Six Easy Steps to Avert the Collapse of Civilization | David Eagleman

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good evening everybody please take your seats as some of you know we uh start these talks off with a long short a short film that exemplifies long-term thinking this long short is one of the shortest at 60 seconds and probably covers the longest time span at several million years formation of rocks prokaryotic cellular photosynthesis photosynthesis by blue-green algae eukaryotic cell organisms last banded ion formation rise of multicellular organisms cambrian's first nation of waxy-coated algae began and for the next four and a half billion years uh good evening stuart brand from the long now foundation as for tonight speaker how many here have read some for details of the afterlives how many have given copies to their friends that happens a lot and it's going to happen more david eagleman okay so this is you and you live in a fantastic terrific society and you would probably think that there's no way that anything's ever going to happen in the society you can't even imagine how something like this would would fold and collapse right it's very difficult to imagine but note that you would feel exactly the same way if this were you and you lived in the roman empire you would have thought exactly that same thing and if you lived in ancient greece it's impossible to imagine that your whole society would fold and collapse similarly if you were living in ancient egypt or in the mali empire in africa it would be very difficult to imagine these things but in fact an astounding number of civilizations have come before us and they have collapsed and centuries of progress and development and invention have caved in on themselves and what this is left is nothing but archaeological runes and scattered genetics so some of these civilizations here have declined slowly and others have suddenly toppled and scholars are still trying to figure out why and there's an entire academic discipline that's devoted towards figuring out why societies collapse now one of the main reasons to figure out why societies collapse is to figure out how to avoid that happening to us so when you sift through the evidence about the different societies and how they fell you find that there are things in common things in common that cause them to collapse and these include things like disease and natural disaster and political corruption and economic meltdown and resource depletion and so the civilizations that survive are those that have either been lucky or the ones that have developed new technologies to circumvent these challenges so what i'm going to argue tonight is that we are a very lucky civilization because we have sort of accidentally invented a technology that i think obviates many of the threats that have caused previous civilizations to collapse this is a connectivity map of the internet and what i'm going to do tonight is present a case that this rapid electronic network system provides six very important steps that we would want to avoid collapse so i think we're at a watershed moment in in our history um and this this may just be the thing that that saves our future so for each step i'm going to explain why it matters historically and what still remains for us to do to keep ourselves safe so step number one for avoiding the collapse of civilization is try not to cough on one another okay so so this is a virus and disease epidemics caused by microbes like this viruses and also bacteria these are the things that precipitated the fall of the roman empire and of the golden age of athens and of most of the empires of the native americans and it's sort of surprising that when you look at the largest threat to the survival of civilizations it's something so small and in fact it's so invisibly small that viruses and bacteria weren't understood until very recently in history and yet despite their their small size these have caused more death and destruction than all the famines and wars put together so take take as an example uh smallpox which is which was the most destructive disease in history it's killed hundreds of millions of people between ancient times and 1977 when it was finally eradicated the romans lost up to a third of their population in parts of their empire and about a millennium later what happened is the crusaders came back from pillaging distant lands and they brought an epidemic of smallpox to europe europeans then went over to the new world they brought smallpox to the new world and and in doing so devastated the incas and the mayans and other natives there and some of you may know in 1707 smallpox wiped out a third of iceland um so similarly the the black plague you're sending a pestis this wiped out a third of europe starting in 1347 and then it kept coming back to haunt europe century after century um yellow fever so badly decimated napoleon's armies in haiti that napoleon gave up the idea of having a western french empire just because of yellow fever because of his 22 000 crack soldiers that he'd sent to haiti 21 000 of them died and and so he gave up and that's why napoleon sold the louisiana territory to the united states because he finally he said i just don't want to be running this show can confronting diseases that i no longer understand so he um he sold it for roughly five cents an acre which in a bloodless manner doubled the size of the united states okay and so it goes on and on there are there are these viruses and bacteria that have really navigated the course of history in major ways and what i'm going to suggest is that the internet is really our key to survival here um and this is for three reasons first what the internet gives us is the ability to work remotely and when you can work from home telepresently what this allows you to do is is inhibit viral transmission by reducing face-to-face contact the human to human contact so in in the face so here's the idea the next time that there's a really killer virus coming our way if businesses are prepared in advance what they can do is really leverage telepresence to keep supply chains running with the maximum number of employees working from home now this isn't going to keep everybody off the street but it's going to vastly reduce the density and it turns out that when it comes to epidemics that's all you need to do you just need to get things below a tipping point so the reason viruses have this sort of tipping point is because viruses have a limited lifetime and a certain probability of infecting somebody and so if you have very low host density then the virus dies before it can get to a new host but as soon as you get enough people together then it can find new hosts and you go from some sort of equilibrium state into an epidemic it really blows up and in fact you can see this sort of thing happening every christmas holiday season with people shopping in the malls because they all bunch together and then you cross over this population tipping point and then everyone gets flu and cold okay so now here's the problem in the past societies have reacted to epidemics by bunching together so for example in medieval europe when the black plague hit and other plagues like it um warring religious factions who spent all their time killing each other would would show solidarity in the face of all this death by marching together in the streets together to show that the catholics and the protestants could be friends in the face of the plague well that was a real misstep in terms of density um and it turns out that the native americans in a show of goodwill they would gather in the tents of people who were infected with smallpox everyone would gather together and again unfortunately that was a gesture that was sort of ill-fated and so this is exactly the fear that all major medical centers have the next time we have a major a new strain hitting us whether it's avian flu or swine flu or something the big fear that medical centers have is that everybody with a cough is going to come flocking into the med center to get checked out and this is really dangerous and so i think this is the second great opportunity afforded to us by the net besides telepresence is is telemedicine whereby with increasingly sophisticated technologies we don't have to have base patients coming in and bunching up together but instead we can have diagnosis from a distance okay so the telepresence and the telemedicine are very useful because they keep the population density below a tipping point i think there's a third benefit that we get from the internet which is we can optimally direct resources when there is an outbreak so uh you may know that the center for disease control tracks the flu by tracking what happens at the local hospitals now the thing is it takes two weeks for the cdc to put together their report it lags the actual flu outbreak by two weeks so google came up with a better idea and what they do is they track where people are searching for terms related to the flu so if they're searching for information on symptoms or medicines or something it turns out that over the course of the nation that serves as an excellent proxy for where there's a flu outbreak so while the cdc's report lags by two weeks google's lags by only a day so this gives us a very rapid way to know dynamically exactly where the flu is and where the outbreaks are are happening okay so um unlike previous generations that were brought down by disease especially because they didn't know how to react in terms of density and sparseness we can now do better because of the internet if we're well prepared when the next epidemic arrives we can fluidly shift into a self-quarantined telepresent society in which the microbes fail by dint of host sparseness and so there's a lot of talk of course about the ills of social isolation and everybody's sitting on facebook but whatever those ills are it bodes a lot worse for the microbes than it does for us so although we're well into the step there's there's work to be done if we want to save our civilization businesses really need to work on developing their disaster plans um and and their work from home epidemic plans uh i wrote a paper on this in the journal nature about five years ago and i've been watching as businesses have been doing this i've been monitoring sort of how this is going some businesses are doing it most aren't still it's really important to try to get businesses to do this and it's extremely easy to test right to work out the kinks by having everybody work from home and then the second thing as a society we really need to keep developing telemedicine and similar ideas like that so that's step one where the internet already gets us a long way down that road of not coughing on each other the second way that i propose the internet is going to uh avert the collapse of civilization is is with this you don't want to lose things so in um in a battle between julius caesar and ptolemy viii julius caesar got backed into a sort of funny uh military move and what he ended up doing was burning his