The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Transcript:
Chris Anderson asked me if I could put the last 25 yearsof anti-poverty campaigning into 10 minutes for TED.That's an Englishman asking an Irishman to be succinct.
(Laughter)
I said, "Chris, that would take a miracle."
He said, "Bono, wouldn't that be a good use of your messianic complex?"
So, yeah.Then I thought, let's go even further than 25 years.Let's go back before Christ, three millennia,to a time when, at least in my head, the journey for justice,the march against inequality and poverty really began.Three thousand years ago,civilization just getting started on the banks of the Nile,some slaves, Jewish shepherds in this instance,smelling of sheep shit, I guess,proclaimed to the Pharaoh, sitting high on his throne,"We, your majesty-ness, are equal to you."
And the Pharaoh replies, "Oh, no.You, your miserableness, have got to be kidding."
And they say, "No, no, that's what it says herein our holy book."
Cut to our century, same country, same pyramids,another people spreading the same ideaof equality with a different book.This time it's called the Facebook.Crowds are gathered in Tahrir Square.They turn a social network from virtual to actual,and kind of rebooted the 21st century.Not to undersell how messy and uglythe aftermath of the Arab Spring has been,neither to oversell the role of technology,but these things have given a sense of what's possiblewhen the age-old model of power, the pyramid,gets turned upside down, putting the people on topand the pharaohs of today on the bottom, as it were.It's also shown us that something as powerfulas information and the sharing of it can challenge inequality,because facts, like people,want to be free, and when they're free,liberty is usually around the corner,even for the poorest of the poor --facts that can challenge cynicismand the apathy that leads to inertia,facts that tell us what's working and,more importantly, what's not, so we can fix it,facts that if we hear them and heed them could help usmeet the challenge that Nelson Mandela madeback in 2005,when he asked us to be that great generationthat overcomes that most awful offense to humanity,extreme poverty,facts that build a powerful momentum.
So I thought, forget the rock opera,forget the bombast, my usual tricks.The only thing singing today would be the facts,for I have truly embraced by inner nerd.So exit the rock star.Enter the evidence-based activist, the factivist.
Because what the facts are telling usis that the long, slow journey,humanity's long, slow journey of equality,is actually speeding up.Look at what's been achieved.Look at the pictures these data sets print.Since the year 2000, since the turn of the millennium,there are eight million more AIDS patientsgetting life-saving antiretroviral drugs.Malaria: There are eight countries in sub-Saharan Africathat have their death rates cut by 75 percent.For kids under five, child mortality, kids under five,it's down by 2.65 million a year.That's a rate of 7,256 children's lives saved each day.Wow. Wow. (Applause)
Let's just stop for a second, actually, and think about that.Have you read anything anywhere in the last weekthat is remotely as important as that number? Wow.Great news. It drives me nutsthat most people don't seem to know this news.Seven thousand kids a day. Here's two of them.This is Michael and Benedicta,and they're alive thanks in large partto Dr. Patricia Asamoah -- she's amazing --and the Global Fund, which all of you financially support,whether you know it or not.And the Global Fund provides antiretroviral drugsthat stop mothers from passing HIV to their kids.This fantastic news didn't happen by itself.It was fought for, it was campaigned for,it was innovated for.And this great news gives birth to even more great news,because the historic trend is this.The number of people living in back-breaking,soul-crushing extreme poverty has declinedfrom 43 percent of the world's population in 1990to 33 percent by 2000and then to 21 percent by 2010.Give it up for that. (Applause)Halved. Halved.
Now, the rate is still too high -- still too many peopleunnecessarily losing their lives.There's still work to do.But it's heart-stopping. It's mind-blowing stuff.And if you live on less than $1.25 a day,if you live in that kind of poverty,this is not just data.This is everything.If you're a parent who wants the best for your kids -- and I am --this rapid transition is a route out of despair and into hope.And guess what? If the trajectory continues,look where the amount of people living on $1.25 a daygets to by 2030.Can't be true, can it?That's what the data is telling us. If the trajectory continues,we get to, wow, the zero zone.For number-crunchers like us,that is the erogenous zone,and it's fair to say that I am, by now,sexually aroused by the collating of data.So virtual elimination of extreme poverty,as defined by people living on less than $1.25 a day,adjusted, of course, for inflation from a 1990 baseline.We do love a good baseline.That's amazing.
Now I know that some of you think this progressis all in Asia or Latin America ormodel countries like Brazil --and who doesn't love a Brazilian model? --but look at sub-Saharan Africa.There's a collection of 10 countries, some call them the lions,who in the last decade have had a combinationof 100 percent debt cancellation,a tripling of aid, a tenfold increase in FDI --that's foreign direct investment --which has unlocked a quadrupling of domestic resources -- that's local money --which, when spent wisely -- that's good governance --cut childhood mortality by a third,doubled education completion rates,and they, too, halved extreme poverty,and at this rate, these 10 get to zero too.So the pride of lionsis the proof of concept.
There are all kinds of benefits to this.For a start, you won't have to listento an insufferable little jumped-up Jesus like myself.How about that? (Applause)
And 2028, 2030? It's just around the corner.I mean, it's about three Rolling Stones farewell concerts away.(Laughter) I hope. I'm hoping.Makes us look really young.
So why aren't we jumping up and down about this?Well, the opportunity is real, but so is the jeopardy.We can't get this done until we really acceptthat we can get this done.Look at this graph.It's called inertia. It's how we screw it up.And the next one is really beautiful.It's called momentum.And it's how we can bend the arc of historydown towards zero,just doing the things that we know work.
So inertia versus momentum.There is jeopardy, and of course,the closer you get, it gets harder.We know the obstacles that are in our wayright now, in difficult times.In fact, today in your capital, in difficult times,some who mind the nation's purse want to cutlife-saving programs like the Global Fund.But you can do something about that.You can tell politiciansthat these cuts [can cost] lives.
Right now today, in Oslo as it happens,oil companies are fighting to keep secrettheir payments to governmentsfor extracting oil in developing countries.You can do something about that too.You can join the One Campaign,and leaders like Mo Ibrahim, the telecom entrepreneur.We're pushing for laws that make sure that at least someof the wealth under the groundends up in the hands of the people living above it.
And right now, we knowthat the biggest disease of allis not a disease. It's corruption.But there's a vaccine for that too.It's called transparency, open data sets,something the TED community is really on it.Daylight, you could call it, transparency.And technology is really turbocharging this.It's getting harder to hide if you're doing bad stuff.
So let me tell you about the U-report,which I'm really excited about. It's 150,000 millennialsall across Uganda, young peoplearmed with 2G phones, an SMS social networkexposing government corruptionand demanding to know what's in the budgetand how their money is being spent.This is exciting stuff.
Look, once you have these tools,you can't not use them.Once you have this knowledge, you can't un-know it.You can't delete this data from your brain,but you can delete the cliched imageof supplicant, impoverished peoplesnot taking control of their own lives.You can erase that, you really can,because it's not true anymore. (Applause)
It's transformational.2030? By 2030, robots,not just serving us Guinness, but drinking it.By the time we get there,every place with a rough semblance of governancemight actually be on their way.
So I'm here to -- I guess we're hereto try and infect you with this virtuous, data-based virus,the one we call factivism.It's not going to kill you.In fact, it could save countless lives.I guess we in the One Campaign would love youto be contagious, spread it, share it, pass it on.By doing so, you will join us and countless othersin what I truly believe is the greatest adventure ever taken,the ever-demanding journey of equality.Could we really be the great generationthat Mandela asked us to be?Might we answer that clarion call with science,with reason, with facts,and, dare I say it, emotions?Because as is obvious, factivists have feelings too.
I'm thinking of Wael Ghonim, though.Some of you know him. He set up one of the Facebook groupsbehind the Tahrir Square in Cairo.He got thrown in jail for it,but I have his words tattooed on my brain.
"We are going to win because we don't understand politics.We are going to win because we don't play their dirty games.We are going to win because we don't have a party political agenda.We are going to win because the tearsthat come from our eyes actually come from our hearts.We are going to win because we have dreams,and we're willing to stand up for those dreams."
Wael is right.We're going to winif we work together as one,because the power of the peopleis so much stronger than the people in power.
Thank you.
(Applause)Thank you so much. (Applause)
In this blog, teachers, students and all those who have some kind of interest in the English language will find useful, interesting, curious and funny things to be used in their classes or for their personal enjoyment.
Sunday, May 19, 2013
TECH/GralINt-TED Talks-Danny Hillis: Internet could crash, we need a plan B
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Transcript:
So, this book that I have in my handis a directory of everybody who had an email addressin 1982. (Laughter)Actually, it's deceptively large.There's actually only about 20 people on each page,because we have the name, addressand telephone number of every single person.And, in fact, everybody's listed twice,because it's sorted once by name and once by email address.Obviously a very small community.There were only two other Dannys on the Internet then.I knew them both.We didn't all know each other,but we all kind of trusted each other,and that basic feeling of trustpermeated the whole network,and there was a real sense thatwe could depend on each other to do things.
So just to give you an idea of the level of trust in this community,let me tell you what it was liketo register a domain name in the early days.Now, it just so happened that I got to registerthe third domain name on the Internet.So I could have anything I wantedother than bbn.com and symbolics.com.So I picked think.com, but then I thought,you know, there's a lot of really interesting names out there.Maybe I should register a few extras just in case.And then I thought, "Nah, that wouldn't be very nice."
(Laughter)
That attitude of only taking what you needwas really what everybody had on the network in those days,and in fact, it wasn't just the people on the network,but it was actually kind of built into the protocolsof the Internet itself.So the basic idea of I.P., or Internet protocol,and the way that the -- the routing algorithm that used it,were fundamentally "from each according to their ability,to each according to their need."And so, if you had some extra bandwidth,you'd deliver a message for someone.If they had some extra bandwidth, they would deliver a message for you.You'd kind of depend on people to do that,and that was the building block.It was actually interesting that such a communist principlewas the basis of a system developed during the Cold Warby the Defense Department,but it obviously worked really well,and we all saw what happened with the Internet.It was incredibly successful.
