James Burke at CCF 2009 Sacramento

foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] good morning how y'all doing good well I'm very excited to be here for the conference on California's future I'm not sure how many of you are with us yesterday for Mr Mark heard's presentation from Hewlett-Packard but I thought he did a great job in sort of setting a message for our event on leadership and what leadership means for transitioning organizations and transitioning regions in our nation we have a very exciting morning this morning I you know one of the great things about being CEO is I get to say who's going to come speak at our event and we have a great lineup this morning and I'm excited to get started we have first a very special guest when we started this conference on California's future the idea was really we hope that we could act as a catalyst for discussions for taking a little bit more time at looking at where California and where the region of Sacramento is going in the future as you all know we've been doing the government technology conference for many years and we really felt if we don't if you can't harness technology for a smarter and sustainable future for our region for our state and ultimately the world you know what good is technology I mean we all you know it's wonderful to have another iPod but it's really about you know building a smarter and more sustainable future and our first Speaker today is someone that has a tremendous amount of passion a tremendous amount of energy and really building a much more rational sustainable future for the Sacramento area he's someone that you know very well he was a star of the National Basketball Association he's uh been the CEO of Saint Hope Academy and given such a tremendous amount to our region already and we are tremendously excited as our new mayor of Sacramento that he's here and he has a passion for you know changing this region so please join me in welcoming mayor Kevin Johnson [Music] foreign [Applause] are we awake yet well I'd like to welcome everyone to think to Sacramento and thanks for the kind remarks and introduction I've been mayor of the city of Sacramento for 164 days thank you let me say I am keeping track and Counting uh at this point I am living the dream I'm the mayor of the city I grew up in and there's no greater honor the most difficult thing I've done in my life up until this point was Guardian Michael well trying to guard Michael Jordan over as a mayor of a city when you have a an economy that's down when you have a 50 million dollar budget deficit it is extremely challenging but with that are tremendous opportunities so I'm loving what I do I wanted just to thank and welcome all of you to the conference um this conference has been in Sacramento for 22 years and we want to make sure it's we Host this conference for another 22 years and while you're here I did tell you about our down economy please spend your dollars in our community it will help me balance my budget and I can certainly use all the help I can get we want to be a city that builds technology into our infrastructure into our thinking into everything that we do we want to be Savvy when it comes to technology and my passion lies with children and you guys most of you know this this data points that 60 of the jobs in the future are going to require some sort of Technology skill and if you look 50 years out it's going to be 90 of the jobs and when you think about young people we have to prepare our Workforce for these jobs in the future and for classrooms and schools that have technology as a main component kids do 30 percent better on standardized tests so we've got to get rid of this digital divide we have to make technology mainstream in every Public School in our country it's going to be an extreme Challenge and as a mayor of the city of Sacramento I'm going to do my part to make that happen and as the capital of California there's no reason why we cannot achieve these goals it's going to take a commitment it's going to take folks like you coming up with innovative ideas holding the state accountable and make us As Cities do our part I have one confession then I'll let you enjoy your powerful speaker Mr Burke I have an iPhone here I don't even know how to turn it on so if somebody can assist me seriously I've been carrying this thing around for like a month and it was on when I got it and then the battery died so I was able to plug it in but I don't know how to turn the darn thing back on so I am committed to technology thank you very much God bless you [Music] thank you Mr Mayor I'm sure we can have somebody out there that can help you with that iPhone isn't it great to have Kevin Johnson as mayor of Sacramento let's give him another well it's my pleasure to introduce our next speaker the keynote speaker for this morning as I said earlier you know one of my the great Pleasures I have is is inviting folks to come and speak at our conference every year and and really I think one of the foremost speakers that I know of certainly one of the foremost Science and Technology journalists historians futurists is joining us this morning he you know came over the pond a couple days ago to be with us came over the Atlantic Ocean and we're very happy to have James Burke with us this morning those of you that have been with government technology conference for a while know that we worked a lot with James a number of years ago and it's very we're very excited to have him back after a long period away and it's it's a little bit like a homecoming for us having it with us today I want to tell you a little bit about James and then we'll uh bring him on up here for those of you that don't know he was uh actually born in Derry Northern Ireland he received his first degree from Oxford University and early on in the 60s was a science and technology journalist for the BBC in England and was one of the actually was the primary news anchor for the Apollo missions including the lunar Landing back in 1969 and if you go on YouTube actually you can see some of those BBC broadcasts from from those times and it was an interesting an interesting period in our history I was living in the Philippines actually at that time and getting Philip in television I much would have rather seen James Burke on BBC in those days most I think most Americans know of James's work through the very popular PBS series connections which was extremely popular around the world certainly in England and here in the United States He also did the very popular uh series The Day The Universe changed he's written numerous books um and done a number of very Innovative programs connecting science technology history of humankind and one of the things I think that is extremely unique about Mr Brook is his tremendous sense of humor and his deep compassion for Humanity I think that's something that you know only an Irishman could bring to the study of science technology and our future and we're blessed for that currently James spends about uh half his time in England and he says the rest of the time he suffers it out in the south of France so uh please join me in welcoming Jamesburg [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] like that crack about being Irish so I'll begin with something I wasn't going to say about the Irish may help you in your present difficulties where the English or the Americans may say that the situation is desperate but not hopeless we Irish say the situation is hopeless but not desperate now as you just heard in that fantastically overblown introduction thanks for all those lies Dennis and I go a long way back as you know therefore most of you know I've wasted my life writing books and teaching and producing television programs and articles and stuff like that about the history of Science and Technology and their social effect on the