>> Kirsten Wiley: Good afternoon and welcome. My name is Kirsten Wiley, and I'm
here today to introduce and welcome Mark Stephenson, who is visiting us as part of the
Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker series. Mark is here today to discuss his new book,
An Optimist’s Tour of the Future. One Curious Man Sets Out to Answer What's Next. It
seems we're inching closer to a future that science fiction writers have speculated about.
While we may not be driving cars, flying cars yet, astounding discoveries are being made
around the world that could significantly change the future. If we handle it right,
technology can help us to rediscover our humanity rather than separate us from it. Mark
is a writer, futurologist, standup comedian and co-director of Flow a cultural learning
consultancy. After graduating from the Information and Technology Institute at Salford
University, he became an editor in an IT think tank before mixing to careers as a
musician and an expert in prime number cryptography. He is a fellow of the Royal
Society of the Arts Manufacture and Commerce. Please join me in welcoming Mark to
Microsoft.
[applause]
>> Mark Stevenson: Hello. Can you hear me all right? Even those people who are
skulking at the back? Okay. Right. So, I suppose I should apologize. Psychologists at
the University of Strathclyde have concluded that people may perform better at public
speaking if they'd recently had sex, so I may as well apologize now [laughter]. I want to
start by showing you two photographs. This is a typical ranchland farm in New Mexico.
In fact, it's typical of how a lot of these farms look the world over. And that is the farm
next door. And those two pictures were taken on the same day, and both those farms
have the same rainfall. But the second farm is sequestering thousands of tons of CO2
into the soil, it's increasing its biodiversity, is reducing its costs, and its increasing its
yields by impressive margins. Now I want to return to these farms a little later in my talk
because what they're doing isn't important in and of itself, or only important in and of
itself, but also it's important in what it says about how we approach the future.
So my book did not start off with any reference to optimism in the title. In fact, when I
originally pitched the book, it was simply called A World Tour of the Future. It was a
book I wanted to write in order to make sense for myself of our rapidly innovating world.
What is the biotech revolution? What is nano technology about? Can Andrew Lloyd
Webber be stopped [laughter]? And so on.
I also wanted to write a book that could be read by anyone. A lot of the books about the
topics that I'm covering are written simply for people who read Scientific American or
New Scientist. And sure. I wanted to write a book for them too, but also for a more
general audience, because I'm passionate about making this stuff accessible. Because the
ethical and economic and social policy issues that come out of areas like genomics and
synthetic biology and networks and climate change and nanotechnology are truly
important. They are going to change the way we and our children live. So that was my
aim. But by the time I'd came back from my travels, I'd seen so many possibilities for a
brighter future that the world optimist got into the title. And those possibilities I have to
say surprised me.
So, in the course of me research I spoke to a man called Stewart Brand who wrote a book
called Whole Earth Discipline, and in referring to the tools and technology that science
now offers us, he wrote, “We are as gods and we better get good at it.” Well, I don't
think we'll do that if more of us aren't informed about the possibilities. I think we could
become bad gods.
Now all of this talk about us becoming gods is a little daunting to some people, and
others find that language a tad inflammatory. So I prefer instead to say that we’re
moving from being the tenants of the planet to becoming the landlord. So, until recently
we acted a bit like students. We tended not to care too much if one of us dented the wall
or threw up on the carpet. It was not our carpet, after all. Except when it comes to the
planet, it is. And that means we need to rethink, and yes, British Petroleum, I'm talking
to you.
If you don't like that analogy here's another that I came across when I visited the Mojave
Spaceport, where the commercial spaceflight industry is literally getting off the ground.
Now let me tell you little bit about the people I met in Mojave. They are mostly, fiercely
right-wing libertarians. There military minded. They hunt, they shoot, they fish; they
hate liberals. This man is in a dark room. This man is Dick Rutan. He's one of the
world's finest aviators. If you come into Seattle airport, there's an airplane hung up, a
modern one. It's called Voyager. It went around the world on one tank of petrol and he
is the man who flew that.
Anyway so, this is a direct quote from Dick, “Stephen Hawking is a prick. You’re telling
me I can't go faster than the speed of light? Bullshit. Einstein's theory of relativity,
bullshit. Never look at a limitation as anything you ever comply with, never. Only look
at it as an opportunity for greatness.” Now Dick also told me that what fighter pilots use
for their birth control are their personalities and I believe him.
So it would be very easy to characterize these hard living, swearing, frontier-living
characters as unthinking searchers of novelty who appropriate resources to satisfy their
personal ambitions, with little care for the ecological impact. But that would be wrong,
because all of them are strong advocates of sustainability. This man here is Stuart Witt.
He's an ex-Navy pilot, but he is now the spaceport manager. And he said to me, “How
would you explain to me our unsustainable use of fossil fuels to an alien? It’s rather
barbaric. So doing this thing that we now dub green is literally doing the right thing. This
isn't about politics. It's about doing the right thing as stewards of spaceship Earth.”
And he's echoing the sentiment of William S Burroughs who said, “After one look at this
planet any visitor from outer space would say I want to see the manager.”
This man on the left here is Jeff Greeson. He was on the Gustin Commission, but he is
also the CEO of a space plane startup called XCorp. And he said, “I can't support the
industrial scale reckless waste of the planet. I like the planet. It's where all my stuff is. I
think we should manage the planet, better because like it or not, we're in charge of it.”
