherever now happens to be. What I want to convince you today is that all of us are walking around with an illusion, an illusion that history, our personal history, has just come to an end, that we have just recently become the people that we were always meant to be and will be for the rest of our lives. Let me give you some data to back up that claim. So here is a study of change in people’s personal values over time. Here are three values. Everybody here holds all of them, but you probably know that as you grow, as you age, the balance of these values shifts. So how does it do so? Well, we asked thousands of people. We asked half of them to predict for us how much their values would change in the next 10 years, and the others to tell us how much their values had

DAN GILBERT OLD FRIENDS

These are a few of my favorite things and they will never change

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changed in the last 10 years. And this enabled us to do a really interesting kind of analysis, because it allowed us to compare the predictions of people, say, 18 years old, to the reports of people who were 28, and to do that kind of analysis throughout the lifespan. Here’s what we found. First of all, you are right, change does slow down as we age, but second, you’re wrong, because it doesn’t slow nearly as much as we think. At every age, from 18 to 68 in our data set, people vastly underestimated how much change they would experience over the next 10 years. We call this the “end of history” illusion. To give you an idea of the magnitude of this effect, you can connect these two lines, and what you see here is that 18-year-olds anticipate changing only as much as 50-year-olds actually do. Now it’s not just values. It’s all sorts of other things. For example, personality. Many of you know that psychologists now claim that there are five fundamental dimensions of personality: neuroticism, openness to experience, agreeableness, extraversion, and conscientiousness. Again, we asked people how much they expected to change over the next 10 years, and also how much they had changed over the last 10 years,