Can Universal Basic Income End Our Cultural Obsession With Work? | Philosopher Andrew TaggartIn 1948, German philosopher Josef Pieper predicted that society was headed for a dystopia he called 'Total Work'. With most of us in 2017 working too long, missing social events, working on weekends, and egging on our older years just for the retirement, practical philosopher Andrew Taggart believes we have reached the verge of that dystopia. He describes the conditions that are tightening around us—our lives are scheduled around the needs of our jobs, our time with family and friends is subordinated to it (in a 5:2 ratio!), and our free time increasingly resembles work, in vocabulary and in action: we run errands, aim to have "productive" days, try to rest so that we are fresh for Monday—the start of another week. Taggart thinks Universal Basic Income is the ideological push we need to begin questioning how we can cut loose from our cultural obsession with work, and how we might live in a world without it. Are we human beings, or instruments of productivity? Has our intense focus on work become pathological? For more, visit http://www.andrewjtaggart.com.
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Transcript:'Total work' was a term coined by Josef Pieper, a lesser known German philosopher from the 20th century, and he was concerned that after World War II there would be a time of total work. By that I take him to mean that work comes to be the center around which the world turns. Human beings start to see themselves chiefly as workers, and the entirety of life becomes more and more work, or work like. To see this we can begin to examine a number of what I might call tightening conditions. So the first condition would be the centrality of work. We've come to think that work is actually the center and everything else begins to turn around it. To see this more clearly we can think about the fact that we woke up to go to work today or that we are going home from work today. That we are preparing for work. That we are preparing to leave work. And this is happening all the way around the world. Meanwhile we’re adjusting our schedules, the rest of our lives, so that they are turning about it. So that would be the first condition. The second condition is subordination. That everything else in life comes to seem as if it’s subordinate to, and to be put in the service of, work. We can think of sleeping: the idea is that we wish to sleep well today in order to be focused and prepared for work. And that when we’re at work we wish to be as productive as possible. So sleep becomes that which is an instrument in the service of productivity. And we can play that game with all sorts of different instances.
The third condition is the resemblance claim. It seems as if everything else in life comes to resemble work, more and more. So you can think of, on a day off you are wanting to be as productive as possible, thinking about how much you got done. You can begin to think about all the ways in which you plan and schedule time with children. The terms that begin to mark out our lives even when we’re not actually working sound more and more work like.
And the last condition I think is the most intense and that’s what I might call cultural forgetfulness.
Well suppose there were to come to pass Universal Basic Income. And suppose, for the sake of argument, that that were sufficient to meet our material needs—that is, those concerned with having enough food, proper shelter, sufficient warmth, sufficient coldness, and the like, so that it was enough. As one philosopher, Harry Frankfurt, calls it we have doctrine of sufficiency. So suppose basic income allowed us all to have enough. Then once again I think we would need to think about what we would do with ourselves. Aristotle in 'Politics' says, really quite famously, that we non-leisure in order to have leisure. And that was the way that it would be translated: we non-leisure in order to have leisure. The question is how are we going to dwell on our leisure?And I think we’ve been educated to a point at which we really don’t know how to answer that question. People, I think, are struck by a very difficult condition, which is a medieval condition, called acedia.
Would you live in a floating city in the sky? (with English subtitles) | Tomás Saraceno(Full English subtitles are available for this talk -- click the CC button in the bottom right of your screen to turn subtitles on.)
In a mind-bending talk that blurs the line between science and art, Tomás Saraceno exhibits a series of air-inspired sculptures and installations designed to usher in a new era of sustainability, the "Aerocene." From giant, cloud-like playgrounds suspended 22 meters in the air to a balloon sculpture that travels the world without burning a single drop of fossil fuel, Saraceno's work invites us to explore the bounds of our fragile human and terrestrial ecosystems. (In Spanish with English subtitles.)
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Facts Don't Win Fights: Here’s How to Cut Through Confirmation BiasIf you want someone to see an issue rationally, you just show them the facts, right? No one can refute a fact. Well, brain imaging and psychological studies are showing that, society wide, we may be on the wrong path by holding evidence up as an Ace card. Neuroscientist Tali Sharot and her colleagues have proven that reading the same set of facts polarizes groups of people even further, because of our in-built confirmation biases—something we all fall prey to, equally. In fact, Sharot cites research from Yale University that disproves the idea that the social divisions we are experiencing right now—over climate change, gun control, or vaccines—are somehow the result of an intelligence gap: smart people are just as illogical, and what's more, they are even more skilled at skewing data to align with their beliefs. So if facts aren't the way forward, what is? There is one thing that may help us swap the moral high ground for actual progress: finding common motives. Here, Sharot explains why identifying a shared goal is better than winning a fight. Tali Sharot's newest book is out now: The Influential Mind: What the Brain Reveals about Our Power to Change Others.
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Transcript: So most of us think that information is the best way to convince people of our truth, and in fact it doesn’t work that well.We see that all the time. We see it with climate change, where there’s tons of data suggesting that climate change is man-made but about 50 percent of the population doesn’t believe it, or with people arguing about things like how many people were in the presidential inauguration. So we have facts but people decide which facts they want to listen to, which facts they want to take and change their opinions, and which they want to disregard. And one of the reasons for this is when something doesn’t conform to what I already believe, what people tend to do is either disregard it or rationalize it away; because information doesn’t take into account what makes us human, which is our emotions, our desires, our motives and our prior beliefs.