past to some extent they're likely affected on the future so this morning I'd like to make a few remarks about the future of the future now more than ever before as Yogi beara once so perspicaciously you know the future isn't what it used to be now since I'm a historian I'll spend much of my time this morning on the subject of the future looking at the past because there is nowhere else to look because the future hasn't happened yet and if you get my drift never will work that one out philosophy lovers and besides like all historians Navigators I believe you only know where you're going if you know where you've been accept the course for Columbus about whom more later so before I kick off in order that you get into proper perspective what I'd like to say on this new future issue let me remind you of something in the late great Mark Twain once said when he might have been talking about people like me and my professional colleagues he said in the real world the right thing never happened in the right place at the right time it is the task of journalists and historians to rectify this era so let me start my rectification by doing a bit of talking about predicting never an easy subject I mean the average medieval man in the street would have fallen off his bar stool laughing at the suggestion that great cities of the distant future are a Time in those cities every individual would have their own personal form of transportation to go where they chose when they chose and he would have laughed at this ludicrous idea believing of course that in such a situation those future cities were in no time at all come to a total standstill when every street was 50 feet deep in Horsham that medieval guy's problem of course was a problem we all suffer from of being stuck inside the Box Science and Technology are no exceptions if contemporary cosmological thought says the universe is made of omelettes then as an astronomer you design instruments to look for traces of Intergalactic egg and if you don't find any no problem instrument failure [Music] this whole matter of Paradigm constraint as it's sometimes called was once cogently addressed by the great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein you know the guy who ruined every administrator's life when he said if anything can be said at all it can be said clearly okay no more philosophy right he apparently went up to which time and remarked quite a bunch of morons we Europeans must have been way back 800 years ago in the days before Copernicus told us how the solar system worked to have looked up there and to have thought that what we were seeing up there was the Sun going around the earth when there's any idiot no the earth goes around the Sun and you don't need to be Einstein to understand it to which the great philosopher is said to have replied as philosophers often do yeah yeah he said I wonder what it would have looked like like up in the sky if the sun had been going around the earth the point being of course it would have looked exactly the same what he was saying was that in any circumstance you see what your data at the time tell you you're seeing so given that fact I'll travel with second guessing change today what it seemed to be primarily that today's high rates of innovation and you know this as well as I do are changing what you think you're seeing faster than most institutions and individuals can keep up with and the reaction of the average citizen I believe to the Avalanche of technological novelty that hits us every day always reminds me of the story of the depressive who goes to the beach to get himself a tan a couple of days out from the hospital and uh the next day his tradition back in the clinic gets a postcard from this holiday making depressive and the message on the Coast Guard will always reminding me very much of the average person's reaction to today's high rates of change because the message from the holiday depressive reads having a wonderful time why I think you can argue but I'm going to that the challenge posed by Innovation basically stems from the way knowledge has been regarded up to now in history and especially after Columbus did his thing not discovering America but for the fact that back in 1492 the definitive last word authority on all knowledge is a Greek called Aristotle whose definitive last word stuff includes of course a map of the world on which America does not feature so in 1492 what the hell is it doing here and verses to come throughout the century after Columbus flooding into Europe from this supposedly non-existent place and then other newly discovered places around the globe come new plants new animals minerals people stuff that nobody's ever seen before and they are not in Aristotle's lists either in the intellectual Panic it follows like Jesus Aristotle is wrong there goes the epistemological neighborhood a French military engineer the man I blame for everything ready Descartes comes up with a solution a technique that allows trustworthy data to be generated but faster and more complex than most people and institutions can handle Descartes technique locks down the way we innovate and how we think about Innovation from then on because Descartes works out how to generate the kind of data that will not let you down with rules for thinking that everybody conforms before Descartes we all live laid back very happily slightly Californian way really by the medieval maximum cradle UT in telegram Faith brings me to understanding after Descartes we reverse it in telugo ut Graydon another rough translation when I have examined your proposition for traps I'll get back to you the modern world s built on Descartes rules and what he says is apply methodical doubt to everything if the guy tells you something is definite think of it as probable if he says it's probable think of it as possible and if the word is it's possible forget it and Descartes adds B reductionist that is reduce your view of anything down to its simplest component parts that way you'll know how it works and if it breaks down how to fix it back then we Europeans take to Descartes with all the abandon of an alcoholic in a brewery result methodical doubt and reductionism kick off modern scientific method and turn the process of innovation into a noodler's paradise pretty soon the reductionist mission statement becomes the one that has driven Discovery and Innovation ever since expertise statement learn more and more about less and less like a pal of mine at Oxford who got his Doctorate in the 17th century English poet John Milton's use of the comma laughs he's now head of department at a major American University requires you make your specialist Niche so small there's only room in there for you and then explain yourself only in your own Gobbledy book this way you are incomprehensible and therefore Irreplaceable the reductionist approach constrains the matter of knowledge and more important who gets it and it has triggered accelerating Innovation and the explosion of data ever since Descartes because along the way as reductionism has taken hold the effect has been to fragment and multiply the discipliners into scientific and technological Niche studies Each of which over time become disciplined in their own right generating their own Niche studies now this Scientific Drilling down into the core of a discipline and the consequent emergence of stuff so specialized that nobody outside the discipline understands a word is also of course the reason why we are the healthiest wealthiest people in history because the reductionist process has along the way it's triggered spectacular advances a small number of people in each generation has achieved what the previous generation would have described as miraculous my laptop here could have landed Apollo on the moon and done my tax returns at the same time however