In fact, it was so successful that there's no waythat these days you could make a book like this.My rough calculation is it would be about 25 miles thick.But, of course, you couldn't do it,because we don't know the names of all the peoplewith Internet or email addresses,and even if we did know their names,I'm pretty sure that they would not want their name,address and telephone number published to everyone.
So the fact is that there's a lot of bad guys on the Internet these days,and so we dealt with that by makingwalled communities,secure subnetworks, VPNs,little things that aren't really the Internetbut are made out of the same building blocks,but we're still basically building it out of thosesame building blocks with those same assumptions of trust.And that means that it's vulnerableto certain kinds of mistakes that can happen,or certain kinds of deliberate attacks,but even the mistakes can be bad.
So, for instance,in all of Asia recently,it was impossible to get YouTube for a little whilebecause Pakistan made some mistakesin how it was censoring YouTube in its internal network.They didn't intend to screw up Asia, but they didbecause of the way that the protocols work.Another example that may have affected many of you in this audience is,you may remember a couple of years ago,all the planes west of the Mississippi were groundedbecause a single routing card in Salt Lake Cityhad a bug in it.Now, you don't really thinkthat our airplane system depends on the Internet,and in some sense it doesn't.I'll come back to that later.But the fact is that people couldn't take offbecause something was going wrong on the Internet,and the router card was down.
And so, there are many of those things that start to happen.Now, there was an interesting thing that happened last April.All of a sudden,a very large percentage of the traffic on the whole Internet,including a lot of the traffic between U.S. military installations,started getting re-routed through China.So for a few hours, it all passed through China.Now, China Telecom says it was just an honest mistake,and it is actually possible that it was, the way things work,but certainly somebody could makea dishonest mistake of that sort if they wanted to,and it shows you how vulnerable the system is even to mistakes.Imagine how vulnerable the system is to deliberate attacks.
So if somebody really wanted to attack the United Statesor Western civilization these days,they're not going to do it with tanks.That will not succeed.What they'll probably do is somethingvery much like the attack that happenedon the Iranian nuclear facility.Nobody has claimed credit for that.There was basically a factory of industrial machines.It didn't think of itself as being on the Internet.It thought of itself as being disconnected from the Internet,but it was possible for somebody to smugglea USB drive in there, or something like that,and software got in there that causes the centrifuges,in that case, to actually destroy themselves.Now that same kind of software could destroy an oil refineryor a pharmaceutical factory or a semiconductor plant.And so there's a lot of -- I'm sure you've read a lot in papers,about worries about cyber attacksand defenses against those.
But the fact is, people are mostly focused ondefending the computers on the Internet,and there's been surprisingly little attentionto defending the Internet itself as a communications medium.And I think we probably do need to paysome more attention to that, because it's actually kind of fragile.So actually, in the early days,back when it was the ARPANET,there were actually times -- there was a particular time it failed completelybecause one single message processoractually got a bug in it.And the way the Internet works isthe routers are basically exchanging informationabout how they can get messages to places,and this one processor, because of a broken card,decided it could actually get a messageto some place in negative time.So, in other words, it claimed it could deliver a message before you sent it.So of course, the fastest way to get a message anywherewas to send it to this guy,who would send it back in time and get it there super early,so every message in the Internetstarted getting switched through this one node,and of course that clogged everything up.Everything started breaking.The interesting thing was, though,that the sysadmins were able to fix it,but they had to basically turn every single thing on the Internet off.Now, of course you couldn't do that today.I mean, everything off, it's likethe service call you get from the cable company,except for the whole world.
Now, in fact, they couldn't do it for a lot of reasons today.One of the reasons is a lot of their telephonesuse IP protocol and use things like Skype and so onthat go through the Internet right now,and so in fact we're becoming dependent on itfor more and more different things,like when you take off from LAX,you're really not thinking you're using the Internet.When you pump gas, you really don't think you're using the Internet.What's happening increasingly, though, is these systemsare beginning to use the Internet.Most of them aren't based on the Internet yet,but they're starting to use the Internet for service functions,for administrative functions,and so if you take something like the cell phone system,which is still relatively independent of the Internet for the most part,Internet pieces are beginning to sneak into itin terms of some of the control and administrative functions,and it's so tempting to use these same building blocksbecause they work so well, they're cheap,they're repeated, and so on.So all of our systems, more and more,are starting to use the same technologyand starting to depend on this technology.And so even a modern rocket ship these daysactually uses Internet protocol to talkfrom one end of the rocket ship to the other.That's crazy. It was never designed to do things like that.
So we've built this systemwhere we understand all the parts of it,but we're using it in a very, very different way than we expected to use it,and it's gotten a very, very different scalethan it was designed for.And in fact, nobody really exactly understandsall the things it's being used for right now.It's turning into one of these big emergent systemslike the financial system, where we've designed all the partsbut nobody really exactly understandshow it operates and all the little details of itand what kinds of emergent behaviors it can have.And so if you hear an expert talking about the Internetand saying it can do this, or it does do this, or it will do that,you should treat it with the same skepticismthat you might treat the comments of an economist about the economyor a weatherman about the weather, or something like that.They have an informed opinion,but it's changing so quickly that even the expertsdon't know exactly what's going on.So if you see one of these maps of the Internet,it's just somebody's guess.Nobody really knows what the Internet is right nowbecause it's different than it was an hour ago.It's constantly changing. It's constantly reconfiguring.
And the problem with it is,I think we are setting ourselves up for a kind of disasterlike the disaster we had in the financial system,where we take a system that's basically built on trust,was basically built for a smaller-scale system,and we've kind of expanded it way beyond the limitsof how it was meant to operate.And so right now, I think it's literally truethat we don't know what the consequencesof an effective denial-of-service attackon the Internet would be,and whatever it would be is going to be worse next year,and worse next year, and so on.
But so what we need is a plan B.There is no plan B right now.There's no clear backup system that we've very carefully keptto be independent of the Internet,made out of completely different sets of building blocks.So what we need is something that doesn't necessarilyhave to have the performance of the Internet,but the police department has to be ableto call up the fire department even without the Internet,or the hospitals have to order fuel oil.This doesn't need to be a multi-billion-dollar government project.It's actually relatively simple to do, technically,because it can use existing fibers that are in the ground,existing wireless infrastructure.It's basically a matter of deciding to do it.
But people won't decide to do ituntil they recognize the need for it,and that's the problem that we have right now.So there's been plenty of people,plenty of us have been quietly arguingthat we should have this independent system for years,but it's very hard to get people focused on plan Bwhen plan A seems to be working so well.
So I think that, if people understandhow much we're starting to depend on the Internet,and how vulnerable it is,we could get focused onjust wanting this other system to exist,and I think if enough people say, "Yeah, I would like to use it,I'd like to have such a system," then it will get built.It's not that hard a problem.It could definitely be done by people in this room.
And so I think that this is actually,of all the problems you're going to hear about at the conference,this is probably one of the very easiest to fix.So I'm happy to get a chance to tell you about it.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Transcript:
So, this book that I have in my handis a directory of everybody who had an email addressin 1982. (Laughter)Actually, it's deceptively large.There's actually only about 20 people on each page,because we have the name, addressand telephone number of every single person.And, in fact, everybody's listed twice,because it's sorted once by name and once by email address.Obviously a very small community.There were only two other Dannys on the Internet then.I knew them both.We didn't all know each other,but we all kind of trusted each other,and that basic feeling of trustpermeated the whole network,and there was a real sense thatwe could depend on each other to do things.
So just to give you an idea of the level of trust in this community,let me tell you what it was liketo register a domain name in the early days.Now, it just so happened that I got to registerthe third domain name on the Internet.So I could have anything I wantedother than bbn.com and symbolics.com.So I picked think.com, but then I thought,you know, there's a lot of really interesting names out there.Maybe I should register a few extras just in case.And then I thought, "Nah, that wouldn't be very nice."
(Laughter)
That attitude of only taking what you needwas really what everybody had on the network in those days,and in fact, it wasn't just the people on the network,but it was actually kind of built into the protocolsof the Internet itself.So the basic idea of I.P., or Internet protocol,and the way that the -- the routing algorithm that used it,were fundamentally "from each according to their ability,to each according to their need."And so, if you had some extra bandwidth,you'd deliver a message for someone.If they had some extra bandwidth, they would deliver a message for you.You'd kind of depend on people to do that,and that was the building block.It was actually interesting that such a communist principlewas the basis of a system developed during the Cold Warby the Defense Department,but it obviously worked really well,and we all saw what happened with the Internet.It was incredibly successful.
In fact, it was so successful that there's no waythat these days you could make a book like this.My rough calculation is it would be about 25 miles thick.But, of course, you couldn't do it,because we don't know the names of all the peoplewith Internet or email addresses,and even if we did know their names,I'm pretty sure that they would not want their name,address and telephone number published to everyone.
So the fact is that there's a lot of bad guys on the Internet these days,and so we dealt with that by makingwalled communities,secure subnetworks, VPNs,little things that aren't really the Internetbut are made out of the same building blocks,but we're still basically building it out of thosesame building blocks with those same assumptions of trust.And that means that it's vulnerableto certain kinds of mistakes that can happen,or certain kinds of deliberate attacks,but even the mistakes can be bad.
So, for instance,in all of Asia recently,it was impossible to get YouTube for a little whilebecause Pakistan made some mistakesin how it was censoring YouTube in its internal network.They didn't intend to screw up Asia, but they didbecause of the way that the protocols work.Another example that may have affected many of you in this audience is,you may remember a couple of years ago,all the planes west of the Mississippi were groundedbecause a single routing card in Salt Lake Cityhad a bug in it.Now, you don't really thinkthat our airplane system depends on the Internet,and in some sense it doesn't.I'll come back to that later.But the fact is that people couldn't take offbecause something was going wrong on the Internet,and the router card was down.
And so, there are many of those things that start to happen.Now, there was an interesting thing that happened last April.All of a sudden,a very large percentage of the traffic on the whole Internet,including a lot of the traffic between U.S. military installations,started getting re-routed through China.So for a few hours, it all passed through China.Now, China Telecom says it was just an honest mistake,and it is actually possible that it was, the way things work,but certainly somebody could makea dishonest mistake of that sort if they wanted to,and it shows you how vulnerable the system is even to mistakes.Imagine how vulnerable the system is to deliberate attacks.
