tedconfjune – TED Blog

Happiness Expert Dan Gilbert on TEDTalks

tedconfjune — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 14:08:38 +0000

Dan Gilbert is a psychology professor at Harvard, and author of Stumbling on Happiness. In this memorable talk, filmed at TED2004, he demonstrates just how poor we humans are at predicting (or understanding) what will make us happy. (Recorded February 2004 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 22:02)

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Transcript: Daniel Gilbert, TED2004

Daniel Gilbert: Why are we happy? Why aren’t we happy?

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"Paradox of Choice" author Barry Schwartz on TEDTalks

tedconfjune — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 14:07:34 +0000

Barry Schwartz is a sociology professor at Swarthmore and author of The Paradox of Choice. In this talk, he persuasively explains how and why the abundance of choice in modern society is actually making us miserable. (Recorded July 2005 in Oxford, UK. Duration: 20:22)

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(opens with cover shot of book: The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz)

I’m going to talk to you about some stuff that’s in this book of mine, that I hope will resonate with other things you’ve already heard, and I’ll try to make some connections myself, in case you miss them.

I want to start with what I call the “official dogma.” The official dogma of what? The official dogma of all western industrial societies. And the official dogma runs like this: If we are interested in maximizing the welfare of our citizens, the way to do that is to maximize individual freedom. The reason for this is both that freedom is in and of itself good, valuable, worthwhile, essential to being human; and because if people have freedom, then each of us can act on our own to do the things that will maximize our welfare, and no one has to decide on our behalf. The way to maximize freedom is to maximize choice. The more choice people have, the more freedom they have; and the more freedom they have, the more welfare they have.

This, I think, is so deeply imbedded in the water supply that it wouldn’t occur to anyone to question it. And it’s also deeply imbedded in our lives. I’ll give you some examples of what modern progress has made possible for us.

This is my supermarket:

(headings on slide, popping up one at a time at intervals: “285 Varieties of Cookies
75 Iced Teas 230 Soups
175 Salad Dressings
275 Cereals 40 Toothpastes”)

Not such a big one. I want to say just a word about salad dressing. 175 salad dressings in my supermarket, if you don’t count the 10 different extra virgin olive oils and 12 balsamic vinegars you could buy to make a very large variety of your own salad dressings, in the off chance that none of the 175 the store has on offer suit you. So this is what the supermarket is like. And then you go to the consumer electronics store to set up a stereo system: Speakers, CD player, tape player, tuner, amplifier- and in this one single consumer electronics store,

(popping up in the center of the supermarket list: “6.5 Million Stereo Systems!!!”)

there are that many stereo systems. We can construct 6 and a half million stereo systems out of the components that are on offer in one store. You gotta admit that’s a lot of choice.

In other domains- the world of communications. There was a time, when I was a boy, when you could get any kind of telephone service you wanted, as long as it came from Ma Bell. You rented your phone, you didn’t buy it. One consequence of that, by the way, is that the phone never broke. And those days are gone. We now have an almost unlimited variety of phones, especially in the world of cell phones.

(diagram of weird sci fi cell phones: “THE PHONES OF DR. MOREAU

PHONE
-DIGITAL CAMERA
-ELECTRIC TOOTHBRUSH

PHONE
-MP3 PLAYER
-NOSE-HAIR TRIMMER
-CREME BRULEE TORCH

PHONE
-P.D.A.
-BLOOD-SUGAR TESTER
-CURLING IRON
-OYSTER KNIFE”)

These are cell phones of the future. My favorite is the middle one, the MP3 player, nose-hair trimmer, and creme brulee torch. (laughter) And if- if by some chance you haven’t seen that in your store yet, you can rest assured that one day soon you will. And what this does, is it leads people to walk into their stores asking this question:

(cartoon of woman in cell phone store: “Do you have a phone that doesn’t do too much?”)

And do you know what the answer to this question now is? The answer is “No.” It is not possible to buy a cell phone that doesn’t do too much.

So, in other aspects of life that are much more significant than buying things, the same explosion of choice is true. Health care. It is no longer the case in the United States that you go to the doctor, and the doctor tells you what to do. Instead, you go to the doctor, and the doctor tells you, well, we could do A, or we could do B. A has these benefits, and these risks. B has these benefits, and these risks. What do you want to do? And you say, doc, what should I do? And the doc says, A has these benefits and risks, and B has these benefits and risks, what do you want to do? And you say- If you were me, doc, what would you do? And the doc says: But I’m not you. And the result is- we call it patient autonomy, which makes it sound like a good thing, but what it really is is a shifting of the burden and the responsibility for decision making from somebody who knows something, namely the doctor, to somebody who knows nothing, and is almost certainly sick, and thus not in the best shape to be making decisions, namely the patient.

There’s enormous marketing of prescription drugs to people like you and me, which, if you think about it, makes no sense at all, since we can’t buy them. Why do they market to us if we can’t buy them? The answer is that they expect us to call our doctors the next morning and ask for our prescriptions to be changed.

(cartoon of two women talking on couch: “We don’t believe in pressuring the children. When the time is right, they’ll choose the appropriate gender.”)

Something as dramatic as our identity is now become a matter of choice, as this slide is meant to indicate. We don’t inherit an identity, we get to invent it. And we get to re-invent ourselves as often as we like. And that means that every day when you wake up in the morning, you have to decide what kind of person you want to be.

With respect to marriage and family, there was a time when the default assumption, that almost everyone had, is that you got married as soon as you could, and then you started having kids as soon as you could. The only real choice was who, not when, and not what you did after. Nowadays, everything is very much up for grabs. I teach wonderfully intelligent students, and I assign 20% less work than I used to, and it’s not because they’re less smart, and it’s not because they’re less diligent, it’s because they are preoccupied asking themselves- Should I get married or not? Should I get married now, should I get married later, should I have kids first, or a career first- All of these are consuming questions. And they’re going to answer these questions whether or not it means not doing all the work I assign, and not getting a good grade in my courses. And indeed they should, these are important questions to answer.

Work. We are blessed, as Carl was pointing out, with the technology that enables us to work every minute of every day from anyplace on the planet- except the Randolph Hotel. (laughter) There is one corner, by the way, that I’m not going to tell anybody about, where you actually- where the WiFi works. I’m not telling you about it because I want to use it. So what this means, this incredible freedom of choice we have with respect to work, is that we have to make a decision, again and again and again, about whether we should or shouldn’t be working. We can go to watch our kid play soccer, and we have our cell phone on one hip, and our Blackberry on our other hip, and our laptop, presumably, on our laps. And even if they’re all shut off, every minute that we’re watching our kid mutilate a soccer game, we are also asking ourselves- Should I answer this cell phone call, should I respond to this email, should I draft this letter. And even if the answer to the question is “no,” it’s certainly going to make the experience of your kid’s soccer game very different than it would’ve been.

So everywhere we look, big things and small things, material things and lifestyle things, life is a matter of choice. And the world we used to live in looked like this:

(cartoon of Moses holding the tablets, addressing the multitude: “Well, actually, they are written in stone.”)

(laughter) That is to say, there were some choices, but not everything was a matter of choice. And the world we now live in looks like this.

(cartoon of blank tablets, hammer and chisel by its side: “The Ten Commandments Do-It-Yourself Kit”)

And the question is, is this good news, or bad news? And the answer is “Yes.” (laughter)

We all know what’s good about it, so I’m gonna talk about what’s bad about it. All of this choice has two effects- two negative effects on people. One effect, paradoxically, is that it produces paralysis, rather than liberation. With so many options to choose from, people find it very difficult to choose at all. I’ll give you one very dramatic example of this, a study that was done of investments in voluntary retirement plans. A colleague of mine got access to investment records from Vanguard, the gigantic mutual fund company of about a million employees, and about 2,000 different workplaces. And what she found is that for every 10 mutual funds the employer offered, rate of participation went down 2%. You offer 50 funds, 10% fewer employees participate than if you only offer 5. Why? Because with 50 funds to choose from, it’s so damn hard to decide which fund to choose, that you’ll just put it off till tomorrow. And then tomorrow, and then tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and of course tomorrow never comes. Understand that not only does this mean that people are gonna have to eat dog food when they retire because they don’t have enough money put away, it also means that making the decision is so hard that they pass up significant matching money from the employer. By not participating, they are passing up as much as 5,000 dollars a year from the employer, who would happily match their contribution.

So paralysis is a consequence of having too many choices. And I think it makes the world look like this:

(cartoon of devil registering a new inmate of hell: “And lastly, for all eternity, French, bleu cheese, or ranch?”)

(laughter) You really wanna get the decision right if it’s for all eternity, right? You don’t want to pick the wrong mutual fund, or even the wrong salad dressing. So that’s one effect.

The second effect is that even if we manage to overcome the paralysis and make a choice, we end up less satisfied with the result of the choice then we would be if we had fewer options to choose from. And there are several reasons for this. One of them is that with a lot of different salad dressings to choose from, if you buy one, and it’s not perfect, then- you know, what salad dressing is?- it’s easy to imagine that you could have made a different choice that would have been better. And what happens is this imagined alternative induces you to regret the decision you made, and this regret subtracts from the satisfaction you get out of the decision you made, even if it was a good decision. The more options there are, the easier it is to regret anything at all that is disappointing about the option that you chose.

Second, what economists call opportunity costs. Dan Gilbert made a big point this morning of talking about how how much the way in which we value things depends on what we compare them to. Well, when there are lots of alternatives to consider, it is easy to imagine the attractive features of alternatives that you reject that make you less satisfied with the alternative that you’ve chosen. Here’s an example:

(cartoon of couple sitting on the beach: “I can’t stop thinking about all those available parking spaces back on West Eighty-fifth Street.”)

For those of you who aren’t New Yorkers, I apologize. (laughter) But here’s what you’re supposed to be thinking. Here’s this couple on the Hamptons, very expensive real estate, gorgeous beach, beautiful day, they have it all to themselves- What could be better? Well, dammit, this guy is thinking it’s August, everybody in my Manhattan neighborhood is away, I could be parking right in front of my building. And he spends two weeks nagged by the idea that he is missing the opportunity, day after day, to have a great parking space. Opportunity costs subtract from the satisfaction we get out of what we choose, even when what we choose is terrific. And the more options there are to consider, the more attractive features of these options are going to be reflected by us as opportunity costs. Here’s another example:

(cartoon of three men, one in office thinking of playing golf, one golfing, thinking about sex, one having sex, thinking about working)

(laughter) Now this cartoon makes a lot of points. It makes points about living in the moment, as well, and probably about doing things slowly. But one point it makes is that whenever you’re choosing one thing, you’re choosing not to do other things, and those other things may have lots of attractive features, and it’s going to make what you’re doing less attractive.

