Input Output: building a better future for all

[Music] halo's interview take one i just want you to sit like this so you can see the enterprise [Music] here on earth we have everything there is a romanian poet who nailed it very well and he says stella on on this planet we have everything good and bad we have geniuses and idiots we have stars and mud so home is everywhere and it is on spaceship earth to the extent to which i can envision a way which can take us faster from the mud to the stars if i would be to explain to someone in a bar what i'm doing is actually working for those marginalized giving power to those to the underdog bringing the power to the fringes through technology so making the world better through technology and and and more equitable through through that this is my mission they probably buy a drink [Music] you know they say romanians i'm romanian and they say the romanian is born a poet so that's how i felt that i was born a poet so i was writing poetry since i started to to write in romania on television we had carl sagan his show cosmos and then at the same time we had star trek so um maybe you can see yes i am a star trek fan you have here the enterprise on my dress i have the galaxy i i feel uh yeah this is this is who i am [Music] by looking at the world in a different way through uh what the star trek universe brought to me you know in a way maybe because i was born there but i was not aware i was a child i felt an alien in the real world and i felt much more at home in the star trek universe so my heart is yes is with science with the universe i identify myself a lot with those people from the developing world because i was one of them and i know their potential and i see that it is you know so big there's so much energy when i left romania i was like a spring with so much energy just ready to unleash it and and when they find an opportunity they will immediately first of all they will see it and they will grab it many people in the developed world don't bother to even see their opportunities i realize that in the developing world people are so used to be creative because they need to do everything with nothing and in the developed world they do nothing with everything far too many times [Music] once you get the gist of it you realize that mathematics is in fact a language you know as you get creative with words and writing a poem mathematics is a beautiful language which enables us to encapsulate the mysteries of the universe and actually explain them creativity is in nature everywhere and you know most mathematicians have observed that so for example joseph fourier i will quote him because he explains it's so beautiful there cannot be a language more universal and more simple more free from errors and obscurities more worthy to express the invariable relations of all natural things than mathematics it interprets all phenomena by the same language as if to attest the unity and simplicity of the plan of the universe and to make still more evident that unchangeable order which presides over all natural causes this is what math is is this eureka moment because you feel that you revealed a truth about the universe and it's a it's a feeling which i think it's it's more exhilarating than when you read a beautiful poem although they have a lot in common so if you really are involving all your creativity you can discover the beauty of mathematics [Music] we are the result of self-organization matter and cell found each other and put each other in the right place and this is what evolution created so in my work i take those kinds of models and i'm doing you know engineering self-organizing systems in order to create structures and and see how we can apply them to social structures it is not possible to use a linear approach you need a self-organizing of communities around their own problems in order to find local solutions my work is called engineering self-organizing application but broadly speaking it's all about information adaptive information infrastructures because we coordinate people in those communities through information infrastructures which now are very much on blockchain through incentives which get people to do the right thing at the right time at the right place in the early days of bitcoin it was clearly opening the world to a new way of doing things the first thing was this intermediation of the centralized powers and empowering the individual so now i can have full control of my money at least something yes i can have full control of but it could be more why not so i could have full control of my own identity how can we make and manage this transition from identity belonging to the government together with our lives and and so on and so forth to identity belonging to me and then what will happen will it be chaos or can we self-organize to find ways for this transition to be smooth but also is it possible to organize society when people have full control of their identity i believe in that i believe that that is the future and it all depends yes how we tweak the incentives and this is what we are working here at cardano [Music] the problem is we do not have a society and the world which is structured by merit and incentives done for contributions in meritocracies and and deploying such meritocracies can solve this problem we are working on finding the the right way for governance of such communities of such self-organizing communities we can step off the dysfunctional systems that are keeping us as cogs in unhappy lives in which we cannot fulfill ourselves yes we can step off and have our own identity and sovereignty and create a better world and a better society through this technology because now we exist we have identities of our own and we have our own money to ourselves which we can use and put together in projects that are helping us and not those at the top i think that