So if somebody really wanted to attack the United Statesor Western civilization these days,they're not going to do it with tanks.That will not succeed.What they'll probably do is somethingvery much like the attack that happenedon the Iranian nuclear facility.Nobody has claimed credit for that.There was basically a factory of industrial machines.It didn't think of itself as being on the Internet.It thought of itself as being disconnected from the Internet,but it was possible for somebody to smugglea USB drive in there, or something like that,and software got in there that causes the centrifuges,in that case, to actually destroy themselves.Now that same kind of software could destroy an oil refineryor a pharmaceutical factory or a semiconductor plant.And so there's a lot of -- I'm sure you've read a lot in papers,about worries about cyber attacksand defenses against those.
But the fact is, people are mostly focused ondefending the computers on the Internet,and there's been surprisingly little attentionto defending the Internet itself as a communications medium.And I think we probably do need to paysome more attention to that, because it's actually kind of fragile.So actually, in the early days,back when it was the ARPANET,there were actually times -- there was a particular time it failed completelybecause one single message processoractually got a bug in it.And the way the Internet works isthe routers are basically exchanging informationabout how they can get messages to places,and this one processor, because of a broken card,decided it could actually get a messageto some place in negative time.So, in other words, it claimed it could deliver a message before you sent it.So of course, the fastest way to get a message anywherewas to send it to this guy,who would send it back in time and get it there super early,so every message in the Internetstarted getting switched through this one node,and of course that clogged everything up.Everything started breaking.The interesting thing was, though,that the sysadmins were able to fix it,but they had to basically turn every single thing on the Internet off.Now, of course you couldn't do that today.I mean, everything off, it's likethe service call you get from the cable company,except for the whole world.
Now, in fact, they couldn't do it for a lot of reasons today.One of the reasons is a lot of their telephonesuse IP protocol and use things like Skype and so onthat go through the Internet right now,and so in fact we're becoming dependent on itfor more and more different things,like when you take off from LAX,you're really not thinking you're using the Internet.When you pump gas, you really don't think you're using the Internet.What's happening increasingly, though, is these systemsare beginning to use the Internet.Most of them aren't based on the Internet yet,but they're starting to use the Internet for service functions,for administrative functions,and so if you take something like the cell phone system,which is still relatively independent of the Internet for the most part,Internet pieces are beginning to sneak into itin terms of some of the control and administrative functions,and it's so tempting to use these same building blocksbecause they work so well, they're cheap,they're repeated, and so on.So all of our systems, more and more,are starting to use the same technologyand starting to depend on this technology.And so even a modern rocket ship these daysactually uses Internet protocol to talkfrom one end of the rocket ship to the other.That's crazy. It was never designed to do things like that.
So we've built this systemwhere we understand all the parts of it,but we're using it in a very, very different way than we expected to use it,and it's gotten a very, very different scalethan it was designed for.And in fact, nobody really exactly understandsall the things it's being used for right now.It's turning into one of these big emergent systemslike the financial system, where we've designed all the partsbut nobody really exactly understandshow it operates and all the little details of itand what kinds of emergent behaviors it can have.And so if you hear an expert talking about the Internetand saying it can do this, or it does do this, or it will do that,you should treat it with the same skepticismthat you might treat the comments of an economist about the economyor a weatherman about the weather, or something like that.They have an informed opinion,but it's changing so quickly that even the expertsdon't know exactly what's going on.So if you see one of these maps of the Internet,it's just somebody's guess.Nobody really knows what the Internet is right nowbecause it's different than it was an hour ago.It's constantly changing. It's constantly reconfiguring.
And the problem with it is,I think we are setting ourselves up for a kind of disasterlike the disaster we had in the financial system,where we take a system that's basically built on trust,was basically built for a smaller-scale system,and we've kind of expanded it way beyond the limitsof how it was meant to operate.And so right now, I think it's literally truethat we don't know what the consequencesof an effective denial-of-service attackon the Internet would be,and whatever it would be is going to be worse next year,and worse next year, and so on.
But so what we need is a plan B.There is no plan B right now.There's no clear backup system that we've very carefully keptto be independent of the Internet,made out of completely different sets of building blocks.So what we need is something that doesn't necessarilyhave to have the performance of the Internet,but the police department has to be ableto call up the fire department even without the Internet,or the hospitals have to order fuel oil.This doesn't need to be a multi-billion-dollar government project.It's actually relatively simple to do, technically,because it can use existing fibers that are in the ground,existing wireless infrastructure.It's basically a matter of deciding to do it.
But people won't decide to do ituntil they recognize the need for it,and that's the problem that we have right now.So there's been plenty of people,plenty of us have been quietly arguingthat we should have this independent system for years,but it's very hard to get people focused on plan Bwhen plan A seems to be working so well.
So I think that, if people understandhow much we're starting to depend on the Internet,and how vulnerable it is,we could get focused onjust wanting this other system to exist,and I think if enough people say, "Yeah, I would like to use it,I'd like to have such a system," then it will get built.It's not that hard a problem.It could definitely be done by people in this room.
And so I think that this is actually,of all the problems you're going to hear about at the conference,this is probably one of the very easiest to fix.So I'm happy to get a chance to tell you about it.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
TED Talks-Kees Moeliker: How a dead duck changed my life
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Work/GralINt-TED Talks-Dan Ariely: What makes us feel good about our work
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Transcript:
I want to talk a little bit today about labor and work.When we think about how people work,the naive intuition we have is that people are like rats in a maze --that all people care about is money,and the moment we give people money,we can direct them to work one way,we can direct them to work another way.This is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds of ways.And we really have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work and what the labor market looks like.
At the same time, if you think about it,there's all kinds of strange behaviors in the world around us.Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing.If you read books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains,do you think that those books are full of moments of joy and happiness?No, they are full of misery.In fact, it's all about frostbite and difficulty to walk and difficulty of breathing --cold, challenging circumstances.And if people were just trying to be happy,the moment they would get to the top,they would say, "This was a terrible mistake.I'll never do it again."(Laughter)
"Instead, let me sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos."But instead, people go down,and after they recover, they go up again.And if you think about mountain climbing as an example,it suggests all kinds of things.It suggests that we care about reaching the end, a peak.It suggests that we care about the fight, about the challenge.It suggests that there's all kinds of other things that motivate us to work or behave in all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about this after a student came to visit me.This was a student that was one of my students a few years earlier.And he came one day back to campus.And he told me the following story:He said that for more than two weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation.He was working in a big bank.This was in preparation for a merger and acquisition.And he was working very hard on this presentation --graphs, tables, information.He stayed late at night every day.And the day before it was due,he sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss,and his boss wrote him back and said,"Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled."And the guy was deeply depressed.Now at the moment when he was working,he was actually quite happy.Every night he was enjoying his work,he was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation.But knowing that nobody would ever watch that made him quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we experiment with this idea of the fruits of our labor.And to start with, we created a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, and we asked them to build with Legos.And for some people, we gave them Legos and we said,"Hey, would you like to build this Bionicle for three dollars?We'll pay you three dollars for it."And people said yes, and they built with these Legos.And when they finished, we took it, we put it under the table,and we said, "Would you like to build another one, this time for $2.70?"If they said yes, we gave them another one.And when they finished, we asked them,"Do you want to build another one?" for $2.40, $2.10, and so on,until at some point people said, "No more. It's not worth it for me."This was what we called the meaningful condition.People built one Bionicle after another.After they finished every one of them, we put them under the table.And we told them that at the end of the experiment,we will take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them,we will put them back in the boxes, and we will use it for the next participant.
There was another condition.This other condition was inspired by David, my student.And this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition.And if you remember the story about Sisyphus,Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push the same rock up a hill,and when he almost got to the end,the rock would roll over, and he would have to start again.And you can think about this as the essence of doing futile work.You can imagine that if he pushed the rock on different hills,at least he would have some sense of progress.Also, if you look at prison movies,sometimes the way that the guards torture the prisoners is to get them to dig a hole and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back up and then dig again.There's something about this cyclical versionof doing something over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating.So in the second condition of this experiment, that's exactly what we did.We asked people, "Would you like to build one Bionicle for three dollars?"And if they said yes, they built it.Then we asked them, "Do you want to build another one for $2.70?"And if they said yes, we gave them a new one,and as they were building it,we took apart the one that they just finished.And when they finished that,we said, "Would you like to build another one, this time for 30 cents less?"And if they said yes, we gave them the one that they built and we broke.So this was an endless cycle of them building and us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these two conditions?The first thing that happened was that people built many more Bionicles -- they built 11 versus seven --in the meaningful condition versus the Sisyphus condition.And by the way, we should point out that this was not a big meaning.People were not curing cancer or building bridges.People were building Bionicles for a few cents.And not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon.So there was not a real opportunity for big meaning.But even the small meaning made a difference.
Now we had another version of this experiment.In this other version of the experiment,we didn't put people in this situation,we just described to them the situation, much as I am describing to you now,and we asked them to predict what the result would be.What happened?People predicted the right direction but not the right magnitude.People who were just given the description of the experiment said that in the meaningful condition people would probably build one more Bionicle.So people understand that meaning is important,they just don't understand the magnitude of the importance,the extent to which it's important.
There was one other piece of data we looked at.If you think about it, there are some people who love Legos and some people who don't.And you would speculate that the people who love Legos will build more Legos, even for less money,because after all, they get more internal joy from it.And the people who love Legos less will build less Legos because the enjoyment that they derive from it is lower.And that's actually what we found in the meaningful condition.There was a very nice correlation between love of Lego and the amount of Legos people built.What happened in the Sisyphic condition?In that condition the correlation was zero.There was no relationship between the love of Lego and how much people built,which suggests to me that with this manipulation of breaking things in front of people's eyes,we basically crushed any joy that they could get out of this activity.We basically eliminated it.
