The Future of Humanity, Malcolm Gladwell - WGS 2018

thank you so much it's a real pleasure to be here and to be part of this distinguished conference I am this is one of my I think this is my fourth visit to Dubai I I always remember my first visit I came from the airport in a taxi trying who's taking me to my hotel and we couldn't find my hotel and we went around and around this is maybe 2006 I went around and around and around the block and finally we found it and the taxi driver said to me you know I'm certain that hotel was not there a month ago I thought was the most Dubai statement ever anyway it's good to be back what I thought I would talk a little bit about was how the challenges facing governments are changing in the modern world you know if you think about the way that we construct government institutions throughout the world they're based on those institutions were all based on models that came from the 19th century in some cases even the 18th century and the expectations we have about government were also set in the 18th and 19th century we expected our government to provide security for us to develop and enforce the rule of law and to ensure us against various kinds of problems disasters unforeseen events that is a set of expectations that have remained in place now for nearly 200 years but what I would like to argue this morning is that there has been very recently a dramatic shift in the nature of what people want and need from their government and this shift in fact doesn't just affect the way the governments are structured it also affects the way that many different professions are are structured throughout the world and that one of the great challenges that faces governments and professions anyone who has to deal with the public is coming to terms with the nature of this dramatic shift and I thought the best way to explain this is to use a paradigm a really interesting theory that comes from a man named Gregory Trevorton who is a very senior intelligence official in the United States a real intellectual when it comes to national security who wrote a very famous essay about ten years ago where he made a distinction between what he called puzzles and mysteries now what did he mean by that well if you think back to the most serious foreign policy crisis of the Cold War era it may well have been the Cuban Missile Crisis if you remember in your history the Cuban Missile Crisis takes place in the summer of 1962 when the American American government notices that a number of ships from the Soviet Union 20:38 ships in all have sailed from Russia to Cuba and unloaded some mysterious cargo and they begin to get very alarmed about what that mysterious cargo is so the CIA sends a series of spy planes this is before the age of drones and satellites a series of spy planes to fly over Cuba they take a thousand pictures they bring those pictures back to Washington DC they develop them and they see lo and behold the cargo the mysterious cargo on these Soviet ships our medium-range nuclear tipped ballistic missiles aimed directly at the United States that is what set in motion the Cuban Missile Crisis the United States demanded that the Soviet Union removed those missiles and in the ensuing showdown the world came as close as it's ever come to blowing yourself up now think about that problem from the CIA's perspective they had a they knew that they had a an enemy who harbored some kind of untoward evil intentions towards them how did they resolve that question they went out they gathered information and that information pointed directly to a course of action right now compare that to the signature foreign policy crisis of our era in when it comes to the United States if you were the American public would say that the most serious foreign policy crisis of the last generation was 9/11 9/11 begins the same way the US intelligence establishment is concerned that their enemy al-qaida harbors some kind of evil intention towards them but the way that crisis unfolds is very different in the case of the Cuban Missile Crisis the response was to go out and gather more information right in the case of 9/11 the problem the the task of the facing the CIA was to make sense of the information they already had right they already knew that something was up for the fall of 2001 they knew that it involved aircraft they had already captured some al-qaeda operatives inside the United States they they knew that it was supposed to be something big and dramatic I mean I could go on and on they found someone who was taking pictures in the Boston Airport in the summer of 2001 they arrested someone at a flight training school in Arizona in a summer of 2001 in the case of 9/11 the problem facing the United States was not in gathering information to point to a conclusion but in making sense of the information they already had now we lump those two foreign policy crises together I mean we treat them both as examples of the same kind of problem but they could not be more different and what Gregory Trevorton would say is that the Cuban Missile Crisis was a puzzle and a puzzle is a problem caused by a lack of information to the contrary 9/11 is what he would call a mystery and a mystery is a problem caused by too much information the challenge when it comes to a mystery is how to sort through the mound of data in front of you and figure out what it means now this is travertine argues an extremely important distinction for a number of reasons the first reason is that you have to know the kind of problem that you're facing if you want to solve it if you're facing a puzzle the path to a solution is very different than if you're facing a mystery you go about solving those problems in fundamentally different ways but more than that he says the reason this distinction is so critical is that most of the institutions that we have built in the modern world coming out of the 19th century to solve our problems are built on the assumption that the problems we face are puzzles that the task of institutions is to gather information in order to solve problems but treverton says the problem with that is that that's not true anymore that the nature of the problems that we face are now overwhelmingly mysteries they are problems none of a