So for example, in one study my colleagues and I tried it to see whether we could use science to change people’s opinions about climate change. The first thing we did was ask people, “Do you believe in man-made climate change? Do you support the Paris Agreement?” And based on their answers we divided them into the strong believers and the weak believers. And then we gave them information.
For some people we said that scientists have reevaluated the data and now conclude that things are actually much worse than they thought before, that the temperature would rise by about seven degrees to ten degrees. For some people we said the scientists have reevaluated the data and they now believe that actually this situation is not as bad as they thought, it’s much better, and the rise in temperature would be quite small.
And what we found is that people who did not believe in climate change, when they heard that the scientists are saying, “Actually it’s not that bad,” they changed their beliefs even more in that direction, so they became more extremist in that direction, but when they heard that the scientists think it’s much worse they didn’t nudge.
And the people who already believe that climate change is man-made, when they heard that scientists are saying things are much worse than they said before, they moved more in that direction, so they became more polarized, but when they heard scientists are saying it’s not that bad they didn’t nudge much. So we gave people information and as a result it caused polarization, it didn’t cause people to come together.
So the question is, what’s happening inside our brain that causes this?
So this is a study that was conducted at UCLA where what they wanted to do is convince parents to vaccinate their kids. And some of the parents didn’t want to vaccinate their kids because they were afraid of the link with autism.So they had two approaches, first they said, “Well the link with autism is actually not real, here’s all the data suggesting there isn’t a link between vaccines and autism.” And it didn’t really work that well. But instead they used another approach. So instead of going that way they used another approach, which was: let’s not talk about autism, we don’t necessarily need to talk about autism to convince you to vaccinate your kids. Instead they said, “Well look, these vaccines protect kids from deadly diseases, from the measles,” and they showed them pictures of what the measles are.
A smog vacuum cleaner and other magical city designs | Daan RoosegaardeDaan Roosegaarde uses technology and creative thinking to produce imaginative, earth-friendly designs. He presents his latest projects -- from the sidewalks of Amsterdam, where he reinterpreted "The Starry Night" to get people thinking about green energy, to Beijing, where he developed a smog vacuum cleaner to purify the air in local parks, to a dance floor that generates electricity to power a DJ booth. Check out Roosegaarde's vision for a future where creativity is our true capital.
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How young people join violent extremist groups -- and how to stop them | Erin Marie SaltmanTerrorists and extremists aren't all naturally violent sociopaths -- they're deliberately recruited and radicalized in a process that doesn't fit into a neat pattern. Erin Marie Saltman discusses the push and pull factors that cause people to join extremist groups and explains innovative ways of preventing and countering radicalization.
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Why Superintelligent AI Could Be the Last Human Invention | Max TegmarkWhen we create something more intelligent than we could ever be, what happens after that? We have to teach it.
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MAX TEGMARK: Hollywood movies make people worry about the wrong things in terms of super intelligence. What we should really worry about is not malice but competence, where we have machines that are smarter than us whose goals just aren’t aligned with ours. For example, I don’t hate ants, I don’t go out of my way to stomp an ant if I see one on the sidewalk, but if I’m in charge of this hydroelectric dam construction and just as I’m going to flood this valley with water I see an ant hill there, tough luck for the ants. Their goals weren’t aligned with mine and because I’m smarter it’s going to be my goals, not the ant’s goals, that get fulfilled. We never want to put humanity in the role of those ants.
On the other hand it doesn’t have to be bad if you solve the goal alignment problem. Little babies tend to be in a household surrounded by human level intelligence as they’re smarter than the babies, namely their parents. And that works out fine because the goals of the parents are wonderfully aligned with the goals of the child’s so it’s all good. And this is one vision that a lot of AI researchers have, the friendly AI vision that we will succeed in not just making machines that are smarter than us, but also machines that then learn, adopt and retain our goals as they get ever smarter.
It might sound easy to get machines to learn, adopt and retain our goals, but these are all very tough problems. First of all, if you take a self-driving taxi and tell it in the future to take you to the airport as fast as possible and then you get there covered in vomit and chased by helicopters and you say, “No, no, no! That’s not what I wanted!” and it replies, “That is exactly what you asked for,” then you’ve appreciated how hard it is to get a machine to understand your goals, your actual goals.
A human cabdriver would have realized that you also had other goals that were unstated because she was also a human and has all this shared reference frame, but a machine doesn’t have that unless we explicitly teach it that. And then once the machine understands our goals there’s a separate problem of getting them to adopt the goals. Anyone who has had kids knows how big the difference is between making the kids understand what you want and actually adopt your goals to do what you want.
And finally, even if you can get your kids to adopt your goals that doesn’t mean they’re going to retain them for life. My kids are a lot less excited about Lego now than they were when they were little, and we don’t want machines as they get ever-smarter to gradually change their goals away from being excited about protecting us and thinking of this thing about taking care of humanity as this little childhood thing (like Legos) that they get bored with eventually.