there is another digging aspect to this highly productive Folk folk behavior and that is the way in which a lifetime of that kind of Silo thinking can make it difficult sometimes for an individual or an agency to predict how some new Gizmo or some new procedure they've developed may end up having unexpected Ripple effects when it gets out into the unsuspecting real world because thanks to the highly interactive nature of innovation and social change those Ripple effects often occur in areas apparently unrelated to the original development discovery take for example this medieval example on the screen now I know you know what that is that's the bio tapestry woven in 1077 to commemorate the Battle of Hastings 11 years earlier when the French beat us Anglo-Saxons and invaded England because the French fought on Horseback here they are and we the Anglo-Saxons fought on foot and lost now the French were on a horseback because if you look very carefully they were wearing these see that there the spirit a little Gizmo recently arrived from Afghanistan where it had been used as a single step up when you were loading a camel the French realized that if you put one of these steps on either side of a horse and put your feet in the steps then when you hit the enemy with your Lance you'd hit with a full weight of the horse and you wouldn't get pushed off the back this technique became known as shock troops and the French Cavalry creamed us Anglo-Saxon foot soldiers okay better military technology wins battles but then came the ripple effect when the French took over England immediately after this they also took over the language and that's why millions of us around the world today speak the way we do and not the way we would be speaking if the French had not used the Stirrup and had not won that battle and had not modified the language we would still be talking unadulterated Anglo-Saxon and sounding like here the unexpected worldwide ribbon effect of one little camel loading Gizmo it happens all the time that ripple effect typewriter took women out of the kitchen and boosted the divorce rate as that's just protected you from fire and was caught an agenda the first refrigerators kept food fresh and punched a hole in the ozone leader there and I'm sure you can think of dozens of examples forecasting Ripple effects like that can be very difficult because the future you're thinking about when you're doing your forecasting is almost never a simple linear extension of your local present the Box you're in at the time let me illustrate for my own work how non-linear that pathway can be how difficult to predict with a not very serious series of connections from the history of technology that ends in the modern world with a piece of hygiene technology with which I assure you each one of you in this audience is intimately connected so that means you should get to the end of the story before I do it was a dark and stormy night in 1707 off the Southwest coast of England and Admiral of The Fleets are cloudsly shovel changed my name anyway so cloudy shovel is bringing the Great British lead back to Britain he's not exactly sure where he is so he decides to turn left hits the southwestern end of France and the entire fleet sinks and everybody including shovel dies unsurprisingly this stimulates the British Parliament to offer quite a large prize for better navigation techniques so at Yorkshire clockmaker called Huntsman goes looking for a bit of Steel for chocolate Springs since those of you who sail a lot will know when you're going east to west the thing that matters much is what time to the second is it here where I am on my boat and therefore what time is it back at home because if I know that I know that some Heavenly Body comes up over the horizon X seconds hours whatever later than it would do back in Jolly Old England and that tells me at the equator to a second within four miles where I am which kind of matters since I've done at the time particularly matters to us Brits because we are using it to come over here to exploit you guys well the steel witch Huntsman invents for the clock spring is terrific and also as it turns out very good for cutting other metals so an iron maker called Wilkinson uses it to carve out very thin walled Cannon barrels which in spite of the fact that we're at war with both of you at the time he sells to you and the French nothing changes a little bit later on Napoleon uses these lightweight Cannon to invent mobile horse artillery and win all his battles except the last and he starts the Empire and in 1810 he comes up with a prize to encourage French inventors and a champagne Butler called Nicola appear steps forward brilliant idea boil up fresh food like peas in a champagne bottle and preserve the peas the food and kill all the germs that nobody knows exists anyway however it works Ten Years Later the English are doing this trick in cans because they have bought happier's patent in the Paris patent office that day they also come across and buy another patent which nobody seems to want for a new continuous process wall paper making technique which eventually allows these guys to return to London where new ceramic pipe technology is making it possible vast new areas of sewage infrastructure allows them to go back and use their continuous wallpaper producing technique to come up with the world's first toilet roll you see what I mean about Innovation being surprising anybody even even if navigational situations have forecast the toilet roll English jerk laughs What's Happening Here is I think of a fundamental connective process involved in the way Innovation happens and the main reason why so far it's been hard to predict and that is the way in which innovation most often happens when people or things or ideas come together in ways that reductionism tends to say they're not supposed to and when that occurs the rules of math change and one in one makes three the result of the process being more than the sum of the parts one example late 19th centuries German engineer called Wilhelm Maybach puts together the antiseptic spray used in Hospital operating theaters so surgeons know about them with kerosene used in oil lamps so lighting Engineers know about that puts those two together and produces what we call the carburetor for automobile people who know nothing about either antiseptics or elimination now that kind of surprise is happening all the time given the fact that institutions today every institution today is backward looking trying to handle High rates of modern Innovation with procedures established in the past with the technology of the past to solve the problems of the past most of the time the key problem back then was scarcity not enough of something to go around for all of history we have lived by and every aspect of Our Lives has been shaped by a culture of scarcity the modern Law Court with its hearings and appeals and pleadings and summings up and all that blah blah blah comes from about 3000 BC where nobody could read so everything had to be spoken and most law back then was about protecting scarce livestock and grain protecting property most of all today still is organizational command structure come straight from the Paleolithic caves when you had to have a top-down hunting hierarchy with one guy in charge to make sure that the very scarce lunch on the hoof going by didn't get away so you wouldn't starve today that hunt Commander is called the CEO five thousand years ago we could only afford to educate a few scribes because it took years to learn hieroglyphs so education literacy was scarce you had it you knew secret things like today is PhD 13 000 years ago Commerce began in the Middle East because somebody else had plenty of your scarcity and you had plenty of theirs so you exchanged the modern Market is designed around scarcity Exchange