own ships at the dock now military historians talk about whether it was a good idea or not but the thing was he accidentally lit the docks on fire and that burned down the library at alexandria now the reason that was such a tragedy is because the library at alexandria had for a very long time been collecting the manuscripts of every single person who passed through the port so if you were going through alexandria you had to give up your manuscripts for careful copying by the scribes and then they would give it back to you so what the library housed was all of the knowledge at that time this was the repository the problem was it was the single repository and when it got torched um it's it's now just a memory and the thing is that all the knowledge collected over that period of time was lost entirely in a single fire and it turns out that the learning and discovery of the mayans met the same fate in the bonfires of the spaniards so of the thousands of books that the mayans had written that cataloged all of their learning and discovery and so on we only have four of them only four survive into modern times now can you imagine somebody trying to understand our civilization by reading let's say the bible and frankenstein and harry potter and twilight that's the situation we're in where we're trying to understand the mayans all of their knowledge is gone it was burned um the minoan civilization was a flourishing civilization between 2700 bce and 1450 bce it was on the island of crete they had all kinds of trade and discovery here's one of the their frescoes um this is known as the face uh the face dose disc from the minoans and does anybody know what those symbols mean nobody does join the club yeah exactly because it was completely lost and in fact in fact they weren't even called the minoans that's not what they called themselves that's a name that a british archaeologist gave to them because we don't know what they call themselves so everything they had anew was lost to us okay so knowledge is hard won by societies and civilizations but it's very easily lost and it proves impossible to estimate the number of museums and archives and libraries and houses of learning that fell under the swords of invaders or under the wrecking ball of natural disasters so the problem is history is characterized by this sort of amnesia where you have civilizations that that flourish if you can imagine little fires on the surface of the globe there where there's a fire that happens for a while and then it gets doused out for whatever reason and everything they learned is now forgotten so so um the thing is that this impacts survival this isn't just some sort of historical interest thing uh so take as an example inoculation many people know that in europe inoculation was introduced by lady montague and the idea is that you introduce a little bit of the virus to somebody and that confers immunity to a bigger dose of the virus for example with smallpox this is where it was used well inoculation isn't just a good idea it's a great idea because it really reduces the the death rate but what's not so widely known outside of western circles is that uh lady montague didn't didn't invent this in fact the the ottoman empire where she first saw it they didn't even invent it turns out that this inoculation had been in practice in china and india and africa for centuries unbeknownst to the europeans so for example in china inoculation was underway since the 10th century and by the time of the ming dynasty in the 1500s it was widely practiced everybody was doing it but the europeans had to sort of re-stumble on this on their own much later does this matter well you bet it matters because millions of people died in the meantime while this was going on while some people had the knowledge of inoculation and others didn't now edward jenner in 1796 improved on inoculation instead of injecting somebody with smallpox you use cow pox instead which makes them less sick but it also confers the immunity well that was a great idea that jenner had except we now know that six people in germany and england had the same idea and they had shown the success of that idea but nobody knew what happened is the little fires got lit but they didn't spread so everybody had to independently rediscover this now as i mentioned it really matters if you're if if these things have to get rediscovered or if they can catch on and spread because at the same time that all this was going on with lady montague and then later with dr jenner native americans were dying of smallpox the knowledge existed in other places in the planet but they didn't exist as these whole empires were falling here okay so what happens is if you can imagine these little these little fires going on i should mention two more examples actually this is stunning but did you guys know that basic plumbing ceased to exist for a millennium after the collapse of the roman empire people forgot how to do plumbing they had to rediscover that a thousand years later and uh as one more example in the year 1900 three different botanists independently discovered the rules of genetic inheritance which gregor mendel had quietly published 40 years earlier it was independently rediscovered three times in the same year so so if you if you can imagine these little fires you've got inoculation that goes and then goes away and you've got basic plumbing and you've got the rules of genetic inheritance and what you really want is for an idea to get discovered once and then to really catch fire that's what you want to happen and that's what the internet is good for because it's distributed and when you distribute ideas it can latch on everywhere and get spread around and in fact this was one of the original motivations for the internet was to have distributed storage and the big idea is uh when you distribute things bits of knowledge and transform ideas can latch on immediately the news spreads everywhere quickly and redundantly and it makes it very difficult to erase so fires like the library of alexandria and and floods and so on have a very difficult time erasing such a knowledge set so for example in my field as a neuroscientist i every day use pubmed which is the central collection of all of the biomedical research so anything that's discovered anywhere on the earth is going to end up in here very quickly and i can find it with a few clicks right there's a company called jstor which some of you may use they they scan these old archives of all these old journals from the 16 and 1700s journals that nobody goes down to the library and actually dusts off anymore now it's fully text searchable you can find things that were once lost to history they've been exhumed now and they're all right there at your fingertips and of course with something like google books you have the world's writing is all there and it's it's clickable and discoverable and readable and so the idea is that if the mayans had had pubmed they could have just looked up inoculation right and and and unlike the library of alexandria you can't torch google books like that's really here to stay so that's the that's the idea now as an as as as an example of the modern appreciation of storing knowledge in a redundant indestructible manner um everyone recognizes michelangelo's david well this is not actually michelangelo's david this is michelangelo's david and it's being scanned with a 3d laser scanner uh from a group that uh it's grouped from stanford and university of washington and what they did is they scanned the entire statue what you're seeing on the right is a reproduction of it made of a billion polygons at a quarter of a millimeter resolution this is the largest scanned object in the world right now and the idea is that if the museum were to be suddenly destroyed in an earthquake this statue would not be lost it's totally reproducible now this is what's known as the digital michelangelo project and you can download this on a cd on your jump drive it's stored all over the world and what this means is unlike by the way this just got completed a few months ago so previous to that if uh if this hadn't been done and there were an earthquake it would just be utterly lost there would be no more statue there now this is just a piece of art of course but i'm using this as an example of the way that we can create things now and make them immune against destruction where this becomes really important is with the intellectual discoveries that might be happening anywhere on the earth and that might become really important for our future we won't be losing those ideas anymore and we can draw on them when we need them and we're not wasting time with parallel rediscovery as has happened so many times in history so this allows us to optimally solve problems including problems that we don't even know are problems yet okay so step two is distribute don't reinvent now the fast spread of these ideas obviously injects noise into the database but it also very importantly prevents the loss of discovery and so in this way societies can sort of optimally ratchet up and and we can use the latest bricks of knowledge in our fortification against against existential threats um so i think we're doing a good job here there's a lot more that we're gonna develop here for example i don't see aside from doing digital statutes i don't see why we couldn't do full digital cities and and combine for example flickr and microsoft photosynth passively and reconstruct in very fine three-dimensional detail everything that's out there and have that for the future right now that's a lot of data but in four years it won't be um and i've been thinking about ways to improve information science so that you could not only make sure that none of the information is lost but you can develop algorithms someday that can actually go and read all the papers in pubmed and analyze them and start constructing new hypotheses and experiments and that ratchets things up even faster so there's a lot of there's a lot of room to grow here but i think we're well on our way for on this step of saving civilization okay step number three tell each other about things faster so what you're seeing in the top left here is is an image from pompeii which was uh destroyed when mount vesuvius blew and covered the city in in ash uh what you're seeing in the lower right is the fresco from from the minoan civilization that i mentioned before which was destroyed by a tsunami um and here we see here the the herapin civilization which uh is in between india and pakistan on the coast which disappeared entirely and uh and megiddo which is in modern-day israel both of these seem to have fallen to earthquakes so in all these cases natural disaster suddenly made a civilization disappear okay and so when i really started thinking about the relationship between natural disaster and the internet is when i was watching what was happening with the california wildfires starting several years ago well what happened was californians were glued to their television sets trying to figure out if their