Soon after I finished running this experiment,I went to talk to a big software company in Seattle.I can't tell you who they were, but they were a big company in Seattle.And this was a group within this software company that was put in a different building.And they asked them to innovate and create the next big product for this company.And the week before I showed up,the CEO of this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers,and canceled the project.And I stood there in front of 200 of the most depressed people I've ever talked to.And I described to them some of these Lego experiments,and they said they felt like they had just been through that experiment.And I asked them, I said,"How many of you now show up to work later than you used to?"And everybody raised their hand.I said, "How many of you now go home earlier than you used to?"And everybody raised their hand.I asked them, "How many of you now add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?"And they didn't really raise their hands,but they took me out to dinner and showed me what they could do with expense reports.And then I asked them, I said,"What could the CEO have done to make you not as depressed?"And they came up with all kinds of ideas.They said the CEO could have asked them to present to the whole company about their journey over the last two years and what they decided to do.He could have asked them to think about which aspect of their technology could fit with other parts of the organization.He could have asked them to build some prototypes, some next-generation prototypes,and seen how they would work.But the thing is that any one of those would require some effort and motivation.And I think the CEO basically did not understand the importance of meaning.If the CEO, just like our participants,thought the essence of meaning is unimportant,then he [wouldn't] care.And he would tell them, "At the moment I directed you in this way,and now that I am directing you in this way,everything will be okay."But if you understood how important meaning is,then you would figure out that it's actually important to spend some time, energy and effort in getting people to care more about what they're doing.
The next experiment was slightly different.We took a sheet of paper with random letters,and we asked people to find pairs of letters that were identical next to each other.That was the task.And people did the first sheet.And then we asked them if they wanted to do the next sheet for a little bit less money and the next sheet for a little bit less money, and so on and so forth.And we had three conditions.In the first condition, people wrote their name on the sheet,found all the pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter.The experimenter would look at it, scan it from top to bottom,say "uh huh" and put it on the pile next to them.In the second condition, people did not write their name on it.The experimenter looked at it,took the sheet of paper, did not look at it, did not scan it,and simply put it on the pile of pages.So you take a piece, you just put it on the side.And in the third condition,the experimenter got the sheet of paper and directly put it into a shredder.What happened in those three conditions?
In this plot I'm showing you at what pay rate people stopped.So low numbers mean that people worked harder. They worked for much longer.In the acknowledged condition, people worked all the way down to 15 cents.At 15 cents per page, they basically stopped these efforts.In the shredder condition, it was twice as much -- 30 cents per sheet.And this is basically the result we had before.You shred people's efforts, output,you get them not to be as happy with what they're doing.But I should point out, by the way,that in the shredder condition, people could have cheated.They could have done not so good work,because they realized that people were just shredding it.So maybe the first sheet you would do good work,but then you see nobody is really testing it,so you would do more and more and more.So in fact, in the shredder condition,people could have submitted more work and gotten more money and put less effort into it.But what about the ignored condition?Would the ignored condition be more like the acknowledged or more like the shredder,or somewhere in the middle?It turns out it was almost like the shredder.
Now there's good news and bad news here.The bad news is that ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes.Ignoring gets you a whole way out there.The good news is that by simply looking at something that somebody has done,scanning it and saying "uh huh,"that seems to be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people's motivations.So the good news is that adding motivation doesn't seem to be so difficult.The bad news is that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy,and if we don't think about it carefully, we might overdo it.So this is all in terms of negative motivation or eliminating negative motivation.
The next part I want to show you is something about the positive motivation.So there is a store in the U.S. called IKEA.And IKEA is a store with kind of okay furniture that takes a long time to assemble.(Laughter)
And I don't know about you, but every time I assemble one of those,it takes me much longer, it's much more effortful, it's much more confusing.I put things in the wrong way.I can't say enjoy those pieces.I can't say I enjoy the process.But when I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces of furniture more than I like other ones.
And there's an old story about cake mixes.So when they started cake mixes in the '40s,they would take this powder and they would put it in a box,and they would ask housewives to basically pour it in, stir some water in it,mix it, put it in the oven, and -- voila! -- you had cake.But it turns out they were very unpopular.People did not want them.And they thought about all kinds of reasons for that.Maybe the taste was not good.No, the taste was great.What they figured out was that there was not enough effort involved.It was so easy that nobody could serve cake to their guests and say, "Here is my cake."No, no, no, it was somebody else's cake.It was as if you bought it in the store.It didn't really feel like your own.So what did they do?They took the eggs and the milk out of the powder.(Laughter)
Now you had to break the eggs and add them.You had to measure the milk and add it, mixing it.Now it was your cake. Now everything was fine.
(Applause)
Now I think a little bit like the IKEA effect,by getting people to work harder,they actually got them to love what they're doing to a higher degree.
So how do we look at this question experimentally?We asked people to build some origami.We gave them instructions on how to create origami,and we gave them a sheet of paper.And these were all novices, and they built something that was really quite ugly --nothing like a frog or a crane.But then we told them, we said, "Look, this origami really belongs to us.You worked for us, but I'll tell you what, we'll sell it to you.How much do you want to pay for it?"And we measured how much they were willing to pay for it.And we had two types of people.We had the people who built it,and we had the people who did not build it and just looked at it as external observers.And what we found was that the builders thought that these were beautiful pieces of origami,and they were willing to pay for them five times more than the people who just evaluated them externally.Now you could say, if you were a builder,do you think that, "Oh, I love this origami, but I know that nobody else would love it?"Or do you think, "I love this origami, and everybody else will love it as well?"Which one of those two is correct?Turns out the builders not only loved the origami more,they thought that everybody would see the world in their view.They thought everybody else would love it more as well.
In the next version we tried to do the IKEA effect.We tried to make it more difficult.So for some people we gave the same task.For some people we made it harder by hiding the instructions.At the top of the sheet, we had little diagrams of how do you fold origami.For some people we just eliminated that.So now this was tougher. What happened?Well in an objective way, the origami now was uglier, it was more difficult.Now when we looked at the easy origami,we saw the same thing: Builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less.When you looked at the hard instructions,the effect was larger.Why? Because now the builders loved it even more.They put all this extra effort into it.And evaluators? They loved it even less.Because in reality it was even uglier than the first version.Of course, this tells you something about how we evaluate things.
Now think about kids.Imagine I asked you, "How much would you sell your kids for?"Your memories and associations and so on.Most people would say for a lot, a lot of money --on good days.(Laughter)But imagine this was slightly different.Imagine if you did not have your kids,and one day you went to the park and you met some kids,and they were just like your kids.And you played with them for a few hours.And when you were about to leave, the parents said,"Hey, by the way, just before you leave, if you're interested, they're for sale."(Laughter)How much would you pay for them now?Most people say not that much.And this is because our kids are so valuable,not just because of who they are,but because of us, because they are so connected to us and because of the time and connection.And by the way, if you think that IKEA instructions are not good,think about the instructions that come with kids.Those are really tough.(Laughter)By the way, these are my kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on.Which comes to tell you one more thing,which is, much like our builders,when they look at the creature of their creation,we don't see that other people don't see things our way.
Let me say one last comment.If you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx,Adam Smith had the very important notion of efficiency.He gave an example of a pin factory.He said pins have 12 different steps,and if one person does all 12 steps, production is very low.But if you get one person to do step oneand one person to do step two and step three and so on,production can increase tremendously.And indeed, this is a great example and the reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency.Karl Marx, on the other hand,said that the alienation of labor is incredibly important in how people think about the connection to what they are doing.And if you make all 12 steps, you care about the pin.But if you make one step every time, maybe you don't care as much.
And I think that in the Industrial Revolution,Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx,but the reality is that we've switched and now we're in the knowledge economy.And you can ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy?Is efficiency still more important than meaning?I think the answer is no.I think that as we move to situations in which people have to decide on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it,are they thinking about labor on the way to work and in the shower and so on,all of a sudden Marx has more things to say to us.So when we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing,but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of things to it --meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.And the good news is that if we added all of those components and thought about them,how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation,and how do we do it in our workplace and for the employees,I think we could get people to both be more productive and happier.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Transcript:
I want to talk a little bit today about labor and work.When we think about how people work,the naive intuition we have is that people are like rats in a maze --that all people care about is money,and the moment we give people money,we can direct them to work one way,we can direct them to work another way.This is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds of ways.And we really have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work and what the labor market looks like.
At the same time, if you think about it,there's all kinds of strange behaviors in the world around us.Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing.If you read books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains,do you think that those books are full of moments of joy and happiness?No, they are full of misery.In fact, it's all about frostbite and difficulty to walk and difficulty of breathing --cold, challenging circumstances.And if people were just trying to be happy,the moment they would get to the top,they would say, "This was a terrible mistake.I'll never do it again."(Laughter)
"Instead, let me sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos."But instead, people go down,and after they recover, they go up again.And if you think about mountain climbing as an example,it suggests all kinds of things.It suggests that we care about reaching the end, a peak.It suggests that we care about the fight, about the challenge.It suggests that there's all kinds of other things that motivate us to work or behave in all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about this after a student came to visit me.This was a student that was one of my students a few years earlier.And he came one day back to campus.And he told me the following story:He said that for more than two weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation.He was working in a big bank.This was in preparation for a merger and acquisition.And he was working very hard on this presentation --graphs, tables, information.He stayed late at night every day.And the day before it was due,he sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss,and his boss wrote him back and said,"Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled."And the guy was deeply depressed.Now at the moment when he was working,he was actually quite happy.Every night he was enjoying his work,he was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation.But knowing that nobody would ever watch that made him quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we experiment with this idea of the fruits of our labor.And to start with, we created a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, and we asked them to build with Legos.And for some people, we gave them Legos and we said,"Hey, would you like to build this Bionicle for three dollars?We'll pay you three dollars for it."And people said yes, and they built with these Legos.And when they finished, we took it, we put it under the table,and we said, "Would you like to build another one, this time for $2.70?"If they said yes, we gave them another one.And when they finished, we asked them,"Do you want to build another one?" for $2.40, $2.10, and so on,until at some point people said, "No more. It's not worth it for me."This was what we called the meaningful condition.People built one Bionicle after another.After they finished every one of them, we put them under the table.And we told them that at the end of the experiment,we will take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them,we will put them back in the boxes, and we will use it for the next participant.