ten thousand years ago the purpose of government in the first cities was to make sure that scarce grain supplies were collected taxes protected the police and got redistributed as and when necessary Public Works the key thing was that doing that would ensure social continuity so the various subdivisions of those first governments were there primarily to preserve and maintain the status quo that is still true living with institutions his main job has always been to preserve social stability means you're usually leery of change I mean everything really should stand its place this is why for example in the Middle Ages there were rules for which class of people could wear which kind of clothing inheritance laws were originally set up to make it hard to break up a family property in the 15th century after the first printing presses came out there was an official sensor standing right next to every one of them after your war of independence the American Electoral College was established to save the country from direct vote mob rule now you can understand all that caution when you consider the way Innovation is so often highly disruptive I mean even while they were finishing the Erie Canal somebody was building a railroad along the back that would put it out of business super fast clipper ships coming here were made obsolete by the stagecoach Coast out of their First Coast to Coast voyages Henry Ford and the Wright brothers undercut the railroads almost as they were getting into their stride and today who uses a fax anymore by the time you understand how some Gizmo works now they are not making that model anymore so maybe the mayor shouldn't bother to learn how to use that little phone thanks to all this all this and in spite of the present temporary recessionary blender yeah we find ourselves enjoying life in a fast lane but given what we perceive from inside our backward-looking institutions what may be the deleterious effect of globalization wondering how long the party's going to last my response is that's the wrong thing to be worried about as I will explain and anyway all is not lost whatever the situation thanks to a killer app in plentiful Supply just waiting for release a killer app which every one of us has called the brain as I'm sure you know every healthy brain on the planet has about 100 billion neurons each one of which linked to up to 50 000 dendrites one of which potentially in contact with another quarter of a Million Dead rights so do the math it looks as if the potential number of ways in which a signal could go through that or is it greater than the number of atoms in the known universe you've got one between your ears so maybe there are other things it could do given an assist as well as go down the ever more narrow backward looking reductionist path maybe Einstein is right when he said we are all born with magnificent brains which formal education then slowly destroys I think he was referring to the linear mode of thought that we are so often taught in school because the most innovative solutions appear to come when the brain is kind of freed from the nuts and bolts not concentrating on a problem the last thing much Innovative thinking seems to be is straight line reductionist and neatly categorized thanks to the connective nature of the way the brain works I mean this explains I think why you are now solving the immensely complex problem of understanding me uh-uh no you're the one to the accent excuse me think about this speak listen event there is no time for you to hear every syllable of every word I say go into some kind of lexicon in your head scan it from top to bottom to find that syllable that noise match it together with the Sound Stream up to this moment in time and say yeah that makes sense and then come back out and listen for the next one I'm doing because if all you were scanning in there was a lexicon the size of the average high school graduate for category wait for this 12 500 Words there are 414 812 words in the language something's wrong however at 12 500 Words at one millisecond per active retrieval you'll be taking 12 and a half seconds to identify each word and you're not doing that are you good so what are you doing you're running simultaneous connective scenarios ahead of me using the syntax and the grammar and the content of what I've said so far to power up all the probable things I'll say next and then powering down the ones you got wrong as I come through and repeating the process again and again and again as long as I utter silence what that means of course is that you are giving this speech before I foreign and any other speech I might have given and anything anybody will say in this conference one wonders why you came by the way that ability to put connective scenarios together you'll be happy to know seems to be why brains like jokes the punch line brings together two concepts in a way that is new to you and since that's what the connective structure of the brain is for you laugh in pleasure at having your connections enriched let me try it on you everybody in this room has in this wonderful machine in here the concept bird and the concept fruit and like everything in the brain they are linked in some way your link may be bird tree fruit bird color fruit Bird Season fruit bird eat fruit who knows see if I can put a new Link in there and if I do you will laugh in pleasure at connectivity enhancement remember Bird fruit a drunk goes up to his house at a party says with that terrible seriousness of the truly zonked excuse me and the host thinks uh oh spins around and there's the drunk glossy eyed and swaying looking very worried so the host is very worried and the host says what's the problem what's the problem and the drunk says you must answer a question and who says I will I will what's the problem and the drunk says do lemons whistle I know says do lemons whistle no why do you ask and the drug staggers back smacks his forehead and check when it says oh my God in that case I have just squeezed your Canary into my gin and tonic [Laughter] okay it's all serious now so enjoy it but you see what I'm saying Innovative Innovative Behavior behaves in some ways just like a good joke but I make a serious point the brain is naturally configured built to work at the one point one plus one equals three mode designing to have Innovative thoughts because it's Prime job is security and survival to create for itself a densely interactive model of the real world out there and use that to match up against what happens to you so that it notices any anomalies out there that might represent a threat and then inform you and as Claude Shannon the Great American inventor of information Theory once said information causes change it doesn't it's not information for example there is no information in this phrase you are sitting in a seat there is information in this phrase the person next to you has a communicable disease oh sorry as I said the key thing about brains is everybody has fun and when you're talking about the present temporary problem of the globalization challenge to our institutions and ways of doing things can we survive in an Ever more interdependent world of Outsourcing recession competitions in the so-called threat economies and all that stuff it is worth remembering that in California alone at last count there were 33 million 893 799 brains the vast majority of them unused [Music] waiting for the opportunity to express themselves innovatively opportunity up to now which they have not had because up to now in a culture of scarcity there was never enough technology to let us organize ourselves in such a way as to let more than a few people history so-called leaders or Geniuses Michelangelo Lincoln bar Einstein thanks to which in one sense the entire Miracle of the modern high-tech world is a product of less than