And I agree with him. I like this planet; it's where all my stuff is. And I suspect you feel
the same too. Not only should we manage it better, I think that we can. Now science is
putting at our disposal tools that are growing in power every day and at an astonishing
rate. But as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Spiderman are supposed to have said, “With great
power, comes great responsibility.” And yes, this is just a gratuitous excuse to put a
Spiderman picture up in Microsoft.
But because of that power and because of that responsibility it is really important that we
get the story of our future that we tell ourselves, right. Because you can't make a better
future, until you can imagine it. Now we have plenty of biographers; they're called
historians. But who is script writing the next episode? I mean think about it. If I recall
the story of the future, I'd been used to hearing in the discourse of our politics and its
reflection in our media, my perception of the story something a bit like this: The future is
rubbish, especially if you vote for that guy. It was better in the old days. You've got to
look after yourself. The world is violent and unsafe. Your job is at risk. The generation
below you are feral and dangerous. Things are changing too fast. You can't trust those
scientists or new agers, or Democrats or Republicans, or nerds, or geeks, or religious
people, or atheists, or football fans, or the rich, or the poor, or what you eat or your
neighbor. You are alone. Make the best of it. Vote for me. Buy my paper. I
understand. I mean it's hardly inspiring, is it?
What's worse is [makes funny noises] just got into a Yoda impression some reason there.
I don't know why [does an inaudible Yoda voice impression]. Anyway, sorry. What's
worse about that story is it seems pretty constant. I mean, I can't remember a time
without it. I actually feel its fingers reaching deep into my soul. And in that context,
optimism is seen as naivety. And I'm going to tell you why it's not.
Now, as part of my trip, I visited this man. This is Mohamed Nasheed. He is the
president of the Maldives. And he told me thoughts are real. Once you’ve given thought
to something, it then because material very often and quickly. And he should know. A
former political prisoner, he's now the first democratically elected president of his nation.
He was imprisoned on 16 separate occasions and spent a total of six years in jail. Of
those, 18 months were spent in solitary confinement. The former dictatorial regime
bound his legs and his hands. They put laxatives and broken glass in his food, and he
was often placed in a cell deliberately designed to heat up like an oven in the sunshine.
And he told me the thing that saddened him the most about these experiences was that he
missed the birth of his two daughters. He was regularly beaten. He was tortured to the
brink of death, twice. And now he is the president.
And he was only able to achieve this, he told me, by seeing a picture other than the very
fearful picture that is staring you right in the face. With the belief that there is hope, that
there is a bright future. And now he's applying that same attitude to climate change
because the Maldives, being one of the lowest lying nations on the earth, is naturally
worried about sea level rise. He's in the process of turning his country carbon neutral.
And he's already making impressive inroads, as an example, to the rest of us. Now I was
lucky enough to attend an underwater cabinet meeting, which was held as part of the
campaign to draw attention to his nation's plight. Now you may have seen this. It got
huge international coverage. Who isn't intrigued by a government meeting taking place
underwater? I'll also warn you, it's the only time you’ll see an entire meeting in tight
fitting black rubber, and it's not something to do with the English aristocracy.
[laughter]
>> Mark Stevenson: After we swam back to the shore, I found myself swimming next to
the president, and his head turned to me and I must've looked surprised, because he made
the underwater hand signal for are you okay. And I responded to say, yes, I was okay,
because there is no underwater hand signal for, bloody hell, I'm at an underwater cabinet
meeting at the Maldives, how cool is that?
[laughter]
>> Mark Stevenson: It's the sort of moment that makes you realize that everything is
possible. And that's not a throwaway line. By the time I returned home from my travels
I did come to realize that rather than our future being a damage limitation exercise, it
could be a Renaissance. Now, I'm not saying the future will be better. But I do believe
we have everything to play for. So, let's have a few examples. When we think of the
future we tend to think about it in personal terms. As you get older you particularly start
to think more and more about how long you've got, and how healthy those years are
going to be. Well, the good news is that all of us are living longer and healthier, on
average. So can anybody here guess the lowest average life expectancy anywhere in the
world a hundred years ago? Go on, it's a figure. This is Microsoft; we're in research.
You must be able to guess. Guess.
>>: 35.
>> Mark Stevenson: 35, anybody else?
>>: 22.
>> Mark Stevenson: 22. Spot on.
>>: 40.
>> Mark Stevenson: Now he's already got it. I said spot on.
>>: [laughter]
>> Mark Stevenson: You just wanted to speak, didn't you? That was incredible. This is
great. I say, nobody got that at Google, by the way, so, well done Microsoft. Does
anyone want to guess which country that was? Oh, come on. Let's get a little bit of
action in the room. Come on.
>>: South Africa.
>> Mark Stevenson: South Africa, no.
>>: Iceland.
>> Mark Stevenson: Iceland, no. Not Iceland. It was actually Bangladesh.
>>: Bangladesh?
>> Mark Stevenson: Uh-huh. Now people in Bangladesh, on average, are living ‘till 67.
And does anyone want to guess what the lowest life expectancy is on the planet today?
>>: 67?
>> Mark Stevenson: 44. And that's in Afghanistan. That's a public health miracle.