Third: Escalation of expectations. This hit me when I went to replace my jeans. I wear jeans almost all the time, and there was a time when jeans came in one flavor, and you bought ’em, and they fit like crap, and they were incredibly uncomfortable, and if you wore them long enough and washed them enough times, they started to fit- feel OK. So I went to replace my jeans after years and years of wearing these old ones, and I said, you know, I want a pair of jeans, here’s my size, and the shopkeeper said do you want slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit? You want button fly or zipper fly? You want stone washed or acid washed? Do you want ’em distressed? You want boot cut, you want tapered, blah blah blah… on and on he went. My jaw dropped, and after I recovered I said- I want the kind that used to be the only kind. (laughter) He had no idea what that was, so I spent an hour trying on all these damn jeans, and I walked out of the store- truth- with the best fitting jeans I had ever had. I did better. All this choice made it possible for me to do better. But- I felt worse.

Why? I wrote a whole book to try and explain this to myself. (laughter) The reason is- The reason I felt worse is that with all of these options available, my expectations about how good a pair of jeans should be went up. I had very low expectations- I had no particular expectations when they only came in one flavor. When they came in 100 flavors, dammit, one of them should’ve been perfect. And what I got was good, but it wasn’t perfect. And so I compared what I got to what I expected, and what I got was disappointing in comparison to what I expected. Adding options to people’s lives can’t help but increase the expectations people have about how good those options will be. And what that’s gonna produce is less satisfaction with results, even when they’re good results.

(cartoon of couple in a travel agency, looking at a brochure for the trip they just purchased: “It all looks so great. I can’t wait to be disappointed.”)

Nobody in the world of marketing knows this. ‘Cause if they did, (gestures to cartoon) you wouldn’t all know what this was about. The truth is more like this:

(cartoon of family walking down the sidewalk: “Everything was better back when everything was worse.”)

(laughter) The reason that everything was better back when everything was worse, is that when everything was worse, it was actually possible for people to have experiences that were a pleasant surprise. Nowadays, the world we live in, we affluent industrialized citizens, with perfection the expectation- the best you can ever hope for is that stuff is as good as you expect it to be. You will never be pleasantly surprised, because your expectations- my expectations- have gone through the roof. The secret to happiness- this is what you all came for. The secret to happiness is low expectations.

(cartoon of couple getting married: “You’ll do.”)

(laughter & applause) I wanna say- just a little autobiographical moment- that I actually am married to a wife, and she’s really quite wonderful- I couldn’t have done better. I didn’t settle. But- settling isn’t always such a bad thing.

Finally- One consequence of buying a bad fitting pair of jeans when there is only one kind to buy, is that when you are dissatisfied, and you ask why, who’s responsible- the answer is clear. The world is responsible. What could you do? When there are hundreds of different styles of jeans available, and you buy one that is disappointing, and you ask why, who’s responsible? It is equally clear that the answer to the question is you. You coulda done better. With a hundred different kinds of jeans on display, there is no excuse for failure. And so when people make decisions, and even though the results of the decisions are good, they feel disappointed about them, they blame themselves. Clinical depression has exploded in the industrial world in the last generation. I believe a significant- not the only- but a significant contributor to this explosion of depression, and also suicide, is that people have experiences that are disappointing because their standards are so high, and then when they have to explain these experiences to themselves, they think they’re at fault.

(“Why Choice Makes People Miserable:
1. Regret and anticipated regret
2. Opportunity costs
3. Escalation of expectations
4. Self-blame”)

And so, the net result is that we do better in general, objectively, and we feel worse. So, let me remind you- this is the official dogma, the one that we all take to be true, and it’s all false:

(“The ‘Official Dogma’
-Maximize welfare
-This means maximize freedom
-This means maximize choice
-More choice means more freedom
-More freedom means more welfare

-NOT!!!”)

It is not true. There’s no question that some choice is better than none, but it doesn’t follow from that that more choice is better than some choice. There’s some magical amount, I don’t know what it is, I’m pretty confident that we have long since past the point where options improve our welfare.

Now, as a policy matter- I’m almost done- as a policy matter, the thing to think about is this. What enables all of this choice in industrial societies is material affluence. There are lots of places in the world, and we have heard about several of them, where their problem is not that they have too much choice, their problem is that they have too little. So the stuff I’m talking about is the peculiar problem of modern, affluent, Western societies. And what is so frustrating and infuriating is this. Steve Levitt talked to you yesterday about how these expensive and difficult to install infant-child seats don’t help. It’s a waste of money. What I’m telling you is that these expensive, complicated choices- it’s not simply that they don’t help, they actually hurt. They actually make us worse off.

If some of what enables people in our societies to make all of the choices we make were shifted to societies in which people have too few options, not only would those people’s lives be improved, but ours would be improved also. This is what economists call a Pareto-improving move. Income redistribution will make everyone better off, not just poor people, because of how all this excess choice plagues us.

(cartoon of fish talking to baby fish in a very small fishbowl: “You can be anything you want to be- no limits.”)

So, to conclude. You’re supposed to read this cartoon, and being a sophisticated person, say, ah! What does this fish know? You know nothing is possible in this fishbowl. Impoverished imagination, a myopic view of the world, and that’s the way I read it at first. The more I thought about it, however, the more I came to the view that this fish knows something. Because the truth of the matter is, that if you shatter the fishbowl, so that everything is possible, you don’t have freedom, you have paralysis. If you shatter this fishbowl so that everything is possible, you decrease satisfaction. You increase paralysis, and you decrease satisfaction. Everybody needs a fishbowl. This one is almost certainly too limited, perhaps even for the fish, certainly for us. But the absence of some metaphorical fishbowl is a recipe for misery, and, I suspect, disaster. Thank you very much.

Malcolm Gladwell on TEDTalks

tedconfjune — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 08:35:22 +0000

Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and best-selling author of The Tipping Point and Blink. In this talk, filmed at TED2004, he explains what every business can learn from spaghetti sauce. (Recorded February 2004 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 18:15)

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I think I was supposed to talk about my new book, which is called Blink, and it’s about snap judgments and first impressions. And it comes out in January, and I hope you all buy it in triplicate. (laughter) But I was thinking about this, and I realized that although my new book makes me happy, and I think would make my mother happy, it’s not really about happiness- so I decided instead I would talk about someone who I think has done as much to make Americans happy as perhaps anyone over the last 20 years. A man who is a great personal hero of mine, someone by the name of Howard Moskowitz, who is most famous for re-inventing spaghetti sauce.

Howard is- (holds hand slightly below shoulder level)- Howard’s about this high, and he’s round, and he’s in his sixties, and he has big huge glasses and thinning grey hair, and he has a kind of wonderful exuberance and vitality, and he keeps a- has a parrot, and he loves the opera, and he’s a great aficionado of medieval history. And he, by profession, he’s a psychophysicist. Now, I should tell you that I have no idea what psychophysics is, although at some point in my life, I dated a girl for two years who was getting her doctorate in psychophysics. Which should tell you something about that relationship.

But- (laughter) Howard- As far as I know, psychophysics is about measuring things. And Howard is very interested in measuring things. And he graduated with his doctorate from Harvard, and he set up a little consulting shop in White Plains, New York. And one of his first clients was- this is many years ago, back in the early 70s- one of his first clients was Pepsi. And Pepsi came to Howard and they said, you know, we- there’s this new thing called aspartame, and we would like to make Diet Pepsi. We’d like you to figure out how much aspartame we should put in each can of Diet Pepsi, in order to have the perfect drink. Right?

Now that sounds like an incredibly straightforward question to answer, and that’s what Howard thought. ‘Cause Pepsi told him, look, we’re working with a band between 8 and 12%. Anything below 8% sweetness is not sweet enough, anything above 12% sweetness is too sweet. We wanna know, what’s the sweet spot between 8 and 12. Now, if I gave you this problem to do, you would all say, it’s very simple. What we do is you make up a big experimental batch of Pepsi, at every degree of sweetness- 8%, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, all the way up to 12- and we try this out with thousands of people, and we plot the results on a curve, and we take the most popular concentration. Right? Really simple.

Howard does the experiment, and he gets the data back, and he plots it on a curve, and all the sudden he realizes- it’s not a nice bell curve. In fact, the data doesn’t make any sense. It’s a mess. It’s all over the place. Now, most people in that business, in the world of testing food and such, are not dismayed when the data comes back a mess. They think, well, you know, figuring out what people think about cola’s not that easy, you know, maybe we made an error somewhere along the way, you know, let’s just make an educated guess, and they simply point and they go for 10%, right in the middle. Howard is not so easily placated. Howard is a man of a certain degree of intellectual standards. And this was not good enough for him, and this question bedeviled him for years. And he would think it through and say, what was wrong? Why could we not make sense of this experiment with Diet Pepsi?

And one day, he was sitting in a diner in White Plains, about to go- trying to dream up some work for Nescafe. And suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, the answer came to him. And that is that when they analyzed the Diet Pepsi data, they were asking the wrong question. They were looking for the perfect Pepsi, and they should have been looking for the perfect Pepsis. Trust me. This was an enormous revelation. This was one of the most brilliant breakthroughs in all of food science. And Howard immediately went on the road, and he would go to conferences around the country, and he would stand up and he would say- You had been looking for the perfect Pepsi- you’re wrong. You should be looking for the perfect Pepsis. And people would look at him with a blank look, and they would say, what are you talking about? This is craziness. And they would say, you know, move! Next! Tried to get business, nobody would hire him- he was obsessed, though, and he talked about it and talked about it and talked about it. Howard loves the Yiddish expression “to a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish.” This was his horseradish. (laughter) He was obsessed with it!

And finally, he had a breakthrough. Vlasic Pickles came to him, and they said, Mr. Moskowitz- Doctor Moskowitz- we wanna make the perfect pickle. And he said, there is no perfect pickle, there are only perfect pickles. And he came back to them and he said, you don’t just need to improve your regular, you need to create zesty. And that’s where we got zesty pickles. Then the next person came to him, and that was Campbell’s Soup. And this was even more important- in fact, Campbell’s Soup is where Howard made his reputation. Campbell’s made Prego, and Prego, in the early 80s, was struggling next to Ragu, which was the dominant spaghetti sauce of the 70s and 80s.

Now in the industry, I don’t know whether you care about this, or how much time I have to go into this, but it was, technically speaking- this is an aside- Prego is a better tomato sauce than Ragu. The quality of the tomato paste is much better, the spice mix is far superior, it adheres to the pasta in a much more pleasing way, in fact, they would do the famous bowl test back in the 70s with Ragu and Prego- you’d have a plate of spaghetti, and you would pour it on, right? And the Ragu would all go to the bottom, and the Prego would sit on top. That’s called adherence. And, anyway, despite the fact that they were far superior in adherence, and the quality of their tomato paste, Prego was struggling.