one percent of the brains available at any one time in history that is the tiny number of brands with the means to access the relevant materials in the small slow database equivalents more than 100 years ago that is to say paper and parchment libraries wanted to make that earlier point about the Brand's functional Readiness because when you get down to how we might manage to innovate fast enough and consistently enough to stay ahead of the game in this new Global jungle giving everybody's brains natural ability to think innovatively if we had the technology to help them into the game or out of The Silo we have a long way to go before we run out of cerebral talents and that's counting brains only one at a time never mind as they say when two or three are collaboratively gathered together however although there is today no shortage of such talent and even though the cost of Information Technology to let them Express that Talent is falling like a stone the presence problem seems to be persuading that talent to get involved in the first place a recent survey shows as I'm probably you probably know that something is happening to cause younger people to lose interest in science and technology to careers to an extent now causing some worry as early as the first years of secondary education so the call from a recent Innovation Summit in Washington for a new educational and training culture that would encourage Innovative thinking would seem to indicate that secondary education might be where to start and since it takes what 30 years from Secondary School to get a fully qualified experienced professional on the job maybe the time to start is now as you may have noticed I take a somewhat connective View history of knowledge so my contribution in this endeavor my small contribution is something connected I've been working on in my spare time for a couple of years more because I believe there are only three things that matter when the future of the future is changing and when you urgently need to respond to that fact and the three things are education education and education my plan would be that when this little connected thing launches online I hope the end of this year it's aimed it free of course and it will be aimed at making the data which users deal with more accessible and more relevant by giving context to the data showing users that whatever Descartes said No data exists in boring or apparently irrelevant isolation and maybe because of the way this little tool Works in a more General Social context showing how you might facilitate the involvement in any problem-solving exercise of people not necessarily from the same Silo as you or even from the same agents or even from any agency at all what used to be called unqualified people members for example of the community the people who serve last but not least just go we're working in the same relational way as the brain does this is how you might learn to think innovatively connectively from the beginning now what I want to show you is very much work in progress It's the back end it's uh Plumbing rather than facade so I'm sure you've seen a lot of that so you'll put up with it I'm sure anyway basically we're talking about 2 800 nodes a node is a person's an event an idea linked as we're all linked to each other people we work with the people who influence us people we influence the people we hate people we fight people we cheat blah blah uh internet uh about 30 000 ways and the name of the game is to take journeys of Discovery across this little manner so let me just show you a couple of things about my work so basically the database is as i said information biographies in this case about of Newton with the things that kids have to have virtual reality uh animation Graphics you know reality of this all that so basically you have a 1000 1000 word biography text or anything else in your own business that you think relevant is that particular node okay one of the ways of getting into it there are lots and lots of interfaces and I won't bother you with them all but here's one for young kids where you see the past the modern world is a series of concentric spheres uh the modern emerge on the outside one and then the 19th century 18 Series so you go back into the past as you go in and you can go in uh you know like this this is this is just an engineer's hacker it will look much better than this and you fly your little spacecraft of knowledge in a new land somewhere and you see where that person is linked and something about why they're like uh okay and then you go find out where it is you want to find out or you say show me all the you know one-legged Russian mathematician female mathematicians in the 14th centuries I showed you that too so basically when you get down to the core here's the core that's just this is just the plumbing I hope you can see it clearly enough at the center a guy called Priestley White Lines around link up to his prime Connections in his life and if you if you Mouse all these connections you will see that by the link is there and if you Mouse on the other end you'll see who that other person is what they did in blah blah blah so let me just show you a bit about why I'm doing it this way one of the things I want to try to try and look don't be scared about knowledge don't think you have that PhD to begin so around those gateways you saw around the outside of your content but two years are many many ordinary little examples I've seen the doorways in so let's pretend that you want a doorway that won't hurt anybody so you start with let's say chewing gum I mean like who who is frightened by and here comes chewing I mean you see a mysterious link to somebody called Santa Anna Santa Anna dictator of Mexico 19th century um Santa Ana and his Pals you see the white links are people who's connected with anyway one of them one of the people who went for sat down there was this fella called uh Robert Owen Owen was a Libertarian Mill owner in England uh utopian person mixed up with the the very early forms of socialism and he wanted to open a utopian commune in Mexico any Arts Center I don't know if he could do so and so down to get lost so oh and as it happens went to New Harmony Indiana and did it there uh oh and as you can see had all kinds of powers including this one here the man who really invented socialism pillar called God really matter of fact her godlin's daughter was Mary Shelley uh so Godwin being a sort of extreme libertarian almost socialist person had many piles I have to find out what I'm looking at and if I was including of course somebody who who inspired him tremendously from the very beginning of all chair inspired everybody who apart from the fact that he was always on the run from the French cops for saying revolutionary stuff spent a lot of time in the countryside being clever and in love with a beautiful Emily du chateaulay here she is and the thing about Emily Duchess is she was almost fully as equal because while he was doing his stuff she was writing the first ever book for women to explain what find in here what's Newton was doing so you see you go chewing up to Newton in five easy jumpers for example is to show how very multidisciplinary it is when you start taking these Journeys the old idea of living inside Sardis where all you want to look at is chemistry let's start with music and see where we go so here's Mozart come on now one of the things about Mozart is that he steals the idea of the manager figure from a French fifth rate sorry if there's any french person you get fifth grade French playwright Court uh Canada here he is now calendar is probably not known to you but he should be because apart from writing really bad plays he was a guy the king persuaded to organize the laundering of all the money guns ships ammunitions troops over here to help you guys fight us