Worldwide, even Afghanistan, war-torn, troubled Afghanistan, life expectancy is twice
what it was in Bangladesh just a century ago. In fact the gap between rich and poor in
terms of life expectancy is narrowing at an astonishing rate. And advances in public
health and medicine are not abating. This lucky lady is Kaitlyne McNamara. She's not
lucky because she's being kissed by George Bush. That would be a ridiculous thing to
say, although her father looks quite pleased about it [laughter]. She's lucky because she's
one of the few people on the planet to have two bladders. The one that she was born
with, which was diseased and the one she has now. Which is a fully functioning, healthy
replacement grown in a laboratory by cultivating her own stem cells, and then implanted
back into her. And she's not the only one. There are quite a few people wandering the
planet with stem cell grown replacement body parts. In fact the Wake Forest Institute of
Regenerative medicine in North Carolina is already growing 22 parts of human tissue in
the laboratory.
So is it possible in the future if I need a hip replacement, I’ll grow my own? Well,
actually researchers at Columbia University Medical Center in New York have already
demonstrated just that technique in rabbits. Using the animal’s own stem cells to re-grow
entire joints. Thomas Einhorn at Boston medical Center has helped more than 50 of his
patients with degenerative hip disease by injecting their own stem cells into the hip to
help them grow new bone. And then of course there's the genomics revolution. I went to
see this man, and not just because he has the best beard in science. He's George Church.
I'm sure many of you know he was the man who along with some colleagues kicked off
the Human Genome Project. But it's what he's doing now that you really need to pay
attention to. It's something called the Personal Genome Project. And it's a study that
could radically change medical practice. Over the coming years George and his
colleagues will sequence 100,000 volunteers’ genomes and try to correlate that data with
those volunteers’ personal traits, their lifestyles and their medical history, to shed light on
how our genetic code interacts with our environment and lifestyle, and when that's good
for us, and when that's bad for us.
And the idea is you'll be able to avoid a good number of diseases simply by adapting your
lifestyle, because now we’ll know, for you and your genome, bananas, Tabasco and
tequila really are a dangerous cocktail [laughter].
Beyond teasing out the relationship between our genes and our lives, studies like
George's can give us access to a treasure trove of life-saving drugs that already exist but
cannot be prescribed. So, currently drugs get rejected because they fail in say 1% of the
population. And a drug with that kind of failure rate is never going to get approved by
the FDA. But you could use genome data to figure out the 1% and then give that drug to
the other 99% who would benefit. And the side effect of that is that drugs could get a lot
cheaper. Because drug companies don't have to swallow the development cost of the, on
average, 4999 drugs that don't make it to market into the one that does.
Now getting these drugs and other benefits of personal genomics requires cheap massmarket human genome sequencing. So, we need to get to the point where all of us if we
want to, can share our genome with our doctor. So it's nice to know that the cost of
genome sequencing isn't so much falling, as plummeting. This is the algorithmic scale.
Think about it, the first complete human genome cost $100 million and that was layered
on top of 3 billion spent by the competing publicly funded effort. That was only 11 years
ago and now there's a man in Harvard called David White, who has actually worked out a
way to do it for $30.
Now if sequencing costs carries on getting cheaper at that rate, you can even begin to
sequence genomes held in different individual cells and then compare them. As a ground
breaking study already has done at the Sanguine Institute in the UK, where they took a
healthy lung cell from somebody, and compared it to a cancerous lung cell in the same
patient. And that starts to herald a diagnosis which goes beyond, I’m sorry to tell you
that you have cancer, to, you'll be pleased to know we've sequenced your cancer and
here's a personalized set of treatments for you. And it's not just the biological sciences
that are given these incredible and interesting medical options. This is Robin af
Ekenstam, and he's the first recipient of that thing they're called Smarthand, which is
controlled by his thoughts. It not only replicates the movements of its human equivalent
that he lost to cancer, but also returns to him a sense of touch.
I could go on; the book is full of this stuff. Medicine isn't abating. And if it continues we
could potentially look forward to cheaper medicine that is preventative and interventions
that can save or enhance our lives in ways that would've been impossible to think about
just a few short years ago. Now when faced with this trend of longer healthier lifestyles,
a lot of pessimists immediately and understandably start to worry about the population. I
mean, isn't it the case that we’re heading for some kind of carrying capacity crunch with
too many mouths to feed? Yet, despite the dramatic increase in human population since
1950s, world food production per capita has actually increased, which is a stunning
achievement. There's more food per person now than there has ever been. Our crime has
been that we have not distributed either it or the means of production equitably. Even
still, according to the UN, there's a global food security situation that taken long-term, is
improving. Now the big worry is that the effects of climate change will greatly reduce
our capacity to grow food, as crops wither under the onslaught of rising temperatures.
And that is a very real concern, but don't worry. I'll be solving climate change a little bit
later in this presentation. But even if we didn't have the climate to worry about, it’s sure
that we couldn't just carry on adding production ad infinitum. I mean we would run out
of capacity at some point.
Well, the good news is that our population is in the process of stabilizing. And the
important thing you need to keep in mind is 2.1. Okay. That's the number of children, on
average, that every woman needs to have to keep the population static. And while 2.1
doesn't account for the fact that some women are having, very, very tiny babies, it's just a
statistical measure that counts the fact that some of us don't have children because we die
before we get a chance, we choose not to, or we are infertile.
So countries that aren't replacing their population today include the United States,
Canada, Russia, China, Australia, New Zealand, every country in Europe, Chile, Brazil,
Sri Lanka, Thailand, North and South Korea, Tunisia, Japan Singapore, I could go on.