There was another condition.This other condition was inspired by David, my student.And this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition.And if you remember the story about Sisyphus,Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push the same rock up a hill,and when he almost got to the end,the rock would roll over, and he would have to start again.And you can think about this as the essence of doing futile work.You can imagine that if he pushed the rock on different hills,at least he would have some sense of progress.Also, if you look at prison movies,sometimes the way that the guards torture the prisoners is to get them to dig a hole and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back up and then dig again.There's something about this cyclical versionof doing something over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating.So in the second condition of this experiment, that's exactly what we did.We asked people, "Would you like to build one Bionicle for three dollars?"And if they said yes, they built it.Then we asked them, "Do you want to build another one for $2.70?"And if they said yes, we gave them a new one,and as they were building it,we took apart the one that they just finished.And when they finished that,we said, "Would you like to build another one, this time for 30 cents less?"And if they said yes, we gave them the one that they built and we broke.So this was an endless cycle of them building and us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these two conditions?The first thing that happened was that people built many more Bionicles -- they built 11 versus seven --in the meaningful condition versus the Sisyphus condition.And by the way, we should point out that this was not a big meaning.People were not curing cancer or building bridges.People were building Bionicles for a few cents.And not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon.So there was not a real opportunity for big meaning.But even the small meaning made a difference.
Now we had another version of this experiment.In this other version of the experiment,we didn't put people in this situation,we just described to them the situation, much as I am describing to you now,and we asked them to predict what the result would be.What happened?People predicted the right direction but not the right magnitude.People who were just given the description of the experiment said that in the meaningful condition people would probably build one more Bionicle.So people understand that meaning is important,they just don't understand the magnitude of the importance,the extent to which it's important.
There was one other piece of data we looked at.If you think about it, there are some people who love Legos and some people who don't.And you would speculate that the people who love Legos will build more Legos, even for less money,because after all, they get more internal joy from it.And the people who love Legos less will build less Legos because the enjoyment that they derive from it is lower.And that's actually what we found in the meaningful condition.There was a very nice correlation between love of Lego and the amount of Legos people built.What happened in the Sisyphic condition?In that condition the correlation was zero.There was no relationship between the love of Lego and how much people built,which suggests to me that with this manipulation of breaking things in front of people's eyes,we basically crushed any joy that they could get out of this activity.We basically eliminated it.
Soon after I finished running this experiment,I went to talk to a big software company in Seattle.I can't tell you who they were, but they were a big company in Seattle.And this was a group within this software company that was put in a different building.And they asked them to innovate and create the next big product for this company.And the week before I showed up,the CEO of this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers,and canceled the project.And I stood there in front of 200 of the most depressed people I've ever talked to.And I described to them some of these Lego experiments,and they said they felt like they had just been through that experiment.And I asked them, I said,"How many of you now show up to work later than you used to?"And everybody raised their hand.I said, "How many of you now go home earlier than you used to?"And everybody raised their hand.I asked them, "How many of you now add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?"And they didn't really raise their hands,but they took me out to dinner and showed me what they could do with expense reports.And then I asked them, I said,"What could the CEO have done to make you not as depressed?"And they came up with all kinds of ideas.They said the CEO could have asked them to present to the whole company about their journey over the last two years and what they decided to do.He could have asked them to think about which aspect of their technology could fit with other parts of the organization.He could have asked them to build some prototypes, some next-generation prototypes,and seen how they would work.But the thing is that any one of those would require some effort and motivation.And I think the CEO basically did not understand the importance of meaning.If the CEO, just like our participants,thought the essence of meaning is unimportant,then he [wouldn't] care.And he would tell them, "At the moment I directed you in this way,and now that I am directing you in this way,everything will be okay."But if you understood how important meaning is,then you would figure out that it's actually important to spend some time, energy and effort in getting people to care more about what they're doing.
The next experiment was slightly different.We took a sheet of paper with random letters,and we asked people to find pairs of letters that were identical next to each other.That was the task.And people did the first sheet.And then we asked them if they wanted to do the next sheet for a little bit less money and the next sheet for a little bit less money, and so on and so forth.And we had three conditions.In the first condition, people wrote their name on the sheet,found all the pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter.The experimenter would look at it, scan it from top to bottom,say "uh huh" and put it on the pile next to them.In the second condition, people did not write their name on it.The experimenter looked at it,took the sheet of paper, did not look at it, did not scan it,and simply put it on the pile of pages.So you take a piece, you just put it on the side.And in the third condition,the experimenter got the sheet of paper and directly put it into a shredder.What happened in those three conditions?
In this plot I'm showing you at what pay rate people stopped.So low numbers mean that people worked harder. They worked for much longer.In the acknowledged condition, people worked all the way down to 15 cents.At 15 cents per page, they basically stopped these efforts.In the shredder condition, it was twice as much -- 30 cents per sheet.And this is basically the result we had before.You shred people's efforts, output,you get them not to be as happy with what they're doing.But I should point out, by the way,that in the shredder condition, people could have cheated.They could have done not so good work,because they realized that people were just shredding it.So maybe the first sheet you would do good work,but then you see nobody is really testing it,so you would do more and more and more.So in fact, in the shredder condition,people could have submitted more work and gotten more money and put less effort into it.But what about the ignored condition?Would the ignored condition be more like the acknowledged or more like the shredder,or somewhere in the middle?It turns out it was almost like the shredder.
Now there's good news and bad news here.The bad news is that ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes.Ignoring gets you a whole way out there.The good news is that by simply looking at something that somebody has done,scanning it and saying "uh huh,"that seems to be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people's motivations.So the good news is that adding motivation doesn't seem to be so difficult.The bad news is that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy,and if we don't think about it carefully, we might overdo it.So this is all in terms of negative motivation or eliminating negative motivation.
The next part I want to show you is something about the positive motivation.So there is a store in the U.S. called IKEA.And IKEA is a store with kind of okay furniture that takes a long time to assemble.(Laughter)
And I don't know about you, but every time I assemble one of those,it takes me much longer, it's much more effortful, it's much more confusing.I put things in the wrong way.I can't say enjoy those pieces.I can't say I enjoy the process.But when I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces of furniture more than I like other ones.
And there's an old story about cake mixes.So when they started cake mixes in the '40s,they would take this powder and they would put it in a box,and they would ask housewives to basically pour it in, stir some water in it,mix it, put it in the oven, and -- voila! -- you had cake.But it turns out they were very unpopular.People did not want them.And they thought about all kinds of reasons for that.Maybe the taste was not good.No, the taste was great.What they figured out was that there was not enough effort involved.It was so easy that nobody could serve cake to their guests and say, "Here is my cake."No, no, no, it was somebody else's cake.It was as if you bought it in the store.It didn't really feel like your own.So what did they do?They took the eggs and the milk out of the powder.(Laughter)
Now you had to break the eggs and add them.You had to measure the milk and add it, mixing it.Now it was your cake. Now everything was fine.
(Applause)
Now I think a little bit like the IKEA effect,by getting people to work harder,they actually got them to love what they're doing to a higher degree.
So how do we look at this question experimentally?We asked people to build some origami.We gave them instructions on how to create origami,and we gave them a sheet of paper.And these were all novices, and they built something that was really quite ugly --nothing like a frog or a crane.But then we told them, we said, "Look, this origami really belongs to us.You worked for us, but I'll tell you what, we'll sell it to you.How much do you want to pay for it?"And we measured how much they were willing to pay for it.And we had two types of people.We had the people who built it,and we had the people who did not build it and just looked at it as external observers.And what we found was that the builders thought that these were beautiful pieces of origami,and they were willing to pay for them five times more than the people who just evaluated them externally.Now you could say, if you were a builder,do you think that, "Oh, I love this origami, but I know that nobody else would love it?"Or do you think, "I love this origami, and everybody else will love it as well?"Which one of those two is correct?Turns out the builders not only loved the origami more,they thought that everybody would see the world in their view.They thought everybody else would love it more as well.
In the next version we tried to do the IKEA effect.We tried to make it more difficult.So for some people we gave the same task.For some people we made it harder by hiding the instructions.At the top of the sheet, we had little diagrams of how do you fold origami.For some people we just eliminated that.So now this was tougher. What happened?Well in an objective way, the origami now was uglier, it was more difficult.Now when we looked at the easy origami,we saw the same thing: Builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less.When you looked at the hard instructions,the effect was larger.Why? Because now the builders loved it even more.They put all this extra effort into it.And evaluators? They loved it even less.Because in reality it was even uglier than the first version.Of course, this tells you something about how we evaluate things.
Now think about kids.Imagine I asked you, "How much would you sell your kids for?"Your memories and associations and so on.Most people would say for a lot, a lot of money --on good days.(Laughter)But imagine this was slightly different.Imagine if you did not have your kids,and one day you went to the park and you met some kids,and they were just like your kids.And you played with them for a few hours.And when you were about to leave, the parents said,"Hey, by the way, just before you leave, if you're interested, they're for sale."(Laughter)How much would you pay for them now?Most people say not that much.And this is because our kids are so valuable,not just because of who they are,but because of us, because they are so connected to us and because of the time and connection.And by the way, if you think that IKEA instructions are not good,think about the instructions that come with kids.Those are really tough.(Laughter)By the way, these are my kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on.Which comes to tell you one more thing,which is, much like our builders,when they look at the creature of their creation,we don't see that other people don't see things our way.
Let me say one last comment.If you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx,Adam Smith had the very important notion of efficiency.He gave an example of a pin factory.He said pins have 12 different steps,and if one person does all 12 steps, production is very low.But if you get one person to do step oneand one person to do step two and step three and so on,production can increase tremendously.And indeed, this is a great example and the reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency.Karl Marx, on the other hand,said that the alienation of labor is incredibly important in how people think about the connection to what they are doing.And if you make all 12 steps, you care about the pin.But if you make one step every time, maybe you don't care as much.