lack of information but of too much information right in other words we have institutions that are not suited to the type of challenges that we face now I said earlier that I think this is a transition that is affecting all aspects of modern life and you can pick almost any profession and you can see how they are grappling struggling to deal with this transition from a puzzle to a mystery let me give you an example from medicine I think in fact that the world of medicine is one of the areas that has had to deal with this transition most acutely a generation ago if you were a middle aged man complaining of pain in your hips and spine and blood in your urine you would go to your urologist the urologist would give you a if he found a lump on your prostate he would say you have prostate cancer we're taking it out that is medicine as puzzle-solving you present with a problem you gather information there's a clear course of action right now that's not the way we work that's not the way that particular problem unfolds now if you are a middle-aged man we encourage you to go to your doctor and get what's called a PSA test which is a blood test that measures the presence of an antigen in your blood associated with an enlarged prostate if your PSA test is elevated the doctor says we should look more closely they'll do an ultrasound if the ultrasound is problematic we'll do a biopsy they will take a little sliver of your prostate if they see some kind of unusual cell growth they will recommend a course of action whether it's radiation chemotherapy surgery or doing nothing now that is a profoundly different way of solving the problem and it requires a very different set of skills on the part of the doctor who's involved in fact there is almost nothing in common between those two ways of treating the disease let me explain the PSM I forgive me I'm gonna go on a little 10-minute detour here about prostate cancer which is I know a bit much for first thing in the morning but bear with me because I think it's important to understand this transition if we are to him to understand the much more important question of how the responsibilities of governments are shifting in the modern era so the PSA test that we give to middle-aged men is on a scale of zero to as high as you want to go zero is normal and the higher your score is the more abnormal we think your prostate might be we have decided that the cutoff point for when we think there's a problem is a score of four now why do we choose four as the as the cutoff point for when we think there's a problem there's no real reason it's just a matter of judgment in our judgment in the judgment of many doctors for is when things start to get problematic is it the case that if you lower that number you would find more cancer yes there is probably as much cancer at a cut-off point of three as there is at four it's a matter of judgment right all right when we say cancer what do we mean well normally when you have a tumor you just and you're going to biopsy that tumor what you do is you just take some cells from the tumor and you see whether they are cancerous right but with an enlarged prostate there is no tumor is just that the prostate is in some early stages of transition so what we do is we and forgive me I really am getting into the details here but if you're a man your prostate is the size of a golf ball it's big what we do is we divide it up into six areas we take a slice of each area why do we take six slices no particular reason it's just we figure six is a good number if we take 12 slices would we find more cancer yes we would so why don't we lower the cutoff point to say two and do twelve slices instead of six we'd find more cancer wouldn't we right well now it gets tricky again what do we mean by cancer there's three kinds of cancer category one is cancer that moves so slowly that if you ignored it you would die of something else first category two is cancer that moves so fast that nothing you can do is going to save your life category three is cancer that moves at a medium pace and if you get there in time and stop it you'll live all right now screening for prostate cancer makes no difference in category one you weren't gonna die of prostate cancer it makes no difference in category two you're dead anyway and in fact in in both those cases it can be worse than doing nothing at all to intervene the only area a kind of cancer where it makes sense to do something is category three the kind of cancer that moves at a medium pace and if you catch it in time you can save your life okay so here's the crucial question facing the physician what is the ratio of type 1 and type 2 cancer to type 3 the answer is almost all prostate cancer is one and two almost all cancer is the kind of cancer for which intervening in almost all prostate cancer is the kind of cancer in which intervening makes no sense right now do you understand how hard the task of the doctor is in the old model the doctor had the physician had an operational role his I'm sorry in the old model did the physician hat was a collector of information he simply gathered some data and acted right was really simple now the doctor has to be an analyst of information he is all of this really confusing information about his patient and he has to decide what am I going to do am I going to use four is the cutoff point or something else am I going to take 6 slices or 12 how do I decide whether my patient is 1 2 or 3 how do I make sense of all the various risks and benefits of all the different methods of treatment I have drugs radiation treatment surgery he's doing nothing if has all of a sudden gone from a very straightforward procedure to a complicated intellectually complicated procedure more than that in the old paradigm the doctor was played an operational role his job was to find out whether your prostate needed to be removed and remove it today the doctor plays a social role today the doctor has his primary responsibility is to communicate in a meaningful manner with his patient to understand how his patient feels about what the most appropriate course of action is so if you're a man your risk of having prostate cancer is your age I am 54 years old I have a 54% chance of having prostate cancer I have to be someone