Taken worldwide, the human race's fertility rate has fallen from 4.92 in the 1950s to 2.56
in 2000. And by 2050, the UN's median variance estimate, which is statistician speak for,
best guess, is that the figure will dip below the all-important 2.1 replacement level across
the entire world population. Which means we’ll stabilize about 9 billion people and then
possibly fall in number. In fact, interestingly, some economists are now worried about
populations falling, because they believe that population growth and economic growth
are linked together. I disagree with them, but it's interesting that there are people
worrying today about populations following rather than rising.
But 9 billion is still a lot of people. Can we increase our agricultural yields to support
them? Well the good news is, the answer is, yes, and we can combat climate change at
the same time. This is the Black Phantom. And I went to visit it in the Zealand. And
what it does is make charcoal. Now for those of you that don't know, a quick summary
of why eco-geeks love charcoal, is that it locks up carbon in a non-biodegradable form
that you can bury, keeping that carbon out of the atmosphere. Now scientist Carl
Johannes Lehmann estimates that of the 60 gigatons of carbon taken out of this sky by
plants as they grow, 10% of it ends up as waste in agriculture or forestry. So that's
cornstalks, rice stocks, branch and leaf litter, that kind of stuff. Enough that if we turned
it to charcoal it could not only halt, but actually decrease the number of atmospheric
carbon by 9.7 gigatons a year, reclaiming the CO2 that we've been pumping into the
atmosphere. But how do you get a bunch of farmers and foresters to start turning their
waste biomass into charcoal?
Well, the good news is that certain types of charcoal, when you add them to the soil, can
radically improve your agricultural yield as high as 50% in some cases. It's a natural and
often very powerful fertilizer. Unfortunately, it's not quite as simple as just taking some
charcoal in the ground. While the right type of charcoal will increase your yields, the
wrong type can actually send them falling. So you need to get the right sort of charcoal
for your soil where you are, which means you need a high degree of control over the
charcoal making process. It's called paralysis. You need to control the temperature that's
in that pot, the mixture of oxygen and so on and so forth. And that's what’s so important
about this machine because it gives you that control. It gives farmers and foresters the
ability to dial up exactly the right cooking program to deliver the charcoal they need
tailored to their soils and therefore increase their yields. So now they've got a reason to
bury the charcoal. In fact, this machine now has such control over the pressures of
making the charcoal, that Carbonscape, the company that makes it, can create activated
carbon. If you don't know, activated carbon is an extremely porous form of carbon that
has lots of interesting uses from absorbing pollutants, to air purification, to water
filtration and even temporarily neutralizing the effects of poisons. It's used a lot in
industry. But more impressive to me you can actually buy these. Flatulence filtering
underwear that passes your farts through activated carbon filters to neutralize the whiff
[laughter]. I have no idea how they convinced that woman to be in the advert. Imagine
she was your mum, terrible.
So there you are. Okay. It's a way to help feed our growing population, combat climate
change, improve the lot of farmers and make your boyfriend less offensive all at the same
time. Even if you don't accept the climate change argument, this is undeniably a good
thing to do. So let's keep this farming theme, okay? So I’m driving through the
Australian Outback with two Aussie geezers called Townie and Bruce. And Townie
stops the car and we get out and we look at this paddock here. So, as you can see it's
almost totally bereft of vegetation. Not only is it totally bereft of legislation now, I'm
sure it is bereft of legislation but it's more importantly bereft of vegetation. Okay. Now
as you know Australia has this unfortunate cycle of drought and flood. When I visited
the drought was nine years long. So naturally I said to Townie looking at that paddock, is
that the lack of rain? And he said look down the fence. And there we were standing up
to our knees in grass. And from that moment on I saw that nearly everywhere we went,
outside the fence grass, inside the fence barren earth. And Tony bends down he picks up
some of this grass and it comes away in his hand. And he says, ah, but this is dying. And
that's the other half of the problem.
So in understanding what was happening here, I discovered something that was truly
awe-inspiring. Now I know we’re in Seattle, I know this is Microsoft. But I'm going to
talk about some technology that is distinctly low-tech. And if you'll bear with me,
because the potential of it is astonishing. To understand that you need to go back in time
to when our grasslands were dominated by large herds of grazing animals. Whether
bison here in America, or wildebeests in Africa. In fact, the Serengeti's one of the few
remaining natural grasslands on the planet. And it's home to these huge migrating herds
of wildebeest and zebra. Now there's no beginning or end to their journey, just this
constant trek in search of water and fresh grass. And every year, 2 million animals cover
1800 miles and the herds stay closely packed as defense against predators. Now what
happens is the herd eats the grass, but then it moves on looking for some fresh stuff.
Now in the Serengeti that herd won't be back on the same piece of ground for at least a
year. And that's important because there is a natural relationship between grasses and
grazing animals that has grown up over millions of years.
See, the growing buds of a grass plant are at its base, and it means that they need
sunlight. And if the plant gets to tall, it starts to kill itself in its own shade because it can
photosynthesize, which is why that stuff had come away in Townie’s hand. But in
nature, the herd would've come along eating the tops off the plants, exposing the growth
buds and moved on. And the problem with the way we farm livestock is that we don't let
them roam. We take these big herds and we split them up between separate paddocks
and we keep them there for far too long.
And with no predators they, can wonder where they like, which means the grass never
gets a chance to grow, because an animal has a go at it as soon as it starts sprouting. And
that's important because grass plants grow roughly the same amount of root matter as leaf
matter. And if a cow or sheep nibbles that plant at the top the plant will lose a
corresponding amount of root matter into the soil within minutes. And that enriches the
soil with carbon. Now nearly all of that carbon will return to the atmosphere as the root
rots. But it leaves behind a small amount of stable carbon residue. And as Townie told
me, a little bit of a bloody big amount soon adds up, because there are 3.5 billion acres of
agricultural grassland on our planet. And if you increase the organic carbon content of
their soils by just 1% that would offset nearly 12 years of global CO2 emissions. And
1% is nothing. Much higher percentages are possible and I saw them.