So they came to Howard, and they said, fix us. And Howard looked at their product line, and he said, what you have is a dead tomato society. So he said, this is what I want to do. And he got together with the Campbell’s soup kitchen, and he made 45 varieties of spaghetti sauce. And he varied them according to every conceivable way that you can vary tomato sauce. By sweetness, by level of garlic, by tartness, by sourness, by tomatoey-ness, by visible solids- my favorite term in the spaghetti sauce business (laughter)- every conceivable way you can vary spaghetti sauce, he varied spaghetti sauce. And then he took this whole raft of 45 spaghetti sauces, and he went on the road. He went to New York, he went to Chicago, he went to Jacksonville, he went to Los Angeles. And he brought in people by the truckload. Into big halls. And he sat them down for two hours, and he gave them, over the course of that two hours, 10 bowls. 10 small bowls of pasta, with a different spaghetti sauce on each one. And after they ate each bowl, they had to rate, from 0 to 100, how good they thought the spaghetti sauce was.

At the end of that process, after doing it for months and months, he had a mountain of data about how the American people feel about spaghetti sauce. And then he analyzed the data. Now, did he look for the most popular brand variety of spaghetti sauce? No! Howard doesn’t believe that there is such a thing. Instead, he looked at the data, and he said, let’s see if we can group these different- all these different data points- into clusters. Let’s see if they congregate around certain ideas. And sure enough, if you sit down, and you analyze all this data on spaghetti sauce, you realize that all Americans fall into one of three groups. There are people who like their spaghetti sauce plain, there are people who like their spaghetti sauce spicy, and there are people who like it extra chunky.

And of those three facts, the third one was the most significant. Because at the time, in the early 1980s, if you went to a supermarket, you would not find extra chunky spaghetti sauce. And Prego turned to Howard, and they said “You telling me that one third of Americans crave extra chunky spaghetti sauce and yet no one is servicing their needs?” And he said yes! (laughter) And Prego then went back, and completely reformulated their spaghetti sauce, and came out with a line of extra chunky that immediately and completely took over the spaghetti sauce business in this country. And over the next 10 years, they made 600 million dollars off their line of extra chunky sauces.

And everyone else in the industry looked at what Howard had done, and they said, oh my god! We’ve been thinking all wrong! And that’s when you started getting 7 different kinds of vinegar, and 14 different kinds of mustard, and 71 different kinds of olive oil, and- and then eventually even Ragu hired Howard, and Howard did the exact same thing for Ragu that he did for Prego, and today, if you go to the supermarket, a really good one, and you look at how many Ragus there are- Do you know how many they are? 36! In six varieties. Cheese, Light, Robusto, Rich & Hearty, Old World Traditional (pause)- Extra Chunky Garden. (laughter) That’s Howard’s doing. That is Howard’s gift to the American people.

Now why is that important? It is, in fact, enormously important. I’ll explain to you why.

(picture of a bowl of spaghetti with sauce)

Because what Howard did, is he fundamentally changed the way the food industry thinks about making you happy. Assumption number one in the food industry used to be that the way to find out what people wanna eat- what will make people happy- is to ask them. And for years and years and years and years, Ragu and Prego would have focus groups, and they would sit all you people down, and they would say “what do you want in a spaghetti sauce? Tell us what you want in a spaghetti sauce.” And for all those years- 20, 30 years- through all those focus group sessions, no one ever said they wanted extra chunky. Even though at least a third of them, deep in their hearts, actually did. (laughter)

People don’t know what they want! Right? As Howard loves to say, “the mind knows not what the tongue wants.” It’s a mystery! And a critically important step in understanding our own desires and tastes is to realize that we can not always explain what we want deep down. If I asked all of you, for example, in this room, what you want in a coffee- You know what you’d say? Every one of you would say “I want a dark, rich, hearty roast.” It’s what people always say when you ask them what they want in a coffee. What do you like? Dark, rich, hearty roast! What percentage of you actually like a dark rich hearty roast? According to Howard, somewhere between 25 and 27% of you. Most of you like milky, weak coffee. Which you will never, ever say to someone who asks you what you want- that I want a milky, weak coffee. (laughter)

So that’s number one thing that Howard did. Number two thing that Howard did is he made us realize- it’s another very critical point- he made us realize in the importance of what he likes to call horizontal segmentation. Why is this critical? It’s critical because this is the way the food industry thought before Howard. Right? What were they obsessed with in the early 80s? They were obsessed with mustard. In particular, they were obsessed with the story of Grey Poupon. Right? Used to be, there were two mustards. French’s and Gulden’s. What were they? Yellow mustard. What’s in yellow mustard? Yellow mustard seeds, turmeric, and paprika. That was mustard. Grey Poupon came along, with a Dijon. Right? Much more volatile brown mustard seed, some white wine, a nose hit, much more delicate aromatics, and what do they do? They put it in a little tiny glass jar, with a wonderful enameled label on it, made it look French, even though it’s made in Oxnard, California, and instead of charging $1.50 for the 8 ounce bottle, the way the French’s and Gulden’s did, they decided to charge 4 dollars. And then they had those ads, right? With the guy in the Rolls Royce, and he’s eating the Grey Poupon, the other Rolls Royce pulls up, and he says, do you have any Grey Poupon? And the whole thing, after they did that, Grey Poupon takes off! Takes over the mustard business!

And everyone’s take home lesson from that was that the way to get to make people happy is to give them something that is more expensive, something to aspire to. Right? It’s to make them turn their back on what they think they like now, and reach out for something higher up the mustard hierarchy. A better mustard! A more expensive mustard! A mustard of more sophistication, and culture, and meaning. And Howard looked to that and said, that’s wrong! Mustard does not exist on a hierarchy. Mustard exists, just like tomato sauce, on a horizontal plane. There is no good mustard, or bad mustard. There is no perfect mustard, or imperfect mustard. There are only different kinds of mustards that suit different kinds of people. He fundamentally democratized the way we think about taste. And for that, as well, we owe Howard Moskowitz a huge vote of thanks.

Third thing that Howard did, and perhaps the most important, is Howard confronted the notion of the Platonic dish. (laughter) What do I mean by that? For the longest time in the food industry, there was a sense that there was one way- a perfect way- to make a dish. You go to Chez Panisse, they give you the red tail sashimi with roasted pumpkin seeds in a something something reduction- they don’t give you five options on the reduction. Right? They don’t say, do you want the extra chunky reduction, or do you want the… No! You just get the reduction. Why? Because the chef at Chez Panisse has a Platonic notion about red tail sashimi. This is the way it ought to be. And she serves it that way time and time again, and if you quarrel with her, she will say- you know what? You’re wrong! This is the best way it ought to be in this restaurant.

Now that same idea fueled the commercial food industry as well. They had a notion- a Platonic notion- of what tomato sauce was. And where did that come from? It came from Italy. Italian tomato sauce is what? It’s blended, it’s thin. The culture of tomato sauce was thin. When we talked about authentic tomato sauce in the 1970s, we talked about Italian tomato sauce. We talked about the earliest Ragus. Which had no visible solids, right? Which were thin, and you just put a little bit over it and it sunk down to the bottom of the pasta. That’s what it was. And why were we attached to that? Because we thought that what it took to make people happy was to provide them with the most culturally authentic tomato sauce-A; and B, we thought that if we gave them the culturally authentic tomato sauce, then they would embrace it. And that’s what would please the maximum number of people.

And Howard- and the reason we thought that, other words- people in the cooking world were looking for cooking universals. They were looking for one way to treat all of us. And it’s good reason for them to be obsessed with the idea of universals, because all of science- through the 19th century and much of the 20th- was obsessed with universals. Psychologists, medical scientists, economists- were all interested in finding out the rules that govern the way all of us behave. But that changed, right? What is the great revolution in science of the last 10, 15 years? It is the movement from the search for universals to the understanding of variability. Now in medical science, we don’t wanna know how necessarily- just how cancer works, we wanna know how your cancer is different from my cancer. Genetics has opened the door to the study of human variability.

What Howard Moskowitz was doing was saying this same revolution needs to happen in the world of tomato sauce. And for that, we owe him a great vote of thanks. I’ll give you one last illustration of variability, and that is- oh, I’m sorry. Howard not only believed that, but he took it a second step, which was to say that when we pursue universal principles in food, we aren’t just making an error, we are actually doing ourselves a massive disservice. And the example he used was coffee. And coffee is something he did a lot of work with, with Nescafe. If I were to ask all of you to try and come up with a brand of coffee- a type of coffee- a brew- that made all of you happy, and then I asked you to rate that coffee, the average score in this room for coffee would be about 60 on a scale of 0 to 100. If, however, you allowed me to break you into coffee clusters, maybe 3 or 4 coffee clusters, and I could make coffee just- one of those for each of those individual clusters- your scores would go from 60, to 75 or 78. The difference between coffee at 60 and coffee at 78 is a difference between coffee that makes you wince, and coffee that makes you deliriously happy.

That is the final, and I think most beautiful lesson, of Howard Moskowitz. That in embracing the diversity of human beings, we will find a surer way to true happiness. Thank you.

Richard Dawkins on TEDTalks

tedconfjune — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 10:30:00 +0000

Richard Dawkins is Oxford University’s “Professor for the Public Understanding of Science.” Author of the landmark 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, he’s a brilliant (and trenchant) evangelist for Darwin’s ideas. In this talk, titled “Queerer Than We Suppose: The strangeness of science,” he suggests that the true nature of the universe eludes us, because the human mind evolved to understand the “middle-sized” world we can observe. (Recorded July 2005 in Oxford, UK. Duration: 22:42)

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David Deutsch on TEDTalks

tedconfjune — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 10:23:58 +0000

Legendary physicist David Deutsch is author of The Fabric of Reality and the leading proponent of the multiverse intrepretation of quantum theory — the astounding idea that our universe is constantly spawning countless numbers of parallel worlds. In this rare (and delightfully engaging) public appearance, he weaves a complex and captivating argument placing the study of physics at the center of our species’ survival. (Recorded July 2005 in Oxford, UK. Duration: 19:45)

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We’ve been told to go out on a limb, and say something surprising. So I’ll try and do that. But I want to start with two things that everyone already knows. And the first one, in fact, is something that has been known for most of recorded history. And that is that the planet Earth, or the solar system, or our environment, or whatever, is uniquely suited to sustain our evolution, or creation as it used to be thought, and our present existence, and most important, our future survival.

Nowadays this idea has a dramatic name: Spaceship Earth. And the idea there is that outside the spaceship, the universe is implacably hostile, and inside is all we have, all we depend on. And we only get the one chance- if we mess up our spaceship, we’ve got nowhere else to go. Now the second thing that everyone already knows is that, contrary to what was believed for most of human history, human beings are not, in fact, the hub of existence. And Stephen Hawking famously said, we’re just a chemical scum on the surface of a typical planet, that’s in orbit around a typical star, which is on the outskirts of a typical galaxy, and so on.

Now the first of those two things that everyone knows, is kind of saying that we’re at a very un-typical place, uniquely suited, and so on, and the second one is saying that we’re at a typical place, and especially if you regard these two as deep truths to live by, and to inform your life decisions, then they seem a little bit to conflict with each other. But that doesn’t prevent them from both being completely false. (laughter) And they are. So let me start with the second one.