guys without yourself of course you would not have won thank you I suppose you're saying then she being in such a case is obviously a very big pile of one Thomas Jefferson who really likes it Thomas Jefferson you know more about it than I do very libertarian chat all kinds of ideas ahead of his time tried to get uh the capital punishment taken off the book so Virginia books and failed but I take one vote and he did so because he was tremendously impressed by the writing of a little guy in Milan or chiselia she's a bakery it was a little magistrate person about that high and he wrote the first book on phenology he asked if somebody commits murder and we hang them why do we commit murder in order to punish murder he said when we put people in jail what's the purpose I mean like in the 18th century this is amazing stuff so obviously it affected all kinds of people who believed in social reform one couple of which were some people called Garland Sports time a couple of uh Viennese loonies who invented phrenology head bump reading their idea being that all the organs of your character are in the brain and if they're very motivate they make little bulges in your skull so you can read a person and say aha this person has yeah he's very careful or he's very violent or she's very libitious or whatever and you can look at the kinds of things that Society wants changing and maybe you can change these people so it's social reform stuff so it appeals to all kinds of left Wingers like this guy Fallen who is a German radical who gets into trouble because he stabbed somebody in his hold up before a German judge called ETA Hoffman what Hoffman does when he's not judging oh damn is right the first of those creepy novels where the dead bodies come out of the graves at night and go back to the graves Before Dawn all of which of course goes over like gangbusters with somebody who copies him called Edgar Allan Poe and grandpa is one of the favorite people of the Russian composer rahmanuel for using some of his ideas rough man enough is at a party in Long Island one day and he meets this really really impressive other Russian Emigrant young guy and gives him 5000 bucks which allows Sikorsky to come up with the very first functioning helicopter so here we are Mozart to the helicopter in 10 very multi-disciplinary jobs all of them easy thank you hey with a web like this you can do it now one aim of this kind of approach is of course ultimately to service The Innovation requirements of the next decade by encouraging users to think like that to think 101 makes three to make people aware that something they know may be meaningfully related to something somebody else knows in some other Silo some other agency some other company community and then identifying these data relationships is easy when you use a network process like a knowledge web and the kind of software with which to access the data you need to build webs webs of your agency webs of the entire organization of the community of the global social political economic environment and so on and the key thing about such awareness is that in building you discover relationships that you didn't know about before on a wider level of course the assessment of talent in this web traveling exercise might no longer be just a matter of whether or not somebody gives a one-size one-size-fits-all correct answer in an exam but instead looking at why they took the kind of pathway they did across the web looking at which silos they went to to investigate things on their way to solving a problem or approaching a new procedure from a social perspective the reason this kind of connective technique seems to domain right now is because if information technology is doing anything it's creating a world of such increasing interdependence I mean look at Supply mortgages and Swine Flu that we need to think more cross-discipline than ever before if we are to be capable of handling very much higher much more interactive rates of Change by using knowledge mapping to become more aware of impending change ahead of time because we live now in a world of such network connectivity we are also discovering that the medications the old reductionist way of solving one problem at a time may not be enough or fast enough anymore what used to be separate parts of an organization are now having to find ways to access and correlate all their separate information silos when for instance they're bringing together more than one product or process so as to measure client's demand for individualized customization of product or when they're trying to predict perhaps The Wider outcome of particular piece of legislation and things are going to get even more complicated when customers themselves become involved in the process when organizations and companies provide online websites that are virtual warehouses of products and processes where the data can be correlated and assembled virtually by a consumer's electronic agent at any level of demand from teachers to politics to postgraduate degrees and these electronic agents whose job it would be to carry out these operations for every individual could themselves turn out to have a greater social impact than computers because serial related every single individual on the planet will have one that's perhaps what the mayor what are you trying to learn to work however as I said the major benefit offered to the community as well as the world of Specialists by knowledge webs might be to make prediction easier and after all that's the only purpose of knowing anything in my case so as to encourage high schoolers to think a bit more predictively I've put a couple of three very simple examples in there let me just show you one let's pretend that you're an 18th century England and you run x y z you say XYZ textiles okay so here you are in your company X1 and your main supplier is a man who makes looms as he would be because you weave and he's made it off right okay now you've got your guys out in the field and they're sending in data every day phoning it in while they count in 18th century England but sending it in either every you know hour a day month whatever you can seem to be relevant about who's doing what we film out there in the world of your market and so you look at alphabet and you say what's he up to today who's he talking to and as you expect most of the people he's talking to are in the business so like modern terrorist trackers you look for the anomaly in his behavior what is he doing talking to this guy who is not in textiles his name is Joe Black and he's a professor of chemistry at Glasgow University and you've got Glasgow and go to him and you see what he's up to and you look around and you see Well everybody's a chemist except who's this guy that he's talking to and he's talking to a fellow called what and then you discover that Joe Black is telling James Watt how to make the steam engine work so you know that the Industrial Revolution is coming if you could do that you would have been able to sort out your textile business in preparation for the Industrial Revolution and everything it was going to do to the marketplace the great 18th century French mathematicians piercing on the last one said you want me to predict everything fine tell me everything you think about the kind of techniques we're going to have soon and you see that with data mining and electronic agents and knowledge mapping we're going to be quite close to what the class is talking about maybe within our lifetime or certainly yours with the ability to know what's going on a science technology social interface and to predict outcomes across a range and at a level of detail orders of magnitude greater than ever before and what we might even be able to do with that will alter the process of innovation itself that's fine except of course in the short term after