Now almost any farmer can adopt this system. And while doing it he does his business a
huge favor. All he needs is some fences. And then he builds lots of small paddocks. He
forms his cattle into a big herd and he puts them in each paddock for a day or two,
mimicking how they would've moved on a natural grassland. That's the Serengeti but it's
on a farm. And the result is that. And the benefits are financially enormous. Your cost
of production goes down. You don't need to buy feed; you don't need to buy fertilizer. I
met one farmer using this method whose cost of production for a kilo of beef was a
quarter of the Australian national average. Which means he can sell his meat at a huge
profit for less than the cost that his competitors can manufacture it, and it's all organic
too, if you care about that sort of thing. I met one farmer using this technique who
bought a failing farm. He sold most of the farm equipment and used the proceeds to buy
some fences and two motorbikes and his neighbors thought he was absolutely bonkers.
And now he rides out to a paddock once a day, opens a gate, lets a big herd of cattle walk
through and he goes to the pub. He said to me, I’ll get really tired looking at my
neighbors, they're so busy.
Also, soils that are rich in carbon retain more water. A 1% increase in organic matter
relates to an extra 150 tons of water storage per hector, which for a nation in the grip of
drought is a big deal. And when the rains come, well they don't just skitter off the top of
that compacted soil surface, but sink into the soil. And that starts to end that devastating
cycle of drought and flood. And who do you think is showing the first signs of investing
in this at an institutional level? Pension funds, because they want assets that grow slowly
over time, and that's what this is. So it's good for the planet, it's good for farmers, it's
good for dealing with drought and flood; it's even good for your pension. And all it takes
is a few fences. And what I like about this is it reminds us that even as we develop these
fantastic new technologies, sometimes all we have to do is think a bit clearer to solve
some of our grand challenges.
In fact, Australia has a wealth of people who love to solve really important problems.
This is the stubby glove. It's a glove made of neoprene rubber with an inbuilt bib bottle
holder and the logic being if you fall over, you don't drop your beer [laughter]. Only in
Australia is falling over more of a problem if you've lost your balance but not your beer.
When I first saw this, I walked into the pub, I saw this, and I turned the landlady and said
is that for real? And she completely ignored me and turned to Townie he was standing
next to me, and said, what's his problem? And his reply, he's English, clearly that
explained everything.
In fact if you’re English in Australia conversations begin with either your intellect or
your sexuality being questioned. It's kind of like hello over there. So here's my final
piece of global warning bashing tech. This is Klaus; I just met him in New York. And
he's built a machine that strips CO2 out of the ambient air. Or to put that another way on
one side of Klaus’s machine is air with current levels of CO2 and on the other side of his
machine is air with CO2 levels less than there was before the Industrial Revolution. And
he captures this stuff by passing it over absorbent, and then he gets that absorbent wet
and it releases its CO2 and it bubbles to the top of his machine like bubbles in
Champaign where it can be collected. And he needs just $20 million to turn his lab
prototype into a licensable manufacturable unit that can take a ton of CO2 from the air
every single day. And 100 million of them at current efficiencies would solve the CO2
problem, which sounds like a lot until you realize that we make 73 million cars every
year. So, why not write down this web address and give him a dollar or two, because
your government decided not to.
What to do with all that CO2 though? Here's an idea and it takes us back to George with
the fabulous beard and all that biotech. Because there are so several companies fiddling
with the names of bacteria to make them do interesting things, including creating fuels.
And one of them I spoke to, a company called Jewel Bio Tech has an organism that eats
CO2 and produces gasoline. Now you couple Klaus’s machine with that system or one of
the competing systems, a lot of companies are doing this, and you could literally pull
your fuel out of the sky. Now of course burning those fuels would put the CO2 back but
crucially were not adding to the carbon dioxide as our use of fossil fuels does. So it's
carbon neutral. Think about that. That's a carbon neutral petrol station that pulls its
petrol out of the freaking sky. Now it will take a couple of technology generations to get
the economics right. But even Exxon Mobil gave Craig Venter reportedly $600 million
to look into this idea.
Now I'm afraid because my time is short, I can't tell you about all of the things that I
discovered. I can't tell you, for instance, this is an organic solar panel, made out of
carbon. And it can offer them in off grid power revolution. I don't have time to tell you
about Leo here and other sociable machines that might mean our relationship with the
technology becomes a bit more like friendship. I don't have time to tell you about the
robot brain that's originally in this robot and is arguably self-aware but is now
discovering scientific truths and explaining them to its creator and by some measures is
outperforming Isaac Newton. Regrettably too, I'm going to skip over the revolution in
nanotechnology that is infiltrating manufacturing and will continue to do so, promising
high-performance at ever cheaper costs as we learn to control matter at finer and finer
levels of granularity. And already it has taken the specter of the water war off the table.
By enabling us to create new membranes that radically reduce the cost of desalination.