Typical. Well- Is this a typical place? Well, let’s look around, you know, and look in a random direction, and we see a wall, and chemical scum, (laughter) and that’s not typical of the universe at all. All you’ve got to do is go a few hundred miles in that same direction (points skyward) and look back, and you won’t see any walls, or chemical scum at all, all you see is a blue planet. And if you go further than that, you’ll see the sun, the solar system, and the stars, and so on. But that’s still not typical of the universe, because stars come in galaxies. And most places in the universe, a typical place in the universe, is nowhere near any galaxies. So let’s go further, till we’re outside the galaxy, and look back, and yeah, there’s the huge galaxy with spiral arms laid out in front of us. And at this point we’ve come 100,000 light years from here. But we’re still nowhere near a typical place in the universe. To get to a typical place, you’ve got to go 1,000 times as far as that, into intergalactic space. And so what does that look like? What does a typical place in the universe look like?

Well, at enormous expense, TED has arranged a high resolution immersion virtual reality rendering of intergalactic space- the view from intergalactic space. So can we have the lights off, please, so we can see it? (lights go out, all is dark except for a couple of computer screens) Well, not quite, not quite perfect- you see, in intergalactic space, intergalactic space is completely dark- pitch dark. It’s so dark, that if you were to be looking at the nearest star to you, and that star were to explode as a supernova, and you were to be staring directly at it at the moment when its light reached you, you still wouldn’t be able to see even a glimmer. That’s how big, and how dark, the universe is. And that’s despite the fact that a supernova is so bright, so brilliant, an event, that it would kill you stone dead at a range of several light years. And yet, from intergalactic space, it’s so far away, you wouldn’t even see it. It’s also very cold out there- less than 3 degrees above absolute zero. And it’s very empty. The vacuum there is one million times less dense than the highest vacuum that our best technology on Earth can currently create. So that’s how different a typical place is from this place. And that is how un-typical this place is. So can we have the lights back on please? Thank you.

Now how do we know about an environment that’s so far away, and so different, and so alien, from anything we’re used to? Well, the Earth, our environment, in the form of us, is creating knowledge. Well, what does that mean? Well, look out even further than we’ve just been- I mean from here, with a telescope- and you’ll see things that look like stars. They’re called quasars. Quasars originally meant quasi-stellar object. Which means things that look a bit like stars. And- (laughter) But they’re not stars. And we know what they are. Billions of years ago, and billions of light years away, the material at the center of a galaxy collapsed towards a super-massive black hole, and then intense magnetic fields directed some of the energy of that gravitational collapse, and some of the matter, back out in the form of tremendous jets which illuminated lobes with the brilliance of, I think it’s a trillion suns.

Now, the physics of the human brain could hardly be more unlike the physics of such a jet. We couldn’t survive for an instant in it. Language breaks down when trying to describe what it would be like in one of those jets. It would be a bit like experiencing a supernova explosion, but at point-blank range and for millions of years at a time. (laughter) And yet, that jet happened in precisely such a way, that billions of years later, on the other side of the universe, some bit of chemical scum could accurately describe, and model, and predict, and explain, above all- there’s your reference- what was happening there, in reality. The one physical system, the brain, contains an accurate working model of the other- the quasar. Not just a superficial image of it, though it contains that as well, but an explanatory model, embodying the same mathematical relationships and the same causal structure. Now that is knowledge. And if that weren’t amazing enough, the faithfulness with which the one structure resembles the other is increasing with time. That is the growth of knowledge.

So, the laws of physics have this special property. That physical objects, as unlike each other as they could possibly be, can nevertheless embody the same mathematical and causal structure, and to do it more and moreso over time. So we are a chemical scum that is different. This chemical scum has universality. Its structure contains, with ever-increasing precision, the structure of everything. This place, and not other places in the universe, is a hub which contains within itself the structural and causal essence of the whole of the rest of physical reality. And so far from being insignificant, the fact that the laws of physics allow this, or even mandate that this can happen, is one of the most important things about the physical world.

Now how does the solar system- and our environment, in the form of us- acquire this special relationship with the rest of the universe? Well, one thing that’s true about Stephen Hawking’s remark- I mean, it is true, but it’s the wrong emphasis. One thing that’s true about it is that it doesn’t do it with any special physics, there’s no special dispensation, no miracles involved. It does it simply with three things that we have here in abundance. One of them is matter, because, well, the growth of knowledge is a form of information processing, information processing is computation, computation requires a computer- there’s no known way of making a computer without matter. We also need energy to make the computer, and most important to make the media, in effect, onto which we record, the knowledge that we discover. And then thirdly, less tangible, but just as essential for the open-ended creation of knowledge, of explanations, is evidence. Now, our environment is inundated with evidence. We happen to get round to testing, let’s say, Newton’s Law of Gravity, about 300 years ago. But the evidence that we did to do- that we used to do that was falling down on every square meter of the Earth for billions of years before that, and will continue to fall on for billions of years afterwards. And the same is true for all the other sciences. As far as we know, evidence to discover the most fundamental truths of all the sciences is here just for the taking, on our planet. Our location is saturated with evidence, and also with matter and energy.

Out in intergalactic space, those three prerequisites for the open-ended creation of knowledge are at their lowest possible supply. As I said, it’s empty, it’s cold, and it’s dark out there. Or is it? Now actually, that’s just another parochial misconception. Because imagine a cube out there in intergalactic space, the same size as our home, the solar system. Now that cube is very empty by human standards, but that still means that it contains over a million tons of matter. And a million tons is enough to make, say, a self contained space station, on which there’s a colony of scientists that are devoted to creating an open-ended stream of knowledge, and so on. Now it’s way beyond present technology to even gather the hydrogen from intergalactic space and form it into other elements and so on, but the thing is, in a comprehensible universe, if something isn’t forbidden by the laws of physics, then what could possible prevent us from doing it, other than knowing how? In other words, it’s a matter of knowledge, not resources. And the same- well, if we could do that we’d automatically have an energy supply, because the transmutation would be a fusion reactor- and evidence? Well, again, it’s dark out there to human senses. But all you’ve got to do is take a telescope, even one of present day design, look out and you’ll see the same galaxies as we do from here. And with a more powerful telescope, you’ll be able to see stars, and planets, in those galaxies, you’ll be able to do astrophysics, and learn the laws of physics, and locally there you could build particle accelerators, and learn elementary particle physics, and chemistry, and so on. Probably the hardest science to do would be biology field trips. Because it would take several hundred million years to get to the nearest life-bearing planet and back. But I have to tell you, and sorry, Richard, but I never did like biology field trips much, and I think we can just about make do with one every few hundred million years (laughter).

So, in fact, intergalactic space does contain all the prerequisites for the open-ended creation of knowledge. Any such cube, anywhere in the universe, could become the same kind of hub that we are, if the knowledge of how to do so were present there. So we’re not in a uniquely hospitable place. If intergalactic space is capable of creating an open-ended stream of explanations, then so is almost every other environment. So is the Earth. So is a polluted Earth. And the limiting factor, there and here, is not resources, because they’re plentiful, but knowledge, which is scarce.

Now this cosmic knowledge-based view may, and I think ought to, make us feel very special. But it should also make us feel vulnerable, because it means that without the specific knowledge that’s needed to survive the ongoing challenges of the universe, we won’t survive them. All it takes is for a supernova to go off a few light years away, and we’ll all be dead! Martin Rees has recently written a book about our vulnerability to all sorts of things, from astrophysics, to scientific experiments gone wrong, and most importantly, to terrorism with weapons of mass destruction. And he thinks that civilization only has a 50% chance of surviving this century. I think he’s going to talk about that later in the conference.

Now I don’t think that probability is the right category to discuss this issue in. But I do agree with him about this. We can survive, and we can fail to survive. But it depends not on chance, but on whether we create the relevant knowledge in time. The danger is not at all unprecedented. Species go extinct all the time. Civilizations end. The overwhelming majority of all species and all civilizations that have ever existed are now history. And if we want to be the exception to that, then logically our only hope is to make use of the one feature that distinguishes our species, and our civilization, from all the others. Namely, our special relationship with the laws of physics. Our ability to create new explanations, new knowledge. To be a hub of existence.

So let me now apply this to a current controversy, not because I want to advocate any particular solution, but just to illustrate the kind of thing I mean. And the controversy is global warming. Now, I’m a physicist, but I’m not the right kind of physicist. In regard to global warming, I’m just a layman. And the rational thing for a layman to do is to take seriously the prevailing scientific theory. And according to that theory, it’s already too late to avoid a disaster. Because if it’s true that our best option at the moment is to prevent CO2 emissions with something like the Kyoto protocol, with its constraints on economic activity, and its enormous cost of hundreds of billions of dollars or whatever it is, then that is already a disaster by any reasonable measure. And the actions that are advocated are not even purported to solve the problem, merely to postpone it by a little. So it’s already too late to avoid it, and it probably has been too late to avoid it ever since before anyone realized the danger. It was probably already too late in the 1970s, when the best available scientific theory was telling us that industrial emissions were about to precipitate a new ice age in which billions would die.

Now the lesson of that seems clear to me, and I don’t know why it isn’t informing public debate. It is that we can’t always know. When we know of an impending disaster, and how to solve it at a cost less than the cost of the disaster itself, then there’s not going to be much argument, really. But no precautions, and no precautionary principle, can avoid problems that we do not yet foresee. Hence we need a stance of problem fixing, not just problem avoidance.

And it’s true that an ounce of prevention equals a pound of cure, but that’s only if we know what to prevent. If you’ve been punched on the nose, then the science of medicine does not consist of teaching you how to avoid punches. If medical science stopped seeking cures and concentrated on prevention only, then it would achieve very little of either. The world is buzzing at the moment with plans to force reductions in gas emissions at all costs. It ought to be buzzing with plans to reduce the temperature, and with plans to live at the higher temperature. And not at all costs, but efficiently and cheaply. And some such plans exist, things like swarms of mirrors in space to deflect the sunlight away, and encouraging aquatic organisms to eat more carbon dioxide. At the moment, these things are fringe research. They’re not central to the human effort to face this problem, or problems in general. And with problems that we are not aware of yet, the ability to put right- not the sheer good luck of avoiding indefinitely- is our only hope, not just of solving problems, but of survival.

So take two stone tablets, and carve on them. On one of them, carve “Problems are soluble.” And on the other one carve “Problems are inevitable.” Thank you.

Jill Sobule's musical tribute to Helen Fisher

tedconfjune — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 15:09:26 +0000

At TED2006, Helen Fisher delivered an unforgettable talk (now available online) focusing largely on love: Its evolution, its vital importance to human society, and the science behind the stages of lust, infatuation, and long-term attachment. Inspired by Fisher — and, well, slightly disturbed by the biochemical basis of it all — singer/songwriter Jill Sobule penned a pensive tribute, which she began performing in clubs this spring.

We didn’t want to wait for the next CD, so Jill recorded a special demo just for TED … Here, timed with the release of Helen Fisher’s TEDTalk, is Jill’s lyrical response:
The End of Love (MP3. Duration: 3:33).