neighborhoods were in danger so here's a picture from san diego and you can see the fire way in the distance what people want to know is am i in trouble so they turn on the news stations let's say cnn and they got disappointed because what happened was cnn was spending all their time covering celebrity mansions and they were looking at whether these mansions in hollywood and malibu were going to be in danger and somehow you know these houses were taking up air time in proportion to their square footage and if you want to know if your neighborhood's in danger that's not useful to you so what happened you could see this several years ago happening something tipped something changed and what happened is everybody turned off the tv and they went to their computer they went they started taking geo-tagged cell phone pics they started twittering they started updating their facebook pages and what happened is the news started spreading very fast the news started spreading in a very accurate way faster than the front of the fire and faster than cnn could cover it because essentially we had all these home journalists right you had journalists embedded on every block in every home and people taking information and putting this out there and so what happened was this this decentralization and this massive networking really sped up the information in a way that old news networking just couldn't compete with anymore and so that got me thinking about what happens when you do and you don't have this kind of networking in the face of a natural disaster so take what happened in december of 2004 when there was uh an earthquake underneath the ocean and that caused a massive tsunami that hit all the the lip of the indian ocean there and caused the devastating tsunami in southeast asia and it all happened without warning okay nobody saw this coming people saw the water receding they thought it was interesting they went out there um and and and everybody knows about the thousands of people that died contrast this with what happened in the pacific ocean um uh just a few days i guess it was four weeks ago february 27th what happened was the pacific ocean has a tsunami warning system because in 1964 there was a giant earthquake in alaska which triggered a tsunami and after that happened scientists went and built the specific tsunami warning system and essentially it's a bunch of buoys that are sprinkled out over the entire ocean and they track what's happening in real time and they're connected to an informational way of getting the word out so what happened on february 27 just four weeks ago uh was that there was an underwater earthquake and the system picked up the shock waves and sent out the word and what happened is within hours the beaches in hawaii were completely evacuated there was nobody there everyone went up to the high grounds people were sort of festive about it got a picnic or whatever but they were up in the high grounds nobody was on the beaches the u.s navy took their ships from pearl harbor and steamed them out so they wouldn't be caught in near shore damage it turns out what happened is the big wave never came it was sort of a false alarm but it was a tremendously successful test of the system because had the wave come nobody would have been hurt because there was great warning that happened there and so the indian ocean lacks a system like that and so i think what we have is this fantastic contrast just in the last few years of what happens when you do and you don't have the sort of networked communication where you can get the word out very quickly and if you can imagine that the minoan civilization had had a tsunami warning system then they'd still be here with us and they'd be sitting in the audience next to you okay uh i want to give another example of how how having fast information like this uh impacts existential threats so imagine that the pompeians had had electronic communication with mount vesuvius blue um and this was in the year 79 and it actually the the volcanic eruption actually happened in two phases so it happened the first day is over the course of about 20 hours there was this huge plume of of uh of pumice that rained about over the course of a day nine feet on on pompeii but that's not what killed people actually what kills people often with these volcanic eruptions is what happened the next day it's called pyroclastic flow what pyroclastic flow is is you've got this hot rock and gas and dust that's screaming down the side of the volcano at a hundred miles per hour and this is a thousand degrees in temperature right so this is what kills you and it turns out that this is what eventually hit pompeii and hit all the people that were the the people that were still there and this is what killed him it's what destroyed the city so by my calculation here's here's uh vesuvius right here and here's pompeii by my calculation it would have been very easy with a networking system for the pompeians to march 10 kilometers to the southeast in about two hours and they would have all been saved had they just known that this was coming right so the idea is they were stymied by a lack of information and they were completely killed and then they were forgotten for centuries something that strikes me as very interesting is that pompeii was re-discovered in the 1700s can you imagine now with our network system forgetting a city but it was forgotten where it was who they were it was forgotten until the 1700s okay so what i've been telling you about is early warning systems with tsunamis with volcanoes but but you might be thinking okay well what about something really fast like an earthquake can you you know is that going to help anybody well maybe not um but certainly where the net has been proving very useful lately is with with aggregating information for the public for crisis response so so just like the information was spread about the california wildfires quickly this has all been sort of formalized this is a site called ushahidi.com and this was originally built in 2008 to monitor violence that was happening in the elections in kenya but what you're seeing here is a real-time map of of areas of trouble in haiti and so what what this is is people can contribute with text messaging or email or web submission exactly where trouble is different sorts of troubles too emergencies menaces public health problems all this stuff and in the in the immediate aftermath of the haitian earthquake this was a real go-to site because everybody on the ground with a mobile phone can text and say hey here at this location something is happening and and then everybody gets to see this it aggregates it and this optimizes disaster response okay so there's and i also want to mention a very interesting twist on this the fact that people we know will inevitably nowadays twitter and text and update statuses from wherever there's a disaster actually gives us another way to read information if things go really badly so we should be able to assess spots of really big damage because of the absence of information so what i mean is um imagine there's a really big hail storm somewhere well there's going to be a lot of twittering about that but now imagine that a giant meteor slams into the united states somewhere it's the absence of any twittering from that spot that's going to carry the bad news at the speed of electricity right that's how we're going to know something really bad happened there okay so so the idea is with step number three here with advanced communication networks humans grow closer to omniscience and omnipresence and they can spread news of a disaster faster than the disasters wave front and in the right circumstances that head start can provide the extra hours that saves us we still have a long way to go with monitoring these sorts of disasters scientists right now are are um working on putting the same sort of monitoring system that's in the pacific ocean into the indian ocean so that we won't have a recapitulation of what happened in 2004 and it's a very good step and we'll continue to have better and more accurate disaster recovery sites and one of the things that has to be absolutely certain is that these sites don't go down right when we need them most okay step number four how to avert the collapse of civilization is you have to minimize tyranny so political censorship has been a familiar specter in the last century with state-approved news outlets in romania china cuba iraq and lots of other countries the official newspapers of the soviet union what you're seeing here you've seen pravda had a complete lock on the news and you could and foreign newspapers were only allowed in if they were published by communist parties in other countries and approved by the soviets and it wasn't just the newspapers the soviets had a firm lock on all the copying machines so that you couldn't even you know have self-published books and disseminate flyers and that sort of thing and of course the soviets were very fond of editing photographs to remove people who had fallen out of favor with the party so you see these sorts of things where people are just gone this is photoshop before photoshop was cool right so they were um so they were fond of doing this sort of thing this is an unusual effect but even the weather reports were doctored so in chanchesku's romania for example it turns out that certain weather extremes translate to time off of work and uh and so those temperatures were never reached ever and and it turns out that stalin did the same thing because uh if the weather report suggested that the sun was not going to shine on the day of celebration of the labor movement then it was doctored so in all of these cases what the censorship did is it hobbled cultural progress and it directly fomented revolutionary reactions and the reason is that censorship never really seems to work that well with the population because people never really fall for doctored messages that easily the parties always think that they're going to get away with it but in fact the the population is is usually smarter so it doesn't do a regime much good but but the point i want to make is that censorship can be even much more dangerous than just books and photos and weather tyranny can actually bring down a nation so on the far left here is trophee lyschenko he was a soviet agronomist who became extremely powerful in the ussr because he was favored by stalin so lyschenko had these theories about how to grow wheat and it turns out that we now know those theories were scientifically fraudulent but it didn't matter because he was favored by stalin he got more and more power and by the late 1940s he was completely in control of soviet agriculture about the way that everybody had to grow their wheat okay well the problem is with the centralized command is that the soviet union covered 13 time zones and had an incredible variety of soils and climates and a lot of local common sense by local farmers and as a result this central rule setting that happened it was called lychenkoism the central rule setting