who is so convinced that most prostate cancer is category one and to that I don't care I don't want and I'm never gonna have my prostate checked ever I'm completely unmoved by all this there's a statistic that says that we treat a hundred men for prostate cancer in order to save one life I look at that and say it's not worth it now there could be another man in this audience who hears those same statistics and says I absolutely want to get my prostate checked tomorrow right that's I'm not right and they're not wrong and they're not wrong and I'm not right that it's just different perspectives on how to deal and live with risk if you're a doctor you need to understand what your patient feels how they what their attitude towards risk is how they want to live their life do they want to ignore risks or they do they want to confront them head on and somehow have those kinds of complicated conversations with a patient and come up with a solution that is most appropriate for them that is what medicine as mystery-solving looks like and it has nothing in common with the way that medicine has been practiced for hundreds of years up to this point in fact I would venture to say that there are very few doctors today who were educated during their time in medical school into how to handle the much more difficult and complicated social questions of modern medicine rather they were educated and trained in the old model of medicine as puzzle-solving now I think that exact same shift is what is facing governments that we have built a series of government institutions around the world that are premise taun the notion that the problems that we face are puzzles that governments play an opera operational role and the governance job is to collect information and dispense resources accordingly but that is not the nature of the world we live in anymore let me give you a couple of examples for example think about education it's pretty well accepted that one of the most important responsibilities of governments in the modern world is to provide a quality public education for their citizens there is probably no more important responsibility when it comes to preparing a modern economy to succeed right than having a well-educated population so how do you ensure that your education system is of the highest possible quality well after a fold several generations of research we've come to a much better understanding of this we used to think that it was simply a matter of spending enough money on education or making classes small enough for building schools now we understand more and more that the most critical person and in the whole education equation is the teacher good teachers make an enormous difference in how good an educational system is to give you an example of this a teacher in the 80th percentile will teach your child a year and a half's material in one year a teacher in the twentieth percentile will teach your child half a year's material in one year that is a difference of a full year of learning in one year between a very good teacher and a mediocre teacher that is enormous that is astronomically large and what that says is the primary responsibility of a government in the modern age is to figure out a way to maximize the quality of teachers in the classroom right now how do we do that well in the past generation or so there has been a whole move throughout the world to what's called value-added metrics value-added metrics they say what we do with the teacher is at the beginning of every school year we measure the performance of the children in that classroom say we give them all a reading test and we see where they fall are they in the 60th percentile as a group and then at the end of the year we measured them again and we if they now fall in the 50th percentile as a group we see that that teacher has had a -10 effect on the class has moved them back 10 percentile points if they now follow in the 70th percentile we say that teacher is a plus ten and is someone is the kind of teacher who can move our students ahead that i grossly simplified how that works but that describes how we are around the world measuring the quality of teachers increasingly and if you look in various countries that have adopted what value-added metrics you can say they are becoming increasingly important we're using them to drive hiring decisions firing decisions to decide how much to pay people whether to promote people parents are using those measures to decide what schools they want to go to or what teachers they want for their children they have become extremely important right they have defined what people think of as the responsibilities of government in the educational world now what have we learned very recently though about value-added metrics well we've learned that the problem is a good deal more complicated so for example what we've discovered is that value-added metrics are incredibly variable so there are for example there were all kinds of different ways different algorithms that can be used to measure a teacher's value-added score there he'll have subtle they're based on the same idea but they have subtle differences what happens if I use a different algorithm to try and measure a teacher's quality what happens is you see that a teacher will go from being ranked as one of the best to ranked as mediocre credible movement what happens if I measure a teacher in different subjects so I want to know how good a math teach mathematics teacher is at teaching mathematics so I measure them in their calculus class and I get a score for them what happens if I measure them in their algebra class will those two scores correspond the answer is they won't a teacher can be seen as a brilliant teacher of algebra but a terrible teacher of calculus most important what happens if I if I measure a teacher's quality over different years what if I compare my score as a teacher this year with my score as a teacher last year what I discovered is there are huge swings from year to year a teacher who can be seen as superb in one year can have a terrible score the next year now any kind of measure that's trying to assess the quality of performance that's that variable is is a problem it's highly problematic right how do you have any faith in that