In fact I just come back from a meeting in Europe where we're implementing this in
Africa. Here's a picture of another nano miracle. This is a tea bag of carbon and nano
fibers that turns a river full of pathogens into a drinkable fresh water source. And it does
it for pennies. So what does it all mean? Well, I think the most important thing that
anybody said to me during my trip came out of the mouth of a philosopher and an ethicist
and a synthetic biology pioneer. A man called Mark Madera and he said change will
happen. And we can either try to influence it in a positive way, or we can try to stop it
from happening or we can ignore it. Trying to stop it from happening is, I think, futile
and ignoring it is irresponsible. You see you can stop the advance of knowledge in some
places for a while if you are brutally draconian or conservative, but not long. And
beyond that lost knowledge is we soon rediscovered and more and more technology gives
us autonomy of the individual. And it makes it harder and harder for us to suppress our
advances whether they are good or bad.
Hoping to roll back the march of human culture, is about as pointless as trying to
reconstruct the frog that your brother has just put into the blender. The frog is dead.
Deal with it. Attempting, as some people are, to hold onto something essentially human
by trying to fight against the very thing that we humans do best which is evolve through
culture and technology is contradictory and ultimately futile. This is who we are,
whether we like it or not. We innovate we invent and we do it faster and faster as time
goes on as one invention gives us a platform to create something more powerful the next
time around. But can our morals keep up with all this change? Einstein famously said it
has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. Well I
think our morals can keep up, but not using many of the systems that we have now. It
became strikingly clear to me that the rate of change embodied in the pace of innovation
in many disciplines is very different from the rate of change that governs the pace of
many of our institutions and, in particular, our governments.
They cannot legislate this stuff. And that is problematic, because all this stuff is
dangerous. And it's not because people and governments or big corporations are lazy or
bad, it's just because they operate in a hierarchy that is not architected to move very fast.
So, as I got to the end of my journey, I came to realize there was a big problem with
innovation. You see when we talk about innovation we usually talk about technology or
medicine. We might even talk about innovation in the arts, dance, music, fashion. What
happens when we talk about institutional innovation, changing the way our corporations
and our government work? You see lots of governments and lots of organizations talk
about stimulating innovation, but they themselves don't change the way they operate.
Let's go back to my own country. Parliamentary democracy, a pretty good innovation
when we invented it. Okay, the last thing we changed, 1928, gave women the vote. Now
when we invented it, it was a massive innovation; it was a huge leap forward. It's 300
years later. Which means that once every four years I get to vote for two people, both of
whom I disagree with, to look after an archaic system that can’t keep up with the pace of
change. Or to quote Einstein again, “you can't solve the problems you got by using the
same level of thinking you had when you created them.”
Vicki Buck is one of the directors of the company that makes the Black Phantom that I
showed you, and she's actually the ex-mayor of Christchurch in New Zealand. That's an
office she held as an independent politician for nine years. And she quit government
despite actually being hugely popular with the massive majority. So she could dedicate
her energy to developing new kinds of schools and building green tech companies,
because she believes, and I agree with her, and this is a direct quote, If we wait for
governments to solve the climate change problem, we're all fucked [laughter]. And yet,
we burn up in a world where we wait for permission to do something. Where power and
influence rest at the top of hierarchies and trickles down except now that's changing,
because the people I met were just getting on with solving our problems. Building their
own legislative frameworks, because they are realizing that we as a network society have
to. Because the tools available to us have become both cheaper and more powerful, it
means we can build even more incredible things without overbearing investment capital
or government funding.
The average cost of a high-tech's start up in Singapore is $50,000, it's nothing. And when
we become more interconnected, we can find the people and resources we need much
more easily, and often, much more cheaply. So, in this coming world you will leave not
by being promoted, but by being connected. I looked at one way our rapidly innovating
and changing world is slightly terrifying. And part of my re-boot was realizing I have to
find a way to deal with change as the norm and not as the exception. Realizing that
society having enjoyed a period of relative stability since the industrial revolution is in
our lifetimes going to change quite dramatically. I need to learn to let go of ideas on a
regular basis, and so to all of you.
And the way I got over this fear was to think of it a bit like a relationship. I mean, have
you ever agonized about breaking up with someone? You go, oh God you know, I'll have
more fun without them. Maybe I should've been with him and I didn't give them enough
of a chance and all that. But if you do split up and it's the right thing, you kind of think
well that was dramatic, but I kind of feel better now and I’ll take what I've learned into
the next relationship. And I think this is kind of how I feel about the industrial capitalist
society I’ve grown up in. I'm kind of scared to break up with it, because we've been
together for so long. But breakup we must, so we can start going steady with the
information age. I concluded that I had to approach my future by judging my worth not
by what I earn, by what I create and share and what other people can then build.
If you look at the intertwining revolutions of nanotech biotech and infotech you'll see an
increasing acceleration of capacity at lower and lower cost. It's a world in which you will
be valued not by how much you earn, but by how much you innovate. Another thing I
realized was it's called the information age for a reason. If you don't know how to sift
fact from opinion, you are in trouble as an individual, as a company, as a nation. In an
age where we are overwhelmed with information, the old model of having it filtered for
us by politicians, newspapers, broadcasters, publishers, even authors, is falling apart. In
fact, if the world becomes more information rich, were beginning to see just how terrible
a job some of those trusted filters have been doing for us. And what that means is a
questing disposition, research skills, the desire to ask meaningful questions is going to
come back into vogue. Being smart is going to be the ultimate fashion accessory. Which
means, we need to teach our kids and ourselves critical creative thinking skills.