Helen Fisher on TEDTalks

tedconfjune — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 09:00:00 +0000

Helen Fisher is an anthropologist with Rutgers University, specializing in gender differences and the evolution of human emotions. Her most recent book is Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love. In this wide-ranging talk, she outlines the bio-chemical foundations of love (and lust), and discusses the natural talents of women, and their new significance in the modern world. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 24:13)

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I’d like to talk today about the two biggest social trends in the coming century, and perhaps in the next 10,000 years. But I want to start with my work on romantic love, because that’s my most recent work. What I and my colleagues did was to put 32 people, who were madly in love, into a functional MRI brain scanner: 17 who were madly in love and their love was accepted; and 15 who were madly in love and they had just been dumped. And so I want to tell you about that first, and then go on into where I think love is going.

“What ’tis to love?” Shakespeare said. I think human beings have been wondering about this question since they sat around their campfires or lay and watched the stars a million years ago. I started out by trying to figure out what romantic love was, by looking at the last 45 years of research on, just the psychological research, and, as it turns out, there’s a very specific group of things that happen when you fall in love.

The first thing that happens is, what I call – a person begins to take on, what I call, ‘special meaning.’ As a truck driver once said to me, he said, “the world had a new center, and that center was Mary Anne.” George Bernard Shaw said it a little differently. He said, “love consists of overestimating the differences between one woman and another,” and, indeed, that’s what we do. (laughter) And then you just focus on this person, you can list what you don’t like about them, but then you sweep that aside and focus on what you do. As Chaucer said, “love is blind.”

I’m trying to understand romantic love. I decided I would read poetry from all over the world and I just want to give you one very short poem from 8th century China, because it’s an almost perfect example of a man who is focused totally on a particular woman. It’s a little bit like – when you are madly in love with somebody and you walk into a parking lot, their car is different from every other car in the parking lot, their wine glass at dinner is different from every other wine glass at the dinner party and, in this case, a man got hooked on a bamboo sleeping mat. And it goes like this.

It’s by a guy called Yuan Chen: “I cannot bear to put away the bamboo sleeping mat. “The night I brought you home I watched you roll it out. He became hooked on a sleeping mat,” – probably because elevated activity of dopamine in his brain – “just like with you and me.”

But anyway, not only does this person take on special meaning, you focus your attention on them, you aggrandize them. But you have intense energy. As one Polynesian said, he said, “I felt like jumping in the sky.” You’re up all night. You’re walking till dawn. You feel intense elation when things are going well, mood swings into horrible despair when things are going poorly; real dependence on this person. As one businessman in New York said to me, he said, “anything she liked, I liked.” Simple. Romantic love is very simple.

You become extremely sexually possessive. You know if you’re just sleeping with somebody, casually, you don’t really care if they’re sleeping with somebody else. But the moment you fall in love, you become extremely sexually possessive of them. I think that that is a Darwinian. There’s a Darwinian purpose to this, the whole point of this is to pull two people together strongly enough to begin to rear babies as a team. But the main characteristics of romantic love are craving, an intense craving to be with a particular person not just sexually, but emotionally. You’d much rather – it would be nice to go to bed with them, but you want them to call you on the telephone, to invite you out, etcetera. To tell you that they love you. The other main characteristic is motivation. The motor in your brain begins to crank and you want this person.

And last but not least, it is an obsession. When I put these people in the machine, before I put them in the MRI machine, I would ask them all kinds of questions, but my most important question was always the same. It was “what percentage of the day and night do you think about this person?” And, indeed, they would say, “All day. All night. I can never stop thinking about him or her.” And then, the very last question, I would ask them – I would always have to work my self up to this question, because I am not a psychologist, I don’t work with people in any kind of traumatic situation, and my final question was always the same. I would say, “would you die for him or her?” And indeed, these people would say “yes,” as if I had asked them to pass the salt. I was just staggered by it.

So we scanned their brains, looking at a photograph of their sweetheart and looking at a neutral photo with a distraction task in between, so we could find – look at the same brain when it was in that heightened state and when it was in a resting state. And we found activity in a lot of brain regions. In fact, one of the most important was a brain region that becomes active when you feel the rush of cocaine. And, indeed, that’s exactly what happens. I began to realize that romantic love is not an emotion. In fact, I had always thought it was a series of emotions, from very high to very low, but, actually, it’s a drive. It comes from the motor of the mind, the ‘wanting’ part of the mind, the ‘craving’ part of the mind. The kind of mind – part of the mind, when you’re reaching for that piece of chocolate, when you want to win that promotion at work: the motor of the brain. It’s a drive. And, in fact, I think it’s more powerful than the sex drive.
You know, if you ask somebody to go to bed with you, and they say “no thank you,” you certainly don’t kill yourself, or slip into a clinical depression, but certainly, around the world, people, who are rejected in love, will kill for it. People live for love. They kill for love. They die for love. They have songs, poems, novels, sculptures, paintings, myths, legends. In over 175 societies, people have left their evidence of this powerful brain system. I have come to think it’s one of the most powerful brain systems on earth for both great joy and great sorrow.

And I’ve also come to think that it’s one of three, basically different, brain systems that evolved from mating and reproduction. One is the sex drive, the craving for sexual gratification. W.H. Auden called it an “intolerable neural itch.” And indeed that’s what it is. It keeps bothering you a little bit, like being hungry. The second of these three brain systems is romantic love: that elation, obsession of early love. And the third brain system is attachment: that sense of calm and security you can feel for a long-term partner.

And I think that the sex drive evolved to get you out there, looking for a whole range of partners. You know you can feel it when you’re just driving along in your car, it can be focused on nobody. I think romantic love evolved to enable you to focus your mating energy on just one individual at a time, thereby conserving mating time and energy. And I think that attachment, the third brain system, evolved to enable you to tolerate this human being, (laughter) at least long enough to raise a child together as a team.

So, with that preamble, I want to go into discussing the 2 most profound social trends, one of the last 10,000 years and the other, certainly, of the last 25 years, that are going to have an impact on these three different brain systems: lust, romantic love and deep attachment to a partner.

The first is women working, moving into the workforce. I’ve looked at 130 societies through the demographic yearbooks of the United Nations and everywhere in the world. 129 out of 130 of them, women are not only moving into the job market – some places, sometimes, very, very slowly – but, they are moving into the job market and they are very slowly closing that gap between men and women in terms of economic power, health and education. It’s very slow. For every trend in – on this planet, there’s a counter trend. We all know of them, but nevertheless.

The old Arab saying- the Arabs say, “the dogs may bark, but the caravan moves on.” And indeed that caravan is moving on. Women are moving back into the job market. And I say ‘back into the job market,’ because this is not new. For millions of years, on the grasslands of Africa, women commuted to work to gather their vegetables. They came home wit 60-80% of the evening meal. The double income family was the standard. And women were regarded as just as economically, socially and sexually powerful as men. In short, we’re really moving forward to the past.

Then, women’s worst invention was the plow. With the beginning of plow, agriculture, men’s roles became extremely powerful. Women lost their ancient jobs as collectors, but then with the industrial revolution & the post industrial revolution they’re moving back into the job market. In short, they are acquiring the status that they had a million years ago, 10,000 years ago, 100,000 years ago. We are seeing now one of the one of the most remarkable traditions in the history of the human animal. And it’s going to have an impact.

I generally give a whole lecture on the impact of women on the business community. I’ll only just say a couple of things and then go on to sex and love. There is a lot of gender differences, anybody who thinks men and women are alike simply never had a boy and a girl child. I don’t know why it is that they want to think that men and women are alike, there’s much we have in common, but there’s a whole lot that we are not – do not have in common. We are, in the words of Ted Hughes, I think that we were built to be – we’re like two feet, we need each other to get ahead. But we did not evolve to have the same brain. And we’re finding more and more and more gender differences in the brain. I’ll only just use a couple and then move on to sex and love. One of them is women’s verbal ability. Women can talk. Women’s ability to find the right word rapidly, basic articulation, goes up in the middle of the menstrual cycle, when estrogen levels peak, but even at menstruation, they’re better than the average man. Women can talk. They’ve been doing it for a million years; words were women’s tools. They held that baby in front of their face, cajoling it, reprimanding it, educating it with words. And indeed they’re becoming a very powerful force.

Even in places like India and Japan, where women are not moving rapidly into the regular job market, they’re moving into journalism. And I think that the television is like the global campfire. We sit around it and it shapes our minds. Almost always when I’m on TV, the producers who call me, who negotiate what we’re going to say, is a woman. In fact, Solzhenitsyn once said, “to have a great writer is to have another government.”

Today, 54% of people who are writers in America are women. It’s one of many, many characteristics that women have that they will bring in to the job market. They’ve got incredible people skills, negotiating skills. They’re highly imaginative. We now know the brain circuitry of imagination, of long term planning. They tend to be web thinkers. Because the female parts of the brain are better connected, they tend to collect more pieces of data when they think, put them into more complex patterns, see more options and outcomes. They tend to be contextual holistic thinkers, what I call web thinkers. Men tend to – and these are averages – tend to get rid of what they regard as extraneous, focus on what they do, and move in a more step by step thinking pattern.

They’re both perfectly good ways of thinking, we need both of them to get ahead, in fact there’s many more male geniuses in the world – when the – and there’s also many more male idiots in the world (laughter). When the male brain works well it works extremely well. And I, what I really think that we’re doing is we’re moving towards a collaborative society, a society in which the talents of both men and women are becoming understood and valued and employed.

But, in fact, women’s moving into the job market is having a huge impact on sex and romance and family life. Foremost, women are starting to express their sexuality. I’m always astonished when people come to me and say, “why is it that men are so adulterous?” And I say, “why do you think more men are adulterous than women?” “Oh, well, men are more adulterous!” And I say, “who do you think these men are sleeping with?” And, basic math! (laughter) Anyway.

In the western world, little girls start – women start, sooner at sex, have more partners, express less remorse for the partners that they do, marry later, have fewer children, leave bad marriages in order to get good ones. We are seeing the rise of female sexual expression. And indeed, once again we’re moving forward to the kind of sexual expression that we probably saw on the grasslands of Africa a million years ago, because this is the kind of sexual expression that we see in hunting and gathering societies today. We’re also returning to an ancient form of marriage equality. They’re now saying that the 21st century is going to be the century of what they call the “symmetrical marriage,” or the “pure marriage,” or the “companionate marriage.” This is a marriage between equals, moving forward to a pattern that is highly compatible with the ancient human spirit.

We’re also seeing a rise of romantic love, 91% of American women and 86% of American men would not marry somebody who had every single quality they were looking for in a partner if they were not in love with that person. People around the world in
a study of 37 societies want to be in love with the person that they marry. Indeed, arranged marriages are on their way off this braid of human life.