for how to grow agriculture was absolutely disastrous for the wheat crops in the soviet union the local farmers knew better how to care for their crops but they were disallowed this freedom and what happened is that scientists who disagreed with lyschenko and in terms of they were correct they were disbarred from their position and several them at least four of them were executed based on the fact that they were disagreeing with his with his uh genetic theories okay well historians trace part of the downfall of the ussr to this catastrophe that happened with their agriculture it hobbled the economy and it crippled the proletariat belief in in the new system and so the lesson for history is that having a centralized tyranny rarely works as well as having local information and nested feedback loops well the internet allows us in a very natural way it democratizes the flow of information by giving open access to everybody to the newspapers the world to the photographs the world to the blogs now obviously some postings that you find on the internet are full of doctoring and dishonesty and others strive for for independence and and impartiality but in the end everything is available on the net for the end user to sift through and to give reasoned consideration to and as a result of this related to this the internet can can allow for massive speedy democratic responses to things so i'm just going to use this as an example because this happened just four months ago on december 30th the canadian prime minister stephen harper announced that um he was going to shut down parliament until march 30th presumably so he could continue to work on a stimulus package but a lot of people knew that the reason he was doing it is because he was about to get a vote of no confidence that would force an election and maybe force him out of office so what he does he just shut down parliament and he did it on december 30th so that everybody would be busy with the holiday season and in fact a lot of people were busy and sort of didn't notice well one student noticed and he started a facebook group which very quickly got 214 000 members and through this they were able to organize rallies all across canada many of these rallies had 3 000 people at them and he was able to do this with such rapidity and effectiveness in a way that would not have been possible before the advent of the internet and of course we see this all the time now we're seeing this all over the world and so um so the idea is that governments can be kept in check this way with a sort of speed that wasn't possible before and here's another way that governments can be kept in check by publicly aggregating and displaying information about vote tampering so this is a growing trend in many countries this has been used in the voting the national elections in the last few years by nigeria in kenya and afghanistan among several others and so the idea is that citizens using their cell phones can report disturbances or defamations or vote tampering or they can even just report incidents where things went well and what this has the effect of doing is keeping the election fair and free as possible in fact uh i mentioned earlier the crisis mapping tool ushahidi it was developed in kenya for the 2008 elections when a lot of violence was going on what this does is it publicly shines a light on the elections and and this is just one way to keep governments a little bit more transparent than they might otherwise volunteer to be on their own now obviously the benefit of the internet in shining lights on governments and minimizing tyranny is in danger in many places around the globe uh as most of you know i'm sure in 2006 google agreed that they would censor traffic in china because it was obviously very appealing to tap into a market of 400 million people and so as many of you know if you search for tiananmen square protest most places in the world on google this is what you get if you're inside china and search on tiananmen square protest then this is what you get so what happened very recently of course is that google changed their mind on this topic and recently started putting into plan into practice ways of circumventing the great firewall of china and in doing so they're taking a real risk about giving up this giant chunk of market but i think it's a very admirable thing to do if you care about mitigating tyranny and it puts the chinese authorities in a very difficult position which is interesting because there the government there is is wary of agitating local google users who tend to be highly educated and vocal so i bring this up to to emphasize this point that minimizing tyranny with the internet is not is not automatic it's not straightforward it's going to require constant vigilance and in fact here's another example of that so this is a map of the internet and information flow around the world and how free it is and you can see that the red areas are sort of the usual suspects where there's really serious danger in terms of the openness the information flow but what some of you might not know is that the government of australia in 2008 decided to try to pass mandatory isp filtering on all the websites and in 2009 it was leaked that they had a list of the blacklist of all the sites that they were going to filter out now this hasn't actually been put into practice in australia but it is a subject of real political discussion and the government that's in power uh wants to do it and this is this is something for us to really be aware of because again while while the internet can reduce the control of a government there's constant vigilance that's required okay so i mentioned these difficulties even in the face of these difficulties it remains likely that future attempts at censorship are eventually going to be defeated by the new technology of the internet or at least the internet will help with this and among other things as citizens our next steps are um first of all to demand transparency in government at every point that we can and this is already underway with sites like recovery.gov and um and we should financially encourage companies that who stand up against censorship there there are several companies now that are considering pulling out of china now it's complicated right some of them have various reasons some of their servers have been hacked and they're mad about that they have various reasons for wanting to do that but i think it's really the onus is on us as a population to give positive feedback to those companies google stock has fallen six percent since they started having this trouble with china and and that's a shame um and i think thinking for a little further into the future eventually people are going to get very good at having home brewed satellite uplink systems which means that you can circumvent government firewalls altogether and so i think all these steps are going to be very important in terms of minimizing tyranny and the internet is one of the technologies that can really help us get there okay step five if you want to save civilization is you get more brains involved in solving problems um okay so we all know about crowdsourcing and the idea here is that you solve problems by massive participation and what you do is you get lots of people together and they're essentially the nodes of the super computer and there's been a lot of it's been a lot of scholarly writing and popular writing about the wisdom of crowds and the fantastic uh properties you get out of crowdsourcing so for example on the site foldit protein folding is an extremely intensive computational problem and the idea here is that you turn it into a game and you have end users work on the game see how they can fold it and see you can get the minimum energy configuration and then you can win prizes and so on so what you're doing is you're distributing this very hard problem to lots and lots of people it's a great idea for crowdsourcing sea start is a new uh organization that's just begun and their idea is to do open source knowledge gathering to get to the moon so we don't have to depend on governments anymore we're going to get to the moon ourselves by everybody sort of pitching in in the same way that you can do open source movements to develop really good software so that's the idea with with crowdsourcing but what i want to point out is that crowdsourcing really the way it's going now it involves less than one percent of the world population who are actually involved in this sort of thing and i want to suggest an important way to go beyond crowdsourcing so 80 years ago virginia woolf in her essay a room of one's own she pointed out that half the planet's writing talent had been squandered by the simple fact that women at that time didn't have the same opportunity as men to become writers and she imagines in this book what would happen if william shakespeare had a sister named judith shakespeare who was equally as talented what would have happened and her answer is we would have never heard of judah shakespeare because she simply wouldn't have had the opportunity and that's a real waste of human capital so human capital is a term that was originally defined by adam smith and it refers to the skills of the labor force and it turns out that it's now becoming clear that the development of human capital depends on open access to education and opportunities and many economists have been have been really emphasizing lately the importance of human of cultivating human capital because the investment translates directly into economic output and and in a world where we know that historical collapse is so tightly tied to economic meltdown civilizations would be well advised to leverage all the brain power that they have the problem is most of the world doesn't have the opportunity to get the education that's afforded to a small minority and so for every einstein or yo-yo ma or barack obama who has the opportunity for education there are uncountable others who just never get the chance and this vast undertapping of our civilization's potential steals security from our future so the internet addresses this problem with a kind of natural ease by opening the gates of education in a way that's never been possible before so a motivated teen anywhere on the planet can start walking through the world's webs of knowledge starting with wikipedia and then going to mit's open courseware and getting an ivy league education many universities launch this sort of thing rice university has a site called connections which is essentially wikified textbooks from children to professionals and it's been very successful so for the intrepid learner anywhere on the globe if she can get a hold of the internet there are tens of thousands of courses online there are lectures there are lecture notes there are homework problems there's quizzes interactive web demos and so on and beyond and beyond the courses the world's scientific knowledge is now at the fingertips of everyone so hunting down a scientific paper when i had first started graduate school you have to walk