And I think that in the Industrial Revolution,Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx,but the reality is that we've switched and now we're in the knowledge economy.And you can ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy?Is efficiency still more important than meaning?I think the answer is no.I think that as we move to situations in which people have to decide on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it,are they thinking about labor on the way to work and in the shower and so on,all of a sudden Marx has more things to say to us.So when we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing,but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of things to it --meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.And the good news is that if we added all of those components and thought about them,how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation,and how do we do it in our workplace and for the employees,I think we could get people to both be more productive and happier.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
GralInt-TED Talks-Liu Bolin: The Invisible Man
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Transcript:
Liu Bolin: By making myself invisible,I try to question the inter-canceling relationship between our civilization and its development.Interpreter: By making myself invisible, I try to explore and question the contradictory and often inter-canceling relationship between our civilization and its development.LB: This is my first work, created in November 2005.And this is Beijing International Art Camp where I worked before the government forcibly demolished it. I used this work to express my objection.I also want to use this work to let more people pay attention to the living condition of artists and the condition of their creative freedom.In the meantime, from the beginning, this series has a protesting, reflective and uncompromising spirit.When applying makeup, I borrow a sniper's method to better protect myself and to detect the enemy, as he did. (Laughter)After finishing this series of protests,I started questioning why my fate was like this,and I realized that it's not just me --all Chinese are as confused as I am.As you can see, these works are about family planning, election in accordance with the law and propaganda of the institution of the People's Congress.This work is called Xia Gang ("leaving post")."Xia Gang" is a Chinese euphemism for "laid off".It refers to those people who lost their jobs during China's transition from a planned economy to a market economy.From 1998 to 2000,21.37 million people lost their jobs in China.The six people in the photo are Xia Gang workers.I made them invisible in the deserted shop where they had lived and worked all their lives.On the wall behind them is the slogan of the Cultural Revolution:"The core force leading our cause forward is the Chinese Communist Party."For half a month I looked for these 6 people to participate in my work.We can only see six men in this picture, but in fact, those who are hidden here are all people who were laid off. They have just been made invisible.This piece is called The Studio.This spring,I happened to have an opportunity during my solo exhibition in Paristo shoot a work in the news studio of France 3 --I picked the news photos of the day.One is about the war in the Middle East,and another one is about a public demonstration in France.I found that any culture has its irreconcilable contradictions.This is a joint effort between me and French artist JR.Interpreter: This is a joint effort between me and French artist JR.(Applause)LB: I tried to disappear into JR's eye,but the problem is JR only uses models with big eyes.So I tried to make my eyes bigger with my fingers.But still they are not big enough for JR, unfortunately.Interpreter: So I tried to disappear into JR's eye,but the problem is JR uses only models with big eyes.So I tried to make my eyes bigger with this gesture.But it doesn't work, my eyes are still small.LB: This one is about 9/11 memories.This is an aircraft carrier moored alongside the Hudson River.Kenny Scharf's graffiti.(Laughter)This is Venice, Italy.Because global temperatures rise,the sea level rises, and it is said that Venice will disappear in the coming decades.This is the ancient city of Pompeii.Interpreter: This is the ancient city of Pompeii.LB: This is the Borghese Galleryin Rome.When I work on a new piece, I pay more attention to the expression of ideas.For instance, why would I make myself invisible?What will making myself invisible here cause people to think?This one is called Instant Noodles.Interpreter: This one is called Instant Noodles. (Laughter)LB: Since August 2012,harmful phosphors have been found in the instant noodle package cups from every famous brand sold in China's supermarkets.These phosphors can even cause cancer.To create this artwork,I bought a lot of packaged instant noodle cups and put them in my studio, making it look like a supermarket.And my task is to stand there, trying to be still,setting up the camera position and coordinating with my assistant and drawing the colors and shapes that are behind my body on the front of my body. If the background is simple,I usually have to stand for three to four hours.The background of this piece is more complex,so I need three to four days in advance for preparation.This is the suit I wore when I did the supermarket shoot.There is no Photoshop involved.Interpreter: This is the suit I [was] wearing when I did the supermarket shoot.There is no Photoshop involved. (Laughter)LB: These works are on China's cultural memories.And this one,this is about food safety in China.Unsafe food can harm people's health,and a deluge of magazines can confuse people's minds. (Laughter)The next pieces of work show how I made myself invisible in magazines of different languages,in different countries and at different times.I think that in art, an artist's attitude is the most important element.If an artwork is to touch someone,it must be the result of not only technique, but also the artist's thinking and struggle in life.And the repeated struggles in life create artwork,no matter in what form.(Music)That's all I want to say.Thank you. (Applause)
Transcript:
Liu Bolin: By making myself invisible,I try to question the inter-canceling relationship between our civilization and its development.Interpreter: By making myself invisible, I try to explore and question the contradictory and often inter-canceling relationship between our civilization and its development.LB: This is my first work, created in November 2005.And this is Beijing International Art Camp where I worked before the government forcibly demolished it. I used this work to express my objection.I also want to use this work to let more people pay attention to the living condition of artists and the condition of their creative freedom.In the meantime, from the beginning, this series has a protesting, reflective and uncompromising spirit.When applying makeup, I borrow a sniper's method to better protect myself and to detect the enemy, as he did. (Laughter)After finishing this series of protests,I started questioning why my fate was like this,and I realized that it's not just me --all Chinese are as confused as I am.As you can see, these works are about family planning, election in accordance with the law and propaganda of the institution of the People's Congress.This work is called Xia Gang ("leaving post")."Xia Gang" is a Chinese euphemism for "laid off".It refers to those people who lost their jobs during China's transition from a planned economy to a market economy.From 1998 to 2000,21.37 million people lost their jobs in China.The six people in the photo are Xia Gang workers.I made them invisible in the deserted shop where they had lived and worked all their lives.On the wall behind them is the slogan of the Cultural Revolution:"The core force leading our cause forward is the Chinese Communist Party."For half a month I looked for these 6 people to participate in my work.We can only see six men in this picture, but in fact, those who are hidden here are all people who were laid off. They have just been made invisible.This piece is called The Studio.This spring,I happened to have an opportunity during my solo exhibition in Paristo shoot a work in the news studio of France 3 --I picked the news photos of the day.One is about the war in the Middle East,and another one is about a public demonstration in France.I found that any culture has its irreconcilable contradictions.This is a joint effort between me and French artist JR.Interpreter: This is a joint effort between me and French artist JR.(Applause)LB: I tried to disappear into JR's eye,but the problem is JR only uses models with big eyes.So I tried to make my eyes bigger with my fingers.But still they are not big enough for JR, unfortunately.Interpreter: So I tried to disappear into JR's eye,but the problem is JR uses only models with big eyes.So I tried to make my eyes bigger with this gesture.But it doesn't work, my eyes are still small.LB: This one is about 9/11 memories.This is an aircraft carrier moored alongside the Hudson River.Kenny Scharf's graffiti.(Laughter)This is Venice, Italy.Because global temperatures rise,the sea level rises, and it is said that Venice will disappear in the coming decades.This is the ancient city of Pompeii.Interpreter: This is the ancient city of Pompeii.LB: This is the Borghese Galleryin Rome.When I work on a new piece, I pay more attention to the expression of ideas.For instance, why would I make myself invisible?What will making myself invisible here cause people to think?This one is called Instant Noodles.Interpreter: This one is called Instant Noodles. (Laughter)LB: Since August 2012,harmful phosphors have been found in the instant noodle package cups from every famous brand sold in China's supermarkets.These phosphors can even cause cancer.To create this artwork,I bought a lot of packaged instant noodle cups and put them in my studio, making it look like a supermarket.And my task is to stand there, trying to be still,setting up the camera position and coordinating with my assistant and drawing the colors and shapes that are behind my body on the front of my body. If the background is simple,I usually have to stand for three to four hours.The background of this piece is more complex,so I need three to four days in advance for preparation.This is the suit I wore when I did the supermarket shoot.There is no Photoshop involved.Interpreter: This is the suit I [was] wearing when I did the supermarket shoot.There is no Photoshop involved. (Laughter)LB: These works are on China's cultural memories.And this one,this is about food safety in China.Unsafe food can harm people's health,and a deluge of magazines can confuse people's minds. (Laughter)The next pieces of work show how I made myself invisible in magazines of different languages,in different countries and at different times.I think that in art, an artist's attitude is the most important element.If an artwork is to touch someone,it must be the result of not only technique, but also the artist's thinking and struggle in life.And the repeated struggles in life create artwork,no matter in what form.(Music)That's all I want to say.Thank you. (Applause)
GRalInt/EDUC-TED Talks-Pearl Arredondo: My story, from gangland daughter to star teacher
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Transcript:
So I grew up in East Los Angeles,not even realizing I was poor.My dad was a high-ranking gang member who ran the streets.Everyone knew who I was,so I thought I was a pretty big deal, and I was protected,and even though my dad spent most of my lifein and out of jail,I had an amazing mom who was just fiercely independent.She worked at the local high schoolas a secretary in the dean's office,so she got to see all the kids that got thrown out of class,for whatever reason, who were waiting to be disciplined.Man, her office was packed.
So, see, kids like us, we have a lot of things to deal withoutside of school,and sometimes we're just not ready to focus.But that doesn't mean that we can't.It just takes a little bit more.Like, I remember one day I found my dadconvulsing, foaming at the mouth,OD-ing on the bathroom floor.Really, do you think that doing my homework that nightwas at the top of my priority list?Not so much.
But I really needed a support network,a group of people who were going to help memake sure that I wasn't going to bea victim of my own circumstance,that they were going to push mebeyond what I even thought I could do.I needed teachers, in the classroom, every day,who were going to say, "You can move beyond that."And unfortunately, the local junior highwas not going to offer that.It was gang-infested, huge teacher turnover rate.
So my mom said, "You're going on a busan hour and a half away from where we live every day."So for the next two years, that's what I did.I took a school bus to the fancy side of town.And eventually, I ended up at a schoolwhere there was a mixture.There were some people who were really gang-affiliated,and then there were those of usreally trying to make it to high school.Well, trying to stay out of trouble was a little unavoidable.You had to survive.You just had to do things sometimes.So there were a lot of teachers who were like,"She's never going to make it.She has an issue with authority.She's not going to go anywhere."Some teachers completely wrote me off as a lost cause.