I even think that marriages might even become more stable, because of the second great world trend. The first one being women moving into the job market, the second one being the aging world population. They’re now saying, that in America, that middle age should be regarded as up to age 85. Because, in that highest age category of 76-85, only as much as 40 % of people have nothing really wrong with them. So we’re seeing there’s a real extension of middle age. And I looked, for one of my books, I looked at divorce data in 58 societies and, as it turns out, the older you get, the less likely you are to divorce. So, the divorce rate right now is stable in America and it’s actually beginning to decline. It may decline some more. I would even say that with Viagra, estrogen replacement, hip replacements and the incredibly interesting – women have never been as interesting as they are now. Not at any time on this planet have women been so educated, so interesting, so capable. And so, I honestly think that – if there really was ever a time in human evolution – that we have the opportunity to make good marriages. That time is now.

However, there’s always kinds of complications in this. In these three brain systems, lust, romantic love, and attachment, don’t always go together. They can go together, by the way. That’s why casual sex isn’t so casual. With orgasm you get a spike of dopamine. Dopamine’s associated with romantic love and you can just fall in love with somebody who you’re just having casual sex with. With orgasm, then you get a real rush of oxytocin and vasopressin, those are associated with attachment, this is why you can feel such a sense of cosmic union with somebody after you’ve made love to them. But, these three brain systems, lust, romantic love and attachment, aren’t always connected to each other. You can feel deep attachment to a long-term partner, while you feel intense romantic love for somebody else, while you feel the sex drive for people unrelated to these other partners. In short, we’re capable of loving more than one person at a time. In fact, you can lie in bed at night and swing from deep feelings of attachment for one person to deep feelings of romantic love for somebody else. It’s as if there’s a committee meeting going on in your head as you are trying to decide what to do. So, I don’t think honestly, we’re an animal that was built to be happy; we are an animal that was built to reproduce. I think the happiness we find we make, and, I think, however, we can make good relationships with each other.

So I want to conclude with two things. I want to conclude with a worry, I have a worry, and with a wonderful story. The worry is about antidepressants. Over 100 million prescriptions of antidepressants are written every year in the United States. And these drugs are going generic. They are seeping around the world. I know one girl who’s been on these antidepressants, serotonin enhancing –SSRI serotonin enhancing antidepressants – since she was 13. She’s 23. I’ve got nothing against people who take them short-term, when they’re going through something perfectly horrible. They want to commit suicide or kill somebody else. I would recommend it. But more and more people in the United States are taking them long-term. And indeed, what these drugs do is raise levels of serotonin. And by raising levels of serotonin, you suppress the dopamine circuit. Everybody knows that. Dopamine is associated with romantic love. Not only do they suppress the dopamine circuit, but they kill the sex drive. And when you kill the sex drive, you kill orgasm, and when you kill orgasm, you kill that flood of drugs associated with attachment, the things are connected in the brain. And when you tamper with one brain system, you’re going to tamper with another. I’m just simply saying that a world without love is a deadly place.

So, now, (applause) – thank you –I want to end with a story and, then, just a comment. I’ve been studying romantic love and sex and attachment for 30 years. I’m an identical twin; I am interested in why we’re all alike. Why you and I are alike, why the Iraqis and the Japanese and the Australian Aborigines and the people of the Amazon River are all alike. And about a year ago, an Internet dating service, Match.com, came to me and asked me if I would design a new dating site for them. I said I don’t know anything about personality. You know? I don’t know. Do you think you’ve got the right person? They said yes. It got me thinking about why it is that you fall in love with one person rather than another. That’s my current project; it will be my next book. There’s all kinds of reasons that you fall in love with one person rather than another, timing is important, proximity is important, mystery is important. You fall in love with somebody who’s somewhat mysterious, in part, because, mystery elevates dopamine in the brain, probably pushes you over that threshold to fall in love. You fall in love with somebody who fits within what I call your “love map,” an unconscious list of traits that you build in childhood as you grow up and I also think that you become –gravitate to certain people, actually with somewhat complementary brain systems. And that’s what I’m now contributing to this.

But I want to tell you a story about – to illustrate – I’ve been carrying on here about the biology of love. I wanted to show you a little bit about the culture of it too, the magic of it. It’s a story that was told to me by somebody who had heard it just from one of the – probably a true story. It was a graduate student at – I’m at Rutgers, and my two colleagues, Art Aaron is at SUNY Stonybrook – that’s where we put our people in the MRI machine – and this graduate student was madly in love with another graduate student and she was not in love with him. And they were all at a conference in Beijing, and he knew from our work that if you go and do something very novel with somebody you can drive up the dopamine in the brain and, perhaps, trigger this brain system for romantic love. (laughter) So, he decided he’d put science to work and he invited this girl to go off on a rickshaw ride with him. And sure enough, I’ve never been in one, but apparently, they go all around the buses and the trucks and it’s crazy and it’s noisy and it’s exciting. And he figured that this would drive up the dopamine and she would fall in love with him. So off they go and she’s squealing and squeezing him and laughing and having a wonderful time. An hour later they get down off the rickshaw and she throws her hands up and she says “wasn’t that wonderful?” And “wasn’t that rickshaw driver handsome!” (long laughter and applause)

There’s magic to love! But, I will end by saying that millions of years ago we evolved three basic drives: the sex drive, romantic love and attachment to a long-term partner. These circuits are deeply imbedded in the human brain. They’re going to survive as long as our species survives on what Shakespeare called “this mortal coil”. Thank you. (applause) [Transcription by Robert Thomas Carter]

Eve Ensler on TEDTalks

tedconfjune — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 09:00:00 +0000

Eve Ensler is the playwright of The Vagina Monologues and The Good Body, and founder of the global movement V-Day, which is working to end violence against women and girls. In this presentation, from TED2004, she performs an excerpt from “The Vagina Monologues” and explains how the show took on a life of its own. (Recorded February 2004 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 21:11)

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Ze Frank on TEDTalks

tedconfjune — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 10:48:00 +0000

Ze Frank rose to Internet fame in 2001 with his viral video How to Dance Properly, and has been a purveyor of imaginative online comedy ever since. His latest experiment, the show, is posted daily at zefrank.com. In this performance, drawn from the TED2004 archive, he offers the signature blend of comedy, technology and social theory that made him our favorite philosopher comic. (Recorded February 2004 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 19:42)

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Mena Trott on TEDTalks

tedconfjune — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 10:38:26 +0000

Mena Trott is the 28-year-old founder of leading blog software company Six Apart (Creators of Typepad, Movable Type, LiveJournal and Vox). In this talk, she explores the personal side of blogging. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 17:30)

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Richard Baraniuk on TEDTalks

tedconfjune — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 09:00:00 +0000

Richard Baraniuk is a Rice University professor with a giant vision: to create a free, global online education system. In this presentation, he introduces Connexions, the open-access publishing system that’s changing the landscape of education by providing free coursework and educational materials to everyone in the world. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 19:18)

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Jimmy Wales on TEDTalks

tedconfjune — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 09:00:00 +0000

Jimmy Wales is founder of Wikipedia, the self-organizing, self-correcting, ever-expanding, and thoroughly addictive encyclopedia of the future. In this presentation, he explains how Wikipedia’s collaborative system works, and why it succeeds. (Recorded July 2005 in Oxford, UK. Duration: 20:47)

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Ross Lovegrove on TEDTalks

tedconfjune — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 09:00:00 +0000

Ross Lovegrove is an industrial designer, best known for his work on the Sony Walkman and Apple iMac. In this highly visual presentation, he presents his recent work — from furniture to water bottles — which is organic in form and inspired by nature. (Recorded February 2005 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 20:14)

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Amy Smith on TEDTalks

tedconfjune — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 09:00:00 +0000

MIT engineer Amy Smith designs ingenious low-cost devices to tackle tough problems in developing countries. She received a MacArthur “Genius” Grant in 2004, and was the first woman to win MIT’s famed Lemelson Prize. In this talk, she explains the vision behind her inventions, which include eco-friendly charcoal and a laboratory incubator that doesn’t require electricity. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 15:48)

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Jennifer Lin on TEDTalks

tedconfjune — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 09:00:00 +0000

Jennifer Lin is an extraordinary young concert pianist, 14 years old when she appeared at TED. In this performance, she plays Joseph Hoffman’s “Kaleidoscope,” Robert Schumann’s “Abegg Variations” and Jack Fina’s “Bumble Boogie,” as well as a dazzling improvisation based on a few notes chosen by a well-known audience member. (Recorded February 2004 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 24:51)

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Sirena Huang on TEDTalks

tedconfjune — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 09:00:00 +0000

Sirena Huang started violin lessons at four, and made her professional solo debut at age nine, with the Taiwan Symphony Orchestra. Now 11, she has won top prizes in numerous international competitions, delighting audiences worldwide with her virtuosity and musical imagination. In this TEDTalk, she gives a technically brilliant and emotionally nuanced performance. In a charming interlude, the 11-year-old praises the timeless design of her instrument. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 25:25)

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Jeff Han on TEDTalks

tedconfjune — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 09:00:00 +0000

Jeff Han is a research scientist for New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences . Here, he demonstrates, for the first time publicly, his intuitive, “interface-free,” touch-driven computer screen, which can be manipulated intuitively with the fingertips, and responds to varying levels of pressure. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 09:32)

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Jeff Han: Unveiling the genius of multi-touch interface design

I’m really really excited to be here today, because I’m about to show you some stuff that’s just ready to come out of the lab, literally, and I’m really glad that you guys are going to be amongst the first to be able to see it in person because I really really think this is gonna change- really change the way we interact with the machines from this point on.

(standing in front of flat table level screen showing a grid)

Now this is a rear-projected drafting table, it’s about 36 inches wide, and it’s equipped with a multi-touch sensor. Now, normal touch sensors that you see, like on a kiosk or interactive light ports, can only register a kind of one point of contact at a time.

(traces single wavy line on grid screen with finger)

This thing allows you to have multiple points at the same time.

(traces lines with multiple fingers, then traces lines with all of his fingers at once)

They can use both my hands, I can use chording actions, and I can just go right up and use all 10 fingers if I wanted to. There, like that.

Now, multi-touch sensing isn’t anything- isn’t completely new, I mean, people like Bill Buxton have been playing around with it in the ’80s. However, the approach I developed here is actually high-resolution, low cost, and probably most importantly, very scalable. So, the technology, you know, isn’t the most exciting thing here right now, other than probably its new-found accessibility, what’s really interesting here is kind of what you can do with it, and the kind of interfaces you can build on top of it. So let’s see…

So, for instance we have a LavaLamp application here-

(overhead video of Han pushing and squeezing colored blobs on light table)

Now you can see, I can use both of my hands to kind of squeeze together, and put the blobs together.

(holds hands at bottom of screen, heat of fingers brightens colors, brighter colored blobs remain on screen, then he pushes two small blobs together to make one big one)

I can inject heat into the system here, or I can pull it apart with two of my fingers, it’s completely intuitive, there’s no instruction manual, the interface just kind of disappears. This started out as kind of a screensaver app that one of the PhD students in our lab, Ilya Rosenberg, made. But I think its true identity comes out here.