over the library now everything's at at your fingertips and the national institute of health has demanded that all the papers that are published on their dime in other words any scientist who has an nih grant now has to upload the published manuscript to pubmed central so the idea is that for the taxpayers the fruits of their labors should be right there at their fingertips if they're the ones contributing to the research they should be able to access that and same with archive.org you've got all the physics papers available so all of the world's knowledge is available right there to anyone who can get a hold of the internet and if you're ever going to be a medical patient of course now is the right time to do it until recently physicians had a lot of asymmetric knowledge over the patients but with the proliferation of medical web portals and sites where patients get together and share information the patients are better educated and that ends up being better for everyone okay so i know what you're thinking you're thinking you know it's not actually trivial for kids in impoverished countries to get a hold of the internet and much of the world does not have access still nonetheless even the mere feasibility of it completely redefines the playing field and people are working on getting computers into the hands of children all over many of you familiar with the one laptop per child program which builds very cheap computers and allows children to have these so that they can have this self-empowered learning there was a lot of development that went into one laptop per child to make these computers very inexpensive and negra ponti the guy who's been leading this charge just announced that they're working on a new model of the computer which will be based on the tablet model and the advantage here is that it's a lot cheaper and more robust to build because the former model has 900 moving parts including the keyboard and the hinge and so on whereas a tablet model has none of that so you can do it for cheaper and it's more robust and you can get this into the hands of even more children so this is a program that's underway and it's been tremendously successful so i talked a few steps ago about the retention of knowledge and the speed of spreading knowledge but what i'm really talking about here is the creation of knowledge and i and i'd like to be able to come up with a better word than crowdsourcing which as i mentioned just uses less than one percent of the population working on these problems and and since there will be problems in the future that we haven't even thought of in the face of that what we want to do is maximize our problem-solving machinery and so what i think we want to do as we democratize education is move from crowdsourcing really to something like society sourcing where we're getting 10 50 of the population involved in really solving problems it goes without saying that vast numbers of people on the planet will not take the opportunity to give themselves an ivy league education but for the first time in history it's widely available so we've the internet has sort of naturally accomplished a human resource capitalization that would make judith shakespeare proud we're finally in a position to actualize the brains available in our worldwide population there are a lot of steps that we need to do next we need to keep increasing sites and applications for crowdsourcing contribute to open courseware support open access publishing in all areas financially incentivize that and improve information science i can go into that a little bit more [Music] finally the last step if you want to avert the collapse of civilization is try not to run out of energy so um so it turns out that carrying capacity is one of the is one of the main concerns on the mind of scientists and and politicians and thinkers it's the fugacity of the the natural energy resources that we have is really the concern because when societies exceed their carrying capacity in other words how much energy is available to support them that's when all is lost that's when they start fighting for the resources that are there and everything goes down the tubes so this characterizes many different types of collapses that have come before us so in jared diamond's book collapse he points out that a common reason for societal failure is environmental damage for example deforestation or soil erosion and in in his book ancient maya arthur demarest points out that the same thing that drought and a loss of soil fertility precipitated the fall of the mayans even before the smallpox arrived and and it turns out that just recently people have come up with um evidence for the exceedance of carrying capacity among the minoans the civilization that i mentioned before that got wiped out by a tsunami it turns out that archaeological recovery shows evidence for deforestation around that part of crete meaning that if a tsunami didn't get them carrying capacity issues might have okay well happily the internet again addresses this sort of problem with a very natural ease i was recently just giving a talk at the nih in bethesda and i was absolutely amazed by these atavistic filing cabinets that that lined the hallways and the rooms and they filled everything with this unnecessary gravity and no one accesses these anymore because all the important papers of course have shifted into electrons at this point so what these do they remain in the hallways is this this fossil-like evidence of a recent age in which you measured information content not by gigabytes but by by cubic meters and and the inefficiency of these giant filing systems has characterized everything businesses and science until very recently and i'm going to suggest that the technological shift from bigger to to smaller is more than convenient it's absolutely critical to the future so take for example our mail service since the introduction of email our postal system which has now been demoted to the moniker of snail mail has been hemorrhaging financially and they've been raising their stamp prices continually to try to keep up why because everybody's sending their documents electronically whether it's real estate contracts or book manuscripts or whatever it is everybody's sending this electronically and it's very difficult to estimate the billions of pounds of carbon dioxide saved by not having to ferry batches of paper everywhere for simple transactions but we can be sure that this makes it the contribution to air quality and and similarly we've we've diminished the need to drive long distances to browse and purchase products and this has allowed many brick and mortar stores to shift a lot of their operation online so if you're shopping for a perfect set of cutlery or dishes or a shirt or something you might have previously driven around to several stores to look for this to look over the stock and now it's replaced with some minutes of web surfing you find exactly what you want at the best price and you click to get a single delivery now i know what you're thinking you're thinking okay well what makes you think that the delivery trucks are any better for the environment than if you drove around well there's a couple things um it turns out that one thing you might worry about is all the packaging that involves in delivery but of course all the companies now are moving towards more eco-friendly packaging they call it eco-friendly packaging but they're of course they're saving themselves money the only reason that they ever had big packaging was to prevent um shoplifting right you have to put things in big display packages so people can't stick it in their pocket and walk out well now you don't have to do that and companies increasingly they're all advertising how they're saving more and more and more on their packaging so now things are very tight okay but obviously we still have to worry about the trucks driving around but the good news is everybody's trying to save money and energy and so it turns out that companies like ups who deliver these things have developed these super optimization algorithms where they can figure out how to make deliveries in the most optimal way possible and some of you may know that ups trucks don't even make left turns anymore why because left turns are terrible you sit there you idle you waste a lot of time and gas and you have to go again so ups they never make left turns anymore they're super optimized and as a result they've saved millions of miles off their delivery route they've saved millions of gallons of gas and they've reduced co2 by a lot okay so in many cases it turns out it actually is much more efficient to have these things delivered to you and to your neighbors rather than you driving all over town in your inefficient sitting alone in your car left turning method okay um and then finally it's the case uh uh so i'm a scientist and i see this all the time people in businesses and other people see this in your own ways all the time but we're having more and more meetings online so um a few months ago i was invited by the journal nature to give a talk in second life and i was able to use powerpoint slides and people dropped in from all around the world to hear the talk and it was a fantastic experience for me because there was not a drop of jet fuel burned for all the people to come and hear the talk it was it was seamless and it was absolutely environmentally friendly now there are of course real costs to the forest of computers that underpin the internet but these costs are far less than the trees and the coal beds and oil deposits that would be spent down for the same amount of information flow and a lot of people are working on ways to produce electricity more cheaply and quickly but there aren't any such plans for trees and coal and oil so to summarize this many authors have pointed out that societal collapse can typically be cast in terms of energy when energy expenditure begins to outweigh energy return that's when collapse ensues so the next time you're annoyed by the accumulation of emails in your email box just think about how grateful you are that it's not all packages and papers like it was in the old days um okay so what to do next well i think it would be really useful for companies to commit to server farms run on sustainable energy governments can incentivize us with tax breaks and you know i don't see in the future why we can't have mobile phone apps where you're where you're minimizing your own routes and doing no left turns and figuring out exactly how to go places and this is just in the near future i think in the far future we're going to have even better ways involving crowdsourcing and other methods of really getting better energy efficiency okay so in jared diamond's book collapse he points out that societies often fall because of malfunctions in long-distance trading for needed resources and i think through the modern lens we can suggest that maybe the most important trade works nowadays the trade networks nowadays are carrying zeros and ones they're informational they're in other