that we're still left with a question as everybody out there gets the technology and they're able to do what we can do how will we keep our markets how will we keep our jobs how will we keep our standard of living well I think most people agree that in the face of this short-term problem diminishing Western support for Pure research needs to be reversed because ultimately that's the kind of research that has in the past created entirely new markets in the 19th century people laughed at Scott's physicist James Dewer when he kept a bubble uh inflated for for three years uh the net result of jurors noodling with surface tension was cling the film and the entire packaging industry the double helix of DNA was revealed by somebody who was noodling with coal crystals electricity came out of studies of magnetism now the negative reaction to funding Blue Sky research like that is often expressed what use is it but as Benjamin Franklin once said when somebody said about the new hot air balloons a French were flying what use are they he said what use is a newborn baby put together pure research with knowledge maps and data mining and electronic agents and you have another intriguing possibility with regard to keeping up in the Innovation economy you might be able to go beyond innovation to some kind of innovation template now I suggest this because back in the 40s the Great American mathematicians weiner said change comes most of all from the unvisited no man's land between the disciplines between the silos knowledge webs make available and accessible the no man's land between different fields and encourage collaboration that's the job of knowledge webs so could it be that knowledge matter might facilitate interdisciplinary initiative that would be able to help people break out of the Alzheimer's more readily across the barriers between one area of expertise and another or one agency and another make redundant the old reductionist turf wars that prevented different agencies and disciplines from sharing what they knew it's no risky new exercise we've done it before but back then we did it by accident I mean in the early 20th century in the no man's land between physics and botany came molecular biology but those things happened in a relatively empty and slow word world today there's no time anymore for that kind of serendipitous approach the ripple effect of change and how so complex so interactive so Global we can no longer afford to leave Innovation entirely to Accidental circular disasters don't get me wrong I am not suggesting some kind of discredited centralized government Patrol over Innovation that approach only ever worked in the world of the past when we all lived under mushroom growing governance you know keep them in the dark and feed them a load of horse manure but with predictive access and virtual testing environments an agent-mediated direct social and political involvement by every member of a knowledge web educated Community we might be able to rethink those backward-looking institutions we might be able to go beyond leaving social decisions to the over simple ideologies of so-called leaders to go beyond the crude win or die strategy as a Marketplace above all to revise the old idea that Innovation only happens with specialist knowledge on a big scale with big bucks with the kind of information coming soon to a brain near you that may no longer be true anymore but we need to move fast if we are to prepare because as Yogi Berra said the future isn't what it used to be above all perhaps thanks to Nano and biotechnology which are going to take us through the most radical change in history when they move us from a culture of scarcity to a culture of abundance which they will likely do in your lifetimes a couple of simple examples I'm sure you know it all there is already a prototype spray on solar energy nanomaterial paint it or sprayed on your house your car you're closing any object and you just independently powered that object whatever it is even on a cloudy day use that sort of solar energy on floating platforms at Sea to take hydrogen from water and carbon from the CO2 in the air and run these two gases over a catalyst and you get all the oil you might ever want if that is you still need oil nanotechnology offers the possibility of a coin-sized battery lasting six months to run your electric car Nano turbines will still store excess wind energy for when it's needed engineered bacteria will clean up polluted soil and make any water drinkable Quantum supercomputers will work on Church the size of the motor dust intelligent consumer articles of all kinds will inventory and manage your personal living medication targeting accurate to a single cell could cure both diseases fertilizers built into the seed will help to feed the world all this and much more is likely within the next 40 years and that's no time I mean the plane you came here in was probably 40 years old but the Clincher in nanotechnology seems to be that four years ago for the first time a couple of Japanese guys built a molecule out of individual additives and there are already early designs for what is being called a personal manufactured a box in your house you download the right Atomic manipulating software and the manufacturers patterned by Atom from the bottom up with unprecedented Precision anything you want using for feedstock the atoms to be found in air and dirt it makes anything like bulbs clothing gold oil water food wetness solar power the Philosopher's Stone Star Trek and what that could do to the world that virtually free abundance of anything a person might want will make the social effect to the Industrial Revolution look like a child's play just a couple of questions at abundance will raise within your lifetime when any every individual has a machine because sooner or later the hackers will get you the software for nothing and the Machine of course will make copies of itself when every individual has a machine and every individual is virtually entirely self-sufficient what need for government or Commerce or nation states or globalization or any of this old world we live in without trade who needs businesses so what happens to work what do people do what happens to our social dynamics when thanks to targeted drugs the vast majority of the population are over 65 and heading healthily towards 100 and something if there is no need to go and grab raw materials is that the end of War but with no more International economic pressure to tell the line will tin pot dictators with Nano weapons go to war for some other reasons will we look back fondly to the time when all we had to worry about was a few terrorists when quantum computers built of DNA give every individual the entire store of human knowledge on a single knowledge web will it be necessary to know anything anymore and if not what will you do with your brain when nobody needs any longer to conform to rules imposed by scarcity what happens to what we used to call agreed standards and values if that's some of what's coming maybe we need to start rethinking about rethinking our institutions instead of using technology just to make them do what they've always done only cheaper and and think Beyond building better mouse traps like high-speed trains Clean Coal government Without Walls transparent Banks brilliant on Medicare and smart power grids the next generation of stealth bombers and so on take a look instead at the prime key problem to solve what will we do to replace the answer to lousy roads and no telecommunications in the 18th century what we call representative democracy 300 years ago you find two fools with a horse and time to spare and you send them out the dangerous lousy Bandit ridden road to the capital to speak for you those roads are so unpleasant they're not going to come back on next day and say have you