(fiddles around with blobs some more)

Now what’s great about a multi-touch sensor is that, you know, I could be doing this with as many fingers here, but of course multi-touch also inherently means multi-user. So Chris could be out here interacting with another part of Lava while I kind of play around with it here. You can imagine a new kind of sculpting tool, where I’m kind of warming something up, kind of making it malleable, and then kind of letting it cool down and solidifying in a certain state. (fiddles more) Google should have something like this in their lobby. (laughter)

(tabletop cuts to grid)

I’ll show you something a little more of a concrete example here- as this thing loads-

(shows photo images scattered haphazardly around the screen, using both hands, Han pushes photos around on the screen)

Now this is a photographer’s light box application. Again, I can use both of my hands to kind of interact and move photos around. But, what’s even cooler-

(uses fingers to ‘grab’ two corners of one of the photos and ‘pulls’ it to full screen size)

is that, if I have two fingers, I can actually grab a photo and then stretch it out like that really easily. I can pan, zoom, and rotate it effortlessly.

(slides piles of photos around)

I can do that grossly with both of my hands,

(pulls photo out of stack & enlarges it)

or if I can do it just with two fingers on each of my hands together.

(grabs empty space around photos & zooms in and out of canvas)

If I grab the canvas I can kind of do the same thing- stretch it out- I can do it simultaneously, where I’m holding this down-

(holds pile of photos down while pulling out another)

-and gripping on another one, stretching this out like this.

Again, the interface just disappears here. There’s no manual. This is exactly what you kind of expect, especially if you haven’t interacted with a computer before. Now, when you have initiatives like the hundred dollar laptop, I kind of cringe at the idea that we’re gonna introduce a whole new generation of people to computing with kind of this standard mouse-and-windows pointer interface. This is something that I think is really the way we should be interacting with the machines from this point on. (applause)

(taps bottom of screen, graphical keyboard appears on screen, he types caption ‘my vacation’ onto one photo, which he then pulls off and puts on top of screen. )

Now, of course, I can bring up a keyboard, and I can bring that around, put that up there. Now- obviously this is kind of a standard keyboard, but of course I can re-scale it to make it work well for my hands. And that’s really important, because there’s no reason in this day and age that we should be conforming to a physical device. I mean, that leads to bad things, like RSI. I mean, we have so much technology nowadays that these interfaces should start conforming to us. I mean, there’s so little applied now to actually improving the way we interact with interfaces from this point on.

This keyboard is- I- probably actually the really wrong way to go. You can imagine, in the future, as we develop this kind of technology, a keyboard with a kind of automatically drifts as your hand kind of moves away, and kind of really intelligently anticipates which key you’re trying to stroke with your hands. So- again, isn’t this great? (moves photos around more, pause)

(audience member: “Where’s your lab?”)

I’m a Research Scientist at NYU, it’s in New York.

(switches off photobox application)

(turns on new graphics app- he makes little balls of light by touching the screen, which are brighter the longer he holds his fingers down, and which move in paths according to his finger movements)

Here’s an example of another kind of app- I can kind of make these little fuzz dolls- it’ll kind of remember the strokes I’m making. Of course I can do it with all my hands. It’s pressure sensitive, you can notice-

(makes larger, brighter ball by holding finger down longer, then he zooms out by stretching screen as he did with photos, making balls on screen smaller. once he zooms out, he can make larger balls, then zoom back in, making the older ones their original size.)

But what’s neat about that is again, I showed you that two finger gesture that allows you to zoom in really quickly. Because you don’t have to switch to a hand tool, or the magnifying glass tool, you can just kind of continuously make things in real multiple scales, all at the same time. (zooms out) I can create big things out here, but I can go back (zooms in) and really quickly go back to where I started, (zooms in further) and make even smaller things here.

Now this is going to be really important as we start getting to things like data visualization. For instance, I think we all really enjoyed Hans Rosling’s talk, and he really emphasized the fact that I’ve been thinking about for a long time too, we have all this great data, but for some reason, it’s just sitting there. We’re not really accessing it. And one of the reasons why I think that is, is because of things like graphics- will be helped by things like graphics and visualization and inference tools. But I also think a big part of it is gonna be- starting to be able to have better interfaces, to be able to drill down into this kind of data, while still thinking about the big picture here.

Let me show you another app here-

(screen showing Earth globe)

This is something called World Wind, it’s done by NASA, it’s a kind of- we’ve all seen Google Earth, this is kind of an open source version of that.

(using previously demonstrated techniques to zoom in and out on various parts of the map, zooming all the way down to San Francisco peninsula, to a street level satellite view of SF)

There are plug-ins to be able to load in different data sets that NASA’s collected over the years. But as you can see, I can use the same two fingered gestures to kind of go down and go in really seamlessly- there’s no interface, again, it really allows anybody to kind of go in- and, just does what you’d kind of expect, you know? Again, there’s just no interface here. The interface just kind of disappears.

(view switches from satellite photo to street contour map)

I can switch to a different data views, that’s what’s neat about this app here- there you go.

(switches to another satellite data view, this time color enhanced)

NASA’s really cool, they have these hyper-spectral images that are kind of false colored so you can- it’s really good for determining vegetative use- well, let’s go back to this:

(switches to another map, zooming away from SF)

Now the great thing about mapping applications- it’s not really kind of 2D, it’s kind of 3D. So, again, with a multi point interface, you can kind of do a gesture like this-

(moves hands, and map flips perspectives to a side on view of a coastal mountain range)

so you can kind of be able to tilt around like that, you know. It’s not just simply relegated to a kind of 2D panning and motion. Now this gesture that we’ve developed, again, is just kind of- putting two fingers down- it’s kind of defining an axis of tilt, and I can kind of tilt up and down that way. That’s something we just came up with on the spot, you know, it’s probably not the right thing to do, but there’s such interesting things you can do with this kind of interface. It’s just so much fun playing around with too.

And, OK, so the last thing I want to show you is, you know, I’m sure we can all think of a lot of entertainment apps that you can kind of do with this thing. I’m a little more interested in the kind of creative applications we can do with this. Now here’s a simple application here-

(draws figure on the desk, once he connects the last lines, it fills in w/ a light blue color)

I can kind of draw out a curve. And when I close it, it becomes a character. But the neat thing about it is, I can add control points-

(touches several points of figure, leaving small dots which he is then able to flex and move separately)

And then what I can do is kind of manipulate them with both of my fingers at the same time. (figure moves as if animated) And you notice what it does. It’s kind of a puppeteering thing, where I can use as many fingers as I have to kind of draw-
-and make-

(draws second figure above first, rotates and bends it)

Now, there’s a lot of actual math going on under here for this kind of to control this mesh and do a lot- do the right thing. I mean, this is a- this technique of being able to manipulate a mesh here, with multiple control points, is actually something that’s state of the art, was just released at Siggraph last year, but it’s a great example of the kind of research I really love. Kind of- all this compute power to apply to make things kind of do the right things. The intuitive things. Do kind of exactly what you expect.

(wiggles figures around)

So, multi-touch, kind of interaction research, is a very active field right now in HCI. I’m not the only one doing it, there are a lot of other people getting into it, this kind of technology is going to let even more people get into it, and I’m really looking forward to interacting with all you guys over the next few days and seeing how it can apply to your respective fields. Thank you.

Nicholas Negroponte on TEDTalks

tedconfjune — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 08:01:00 +0000

Nicholas Negroponte is former Director of the MIT Media Lab, and founder of the non-profit, One Laptop Per Child, dedicated to making the famed “$100 laptop” a reality. In this talk, he outlines some of the challenges of getting the laptop produced, and explains why he stepped down as Media Lab director to focus on the initiative full-time, “for the rest of my life.” (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 18:21)

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I’ve been at MIT for 44 years, I went to TED I. There’s only one other person here, I think, who did that. All the other TEDs, and I went to them all under Ricky’s regime, I talked about what the Media Lab was doing, which today has almost 500 people in it.

And if you read the press, it actually last week said I quit the Media Lab. I didn’t quit the Media Lab, I stepped down as chairman‚ — which was a kind of ridiculous title, but someone else has taken it on, and one of the things you can do as a professor, is you stay on as a professor, and I will now do for the rest of my life the One Laptop Per Child, which I’ve sort of been doing for a year and a half, anyway.

So I’m going to tell you about this, use my 18 minutes to tell you why I’m doing it, how we’re doing it, and then what we’re doing. And at some point I’ll even pass around what the $100 laptop might be like.

Now, I was asked by Chris to talk about some of the big issues, and so I figured I’d start with the three that at least drove me to do this. And the first is pretty obvious. It’s amazing when you meet a head of state, and you say, What is your most precious natural resource? They will not say children at first, and then when you say children, they will pretty quickly agree with you. And so that isn’t very hard.

[The basic principles: 1. Children are our most precious natural resource;]

[2. The solution to poverty, peace, environment is education; 3. Teaching is one but not the only way to achieve learning]

Everybody agrees that whatever the solutions are to the big problems, they include education, sometimes can be just education, and can never be without some element of education. So that’s certainly part of it.

And the third is a little bit less obvious. And that is that we all in this room learned how to walk, how to talk, not by being taught how to talk, or taught how to walk, but by interacting with the world, by having certain results as a consequence of being able to ask for something or being able to stand up and reach it. Whereas, at about the age six, we were told to stop learning that way, and that all learning from then on would happen through teaching, whether it’s people standing up, like I’m doing now, or a book, or something, but it was really through teaching. And one of the things in general that computers have provided to learning, is that it now includes a kind of learning which is a little bit more like walking and talking in the sense that a lot of it’s driven by the learner himself or herself.

So with those as the principles, some of you may know Seymour Papert, this is back in 1982, when we were working in Senegal, because some people think that the $100 laptop just happened a year ago, or two years ago, or we were struck by lightning. This actually has gone back a long time, and in fact back to the ’60s. Here we’re in the ’80s, Steve Jobs had given us some laptops; …

[An education project, not a laptop or cellphone project]

… we were in Senegal; it didn’t scale, but it at least was bringing computers to developing countries and learning pretty quickly that these kids, even though English wasn’t their language, the Latin alphabet barely was their language, but they could just swim like fish; they could play these like pianos.

A little bit more recently, I got involved personally — and these are two anecdotes — one was in Cambodia, in a village that has no electricity, no water, no television, no telephone, but has broadband Internet now. And these kids, their first English word is Google, and they only know Skype. They’ve never heard of telephony. Okay, they just use Skype. And they go home at night; they’ve got a broadband connection in a hut that doesn’t have electricity. The parents love it, because when they open up the laptops, it’s the brightest light source in the house.

And talk about where metaphors and reality mix, this is the actual school. In parallel with this, Seymour Papert got the governor of Maine [Not two kids per laptop or one laptop per room] to legislate one laptop per child in the year 2002. Now at the time, I think it’s fair to say that 80% of the teachers were — let me say — apprehensive. Really, they were actually against it. And they really preferred that the money would be used for higher salaries, more schools, whatever, and now, three and a half years later, guess what? They’re reporting five things. Drop of truancy to almost zero, attending parent-teacher meetings, which nobody did and now almost everybody does, drop in discipline problems, increase in student participation. Teachers are now saying it’s kind of fun to teach; kids are engaged. They have laptops. And then the fifth, which interests me the most, is that the servers have to be turned off at certain times at night, because the teachers are just getting too much email from the kids, asking them for help.