words instead of sort of the silk route it's it's the fiber optic trading routes and and what i've argued is that the internet can in a very natural easy way defy six problems that play traditional roles in societal collapse and these are the problems now of course i'm sure some people are scribbling down questions now saying you know it's more complex than that and that's exactly right there are a lot of things that the internet will only address tangentially there are many scholars who address why civilizations collapse uh some point out that um very general things they they they don't change their fixed design for solving problems or they find problems that they cannot solve these are two famous ideas about why societies collapse they're very general i actually think that even though it's sort of tangential here the internet with the crowdsourcing the democratization of education and so on the speed of information i think it might actually be able to touch on these there are others that it probably won't be able to touch on directly tumen and bennett in 1948 listed many prerequisites for civilization's survival i've picked out some here that i think the net doesn't directly address basic nutritional needs construction of a good legal system maintenance of order with good executive and judicial branches and having meaningful diplomacy abroad these are all things that maybe the net doesn't directly address and then i'm sure somebody scribbled this down on a piece of paper already there's a really big problem with everything i've been saying which is what happens when the net goes down and we are completely married to this i mean it's already the case that we're in this situation but but i'm arguing that it'll save civilization and here's the real achilles heel to the argument here so i think there are at least two ways that the net will go down one of course is major electricity outages and um i think what's going to need to happen is people are going to need to think very hard about backup plans not only for the server farms but the routers the end users people having ways at their own homes to run this and it might not just you might not want to just have it solar because there might be something like a nuclear winter where there is no sun you maybe want wind i mean there are a lot of really bad scenarios you can imagine where the net would go down and you're completely dependent on it and you want some way that the whole society has a backup plan here and i have a suspicion that the net's going to go down a few times before people get really good about having home backup plans and everybody along the way has a good a good method for this and then of course there's going to be network attacks and we're already seeing some of this the internet and iran went down recently and i haven't been able to find out exactly the follow-up on what happened but but at the time they were saying it looked like cables were cut these undersea cables and i think the jury's still out about exactly what happened if it was purposeful or not what's clear is that in warfare of the future we're not going to be talking about just having rugged soldiers in camos and machine guns we're going to be talking about young people in their workout clothes slamming energy drinks and fighting national wars this way with cyber warfare this is really as we get more and more married and interconnected with the internet that's going to be the future of warfare so i just want to wrap up with making one statement given how married we are to the internet and given that this is the thing that might save us in various ways i think we should probably have something like an equivalent of the seed vault this is the seed vault in svalbard which holds 500 000 different types of plant seeds and the idea is that if there's some global catastrophe you've got a backup of everything here and you can actually reconstitute the crops of the world by pulling them out of this seed bank and svalbard and so we need to have some sort of internet seed bank and i'm not talking about the internet archive or just having a copy of what's been happening on the internet i'm talking about things burned into physical media that teach you how to generate electricity how to build a computer and how to reconstitute the net because we might have backup of all the data on the net but someday if things get really disastrous we're going to be able to actually know how to rebuild the net so that's all i'm going to say and i'm happy to take questions now thank you so much let's go see it a couple questions about um you know the net savings and you said what if the net goes down what is a neuroscientist doing thinking about all this stuff i just have to and writing short stories well i i oh yeah i think i have two different answers to that um neuroscience is such an exciting field and that's where i spend all of my day right but we just happen to be this incredible time where everything's changing so rapidly around us as you and everyone here knows it's just such a great time it would be impossible to not think about those other issues and i've always been a real student of history i've been a real history buff so it's impossible not to think about what's happened before and how this is changing it so i found i couldn't help but do that does it feed into your science at all to do this i mean if you become a best-selling story writer that will help finance your science but how about intellectually right well interestingly the fiction writing and the science go together very well because the way science actually works as many people here know what's written in the textbooks is completely untrue science never goes as a linear process of discovery it's always people making creative leaps it's people you go into lab every day and you make up the wackiest stories that you can and you see which ones you can build a bridge of evidence back to what we already know but often what happens is you end up on some really interesting island and you can't do any science with it but you can go home at night and use literature as a as a channel for exploring that more and so i use literature and science it's both the same thing it's just it's creative ideas and getting to explore those and see what happens with it and in general art and science is really the same thing it's it's just trying to figure out what is the essence of something how do you how do you get it down i've gotten the sense that science has flipped from my generation to yours in my generation biologists for example morphologists would master a certain body of science and then sequester it and valve it out very carefully and that's how they got power and then along came genbank and now it looks like uh you know sharing half-baked information practically in real time is almost how people move ahead in science is that i'm not sure about the half-baked part but but you do want to get it out there as quickly as you can yeah that seems right one cookie at a time you don't need to do a whole but as long as it's fully cooked that's right that's right i mean the paper is getting smaller you know the royal society sort of invented the scientific paper and are they getting into smaller fragments or more authors or what's the what's the trend there i don't think so because i was just recently reading on jstor these old archived papers i was reading issues of science and nature from like 1910 and they were extremely short papers that had very little a guy said dear sirs i was sitting on my porch listening to the cicadas and i noticed that there's a certain rhythm to it and that was a science paper at that time so yeah i think i think they've become more sophisticated i mean in fact the competition's become very fierce because there are so many smart kids going into science now um you know the field's very they the the saying i don't know how anyone measured this but saying is that 80 percent of what we know in neuroscience we've learned in the last 20 years um as a result there's just lots of competition for for some limited amount of room in the journal so is that going to keep happening is the next 20 years going to be another 80 is that some some kind of exponential hard to say i mean we've we've learned so much in neuroscience but there's actually a problem i know there are a few neuroscientists here in the audience who's a neuroscientist here yeah who's a neuroscientist you got thank you okay we got a few um you know the deep problem in neuroscience now is that we don't really know how the brain works we don't know what the theory of the brain is we don't even know what the theory is going to look like because when you take the deep problem of consciousness which is how you ever put together physical pieces and parts and get private subjective experience out of it none of the kind of ways we have making theories now will ever answer that there's no amount of tinker toys that you can put together and then suddenly you put one more and you say ah now it it's having the taste of feta cheese or something so so this is the great unsolved problem in neuroscience and and the fact is that our books keep getting thicker and we have a book in the field called principles of neural science which is that fat and i don't think you can call it principle because if it were really principles it would be thin if we knew more it would be a pamphlet but what this means is we're just dumping everything in there because we don't really understand how it fits together right now bernard avengers said to one of these audiences that um the singularity might happen when the net wakes up does that mean anything it might um so the one of the theories on the table now we don't know if it's right but it's it's the computational hypothesis of the brain function which is that really what's important is not the wet gushy stuff but the algorithms that are running on top of that and and so if this computational hypothesis is true it means that you could reproduce if i reproduced your brain out of beer cans and tennis balls and it was running the same software it would be you and i could have this conversation with with that brain um if that's true we should be able to reproduce things in zeros and ones on computers someday and download ourselves into the matrix as well but if it's all true it means that the city of san francisco might be conscious it means that the net might be conscious if really what it is is a bunch of physical pieces and parts interacting in ways that are running algorithms once we understand what those algorithms are um we might find that a lot of stuff is is conscious and we just don't have you know san francisco doesn't have ears and a mouth to to ask it and have any kind of meaningful communication an example of a brain algorithm that we've sorted already oh um we don't have any real complete ones but we i mean we know a lot about uh how the visual system works it's probably the best understood part and then the other sensory systems and we know more and more about the front half of the brain which