And our school system strapped to an industrial model does not do this. And even when
it tries to, it’s stifled. In the UK I was very pleased to find out we now have an A level in
critical thinking. That's great, but now I found out that some of our universities have an
official policy of discounting its value when their thinking about admissions, including
Cambridge. So we're already seeing this almighty clash between old hierarchal past
structures which are being wrong footed by these swift moving networkers. And the next
generation of influences really has no patience with what they see as archaic and quaint
institutions that talk about promoting innovation, but do not innovate themselves.
Because the world is Darwinian in the end, even for governments. If you do not adapt
you die. Ask President Mubarak.
But Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “I like to believe that people in the long run are going to
do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed I think that people want peace
so much that one of these days, governments had better get out of the way and let them
have it.” And perhaps we're inching closer to that moment. In fact, another thing I cover
in the book and I talked about it with the guy who invented the Internet Vince Cerf, is the
staggering decline of violence. I didn't believe it either, but the world is getting far more
peaceful. Yet we think it's more violent. And why is that? Because violence is now
becoming an outrageous exception that we draw attention to, rather than the cultural
norm was just a few centuries ago.
As the tools that we have, become more powerful and the nature of influence becomes
more networked, it is crucial that we put a different narrative of our future back on the
table. And I believe that as a network, we have a far better chance of our future being a
Renaissance than the damage limitation exercise that's being sold to us by the old guard.
It's not really easy; they’ll be lots of trouble along the way, but one thing I do know is, if
you can't imagine a better future, you will not make it.
So Henry G. is one of the senior editors of Nature and he wrote a rather brilliant review
of my book, and not just because it was very, very nice about it, but because I think in a
few short words Henry nailed something important. And what he wrote was this, “The
future is here and all around us. It's just as William Gibson puts it not evenly distributed
yet. And why not? Because although we have 21st century technology our familiar
world from schools to work to our days of retirement hasn't changed since the industrial
revolution. And the future cannot happen until we change our minds to meet it.” And
what I am saying is that we can no longer make do with tired and faded attitudes of
cynicism, lazy opinion and fatalism. Our tools are becoming too powerful for us to wield
them with anything other than critical thinking and a story of renewal.
Because as that would be national and my heart has told me, I like this planet. It's where
all my stuff is. And I think we should manage the planet better because like it or not we
are in charge of it. Not our governments, but you and me. It's one of the reasons I'm now
involved in the project called the Age of Smart. It's kind of a think tank and an action
tank for the planet. Which we’re trialing with an addressable audience of 30 million of
the poorest people in Africa and Asia. We couldn't have even thought about doing that
five years ago. But now we can. So, we need to adopt a new mantra about our future and
then commit ourselves to it as individuals. And it’s simply this: Cheer up; it might
happen. Thank you.
[applause]
>> Mark Stevenson: Any questions? Or have I taken too much of your lunch break?
One of you back there.
>>: What surprised you the most when you are researching the book?
>> Mark Stevenson: What surprised me the most? I get asked this question a lot and it
wasn't one thing. What surprised me the most was how technologies interact. So
innovation always occurs when things clash together. And I think the carbon neutral
petrol station, actually, I think that may have sort of been my idea. Because I had kind of
networked scientists together but you kind of think oh, hang on, you know. And I think
that point about things interacting is really crucial. I went to see a man at MIT who
designs buildings so that people will bump into each other, because innovation only
happens when things brush up against each other. So I think it's the combination of
technologies that surprised me the most; not an individual thing.
>>: Is there anything in the information age more crucial than the fact that we are asking
questions to get to the root of things so that it's crucial we do not get our information
filtered to us through the old technology. With the flood of information everyone looks
for bite-size ways of consume all the information so that by necessity comes through
many, many filters reduced down to corporate information, what is your response about
that?
>> Mark Stevenson: This is a perennial problem, and the solution is only education. Of
course, we choose our filters, we all choose our filters, they’re our friends or our
colleagues or whatever, but we've got to learn to understand where the prejudice is, when
someone selling you a line or the selling you a pup. And the thing is our education
doesn't teach you to do that. It gives you an inventory of facts. It doesn't give you an
inventory of skills for thinking. It doesn't teach you Socratic inquiry, scientific method
logic, how to debate. These are not things of value in our education system. And
unfortunately, now we've got this wealth of information. So yes, we need to filter and to
be more careful, and that's why I run an educational consultancy. Because I believe that
we need to teach everybody to be able to question everything in a good way. So yeah,
and you guys work at Microsoft so hopefully you are on that, hoping to solve that
problem as well, right? I hope so.
>>: What are your thoughts on intellectual property?
>> Mark Stevenson: That's a really good question, intellectual property. I don't know
my thoughts on intellectual property, other than, please by the book and don't download it
[laughter]. But no, actually, I've battled with this one, because if you go back to the
Enlightenment which was this incredible time, nobody sat around thinking about
intellectual property. They all went to coffee houses and shared their ideas because they
realized that the power of an idea came from how many people used it, not who owned. I
think we may be coming to a point where the whole concept of intellectual property
becomes fairly useless. If you look at what's happening in music now, this is interesting.
Music wants to be free, recorded music. But concerts want to be expensive. Okay. I'm
actually an ex-musician; I didn't make any money. So maybe I'm not happy about this
but, you know, I think that's good because it means that musicians who can actually play
their instrument will start to earn money again, because you want the live experience. I
think we’re going to have to get used to the idea that just creating a piece of knowledge is
not enough. You have to go out there and do something with it. And then people will
buy that, the action. That's why I do stand up comedy; that's why I've just written a play;
that's why I'm here, you know. And actually I'm going to make more money from
speaking engagements and people asked me to be on their boards of, on advisory boards
and I will add that to the royalties of this book. So I think maybe, painfully, that we may
have to get rid of patent lawyers, oh dear. Any other questions?