changed your political Minds over a number of decades we come to know these horse owning adventurers as politicians and their return Journeys as elections today we have perfect roads and Telecom and the same numbering 18th century representative system which is no longer representative because we are no longer a bunch of illiterate out of touch peasants what we need among many other things is perhaps to start thinking about electronic agent mediated direct democracy and how to process the decisions made every second of every day by millions of empowered electronically enfranchised individuals each of whom is entirely resource autonomous the end of ideology now in all this and I'm finishing at least the one thing I think you can be sure of in terms of the future not being the same is that whatever physical shape it takes whatever infrastructure or lack of there is one thing material abundance I don't think will automatically provide and it'll be something which will give those individuals and communities who have it and Edge over those who don't and that's new ideas the natural byproduct of every one of those 35 million 893 799 Californian brains lying around the place waiting to be used if we can only get on very soon with finding means to bring them in from the cold tap the tremendous power the tremendous pool of potential Talent they represented says we can then make use of a future Universal knowledge where perhaps to create an entirely new form of social construct facilitated by the kind of person we have not seen since the 15th century the kind of guy who used to be known as Renaissance Man the guy who knew everything there was to know this time around the New Renaissance fascism who may perhaps be your next generation replacement won't know everything but they'll know how to know what's required when required how to take this synoptic view of the way everything connects from the overall level of General Trends down to the smallest zoomed in detail of predictable change predicting change and Advising the general population where and when to direct their decision-making attention in an exercise perhaps of the first true informed direct democracy in history what your founding fathers would have called mob room sounds like a bit of a free-for-all I would argue it will be the first Free Fall Ball in history an arrangement through which we might finally free ourselves from the top down reductionist way up to now we have so far handled the challenges of innovation by sticking hunkering down in our silos wearing our blinkers holding tight to standard operating procedures and generally employing the management technique known as the skyscraper approach you know that of the guy who falls off the top of his skyscraper as he's falling past the 75th floor somebody called out to ask him how he's doing and he Shrugged his shoulders and now falling past the 55th floor says so far so good [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] um I do if you can stand it I can stand it okay the usual rules obtain our Twisted question and to suit me and then duck it you know the technique if you teach ER I'm curious if you talked about a mob rule of representative democracy uh here in California we have the initiative process that has at least been blamed for time the government somewhat in knots um I'm wondering how the idea of opening that process up squares with the the California experience I'm biased of course I mean I think that the initiative process which is what you call it um I mean people say oh the terrible thing about the initial process is to change it you have to have another one well I want one every 186 000 times a second every day so I'm for it I mean you know there is I mean if if Ordinary People are too stupid or unintelligent or badly educated to become involved in the niceties of government why do they vote what is the point of the vote either it's vox populi Vox day or it's not Fox property box day and we've been playing with it I mean there's never been one the the the king John's deal with the Magna Carta was with the Barons it wasn't with the people um Elizabeth Parliament nobody went near the people they couldn't read write or shake a stick nobody went and talked to them I mean forgive me but in this country up until 200 years ago people and women couldn't vote what kind of democracy is that for God's sake so we haven't really had one to get rid of so it doesn't bother me when you know I mean when I hear people saying this is the end of democracy as we know it well Ray all right I mean not to graciously have a simple answer but I'm a grocery of a simple person okay so yes I'm wondering about the the talk of abundance and how how can that be when we have like over six billion people and it's hard enough to get fresh air and water or running out of water and all how can we expect abundance unless there's control of the human population control and Ministry of the human population yes and that's a very good point the population population issue is a very good point I'm not sure about the pollution or freshwater or food issue I mean there's a spare acre for everybody on the planet and that's using the old-fashioned garbage techniques we use today so I don't think we're in danger I mean we're obviously we're in danger of all kinds of other things like clearing the forest for money and that kind of stuff so um I think if we were to settle down and put as much effort behind getting nanotechnology to work as you put behind getting somebody to stand on the moon we would be in better position to argue about these issues I think much of what goes on is because we're still using 19th century technology basically you know burn it and Chuck the stuff away um the population issue is a more difficult issue again I'm biased I believe that if you educate women all around the planet the population will fall like a stone [Applause] [Music] right there James [Music] especially connections uh my question is regarding knowledge tracking and other efforts currently on internet like Wikipedia and other online resources what what mechanism should people consider as far as ensuring the information is to valid and that it's not misused or misrepresented gee I didn't hear that did you ask me what should we do to make sure that the image we receive is valid enough represented in some ways that come to us yes good question I mean it's a question which becomes more and more important as the load becomes bigger and bigger um well I don't think it's beyond the witch of man I had a meeting yesterday in San Francisco with some people who are building filters yeah right who put you know Chris custodet who've run to filter I understand that's what you'll say next however we've always had this problem from the beginning I mean all I can say is I believe the problem is and I believe we have better tools for filtering uh what we consider to be valuable information let's throw away words like truth that's too dangerous facts so-called facts that we feel to be important for us I think we have we're better placed than 100 years ago far better placed I mean I know the amount is gigantically bigger but a lot of it's repetitive a lot of it's the same stuff um it's just a detail that perhaps and then so I think I think in in general we're better off it's obviously a key issue but I don't think it's beyond the Wicked Man to develop a filtering system for that over the next 10 years so it doesn't bother me too much um no [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Eidolon Media

Views: 51,721

Keywords: James Burke, Connections (TV Program), The Day The Universe Changed (TV Program), Nanotechnology (Field Of Study), 3D Printer, K-Web, Knowledge Web, Science, Philosopher's Stone

Id: 7G8YHWbi-9U

Length: 69min 0sec (4140 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 02 2015