But then, they were very surprisedwhen I graduated from high school.I was accepted to Pepperdine University,and I came back to the same school that I attendedto be a special ed assistant.
And then I told them, "I want to be a teacher."
And boy, they were like, "What? Why?Why would you want to do that?"
So I began my teaching careerat the exact same middle school that I attended,and I really wanted to try to save more kidswho were just like me.And so every year, I share my background with my kids,because they need to know that everyone has a story,everyone has a struggle,and everyone needs help along the way.And I am going to be their help along the way.
So as a rookie teacher, I created opportunity.I had a kid one day come into my classhaving been stabbed the night before.
I was like, "You need to go to a hospital,the school nurse, something."
He's like, "No, Miss, I'm not going.I need to be in class because I need to graduate."So he knew that I was not going to let him be a victimof his circumstance,but we were going to push forward and keep moving on.And this idea of creating a safe haven for our kidsand getting to know exactly what they're going through,getting to know their families -- I wanted that,but I couldn't do it in a school with 1,600 kids,and teachers turning over year after year after year.How do you get to build those relationships?
So we created a new school.And we createdthe San Fernando Institute for Applied Media.And we made sure that we were still attachedto our school district for funding, for support.But with that, we were going to gain freedom:freedom to hire the teachersthat we knew were going to be effective;freedom to control the curriculumso that we're not doing lesson 1.2 on page five, no;and freedom to control a budget,to spend money where it matters,not how a district or a state says you have to do it.We wanted those freedoms.But now, shifting an entire paradigm,it hasn't been an easy journey, nor is it even complete.But we had to do it.Our community deserved a new way of doing things.
And as the very first pilot middle schoolin all of Los Angeles Unified School District,you better believe there was some opposition.And it was out of fear --fear of, well, what if they get it wrong?Yeah, what if we get it wrong?But what if we get it right?And we did.So even though teachers were against itbecause we employ one-year contracts --you can't teach, or you don't want to teach,you don't get to be at my school with my kids.
(Applause)
So in our third year, how did we do it?Well, we're making school worth coming to every day.We make our kids feel like they matter to us.We make our curriculum rigorous and relevant to them,and they use all the technology that they're used to.Laptops, computers, tablets -- you name it, they have it.Animation, software, moviemaking software, they have it all.And because we connect it to what they're doing —For example, they made public service announcementsfor the Cancer Society.These were played in the local trolley system.Teaching elements of persuasion,it doesn't get any more real than that.Our state test scores have gone upmore than 80 points since we've become our own school.
But it's taken all stakeholders, working together --teachers and principals on one-year contracts,working over and above and beyond their contract hourswithout compensation.And it takes a school board memberwho is going to lobby for you and say,"Know, the district is trying to impose this,but you have the freedom to do otherwise."And it takes an active parent centerwho is not only there, showing a presence every day,but who is part of our governance,making decisions for their kids, our kids.
Because why should our students have to goso far away from where they live?They deserve a quality school in their neighborhood,a school that they can be proud to say they attend,and a school that the community can be proud of as well,and they need teachers to fight for them every dayand empower them to move beyond their circumstances.Because it's time that kids like mestop being the exception, and we become the norm.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Transcript:
So I grew up in East Los Angeles,not even realizing I was poor.My dad was a high-ranking gang member who ran the streets.Everyone knew who I was,so I thought I was a pretty big deal, and I was protected,and even though my dad spent most of my lifein and out of jail,I had an amazing mom who was just fiercely independent.She worked at the local high schoolas a secretary in the dean's office,so she got to see all the kids that got thrown out of class,for whatever reason, who were waiting to be disciplined.Man, her office was packed.
So, see, kids like us, we have a lot of things to deal withoutside of school,and sometimes we're just not ready to focus.But that doesn't mean that we can't.It just takes a little bit more.Like, I remember one day I found my dadconvulsing, foaming at the mouth,OD-ing on the bathroom floor.Really, do you think that doing my homework that nightwas at the top of my priority list?Not so much.
But I really needed a support network,a group of people who were going to help memake sure that I wasn't going to bea victim of my own circumstance,that they were going to push mebeyond what I even thought I could do.I needed teachers, in the classroom, every day,who were going to say, "You can move beyond that."And unfortunately, the local junior highwas not going to offer that.It was gang-infested, huge teacher turnover rate.
So my mom said, "You're going on a busan hour and a half away from where we live every day."So for the next two years, that's what I did.I took a school bus to the fancy side of town.And eventually, I ended up at a schoolwhere there was a mixture.There were some people who were really gang-affiliated,and then there were those of usreally trying to make it to high school.Well, trying to stay out of trouble was a little unavoidable.You had to survive.You just had to do things sometimes.So there were a lot of teachers who were like,"She's never going to make it.She has an issue with authority.She's not going to go anywhere."Some teachers completely wrote me off as a lost cause.
But then, they were very surprisedwhen I graduated from high school.I was accepted to Pepperdine University,and I came back to the same school that I attendedto be a special ed assistant.
And then I told them, "I want to be a teacher."
And boy, they were like, "What? Why?Why would you want to do that?"
So I began my teaching careerat the exact same middle school that I attended,and I really wanted to try to save more kidswho were just like me.And so every year, I share my background with my kids,because they need to know that everyone has a story,everyone has a struggle,and everyone needs help along the way.And I am going to be their help along the way.
So as a rookie teacher, I created opportunity.I had a kid one day come into my classhaving been stabbed the night before.
I was like, "You need to go to a hospital,the school nurse, something."
He's like, "No, Miss, I'm not going.I need to be in class because I need to graduate."So he knew that I was not going to let him be a victimof his circumstance,but we were going to push forward and keep moving on.And this idea of creating a safe haven for our kidsand getting to know exactly what they're going through,getting to know their families -- I wanted that,but I couldn't do it in a school with 1,600 kids,and teachers turning over year after year after year.How do you get to build those relationships?
So we created a new school.And we createdthe San Fernando Institute for Applied Media.And we made sure that we were still attachedto our school district for funding, for support.But with that, we were going to gain freedom:freedom to hire the teachersthat we knew were going to be effective;freedom to control the curriculumso that we're not doing lesson 1.2 on page five, no;and freedom to control a budget,to spend money where it matters,not how a district or a state says you have to do it.We wanted those freedoms.But now, shifting an entire paradigm,it hasn't been an easy journey, nor is it even complete.But we had to do it.Our community deserved a new way of doing things.
And as the very first pilot middle schoolin all of Los Angeles Unified School District,you better believe there was some opposition.And it was out of fear --fear of, well, what if they get it wrong?Yeah, what if we get it wrong?But what if we get it right?And we did.So even though teachers were against itbecause we employ one-year contracts --you can't teach, or you don't want to teach,you don't get to be at my school with my kids.
(Applause)
So in our third year, how did we do it?Well, we're making school worth coming to every day.We make our kids feel like they matter to us.We make our curriculum rigorous and relevant to them,and they use all the technology that they're used to.Laptops, computers, tablets -- you name it, they have it.Animation, software, moviemaking software, they have it all.And because we connect it to what they're doing —For example, they made public service announcementsfor the Cancer Society.These were played in the local trolley system.Teaching elements of persuasion,it doesn't get any more real than that.Our state test scores have gone upmore than 80 points since we've become our own school.
But it's taken all stakeholders, working together --teachers and principals on one-year contracts,working over and above and beyond their contract hourswithout compensation.And it takes a school board memberwho is going to lobby for you and say,"Know, the district is trying to impose this,but you have the freedom to do otherwise."And it takes an active parent centerwho is not only there, showing a presence every day,but who is part of our governance,making decisions for their kids, our kids.
Because why should our students have to goso far away from where they live?They deserve a quality school in their neighborhood,a school that they can be proud to say they attend,and a school that the community can be proud of as well,and they need teachers to fight for them every dayand empower them to move beyond their circumstances.Because it's time that kids like mestop being the exception, and we become the norm.
Thank you.
(Applause)
GRAlINT-TED Talks-Jennifer Healey: If cars could talk, accidents might be avoidable
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Transcript:
Let's face it:Driving is dangerous.It's one of the things that we don't like to think about,but the fact that religious icons and good luck charmsshow up on dashboards around the worldbetrays the fact that we know this to be true.Car accidents are the leading cause of deathin people ages 16 to 19 in the United States --leading cause of death --and 75 percent of these accidents have nothing to dowith drugs or alcohol.
So what happens?No one can say for sure, but I remember my first accident.I was a young driver out on the highway,and the car in front of me, I saw the brake lights go on.I'm like, "Okay, all right, this guy is slowing down,I'll slow down too."I step on the brake.But no, this guy isn't slowing down.This guy is stopping, dead stop, dead stop on the highway.It was just going 65 -- to zero?I slammed on the brakes.I felt the ABS kick in, and the car is still going,and it's not going to stop, and I know it's not going to stop,and the air bag deploys, the car is totaled,and fortunately, no one was hurt.But I had no idea that car was stopping,and I think we can do a lot better than that.I think we can transform the driving experienceby letting our cars talk to each other.
I just want you to think a little bitabout what the experience of driving is like now.Get into your car. Close the door. You're in a glass bubble.You can't really directly sense the world around you.You're in this extended body.You're tasked with navigating it downpartially-seen roadways,in and amongst other metal giants, at super-human speeds.Okay? And all you have to guide you are your two eyes.Okay, so that's all you have,eyes that weren't really designed for this task,but then people ask you to do things like,you want to make a lane change,what's the first thing they ask you do?Take your eyes off the road. That's right.Stop looking where you're going, turn,check your blind spot,and drive down the road without looking where you're going.You and everyone else. This is the safe way to drive.Why do we do this? Because we have to,we have to make a choice, do I look here or do I look here?What's more important?And usually we do a fantastic jobpicking and choosing what we attend to on the road.But occasionally we miss something.Occasionally we sense something wrong or too late.In countless accidents, the driver says,"I didn't see it coming."And I believe that. I believe that.We can only watch so much.