If we can solve all three of these challenges, getting machines to understand our goals, adopt them and retain them then we can create an awesome future. Because everything I love about civilization is a product of intelligence. Then if we can use machines to amplify our intelligence then we have this potential to solve all the problems that are stumping us today and create a better future than we even dare to dream of.
If machines ever surpass us and can outsmart us at all tasks that’s going to be a really big deal because intelligence is power. The reason that we humans have more power on this planet than tigers is not because we have larger muscles or sharper claws, it’s because we’re smarter than the tigers. And in the exact same way if machines are smarter than us it becomes perfectly plausible for them to control us and become the rulers of this planet and beyond. When I. J. Good made this famous analysis of how you could get an intelligence explosion, or intelligence just kept creating greater and greater intelligence leaving us far behind, he also mentioned that this super intelligence would be the last invention that man need ever make. And what he meant by that, of course, was that so far the most intelligent being on this planet that’s been doing all the inventing—it’s been us. But once we make machines that are better than us at inventing, all future technology that we ever need can be created by those machines if we can make sure that they do things for us that we want and help us create an awesome future where humanity can flourish like never before.
Election Hackers: Why Voting Technology Has to Stay Primitive | Cybersecurity Expert Kathleen FisherSince Russia (most likely) hacked our Presidential election in 2016, there's been talk of using cell phones for voting. Think again.
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Kathleen Fisher: One of the reasons why computer security is so hard is because you have to get absolutely everything right in order to have a secure system. And there’s lots of different kinds of things you can get wrong. Everything from your software was buggy, your passwords were too weak, you published your passwords accidentally, your hardware was insecure, the user made a mistake and fell victim to a phishing attack and gave their credentials to a foreign agent or a bad guy. All of those things have to be done correctly in order to have a secure system.
It might seem tempting to think, you know, everybody has a cell phone so you could just use your cell phone to do voting like we do for American Idol or similar TV shows. It works for American Idol because nobody cares all that much who wins or doesn’t win.
If you get the wrong outcome some people will care, but it won’t affect sort of the future of the country, for example. It’s not sensible to use cell phones for voting for things that matter, national elections for example, because the software on a phone is enormous and very complicated, and so understanding that that code is correct and actually counting all of the votes appropriately would be a task that would be so complex as to be infeasible to do.
You could have the legitimate app that is designed to correctly count the votes for an election, but somebody could hack into that set of applications and plant bugs in a bunch of different cell phones so that the final results were not the actual intent, it didn’t actually capture the intent of all the voters.
So a system for voting that relies entirely on computers to do all of the voting will never be secure, because you’ll never have enough confidence that the code that was running on those computers correctly counted the votes as the person who voted intended. There’s always the chance that there were bugs or that a hacker came and changed the code or corrupted the code to make the result be what the hacker wanted instead of what the voters wanted.
So one of the things to know about how the U.S. election system works is that voting machines are the perview of states. So every state has their own process for deciding how what technology to use to count votes. And so it’s not, there’s not a monoculture where every single voting site has the same technology. It’s determined on the state-by-state basis.
So you have 50 different state authorities—at least —who are deciding what technology to use for that particular state, and there are different technologies in play. One of the technologies is just a touch screen where you go and you tap the choices that you want and it records it in a computer program. Ten states currently have that kind of technology, and from a cybersecurity perspective that technology is terrible, because what computers do is exactly what they’re told to do by the last person who loaded code onto the system.
I think people who don’t know very much about computers tend to think that computers do the “right thing.” But in fact they just do exactly what their told to do. So if they’re told to do the correct thing by a person who has the authority to tell them, then that’s great. But that’s often not what happens. The voting systems that just have the touch screen, there’s no way of auditing what happened retroactively. It’s just a question of “did the system actually count it correctly?” You don’t know. All you have at the end of the day is the collection of totals. So somebody could have replaced the code, hacked in and made it count in a slightly skewed way, in a very skewed way—You really have no way of telling. So that technology is bad. People pretty much know that technology is bad and it’s being phased out. So no one is trying to buy more of these machines at this point and they’re no longer being manufactured. So we’re trending in a good direction as far as that’s concerned.
A different kind of machine are the optical scanning machines where you fill out – it’s kind of like a Scantron form from elementary school where you fill out the multiple choice questions on the form and then the form is read electronically. And now the program that’s doing the reading has all the problems of the system that I talked about before where it is software that’s scanning and counting and could be buggy, could be corrupted by somebody who’s hacking in.
Manage Anxiety: Use Hope to Build Trust and Confront Disappointment | Victoria McGeerIn this refreshing take on the utility of hope, Princeton research scholar Victoria McGeer explains that there's a difference between blind hope and practical hope. The latter means taking a clear-eyed view of potential disappointment, knowing that there may be failure, and then putting your anxieties offline by trusting in the elements that are beyond your control. Trust is a critical feature of human social life, and we're often obligated to trust in uncertain circumstances: trust your kids, trust that stranger, trust your neighbor. Hope, when done properly, can fortify trust, reduce anxiety, and actually give you the tools to cope with disappointment. This video was filmed as part of the Los Angeles Hope Festival, a collaboration between Big Think and Hope & Optimism.