is what drives me that what i have seen drives charles and this community of fans of which i think i am the greatest of of charles vision and work [Music] with blockchain now one can reach the individuals yeah having self-sovereign identities and so on and so forth and bring them together you can see that actually you can solve very difficult problems if you have a collective that is pursuing it and if it's the right collective you can solve a wicked problem very fast a wicked problem is a problem where you can see the symptoms but you cannot point to the cause because the causes are dynamic interdependent and unclear i've been working with the department of defense on wicked problems because this term came from the counter-terrorist fight where terrorists are networks which are decentralized and quickly self-organizing speaking of yes my expertise when the department of defense is a top-down very rigid structure which actually cannot have the agility of response when it comes to those kind of asymmetric attacks as we call them when you have a collapse and a power vacuum happens in this case of course there are two extremes so we can either get into total anarchy or we can get into total big brother effect in which top-down dominance dictatorship so how do we find that middle and between you know um to offer society something better than before if you look you know at the patterns in which the universe works from the solar system to the atom you have all these self-replicating structures the atom with its electrons around the nucleus it's like the solar system with the planets around the sun so there are all these fractals self-replicating patterns at many levels that kind of structure is called a hierarchy and these hierarchies are able to combine bottom up and top down structuring of things as well as societies that's how we self-organize ourselves so this is what we are working on right now at cardano i really very much love my students and that i appreciate their talent and potential and i see them the potential which maybe they don't see themselves sometimes i actually mentored gareth camp before he founded uber he was my student in calgary so i i took him under my wing i can call it this way so i i keep his thesis you know since then is a very dear thing to me because he was extremely talented and this is a phenomenon which is far too often in our education system talented kids are you know kind of being leveled leveled up and and this is not good for the progress of our world it's not good for meritocracy so he was extremely talented and he developed during his master's disease system called in order it was it was a search system through self-organization exactly that was the work in my emergent information systems lab in calgary so so he was a pioneer as well in self-organizing applications and information systems and so the thing is that it was bought by google and it became stumble upon and then that's how he moved to california and he met travis and they co-founded uber and now garrett bought the most expensive home in hollywood so you know who would have thought when he was in calgary well if it is one advice if i am to pick one it is encapsulated in this saying the real trick to life is not to live in the now but to live in the mystery of what's possible this is the only way in which you can create a better world this is the only way to move forward begin you know by putting yourself in the shoes of the other how what i'm doing let's say i'm a startup impacting the others and not impacting them immediately how is it going to impact them 10 years from now so look at facebook look at dupont you know what what disasters they created without knowing just by thinking they are helping so begin with the end in mind as much as possible and build that emerging future in the best possible way for the other i think it's called empathy that's pretty much it philosophy comes from two words philos and sophia philos means love and and sophia means wisdom so it is love of wisdom this is from greek and as such philosophy i think it's the most important of it because it helps us look at the world in a way in which you know we come from the ancient traditions so there's a lot of wisdom still on this planet which we forgot as conquerors were didn't do a very good job because now we are close to extinction so we have to come back to that ancient wisdom so philosophy this love of wisdom i think should be at the foundation of where we come from in our science in our work in everything we do this is actually what we are looking for human knowing so we can deploy technology as much as we want but if we do not understand fundamental things so such as why are we here we will not do the right thing we did not inherit the earth from our ancestors we borrowed it from our children then we change everything we change how we look at the world if we look at earth as a spaceship which is carrying us then immediately i'm sure all what we do will be with this social impact angle so it's all about where you come from and and then what you do in order to have a positive impact in the world so you know if i'm looking at 2025 and even before and and beyond is to see cardano really as a force for social good for social impact as they say yes blockchain and technology for social impact the question is what future do we want to create what is the possible future and this is why i'm here this is actually what i foster i foster those projects which are improving society and our world and i see cardano actually being that drive for the world it has all the ingredients from great science to great enthusiastic community to great minds and of course amazing technology [Music]

Channel: Input Output

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Id: m9kAkjWpdg4

Length: 17min 3sec (1023 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 27 2021