But the technology exists now that can help us improve that.In the future, with cars exchanging data with each other,we will be able to see not just three cars aheadand three cars behind, to the right and left,all at the same time, bird's eye view,we will actually be able to see into those cars.We will be able to see the velocity of the car in front of us,to see how fast that guy's going or stopping.If that guy's going down to zero, I'll know.
And with computation and algorithms and predictive models,we will be able to see the future.You may think that's impossible.How can you predict the future? That's really hard.Actually, no. With cars, it's not impossible.Cars are three-dimensional objectsthat have a fixed position and velocity.They travel down roads.Often they travel on pre-published routes.It's really not that hard to make reasonable predictionsabout where a car's going to be in the near future.Even if, when you're in your carand some motorcyclist comes -- bshoom! --85 miles an hour down, lane-splitting --I know you've had this experience --that guy didn't "just come out of nowhere."That guy's been on the road probably for the last half hour.(Laughter)Right? I mean, somebody's seen him.Ten, 20, 30 miles back, someone's seen that guy,and as soon as one car sees that guyand puts him on the map, he's on the map --position, velocity,good estimate he'll continue going 85 miles an hour.You'll know, because your car will know, becausethat other car will have whispered something in his ear,like, "By the way, five minutes,motorcyclist, watch out."You can make reasonable predictions about how cars behave.I mean, they're Newtonian objects.That's very nice about them.
So how do we get there?We can start with something as simpleas sharing our position data between cars,just sharing GPS.If I have a GPS and a camera in my car,I have a pretty precise idea of where I amand how fast I'm going.With computer vision, I can estimate wherethe cars around me are, sort of, and where they're going.And same with the other cars.They can have a precise idea of where they are,and sort of a vague idea of where the other cars are.What happens if two cars share that data,if they talk to each other?I can tell you exactly what happens.Both models improve.Everybody wins.Professor Bob Wang and his teamhave done computer simulations of what happenswhen fuzzy estimates combine, even in light traffic,when cars just share GPS data,and we've moved this research out of the computer simulationand into robot test beds that have the actual sensorsthat are in cars now on these robots:stereo cameras, GPS,and the two-dimensional laser range findersthat are common in backup systems.We also attach a discrete short-range communication radio,and the robots talk to each other.When these robots come at each other,they track each other's position precisely,and they can avoid each other.
We're now adding more and more robots into the mix,and we encountered some problems.One of the problems, when you get too much chatter,it's hard to process all the packets, so you have to prioritize,and that's where the predictive model helps you.If your robot cars are all tracking the predicted trajectories,you don't pay as much attention to those packets.You prioritize the one guywho seems to be going a little off course.That guy could be a problem.And you can predict the new trajectory.So you don't only know that he's going off course, you know how.And you know which drivers you need to alert to get out of the way.
And we wanted to do -- how can we best alert everyone?How can these cars whisper, "You need to get out of the way?"Well, it depends on two things:one, the ability of the car,and second the ability of the driver.If one guy has a really great car,but they're on their phone or, you know, doing something,they're not probably in the best positionto react in an emergency.So we started a separate line of researchdoing driver state modeling.And now, using a series of three cameras,we can detect if a driver is looking forward,looking away, looking down, on the phone,or having a cup of coffee.We can predict the accidentand we can predict who, which cars,are in the best position to move out of the wayto calculate the safest route for everyone.Fundamentally, these technologies exist today.
I think the biggest problem that we faceis our own willingness to share our data.I think it's a very disconcerting notion,this idea that our cars will be watching us,talking about us to other cars,that we'll be going down the road in a sea of gossip.But I believe it can be done in a way that protects our privacy,just like right now, when I look at your car from the outside,I don't really know about you.If I look at your license plate number,I don't really know who you are.I believe our cars can talk about us behind our backs.
(Laughter)
And I think it's going to be a great thing.I want you to consider for a momentif you really don't want the distracted teenager behind youto know that you're braking,that you're coming to a dead stop.By sharing our data willingly,we can do what's best for everyone.
So let your car gossip about you.It's going to make the roads a lot safer.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Transcript:
Let's face it:Driving is dangerous.It's one of the things that we don't like to think about,but the fact that religious icons and good luck charmsshow up on dashboards around the worldbetrays the fact that we know this to be true.Car accidents are the leading cause of deathin people ages 16 to 19 in the United States --leading cause of death --and 75 percent of these accidents have nothing to dowith drugs or alcohol.
So what happens?No one can say for sure, but I remember my first accident.I was a young driver out on the highway,and the car in front of me, I saw the brake lights go on.I'm like, "Okay, all right, this guy is slowing down,I'll slow down too."I step on the brake.But no, this guy isn't slowing down.This guy is stopping, dead stop, dead stop on the highway.It was just going 65 -- to zero?I slammed on the brakes.I felt the ABS kick in, and the car is still going,and it's not going to stop, and I know it's not going to stop,and the air bag deploys, the car is totaled,and fortunately, no one was hurt.But I had no idea that car was stopping,and I think we can do a lot better than that.I think we can transform the driving experienceby letting our cars talk to each other.
I just want you to think a little bitabout what the experience of driving is like now.Get into your car. Close the door. You're in a glass bubble.You can't really directly sense the world around you.You're in this extended body.You're tasked with navigating it downpartially-seen roadways,in and amongst other metal giants, at super-human speeds.Okay? And all you have to guide you are your two eyes.Okay, so that's all you have,eyes that weren't really designed for this task,but then people ask you to do things like,you want to make a lane change,what's the first thing they ask you do?Take your eyes off the road. That's right.Stop looking where you're going, turn,check your blind spot,and drive down the road without looking where you're going.You and everyone else. This is the safe way to drive.Why do we do this? Because we have to,we have to make a choice, do I look here or do I look here?What's more important?And usually we do a fantastic jobpicking and choosing what we attend to on the road.But occasionally we miss something.Occasionally we sense something wrong or too late.In countless accidents, the driver says,"I didn't see it coming."And I believe that. I believe that.We can only watch so much.
But the technology exists now that can help us improve that.In the future, with cars exchanging data with each other,we will be able to see not just three cars aheadand three cars behind, to the right and left,all at the same time, bird's eye view,we will actually be able to see into those cars.We will be able to see the velocity of the car in front of us,to see how fast that guy's going or stopping.If that guy's going down to zero, I'll know.
And with computation and algorithms and predictive models,we will be able to see the future.You may think that's impossible.How can you predict the future? That's really hard.Actually, no. With cars, it's not impossible.Cars are three-dimensional objectsthat have a fixed position and velocity.They travel down roads.Often they travel on pre-published routes.It's really not that hard to make reasonable predictionsabout where a car's going to be in the near future.Even if, when you're in your carand some motorcyclist comes -- bshoom! --85 miles an hour down, lane-splitting --I know you've had this experience --that guy didn't "just come out of nowhere."That guy's been on the road probably for the last half hour.(Laughter)Right? I mean, somebody's seen him.Ten, 20, 30 miles back, someone's seen that guy,and as soon as one car sees that guyand puts him on the map, he's on the map --position, velocity,good estimate he'll continue going 85 miles an hour.You'll know, because your car will know, becausethat other car will have whispered something in his ear,like, "By the way, five minutes,motorcyclist, watch out."You can make reasonable predictions about how cars behave.I mean, they're Newtonian objects.That's very nice about them.
So how do we get there?We can start with something as simpleas sharing our position data between cars,just sharing GPS.If I have a GPS and a camera in my car,I have a pretty precise idea of where I amand how fast I'm going.With computer vision, I can estimate wherethe cars around me are, sort of, and where they're going.And same with the other cars.They can have a precise idea of where they are,and sort of a vague idea of where the other cars are.What happens if two cars share that data,if they talk to each other?I can tell you exactly what happens.Both models improve.Everybody wins.Professor Bob Wang and his teamhave done computer simulations of what happenswhen fuzzy estimates combine, even in light traffic,when cars just share GPS data,and we've moved this research out of the computer simulationand into robot test beds that have the actual sensorsthat are in cars now on these robots:stereo cameras, GPS,and the two-dimensional laser range findersthat are common in backup systems.We also attach a discrete short-range communication radio,and the robots talk to each other.When these robots come at each other,they track each other's position precisely,and they can avoid each other.
We're now adding more and more robots into the mix,and we encountered some problems.One of the problems, when you get too much chatter,it's hard to process all the packets, so you have to prioritize,and that's where the predictive model helps you.If your robot cars are all tracking the predicted trajectories,you don't pay as much attention to those packets.You prioritize the one guywho seems to be going a little off course.That guy could be a problem.And you can predict the new trajectory.So you don't only know that he's going off course, you know how.And you know which drivers you need to alert to get out of the way.
And we wanted to do -- how can we best alert everyone?How can these cars whisper, "You need to get out of the way?"Well, it depends on two things:one, the ability of the car,and second the ability of the driver.If one guy has a really great car,but they're on their phone or, you know, doing something,they're not probably in the best positionto react in an emergency.So we started a separate line of researchdoing driver state modeling.And now, using a series of three cameras,we can detect if a driver is looking forward,looking away, looking down, on the phone,or having a cup of coffee.We can predict the accidentand we can predict who, which cars,are in the best position to move out of the wayto calculate the safest route for everyone.Fundamentally, these technologies exist today.
I think the biggest problem that we faceis our own willingness to share our data.I think it's a very disconcerting notion,this idea that our cars will be watching us,talking about us to other cars,that we'll be going down the road in a sea of gossip.But I believe it can be done in a way that protects our privacy,just like right now, when I look at your car from the outside,I don't really know about you.If I look at your license plate number,I don't really know who you are.I believe our cars can talk about us behind our backs.
(Laughter)
And I think it's going to be a great thing.I want you to consider for a momentif you really don't want the distracted teenager behind youto know that you're braking,that you're coming to a dead stop.By sharing our data willingly,we can do what's best for everyone.
So let your car gossip about you.It's going to make the roads a lot safer.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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