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I think of trust and hope as being really quite closely related and oftentimes we trust without really having to worry too much about whether the person we’re trusting is able to do what we’re trusting them with. Maybe they’re a very reliable type and we trusted them in the past with this sort of thing, and we don’t really—we’re not too worried about their capacity for living up to that trust. But very often we’re having to trust under conditions where we’re a little more uncertain. Or where we think there’s some sort of, as it were, almost moral obligation. Certainly it can be a sort of parental obligation to trust, for example, our children, when we think maybe they’re not fully reliable yet. And they may well disappoint us, but it’s certainly an important part of raising those children to understand that they are going to be asked to do things, they are going to be relied on in various ways. It’s a way of allowing them to develop those capacities to be responsive to trust, which is a very important feature of human social life. And there I think we do need to energize our trust with our own capacity to hope—that means something very particular for me. That is to say when we hope for things, we’re always facing the fact that we could be disappointed. And we’re facing that disappointment sort of in a clear-eyed way—that is, if we’re hoping well. And we’re saying, you know, I understand what the stakes are here but I think this is an important thing to do and it’s important to regulate my own anxiety about this.
So I use my hope to put certain worries offline, as it were, to just not focus on them. To focus instead on what could be, under the right sort of conditions and giving whatever support is necessary to make that come about. But, of course, I have to, as a hoper, realize that I could be disappointed and also therefore that I have the kind of capacity to recover from disappointment. That’s a very important part of hoping well.
Dare to refuse the origin myths that claim who you are | Chetan BhattWe all have origin stories and identity myths, our tribal narratives that give us a sense of security and belonging. But sometimes our small-group identities can keep us from connecting with humanity as a whole -- and even keep us even from seeing others as human. In a powerful talk about how we understand who we are, Chetan Bhatt challenges us to think creatively about each other and our future. As he puts it: it's time to change the question from "Where are you from?" to "Where are you going?"
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How your pictures can help reclaim lost history | Chance CoughenourDigital archaeologist Chance Coughenour is using pictures -- your pictures -- to reclaim antiquities that have been lost to conflict and disaster. After crowdsourcing photographs of destroyed monuments, museums and artifacts, Coughenour uses advanced technology called photogrammetry to create 3D reconstructions, preserving the memory of our global, shared, human heritage. Find out more about how you can help celebrate and safeguard history that's being lost.
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How the US government spies on people who protest -- including you | Jennifer GranickWhat's stopping the American government from recording your phone calls, reading your emails and monitoring your location? Very little, says surveillance and cybersecurity counsel Jennifer Granick. The government collects all kinds of information about you easily, cheaply and without a warrant -- and if you've ever participated in a protest or attended a gun show, you're likely a person of interest. Learn more about your rights, your risks and how to protect yourself in the golden age of surveillance.
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Why America Confuses Fantasy for Reality: Celebrity, Hollywood, & Disneyland | Kurt AndersenThe start of the 20th century was the birth of a strange new reality in the United States. The advent of the moving image, of Hollywood and sudden celebrity, caused a quantum shift in how Americans thought about the experience of life. Actors were elevated to the status of superheroes and demigods, and those left in the obscurity of the masses began to desire that elusive privilege: fame. But where America really went haywire, author Kurt Andersen explains, is when the cult of celebrity and the cult of capitalism merged: it was the opening of Disneyland in 1955. A bizarre reality where advertising met animation. You could buy real wares, from fake characters, in real stores, with make-believe themes. "What happened in Disneyland... did not stay there," says Andersen. From Mickey Mouse all the way to the White House, Anderson doesn't find it at all surprising that Americans might have a hard time telling what's true from what's false. He calls it the fantasy-industrial complex, and it might just be America's beautifully branded nightmare. Kurt Andersen's new book is Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History.
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Transcript: All kinds of modern, amazing things were happening at the beginning of the 20th century, especially in the United States of America, and the movies and Hollywood were one of those things that we kind of, I think, we have lost track of what a quantum shift watching movies represented for the experience of life. Sure there had been actors and plays before, but first of all the glut of entertainment that suddenly existed and the almost phantasmagorical quality of watching real people moving around that weren’t in front of you but in some netherworld in film, and they were really in London or India or the Yukon or wherever, and time was suddenly changed, it went from childhood to adulthood—everything about the cinema, we have to understand what a huge change that was and how mutable it seemed to make reality. So you take that—the fact of cinema, TV, video, everything we now for five generations have taken as the way things are—it gave us, and especially Americans, obviously French people and English people as well, this idea that reality was mutable. Then on top of that and with that you have this celebrity culture where there are, by orders of magnitude, suddenly more celebrities. In the 19th century and earlier there were famous people, but just a few of them, and now there were hundreds and then eventually thousands of famous people who were now famous for pretending to be somebody else: actors. That was a strange new condition.