>>: Yes, I'm sure it looks like you've met scads of very intelligent and innovative people
and among some of these people what kinds of personality traits or characteristics did
you notice in common, and what can we do to open ourselves to creative thoughts and
actions?
>> Mark Stevenson: That's a very good question and towards the end of the book I--and
it kind of answers a question from, from the back again, in another would actually, which
was the thing that I thought they all had in common was two things. First, they were
driven by the idea of making the world better. They were just driven by they were
involved in something bigger than themselves. They didn't get into synthetic biology
because they were interested in synthetic biology; they were doing what they are doing so
that I can solve the fuel crisis with this. And Eric Drexler told me that the reason he got
into nanotechnology was because he wanted to save the world, which is a fair old
ambition. The other thing I noticed about all of them is that none of them waited for
permission to do the right thing. They just got on with it and we live in a permissionbased world. We wait for the government or our teacher or our parents to tell us it's
okay. So I think it's better to ask for forgiveness rather than permission. And, you know,
allowing yourself to a bigger project. The other thing I would say is we must have an
optimism of ambition. That's kind of been taken off the table. The pessimists will tell us
it's not worth bothering. Well, if you think like that it isn't. So yeah, I think that probably
answers it, I think. Does that satisfy you?
>>: Yes, thank you.
>> Mark Stevenson: Okay good. Any other questions?
>> Kathryn Schulz: We can just do one more.
>> Mark Stevenson: Okay only one more? Okay, who's the best? You with a nice beard
you look a little bit, little bit like a member of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. That's good.
>>: I like that much better than being here.
>> Mark Stevenson: You now actually have never met the Red Hot Chili Peppers so that
would be really crazy.
>>: That would be weird, right? Truly my ax to grind. So, I was wondering, you said
that the governmental institutions we have are not what we need so I guess my first
question would be what do you envision, is there some sort of philosophical debate about
it?
>> Mark Stevenson: Yes, oh, you've got two parts, sneaky, okay.
>>: Do you see singularity coming, you…
>> Mark Stevenson: Ha, ha, ha, I think I better talk to Ray Kurzweil. I thought I'd bump
into him the other day in San Francisco. We were both on a TV show together. That
interesting. He's an interesting guy. Okay. What shall I do first? Government. I don't
know what the future of government looks like. I know that it doesn’t look like what
we've got now. And also, I don't think you have to know. I think you have to do a bunch
of experiments.
So this age of Smart Project that I’m involved in is one of the experiments. A lot of
people like me -- a lot of people are afraid to make changes or make experiments because
were stigmatized for making mistakes. So, what if we get it wrong? And people all, or
people won't choose a career because they don't know exactly what it is they want to be.
So often I teach and I often talk to kids, and they’re, I don't know what I went to be.
What should I do? What jobs I take? And I say, well just take any one. Because you’ll
learn something. Don't be afraid to get it wrong. because that will give you a guide on
the route. So I think there is something called network governance, and actually I think
you see some examples of this already, and we've all seen some examples on the web of
people actually getting together for all sorts of community things and doing interesting
things and being much more productive.
Actually we look at the history of robotics and artificial intelligence, the hierarchal
models of thought that they tried to program into computers and robots didn't work. And
then they just gave them the sense to react to the world around them and they've gotten
themselves a lot better. So I'm not entirely sure what the answer is, although I think we
need to do a bunch of experiments and we need to do them quickly. As of hence the
agency Smart. So, I’m afraid I don't know. But there again I'm not running for president
so I don’t deal in certainties.
And the second question about the singularity of those you don't know is this idea that
our technology will get to a point where it's evolving so rapidly that the only way we can
possibly survive is to merge with our machines and go off into some techno rapture or
Armageddon. And it’s called the singularity because it's just a singular event that we
can't predict what's going to happen after it. Ray Kurzweil thinks it’ll happen about
2050, I think. I mean I love Ray and I think the questions he raises are really important.
I think all technology is sociotechnical. And we've got lots of things, you know,
technology doesn't always run off with us in the direction. You look at the car; it's been
with us forever, and it's actually restricted us from doing new technology. It kind of, you
know, we've got this huge infrastructure now that means we actually can't innovate on
transport because we are so embedded with this old technology.
So, I think we have to get used to the idea that the human evolution isn't over, that to
some degree we will become a merger of flesh and machines. But I'm not sure where, if
we’re going to hit the singularity at 2050. And what, there was an interesting equation
which says that futurists tend to predict immortality, which is another idea, of, and it's
another sort of consequence of singularity. They tend to predict immortality for about
around about the time that they hit 70. So, you know you just take that equation, if their
50, than they always say, you know, immortality and the singularity will happen about 20
years from now. Ray’s actually better than that because, I think is already 65 but he's
looking incredible. He does seem to have reprogrammed his biology to a certain degree.
I mean the argument for defeating death is credible now, not proven, but it's not so wacko
as it used to be. And they've got people like Kaitlyne, wondering around the planet with
a replacement body part. So, don't know, I'm not holding out for the singularity, but we
should keep an eye. If Ray starts talking with a robotic voice then we'll know
something's happening. Anyway, look, thank you so much for having me. It was very
sweet.
[applause]