so what's the reason for that high variability the reason is that good teaching we now understand is about an interaction between a teacher and a student right you can't take the student out of the equation that students are responding to a certain kind of teacher teaching a certain kind of subject in a certain kind of situation the reason that teachers can have scores that are really high one year and really low the next is that their students have changed and one teacher can be fantastic at teaching a roomful of very very capable students from well-educated backgrounds and be very poor at teaching a classroom of students who are not that capable from poor backgrounds and vice-versa some teachers can be fantastic at teaching poor students and not very good at teaching highly capable students now think about what that fact means for the role of government it used to be the case that if you were trying to build a quality educational system you were solving a puzzle you were just deciding where I spend resources and I you would collect information about teachers and you would say oh I need to hire that person and fire that person now that we understand though that good teaching is about an interaction between a teacher and a particular pupil the task of managing and creating an effective school has gotten an order of magnitude harder all of a sudden now we are faced with a much more complicated task we have to simultaneously measure the quality of teachers and the quality of students we have to figure out how they intersect and then we have to arrange schools such that that there is the best possible fit between the person to the front of the classroom and the person in the classroom that is not easy that requires negotiations with teachers with parents constant monitoring of students more than that it requires that we shift from thinking about students as groups to thinking about students as individuals it requires that the educational system no longer think about serving a classroom of students but it requires the educational system to start saying how does this student different from that student different from that student and relate to this teacher or that teacher or that teacher when you understand the problem of education as a mystery you understand that the role of the government has profoundly changed they are now in the business of providing individualized personalized solutions and not group solutions let me give you another example of this particular shift there was a really interesting paper that came out a couple weeks ago by a group of public health experts at the Bloomberg School in University of Johns Hopkins University and in in the United States and they were looking at life expectancy and they made the observation they were comparing life expectancy gains in every decade since the 1950s all around the world and they observed that in the 1950s and 1960s there were huge increases in life expectancy in virtually every country in the world but since then over the last 20 years or so those gains have slowed dramatically and even in some cases have gone into reverse now the question is why is this happening well you might say well it makes sense because now that we've raised average life expectancy so high we're now coming up against the natural biological limits of the human lifespan you would expect the gains to slow and that's true in part but then the researchers point out that the biggest slowdown in life expectancy increases are in the countries that have the lowest life expectancy right the group of countries that have life expectancy of below 51 years are the ones who've seen the biggest slowdown that has nothing to do with natural biological limits to how high you how long you can live right that's a whole different problem okay you might say well maybe this is simply just a statistical consequence of this very unusual thing that happened in the world in the 1980s and 1990s which was the AIDS epidemic right and they say the researchers say yes that's true but turns out that even in countries that had that largely escaped the brunt of the AIDS epidemic we see the same pattern right so it's not the AIDS epidemic then you might say well maybe it's because in the last 20 or 30 years we have been spending less and less on health care totally not true we've been spending more and more what about maybe it's the case that in the last 20 years we have had a real slowdown in medical innovation right not true the opposite is true the last 20 years have been a golden age of medical innovation right so what's the reason for this puzzling change why have one of them it's one of the most disturbing facts about the modern world that all of a sudden the tremendous gains that we made in the post-war era are slowly coming to a halt and in many cases being reversed the answer is that the nature of the problem that we face when it comes to providing quality health care to our citizens has changed right in the 1950s if you were trying to solve the problem of making your population healthier it was a puzzle what you needed to do was to provide more resources buy more drugs build more hospitals hire more doctors it was fairly straightforward but now we're dealing with a problem that is a mystery it's a good deal more complicated and it's not caused by in many cases by a lack of resources in many cases it's caused by an excess of resources right think about a problem possibly one of the most serious medical healthcare problems facing the world today which is diabetes the problem that is exploding in every corner of the world I think the number of diabetes deaths is expected to double around the world between now and 2030 and the cost of diabetes to healthcare systems as I'm sure all of you know is astronomical this is the thing that's going to bankrupt us what is diabetes caused by it is caused by changes in lifestyle it's brought about by affluence it's about vii increasingly sedentary habits and increasingly rich diets that are causing people to have their people's physiology to spiral out of control in ways we could never have imagined and how do you solve the problem of diabetes being out of control well you can make some inroads by spending more by buying more drugs and hiring more physicians