And so for a long time, for much of the 20th century, people looked up to movie stars because they seem to have real potency in this world where individuals seem more and more part of a mass. Here were the people, because they were famous and because we watched them and stared at them and dreamed about them, they were like superheroes or demigods. So by the end of the 20th century or before the end of the 20th century, who wouldn’t—if you’re an American steeped in this movie and television culture—want to be famous? Maybe there’s no reason for you to be famous but, my god, only famous people have real agency in the world. So we got to that point, where fame is its own end. You also—again, there’s advertising everywhere, but advertising and the advertising industry were really an American invention, starting way back in the 1800s when, for instance, the presidential candidate William Henry Harrison was the first marketed, advertised presidential candidate. He was this rich guy who they wanted to rebrand as a humble guy who had grown up in a log cabin, so log cabins became his icon, his branding symbol, and they made real big ones and little ones and liquor and facial creams in log cabin containers, and they made chants and songs, and he won by a landslide over a guy who was actually of humble origins.
So advertising as part of this fantasy-industrial complex that is so American and so defining of America has been a big part of what we’re talking about as well. Disneyland: I love Disneyland, but when it was created in the 1950s, not just as a little amusement park to promote Walt Disney’s animated films but as this other version of reality that was real—it was there, you could go there and buy things at these old-fashioned shops on Main Street USA with actors, but they were selling you stuff.
Can a robot pass a university entrance exam? | Noriko AraiMeet Todai Robot, an AI project that performed in the top 20 percent of students on the entrance exam for the University of Tokyo -- without actually understanding a thing. While it's not matriculating anytime soon, Todai Robot's success raises alarming questions for the future of human education. How can we help kids learn the things that humans can do better than AI?
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Why we need to end the era of orphanages | Tara WinklerCould it be wrong to help children in need by starting an orphanage? In this eye-opening talk about the bad consequences of good intentions, Tara Winkler speaks out against the spread of orphanages in developing countries, caused in part by foreign donors, and details the harm done to children when they are separated from their families and left to grow up in institutions.
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Babies Are Master Learners: How Adults Can Stimulate Their Innate Learning Skills | Janet LansburyInfants come equipped with higher learning skills—it's up to adults to encourage their development, and foster their natural sense of agency. So what's the best way to do that? Help them create their stimuli, not just consume it, says parenting expert Janet Lansbury. Screens are a fact of life for the modern infant, following them everywhere they go in their parents' hands or pockets. How does screen-based learning affect their development? Mobile devices aren't the devil, but understanding how an infant's mind is developing can help you choose the best toys for the kid in your life. Screens, even small ones, can be incredibly overstimulating. Babies are soaking in their environment constantly, and their senses are stimulated by the movement of hair, light coming through the window, a small noise—they are all mysteries a baby tries to solve. Screens are entertaining, but their mystery is too complex and it doesn't adequately demonstrate the cause and effect needed for learning. Lansbury explains how to choose the toys that will help kids become active learners—exercising their creativity and analytic mind— rather than being passive learners. Janet Lansbury is the author of No Bad Kids: Toddler Discipline Without Shame and Elevating Child Care: A Guide to Respectful Parenting
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Transcript: When we’re considering offering young children technology and mobile devices or other kinds of screens when they’re very, very young we have to consider, first of all, the stimulation factor. These are brand-new people to the world that are very, very sensitive and highly aware, and all of this works to their great advantage as learners and absorbers of their environment and life.
We develop more in the first three years than the whole rest of our life put together, so they’re able to learn from an empty room, being at a position where they’re ideally free to move their bodies, so they’re able to turn their heads—we say start infants on their backs for that reason—and they could be fascinated by dust particles or the corner of the room or natural light coming in, a number of things, and they are learning something from that, they’re figuring something out. So when we offer technology it’s an onslaught on their senses basically. Not so much a phone but a larger screen. But even a mobile device or a small screen, it’s not something they’re going to be able to master, it’s not something they’re going to be able to understand how it all works.
Imagine an infant who, from the RIE approach, we believe wants to be capable, wants to be competent, wants to be able to do things and feel a sense of agency in the world right away rather than being passive to something that sort of takes over and you’re drawn into it because there’s so much going on there.
For young children it can be very over-stimulating and it can discourage them from being the active learners that we want them to be, that will help them throughout life and help them prosper and help them reach their full potential, make school easier, a lot of practical things like that, and make them be able to retain what they learn and be interested in knowing more.
So it’s interesting—screens are kind of the extreme on one end of things babies can’t understand. Just to give you an example, there are screens where babies are totally passive and it’s just coming at them and they can’t really get it, then there’s something like a toy where you push a button and it makes a sound. So that’s pretty hard for them to understand too, I mean, they have a little bit of agency there: they can figure out, “Well if I do this it makes a sound,” but they’re never going to really understand where the sound comes from in those early years, in the first year or two.
And then there’s a rattle. I mean, is a rattle a terrible thing? No. But with this approach we just try to be aware that a rattle is a mystery, there’s a mysterious element. Then there’s those rattles where you can see through them to the little thing that’s making the sound, the little bell or whatever, and so the child can feel a little more capable of mastering that and understanding that, so that’s a little more encouraging.
Fun, fierce and fantastical African art | Wanuri KahiuWe're so used to narratives out of Africa being about war, poverty and devastation, says TED Fellow Wanuri Kahiu. Where's the fun? Introducing "AfroBubbleGum" -- African art that's vibrant, lighthearted and without a political agenda. Rethink the value of all that is unserious as Kahiu explains why we need art that captures the full range of human experiences to tell the stories of Africa.