is about making executive decisions and so on um but we we don't yet have anything where we can simulate in a computer and say well now it's conscious and there's an interesting legal thing in the future here which is once we simulate consciousness on a computer then you can't turn it off because that'd be murder right yeah yeah and we always project that it'll object but you know maybe it says turn me off this is horrible okay we'll get dr kevorkian to turn it on yeah this leads right into a question from paul barrell what do you think of joseph tainter's thesis that complexity causes the collapse of societies you've just described endless complexity here and that it's all good is tinder for lunch well there's this idea um and i'm afraid i've just forgotten the name george white sides is that the name of the guy who said they have stacked complexity which i hope i get this right but the idea is you start something very simple like the transistor and you build more and more complex things like the computer but eventually what this leads to is new simplicity like google where it's just a page and you type a word and you find something so so as complexity increases it tends to sort of re-collapse into simplicity and so given the points that i um was making today about the internet and all these ways where it'll save civilization i guess i disagree with tainter on that um i think complexity has led to new simplicity which is gonna be thing that saves us scott ether smith says we're calling daniel suarez's lecture in this series on bot mediated reality do you think there may be new challenges to this ability of civilization to come from the internet and kevin kelly who processed this said this this is a new way to collapse society you have to you have seven things to deal with yeah well what i i didn't see suarez's talk but it was bought mediated reality i mean is this the idea of the net waking up in a bad way like in the terminator skynet uh it's just that they're basically malware uh rules ah here's what i think um so since the long now foundation is interested in the ten thousand year scale i thought what if we considered ten thousand years what if we mapped a single human lifetime onto those ten thousand years uh if we did that if we mapped a human lifetime on to that it means that the internet is now two and a half months old and what that means is that any prognostication we make about the net is going to stink we just don't know because we're too early in it it's just learning how to stick its tongue out and so um so my answer would be maybe maybe we're in real trouble with the net all the prognostications i'm making are just the most primitive ones based on extrapolating what we have right now sounds to me like sticking his tongue out makes me think that the metaphors for the net are going to always be insufficient for understanding what's going on with it i mean in a sense you're sort of mapping old civilizational problems onto well we solve that with this and we solve that with that and all these net capabilities the technology makes us lucky in a sense um but i suppose this is a version of the singularity problem is it you know if we can't under if we can't grasp what's coming because of all this acceleration you're talking about uh does failure to grasp what's coming become itself a problem um yes but it's one that we can't do anything about prognostication has always been bad and so my point number five on there was that really what you want to do when you can't see what the problems are that are coming is you want to really leverage your human capital you want to get everybody involved in solving problems and i think that's probably our only defense our best defense for problems that we can't foresee this quest that point is greatly anticipated by a question from brian what difference do you think we would see when 10 to 50 of the world's population is involved in crowdsourcing in its various forms i know yeah these are all great prognostication questions and i just don't know the answers to these well what we're looking at is you know we talked about you know there's there's always more bandwidth there's always more but engineers say any 10 quantitative change is a qualitative change this just described the qualitative change in crowdsourcing um sort of extrapolating from you now tracking how many different kinds of problems crowdsourcing can step up to play that forward a little bit yeah well there might be more open source projects i hadn't heard of sea star until just a few days ago i don't know how long it's been around but the idea of an open source project to get to the moon really captured my imagination i thought what a what a wonderful idea and if it works i mean who knows if it will but if in 15 years from now there's some sort of you know like linux version of getting to the moon that's really that's really superb and maybe what we'll start seeing is more of that stuff and um a move away from yeah from big corporations i mean you know we've got problems with tyranny and governments uh but of course a concern that people have always had spengler in his decline of the west was concerned about rule by the wealthy is you get these corporations and they take over and then you don't have good social mobility of the poor maybe this is the thing that will lead to good social mobility of the poor and will avoid spengler's pratfall um of just having the corporations and the wealthy take over everything you may have just framed the next discussion we're having on global deviant globalization where basically the poor the outlaws that used to be poor i have this whole other version of non-corporate ways to build wealth and even to build governance in a certain way and that sounds like from your standpoint uh work around to some of the problems of the uh standard globalization yeah maybe yeah either that or it helps break it down i mean what you know does banditry help or hinder uh civilizations yeah it should i don't know banerjee probably hinders um yeah i don't know i don't know anything about banditry really but i think work on that all right i'll get back to you jay cross asks how can we satisfy people dedicated to preserve religious memes started long before the information age you know the wisdom of the ancients what do they know they didn't have cell phones yeah yeah um i mean this is something that's been amazing to me for a long time right the people who wrote these holy books didn't know the size of the cosmos they didn't know bacterial infection computation quantum they didn't know any of this stuff so the philosophers russell and white had suggested a long time ago look if you're going to have spirituality you might as well predicate it on the bedrock of what we already know to be true we know so much about the size of the cosmos now for example you might as well start there and in fact carl sagan echoed this he said he said i can't believe that religions haven't taken this on board and said wow the cosmos is even more wonderful than we thought it's more full of awe than we thought there are sextillion stars out there there's any number of extraterrestrial civilizations that's fantastic but you know for reasons of retaining seats of power and so on yeah religions tend not to take this stuff on um i have no idea where i was go where are we going like a train wreck anyway well it's uh in a way the question was making a case for creative forgetting um because in a sense you're saying hey we're moving up the capability to basically remember everything and access everything and uh are the problems with that oh oh um people get locked into a grand old idea and sort of swear romantic allegiance to it and then act according to it uh which is easy to do because they've got you know they collect online lots of people who feel the same next thing you know they're they're in michigan practicing uh with rifles you're right well now this um wait i'd like to ask a show of hands how many people know what the ultra deep field experiment was done by nasa the ultra deep field experiment this is okay so maybe maybe seven what's that that they know more than i do that's free okay right and this is extremely educated credit right and only seven percent so uh this is a quick tangent but to me this is the most amazing thing that i know and it has theological implications it has implications for how everybody should be thinking about so um what happened was nasa took the hubble space telescope which is in geosynchronous orbit and they decided they were going to instead of sort of mapping the skies they were going to pick one little spot dark spot and point the telescope at that and see if maybe they could detect a star there even though you could even those black so they picked a nice spot that didn't have any earth shine or galaxy dust and they pointed the telescope at it and they did this 400 times every time the hubble came around and they collected a million seconds worth of data and when they exposed it what they wanted to see is even on that spot it's about the size of a pencil tip even though that spot looks pitch black was there anything behind there when they exposed it what they found was not a star not a bunch of stars they found 10 000 galaxies in that spot in space a galaxy consists of a hundred billion stars so when you look at that and you think about the number of planets and extraterrestrial life forms and so on and that's one spawn space if you wanted to map out all the space that resolution would take a million years right so it makes you think wow everybody's story is really limited and i think that's what technology does is it's going to it's going to force an improvement of people's stories and and um i think as experiments like this become well known it'll be harder and harder for somebody to cling to a story that's millennia old they'll just be confronted with so much new data that it'll sort of take the wind out of the sales of their story that's what i think it has to happen i used to know carl sagan i feel like you're he's back [Music] kevin kelly had one uh if a small virus can take down an ancient civilization then why can't a computer virus take down the internet and civilization oh boy it can that's where the future of cyber warfare is i mean i think i think it's going to be really worrisome um yeah that's that's the achilles heel and the whole argument i made is is what happens is people as it becomes more and more important for nations to clip undersea cables or have viruses in their there yeah so we have to be very careful as long as the internet works it's absolutely going to save us in all kinds of ways but but we're really in trouble when that goes down what if do you have any theories from sort of brain study as to i mean the brain is this tremendously sensitive networked thing that has developed various protective mechanisms and so on presumably it has some in software so what would a brain scientist tell the network engineer to do to head off this kind of problem that's a that's a great question it turns out