and building more hospitals but fundamentally the problem that you face is that you have to convince your population to change their lifestyle to eat better and to exercise more and that's not easy that requires that you learn how to motivate pee that requires that you understand their psychology that you speak to them from a position of credibility and trust that you reach into their into their individual hearts and motivate them in ways that governments aren't used to do it tackling modern healthcare problems requires that governments behave in ways that they have never behaved before and learn to speak to people in a way they've never had to speak to them before one last example the many of you remember last summer there was that cyberattack in Europe the wanna cry cyberattack which has the effect of shutting down the British healthcare service crippling FedEx's operations in federal Express's operations in Europe it ended up affecting I think 300,000 computer systems in 150 countries and in many cases people were required to pay ransoms to get their systems up again working again you know this is an example of something that isn't becoming increasingly common right this ransomware or whatever cyber attacks whatever phrase we use to describe it and what is interesting about it is that it represents a fundamentally novel kind of risk we're used to the idea that somebody would go into a bank and rob that bank we're in we're used to the idea of theft that takes place on a individualized case-by-case basis this is structural theft this is theft that affects an entire system across national boundaries we've never really faced that kind of crime before it's a completely unfamiliar kind of risk or think about what's going to take place in the coming decade when we move to autonomous vehicles virtually everyone considers the move to autonomous vehicles as inevitable rightward that's where we're all headed and what autonomous vehicles will do is they will greatly reduce the amount of accents that are due to human error right that's the great advantage but they bring with them a new completely novel kind of risk and that is the risk that comes from some kind of third party interference your car now becomes an object that can be hacked by an outsider right and if you want to be terrified have a conversation with someone in the autonomous vehicle business but how they intend to defend against hacking threats to automobiles and their answer is we don't really know right we have a entirely new kind of risk on the horizon that we've not coped with before now I could go down the list and talk about the number of novel risks that are lurking on the horizon in our world think about climate change for millennia we have dealt with the fact that the weather is highly variable that we have droughts and floods that we have hurricanes that we have all kinds of ups and downs in the weather and we've developed institutions to deal with them private insurance public insurance we have found a way to make the unpredictable predictable and it's worked really well but now we have climate change coming along and climate change is a kind of unpredictability that we have never seen before that we cannot properly model or account for and which our institutions our insurance institutions don't know how to deal with this is an entirely novel kind of risk right now will we develop ways of dealing with these novel risks I'm sure we will but I think we all have to understand what kind of threat these sorts of novel risks face write novel risks are profoundly upsetting and anxiety-producing for the public you know last year around the world 1.25 million people died in automobile accidents that is a terribly high number and that is 1.25 million individual tragedies but none of those automobile accidents caused fundamental breakdown in societies right why because we've been dealing with the risks of automobiles for over a hundred years we understand why they happen and we understand what we can do to prevent them but all of a sudden if you have a situation where someone hacks into a tractor-trailer driving at 70 miles an hour down a highway and causes a hundred car pileup and 200 people die that's a kind of risk we haven't seen before and that's going to be profoundly terrifying similarly if we wake up one day and Miami and Mumbai and countless other coastal cities are under water right that is going to be and millions of people are displaced and billions of dollars in real estate is lost that is going to be profoundly upsetting to people in a way that we've never seen before and what will that require of government that will require that government play a very different role tha's had to pay in the past governments going to have to to learn how to reassure people in a time of unusual anxiety but how to reach out and to calm their fears and to convince them that our institutions are good enough to get us through this period and to treat them and to think about them from a psychological perspective and not just as a recipient of resources or some kind of institutional mechanism that is going to be really hard you know we sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that as we move into an increasingly technologically sophisticated world that all of this new data and algorithms and tools that are at our disposal are going to make the job of managing government's easier and I think that is a mistake but as we raise the sophistication of the tools and the data and algorithms that surround us we're going to have to simultaneously raise the sophistication of our social gifts in government governments are going to have to learn how to treat people as instant as individuals they're gonna have to learn how to reassure people who are frightened and they're going to have to learn how to motivate people to change their lives in meaningful ways that is the challenge that I think all governments around the world are going to face over the next generation they're going to have to find a way to be more human thank you so much [Applause] [Music]

Channel: World Government Summit

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Id: leRRAvnDc6s

Length: 38min 19sec (2299 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 01 2018