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When workers own companies, the economy is more resilient | Niki OkukAnother economic reality is possible -- one that values community, sustainability and resiliency instead of profit by any means necessary. Niki Okuk shares her case for cooperative economics and a vision for how working-class people can organize and own the businesses they work for, making decisions for themselves and enjoying the fruits of their labor.
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4 Professional Poker Lessons to Help You Think Clearly and Live Wisely | Liv BoereeThere's a saying that if you play a game of poker with someone, you can find out a lot about them. Nobody knows this better than poker pro Liv Boeree, who whittles down years of playing into some great life advice. Amongst some other gems, she posits that too many people think along the "in for a penny, in for a pound" mindset and keep playing a bad hand despite knowing the odds. Poker, she says, does a great job of making you figure out where you are in the moment and not live either too much in the past or the present. Not bad for a game of cards.
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Transcript: So, the most damaging bias that can come up in poker, and I also think very often in life, is what's known as confirmation bias. So that's basically when you have like a pre-existing want to believe something, a desire for something to be true, and you will overvalue evidence that confirms that belief and disvalue evidence that disproves it. And in poker that can be absolutely devastating if, say, you're in a big hand and a ton of your chips are in the middle and your opponent has made a big bet and your hand is not that strong, and you really, really want to believe that they're bluffing so that you can win this hand. And you'll then look for all these signs: “Oh, well, I saw that their hand look shaky in that way and they seem a little uncertain,” look for all the evidence that could suggest that they are bluffing, and then not really ask yourself those vital questions like, “Okay well what evidence is there that they actually have a strong hand?” And learning that skill is absolutely crucial to be a great poker player, and I think that applies to many paths.
So if you're trying to make a big business decision: “Should I hire this new person as a manager?” and they're an old family friend and you really, really like them so you really do want to hire them, you'll tend to look for all the signs that they could be great but dismiss the perhaps overwhelming signs or the very strong signs that they're actually not the right person for the job.
So it's very important to just remember that our brains are naturally inclined to confirm what we really want to believe.
The status quo bias is whenever we catch ourselves saying, “Well it's always been done this way” or “It’s worked for me like this in the past and this is my way of doing things”—that's the status quo bias rearing its rather ugly head.
And what this means is that we have a tendency to not want to change our methodology, perhaps change the process with which we do something because it perhaps worked sometime in the past or we like doing it that way. And in poker I remember I used to catch myself falling into that, I had like a style of play that had worked for me a number of times and I would over rely on that and not update my playing style based upon the table that I was at because perhaps I didn't enjoy it as much or I found it more scary, for example. And the same thing can apply to us in life. The important thing there is to just be aware of the bias and look for situations where you could be using it to justify staying in a situation that you're a little bit scared to change.
Another classic one that comes up in poker is the sunk cost fallacy where, again, you'll have a lot of chips, perhaps almost all of your stack is in the middle and yet you are 85 to 90 percent confident that you have the worst hand and that putting another chip in the pot is probably not a good idea, but we'll often go to ourselves, “Well I've gone this far, I've put this much in I might as well see it through to the end.” But if you have very strong information that actually from this point onwards putting more money in the pot is a bad idea, then you shouldn't. But we have this belief that while I've put this much time in or this much effort that we should continue on.
In poker whenever a new card comes out, even though historically you've put in a lot of money into the pot, when that new information comes out that's an entirely new situation, what's happened before in terms of how much money you've put in is actually largely irrelevant. And the same thing applies to if you're investing in a business, be it time or money, when no matter how much you've put in over the last few years, let's say if new information comes out that this market is shrinking, some like legislation has been passed that's going to make it even harder to proceed, then you have to largely ignore the decisions that you made yesterday or before you got that information. You're in an entirely new situation and you have to evaluate it with all the information that you now have available.
"The Sacred Art of the Ori" | Laolu SenbanjoThe TED Talks channel features the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and more.
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Hackers Can Control Your Car’s Brakes, Doors, Steering—Car Makers Can't Stop Them | Kathleen FisherMore modern cars are easier to hack. So are pacemakers and other medical devices. What does that mean for the future?
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Kathleen Fisher: We’re hearing a lot about the internet of things, how your many, many devices are becoming networked computers.
And many of these devices are a ten dollar thing that you buy and you put on your shelf and you have it for a year and you throw it away.
I think not a lot of attention is being paid to the security of those kinds of devices. In some sense the companies that are making them can’t afford to do it, but they can lead longstanding vulnerabilities.
The automotive industry is another interesting example. A typical American modern automobile has somewhere between 30 and 100 what are called “embedded control units”. An embedded control unit is just a computer. Some of them are very, very small and run very simple code native on the hardware.