they're so different because networks at the beginning worry about things like feedback and redundancy and how to make sure things don't go into epilepsy whereas everything that evolves through time um you know it's just all this craziness piled on top of each other through through deep time uh and so brains have to make all these broken rococo corrections to things to make sure that things don't blow up and of course they do blow up all the time with epilepsy and brain tumors and strokes and so on i hope because of ways that engineers are building the net from the beginning that we won't have the equivalent to an epileptic seizure or stroke or a brain tumor in the network but if we're to take the matrix as any guide when you have a system that big you find anomalies in the matrix that you just can't help because the system is too big so maybe that will happen well this leads to um and we're trying to reverse engineering the brain which is reverse engineering 20 million generations of morons doing the least bad thing 20 million in one yeah those are all the mothers and so what you're suggesting is suggests to me anyway a less baroque less rococo dead at it just you know do it uh approach to brain design which when we get far enough into the reverse engineering maybe we're already there we can start saying well nice try but we can do better and we'll we'll make a better brain from the ground up is that what you see that's true although the truth is that that's the approach that started in the 1960s with this idea of artificial intelligence the idea was you know the brain's really messy and complicated and has a lot of history to it why don't we just start from scratch and event intelligence and um when i was a kid growing up i thought for sure by 2010 we'd have robots everywhere and the best thing we've got is the roomba vacuum cleaner so something went really wrong there and this was the 1960s we essentially threw the smartest guys on the planet at this problem and it failed artificial intelligence is a failed field and the lesson that we learned from that is that actually mother nature is really clever and it's a really hard problem and so the game shifted at some point maybe starting the 80s and 90s the game really shifted to okay fine let's look in the brain and let's actually copy what's going on there and try to figure out what the algorithms are instead of circumventing it that's been the recent history you know what happened to all those ai guys they went into finance [Laughter] i'll bet and we're running you know the world banking system is that what always happens from the best and brightest all swarm to some particular area do you think that that that will that that well it will yeah it will crash in a superfluity of hubris or something and can we point them at less delicate parts [Laughter] are you going to get to actually stay a scientist do you think and think of all this because you're going around giving you've worked in london you gave how many talks in england uh five yeah but one of them was the keynote speech of the scientific conference here's the thing i hope to everybody's asking me this question um i hope to remain a scientist because i've put so much work to get here and this is really the golden age of neuroscience this is really when it's all happening and um this would be the worst time to jump ship from that so i'm i'm gonna make you know i go into lab every day from nine to nine and i work really hard at running that laboratory and then when i go home at night that's when i do the other stuff that's when i write fiction or write long now talks um but uh yeah i'm gonna remain a scientist that's why your afterlife stories are such good bedtime reading we've found because if they work for you keeping you awake putting us to sleep with weird dreams i mean [Laughter] what an amazing thing to do to sort of program other people's dreams does this mean you're doing stories there for one officer are you going to do another domain of do you think oh um i'm doing another domain off so the the biggest compliment that i got with some was that it was unique that there's not another book like it so my next book is even uniqueer so um so it takes place over 200 billion years with a single narrator it takes place over the course of several cosmoses some some of you may know that astrophysicists are debating this issue about whether there's enough gravitational pull that the expanding universe will eventually slow down and stop and come back together and if it does if that's the right model there's going to be a big crunch and everything that we've ever developed all our literature and love letters and art and so on everything will be utterly destroyed in the collapse of the universe but the good news is there'll be enough energy there to cause the next big bang and if this model is right it means that our entire cosmos is one in a series an infinite series of cosmos that have existed before us and have had their own literatures and wars and and arts and so on and they've been utterly destroyed so what my next book is doing is taking um it's asking it's sort of starting with this question of if you can imagine a cosmos before us that was a billion years more advanced in technology than we are could they figure out a way to transmit a message to us across the cusp of that universal collapse and if so what would they send what would we send right would we send our funniest joke or you know instructions on head right what would they send and and whatever message they send they'd have to assume that it'll take 14 and a half billion years until some species will evolve in the next cosmos to be able to read it and what should we be looking for and so that's the fictional starting point for that book and it shares the same spirit of some in that it's short stories that really point a spotlight on us and the joys and complexities of being human but but that's the the structure of the next one do you have to sort of portage through brain theory into another brain universe cosmos theory into another universe to get that message through or do you see a straight line uh just as well just a straight line of sending the message right across but but the message is something that has to unpack itself over oh that's billions of years so you're a science fiction writer now well the interesting thing is when i when i first turned in some to my agent she said look no one's gonna know how to market this they're gonna science fiction and religion atheism like no one's gonna know where tomorrow i said come on just you know loosen up we get we'll just do it's literary fiction yeah and um yeah and so it's really worked that way as literary fiction and i actually resist the label science fiction i don't think it's exactly that let me give you a reason not to i was uh spent some time with gregory benford last week at a meeting on geo engineering in acelamar and he's doing a lot of interesting research including on geo engineering i said how do you pay for it he said i have millions of dollars from selling science fiction stories is that at all attractive rather than you know going begging to in national science foundation or somebody well yeah boy the whole grant making system is totally broke i actually am making more money now with my writing than i am in uh in my science career some actually became the number two book in england uh in september which is extremely unusual for book of short stories um the part that's been the most amazing to me about it is that both atheists and religious people really like it so the book is blurbed by all these famous uh militant atheists yeah i mean people like philip pullman and brian green now they they think it's and then it also got awarded the best spiritual book of the year by this christian website and i thought that's great i you know everybody's finding something that resonates with them in there and and what's your religious affiliation so i call myself a possibilian and and we're going to end with your answer to this question spell it out what's the possibility and then you know do we join or what do we do here here's my yeah just a small membership fee um here's been my take on it as a sign what a life in science really teaches you is the limits of our knowledge what you learn is that the stuff that we don't know vastly outstrips what we do know right and even with all the tremendous progress of science you're standing at the end of the pier and it's all uncharted waters that you know how to build consciousness from pieces of parts dark matter dark energy quantum mechanics it's all completely mysterious um so given that i've you know there are there are all these new books by by the new atheists uh dennis and dawkins and hitchens these are fantastic books they're very important unfortunately it's given the the public sort of a misconception about scientists that a lot of the public has walked away thinking okay scientists are acting like all right we've got it all figured out there's nothing else to talk about here and that's really unfortunate because the fact is that we do not know enough to commit to that sort of viewpoint of acting like we've got it all figured out at the other end of the spectrum we know way too much to commit to any particular religion so that leaves me somewhere in the middle and so what happened about uh 14 months ago i was on npr and and i was asked if i was atheist i said no we know too little and i religious no so i said i was a possibilian and what happened is by the time you know so i explained that possibilism is an active exploration of new ideas and the idea is to shine a flashlight around the possibility space just to instead of pretending like you know the answer to something you can't possibly know so what happened is i left the live interview and by the time i got back to my neuroscience lab i logged into my email and i had hundreds of emails from people saying hey i think i'm a possibilian too and so uh so i looked on google and the word didn't exist so i did so i did what anybody would do i bought possibility.com and then i and then [Applause] and then i've just and then i've just been watching what's happened and it's grown to thousands and thousands of hits on the web and people i think are a little tired of the debates between dawkins and the discovery institute and what they want is sort of you know instead of pretending like you know they want a little bit of celebration of the vastness of our ignorance and of uncertainty and that's what possibilities is about her thank you that was great thank you [Music] [Music] you
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Channel: Long Now Foundation
Views: 44,352
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: History, Future, Civilization, Disease, Archives, Libraries, Government, Technology, Psychology, Energy, Education, Economics, Internet
Id: mRv_U4IAonI
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 89min 47sec (5387 seconds)
Published: Tue Feb 02 2021
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