So when you see that kind of thing — this is not something you have to test. The days of pilot projects are over, when people say, “Well, we’d like to do 3 or 4000 in our country to see how it works.” Screw you. Go to the back of the line and someone else will do it, and then when you figure out that this works, you can join as well. And this is what we’re doing. [Audience laughter and applause]

So One Laptop Per Child was formed about a year and a half ago. It’s a nonprofit association; it raised about $20 million to do the engineering to just get this built, and then have it produced afterwards. Scale is truly important. And it’s not important because you can buy components at a lower price. Okay? It’s because you can go to a manufacturer, and I will leave the name out, but we wanted a small display, doesn’t have to have perfect color uniformity, it can even have a pixel or two missing; it doesn’t have to be that bright. And this particular manufacturer said, Well, we’re not interested in that. We’re interested in the living room, we’re interested in perfect color uniformity, we’re interested in big displays, bright displays. You’re not part of our strategic plan. And I said, Well, that’s kind of too bad, because we need 100 million units a year. And they said, Oh, well maybe we could become part of your strategic‚ — and that’s why scale counts. And that’s why we will not launch this without 5 to 10 million units in the first run.

And the idea is to launch with enough scale, that the scale itself helps bring the price down, and that’s why I said 7 to 10 million there, and we’re doing it without a sales and marketing team. I mean, you’re looking at the sales and marketing team. We will do it by going to seven large countries and getting them to agree, and launch it, and then the others can follow.

We have partners; it’s not hard to guess Google would be one, the others are all playing to pending. And this has been in the press a great deal. It’s the so-called Green Machine, that we introduced with Kofi Annan in November at the World Summit that was held in Tunisia.

Now once people start looking at this, they say, Ah, this is a laptop project. Well, no, it’s not a laptop project. It’s an education project. And the fun part — and I’m quite focused on it‚ I tell people I used to be a light bulb, but now I’m a laser. I’m just going to get that thing built, and it turns out it’s not so hard.

Because laptop economics are the following: I say 50% here; it’s more like 60, 60% of the cost of your laptop is sales, marketing, distribution and profit. Now we have none of those. Okay? None of those figure into our cost, because first of all, we sell it at cost, and the governments distribute it. It gets distributed to the school system like a textbook. So that piece disappears, and then you have display and everything else. Now the display on your laptop costs in rough numbers,

[Getting to the $100 Laptop Gross Breakdown in Laptop Costs 2005]

$10 a diagonal inch. Now that can drop to 8, it can drop to 7, but it’s not going to drop to 2, or to 1 1/2, unless we do some pretty clever things. It’s the rest — that little brown box — that is pretty fascinating, because the rest of your laptop is devoted to itself. It’s a little bit like an obese person having to use most of their energy to move their obesity. Okay.

And we have a situation today which is incredible. Okay. I’ve been using laptops since their inception. And my laptop runs slower, less reliably, and less pleasantly, than it ever has before. And this year is worse. Now people clap, sometimes you even get standing ovations, and I say, What the hell’s wrong with you? Why are we all sitting there? And somebody to remain nameless called our laptop a gadget recently. And I said, God, our laptop’s going to go like a bat out of hell. When you open it up, it’s going to go “bing,” it’ll be on, it’ll use it, it’ll be just like it was in 1985, when you bought an Apple Macintosh 512. It worked really well. And we’ve been going steadily downhill.

[500 Mhz AMD x86 processor, 128M DRAM, 512M FLASH, 2 W nominal, thus Wind-up,] [3 or 4 USB ports, WiFi mesh network, Rugged, Dual mode display]

Now this people ask all the time, what it is, that’s what it is. The two pieces that are probably notable is it’ll be a mesh network, so when the kids open up their laptops, they all become a network, and then just need one or two points of backhaul. You can serve a couple of thousand kids with 2 megabytes. So you really can bring into a village, and then the villages can connect themselves, and you really can do it quite well.

The Dual Mode Display‚ — the idea is to have a display that both works outdoors‚ — isn’t it fun using your cell phone outdoors in the sunlight? Well, you can’t see it. And one of the reasons you can’t see it is because it’s backlighting most of the time, most cell phones. Now, what we’re doing is, we’re doing one that will be both front lit and backlit. And whether you manually switch it, or you do it in the software is to be seen. But when it’s backlit, it’s color, and when it’s front lit, it’s black and white at three times the resolution. Is it all worked out? No. That’s why a lot of our people are more or less living in Taiwan right now. And in about 30 days we’ll know for sure whether this works.

Probably the most important piece there is that the kids really can do the maintenance, and this is again something that people don’t believe, but I really think it’s quite true.

[Open source, Skinny Linux, Instant on, Fast and not a “gadget”]

[Parallel Commercial Channel, Maintenance by the kids, Design‚ — not cheap, not toy]

That’s the machine we showed in Tunis,

[The Design of Rotation]

and this is more the direction that we’re going to go. And it’s something that we didn’t think was possible. Now, I’m going to pass this around. This isn’t a design, okay? So this is just a mechanical engineering sort of embodiment of it for you to play with. And it’s clearly just a model. The working one is at MIT. I’m going to pass it to this handsome gentleman. At least then you can decide whether it goes left or — [inaudible, off camera] Oh, Simulcast. Sorry! I forgot. I forgot. Okay, so wherever the camera is — okay, good point. Thank you, Chris.

The idea was that it would be not only a laptop, but that it could transform and be into an electronic book. So it’s sort of an electronic book, this is where you can go outside it’s in black and white. The games buttons are missing, but it’ll be also a games machine, book machine. Set it up this way and it’s a television set, etc., etc. Is that enough for simulcast? Okay, sorry. I’ll let Jim decide which way to send it afterwards. Okay.

Seven countries. [Audience laughter].

[Seven countries + Massachusetts (maybe) China, India, Thailand, Egypt, Nigeria, Brazil, Argentina]

I say maybe for Massachusetts, because they actually have to do a bid. By law you’ve got to bid, and so on and so forth. So I can’t quite name them. In the other cases, they don’t have to do bids. They can decide. It’s the federal government in each case. It’s kind of agonizing, because a lot of people say, Well, let’s do it at the state level, because, of course, states are more nimble than the feds, just because of size. And yet we count. We’re really dealing with the federal government; we’re really dealing with ministries of education. And if you look at governments around the world, ministries of education tend to be the most conservative, and also the ones that have huge payrolls; everybody thinks they know about education; a lot of culture is built into it as well. It’s really hard. And so it’s certainly the hard road. If you look at the countries, they’re pretty geoculturally distributed.

Have they all agreed? No, not completely; probably Thailand, Brazil and Nigeria are the three that are the most active, and most agreed. we’re purposely not signing anything with anybody, until we actually have the working ones. And since I visit each one of those countries within at least every three months, I’m just going around the world every three weeks.

[TimeLine: Nov. 17 Announced WSIS, Dec. 12 Quanta agreed to build, May 24 Learning Learning @ MIT,]

[July ’06 final country commitment, Q3 ’06 developer prototypes, Q4 ’06 education prototypes, Q1 ’07 rollouts,]

[Maybe free laptops at TED 2008]

Here’s sort of the schedule, and I put at the bottom we might give some away free in two years at this meeting. Everybody says it’s a $100 laptop, you can’t do it. Well, guess what, we’re not. We’re coming in at 135, to start. Then drift down. And that’s very important, because so many things hit the market, at a price and then drift up. It’s kind of the loss leader, and then as soon as it looks interesting, it can’t be afforded, or it can’t be scaled out. So we’re targeting $50 in 2010.

The gray market’s a big issue. And one of the ways — just one — but one of the ways to help in the case of the gray market, is to make something that it’s so utterly unique, it’s a little bit like the fact that automobiles — thousands of automobiles are stolen every day in the United States; not one single post office truck is stolen. Okay. And why? Because there’s no market for post office trucks. It looks like a post office truck. You can spray paint it; you can do anything you want. I just learned recently, in South Africa, no white Volvos are stolen. Period. None. Zero. So we want to make it very much like a white Volvo.

Each government has a task force. This perhaps is less interesting, but we’re trying to get the governments to all work together, and it’s not easy. The economics of this is to start with the federal governments, and then later to go to other —

[Economics Initial and launch: Central government funded, Single order]

[Subsequent: Philanthropic organizations, Child to child funding, Commercial subsidy, Adopt-a-village, etc.]

— whether it’s child-to-child funding, so a child in this country buys one for a child in the developing world, maybe of the same gender, maybe of the same age. An uncle gives a niece or a nephew that as a birthday present, I mean, there are all sorts of things that will happen, and they’ll be very, very exciting.

And everybody says‚ — I say‚ — it’s an education project, are we providing the software? The answer is, the system certainly has software, but no, we’re not providing the education content. That is really done in the countries. But we are certainly constructionists. And we certainly believe in learning by doing, and everything from Logo, which was started in 1968, to more modern things, like Scratch, if you’ve ever even heard of it, are very, very much part of it. And that’s the rollout.

Are we dreaming? Is this real? It actually is real. The only criticism, and people really don’t want to criticize this, because it is a humanitarian effort, it is a nonprofit effort, and to criticize it is a little bit stupid, actually, but the one thing that people could criticize was, great idea, but these guys can’t do it. And that could either mean these guys, professors, and so on couldn’t do it, or that it’s not possible. Well, on December 12, a company called Quanta agreed to build it, and since they make about one third of all the laptops on the planet today, that question disappeared. So it’s not a matter of whether it’s going to happen. It is going to happen. And if it comes out at $138, so what; if it comes out six months late, so what. That’s a pretty soft landing. Thank you. [Applause]

Nigeria orders first million $100 laptops

tedconfjune — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 05:44:33 +0000

At TED2006, former MIT Media Lab Director Nicholas Negroponte outlined the challenges of producing the $100 laptop, which will be designed for — and only available to — children in the developing world. The key, he suggested, is scale. The economics will work when countries begin ordering them by the millions. Well, according to the Nigerian newspaper, Vanguard, the first order is in: The Nigerian government has committed to purchasing at least one million. India, on the other hand, has declined. (Via VnuNet and PC Advisor.)

TEDPrize winner Larry Brilliant on TEDTalks

tedconfjune — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 08:03:00 +0000

TEDPrize winner Larry Brilliant is an epidemiologist who presided over the last case of Smallpox on the planet. He also founded the Seva Foundation, which works to reverse cases of blindness, and co-founded several technology start-ups, including the legendary online community, The Well. He was recently named Executive Director of the Google Foundation.

In this talk, he explains in fascinating detail the key behind the successful WHO campaign to eradicate Smallpox, and then unveils his TEDPrize wish: to build a global system that detects each new disease or disaster as it emerges or occurs. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 26:34)

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