Some of them are full blown Linux computers or Windows computers, and they’re networked. A modern car has four to five network connections where the computers on the car talk to computers outside of the car. So an example is: there’s a Bluetooth connection so that your cell phone can talk to the car so that you can play your music from your phone on the car or you can talk on the cell phone without having to use your hands. There’s also a telematics unit which is the thing that if you get in an accident will arrange to call 911 or have the paramedics come. That service which is really useful and it’s a great safety feature means that your car has a cell phone number and that it’s possible to communicate with your car over that cell phone connection. Hackers can use those network connections to remotely break in to the computer system that’s on your car, and white hat hackers have shown they can do that and then can then rewrite any of the software on the car, replace the code that was legitimately put there by the car manufacturer with whatever code they want to have there.
And a typical modern car pretty much all of the functionality of the car is now controlled by software. So braking is controlled by software because you really want to have antilock braking.
Acceleration is controlled by software because of cruise control. Like you really want to have a car that can do parallel parking for you. That means steering is under software control. The locks are under software control so you can push the key fob button and have your locks open. Essentially all of the functionality of cars are under software control. And for the most part that’s a really good thing. Having it be under software control means that you can get increased functionality. You can have improved safety features. You can get upgrades as the car companies figure out how to do things better. All of that’s really good.
The downside is that, because it’s controlled by software, if an attacker can come in and replace that software then they can control the braking and the acceleration and the locks and everything that was under software control.
So we’re starting to see theft rings, for example, that are using electronic hacking in order to steal cars more easily. Lloyds of London recently stopped insuring Land Rovers in England unless the Land Rovers were garaged in a locked facility because they were being stolen too frequently.
So that’s the kind of state of the art of the automotive industry. The question is well, why isn’t it better? So one starting point is: it’s really hard to get good security. You have to do tons of things right. It costs money. So the car industry could improve the security of their cars, and hopefully they will eventually. That improvement will cost them money and the car industry doesn’t have huge profit margins. They can’t really afford to invest in the security unless they can recoup the cost associated with that investment by passing the cost on to the consumer. So that means the price of the car is going to be higher.
Will AI Result in Mass Unemployment or a New Middle Class? | Luis PerezWe've heard it before: Artificial Intelligence is coming to take our jobs. But is it really their fault, or the company that can't figure out how to create new ones?
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Luis Perez-Breva: A lot of people are scared about AI. And the reason is I think we’ve seen too many Terminator movies. So we’re mixing many things up. So it is true Terminator is not the scenario we are planning for. But when it comes to artificial intelligence people get all these things confused. It’s robots, it’s awareness, it’s people smarter than us to some degree. So we’re effectively afraid of robots that will move and are stronger and smarter than we are, like Terminator. So that’s not our aspiration. That’s not what I do when I’m thinking about artificial intelligence. When I’m thinking about artificial intelligence I’m thinking about it in the same way that mass manufacturing has brought by forth created a whole new economy. So mass manufacturing allowed people to get new jobs that were unthinkable before. And those new jobs actually created the middle class. To me artificial intelligence is about developing... making computers better partners, effectively. And you’re already seeing that today. You’re already doing it except that it’s not really artificial intelligence. Today whenever you want to engage in a project you go to Google. Google uses advanced machine learning, really advanced.
And you engage in a very narrow conversation with Google except that your conversation is just key words. So a lot of your time is spent trying to come up with the actual key word that you need to find the information and Google gives you the information. And then you go out and try to make sense of it on your own and come back to Google for more. And then go back out and that’s the way it works. So imagine that instead of being a narrow conversations with key words you could actually engage for more and actual information meaning to have the computer reason with you about stuff that you may not know about. It’s not so much about the computer being aware. It’s the computer being a better tool to partner with you. Then you would be able to go much further. The same way that Google allows you to go much further already today because before through the exact same process you would have had to go to a library every time you wanted to search for information. So what I’m looking for when I do AI is I want the machine that partners with me to help me set up or solve real world problems thinking about them in ways we have never thought about before. But it’s a partnership. And you can take this partnership in so many different directions through additions to your brain like Elon Musk proposes or through better search engines or through a robotic machine that helps you out. But it’s not so much they’re going to replace you for that purpose. That is not the real purpose of AI. The real purpose is for us to reach further the same way that we were able to reach further when Ford invented automation or when Ford brought automation to mass market.
People fear that automation might actually remove jobs. And what I want to stress is that that’s not artificial intelligence. Automation is something we’ve been doing for ages, all of us. You do it at your home. You do it with the way you set up your own schedules. You do it for many, many things. In some cases it involves computers, in some cases it doesn’t. Now the purpose of automation is to free time so that we can reach further. So when a company starts using automation and it erases certain jobs but doesn’t figure out how to create new ones then they’re mostly just looking at cost savings. They’re not looking really at expanding their own market. And that turns out to be a lack of imagination. So with the free time and the expertise that was left free now because of the automation they should be able to build and reach further. If they don’t it has little to do with the actual machine which is somewhat dumb. It has more to do with lack of imagination on the part of whomever. But certainly not the worker, right.
What the sugar coating on your cells is trying to tell you | Carolyn BertozziYour cells are coated with sugars that store information and speak a secret language. What are they trying to tell us? Your blood type, for one -- and, potentially, that you have cancer. Chemical biologist Carolyn Bertozzi researches how sugars on cancerous cells interact with (and sometimes trick) your immune system. Learn more about how your body detects cancer and how the latest cancer-fighting medicines could help your immune system beat the disease.
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What would happen if we upload our brains to computers? | Robin HansonMeet the "ems" -- machines that emulate human brains and can think, feel and work just like the brains they're copied from. Economist and social scientist Robin Hanson describes a possible future when ems take over the global economy, running on superfast computers and copying themselves to multitask, leaving humans with only one choice: to retire, forever. Glimpse a strange future as Hanson describes what could happen if robots ruled the earth.
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A lyrical bridge between past, present and future | David WhyteWith his signature charm and searching insight, David Whyte meditates on the frontiers of the past, present and future, sharing two poems inspired by his niece's hike along El Camino de Santiago de Compostela in Spain.
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What moral decisions should driverless cars make? | Iyad RahwanShould a driverless car kill you if it means saving five pedestrians? In this primer on the social dilemmas of driverless cars, Iyad Rahwan explores how the technology will challenge our morality and explains his work collecting data from real people on the ethical trade-offs we're willing (and not willing) to make.
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Richard Dawkins Reveals How Science Really Works: Imagination, Intuition, Evidence, and TruthYou can be committed to science, but as soon as you're committed to a hypothesis, you've walked off the trail of objective truth, says Richard Dawkins. For him, that is the mission of science and the purpose of the scientific method: these truths exist—they are the foundations of innovations like vaccinations, antibiotics, and space travel, because they are built on something solid: evidence. Einstein is known for highly valuing the role of imagination in science, and Dawkins agrees: imagination and intuition are the springboards scientific progress depends on—but when evidence refutes a hypothesis or a feeling, that's the end of the line. Dogged persistence doesn't get you any closer to the truth, says Dawkins, only critical thinking can do that. Richard Dawkins' latest book is Science In The Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist.
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Transcript: The first chapter of 'Science in the Soul' is called 'The Values of Science and the Science of Values'. And it does, of course, give prominence to objective truth. There is a kind of whispering campaign—more than a whispering campaign, sometimes a yelling campaign—against the value of objective truth. Science, I think, is committed to objective truth; we’re committed to the view that truth is independent of the cultural background of the scientist, for example. So as I said in the book, an experiment done in a lab in New York can be replicated in a lab in New Delhi, and if it’s all done correctly in the same way they’ll get the same result. Science’s belief in objective truth works. Engineering technology based upon the science of objective through achieves results: it manages to build planes that get off the ground, it manages to send people to the moon and explore Mars with robots, and land robotic vehicles on comets. Science works. Science produces antibiotics, it produces vaccines that work. So anybody who chooses to say, “Oh, there’s no such thing as objective truth, it’s all subjective, it’s all socially constructed,” tell that to a doctor, tell that to a space scientist.
Manifestly, science works and the view that “there is no such thing as objective truth” doesn’t. Science proceeds, I believe, in the sort of Popperian view that science proceeds by intuitive leaps of the imagination, building an idea of what might be true and then testing it by experiment, by observation, in the second phase. It’s a kind of Darwinian selection of mutation, which is provided by the imagination.
So intuition is very important, but it is important that scientists should not be so wedded to their intuition that they omit the very important testing phase, and if their hypothesis is disproved they should regard that as a reason to reject the hypothesis or modify it, not a reason to just carry on doggedly sticking to the hypothesis because they are intuitively committed to it.
The phrase 'critical thinking' is quite a cliché but it is immensely important. And so I think that I really could sum it up by saying what we need is critical thinking; we need to respect evidence, we need to respect the fact that the only reason to believe anything about the real world is evidence. The evidence must be assessed critically, preferably statistically and logically. You cannot derive truths about the real world by intuition alone, by feelings alone, by what feels good.
People who say things like, “All opinions are equally valid,” or, “Well, it’s true for me, it may not be true for you.” Never tolerate that kind of thing. The only reason to believe anything is true is that there’s evidence, and everybody should either look at the evidence for themselves or they should trust that the person they’re talking to has looked at the evidence in a scientific, logical, rational, critical way.
Just for example, I’m not qualified to assess the evidence of modern physics experiments, I’m just not qualified. So I have to trust—this is not trusting authority so much as trusting the scientific method, which I know has been used by physicists whom I can’t directly assess, it has been used by physicists who are using the same techniques as I know work in my own field of biology.
The era of blind faith in big data must end | Cathy O'NeilAlgorithms decide who gets a loan, who gets a job interview, who gets insurance and much more -- but they don't automatically make things fair. Mathematician and data scientist Cathy O'Neil coined a term for algorithms that are secret, important and harmful: "weapons of math destruction." Learn more about the hidden agendas behind the formulas.
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Train Your Brain: Mindfulness Meditation for Anxiety, Depression, ADD and PTSD | Daniel GolemanBy now, everyone knows that mindfulness meditation is good for you—but what's still surprising scientists is just how quickly it works. Ten minutes of meditation won't make you a better mutlitasker—there's no such thing, as psychologist and science journalist Daniel Goleman explains—but it will make you more adept at switching tasks and returning to a deep level of concentration more quickly after a distraction. Every time you practice meditation, you’re strengthening the neural circuitry for focus and training your brain away from mind-wandering. Beyond the need to concentrate for work, pleasure, or to overcome negative emotion, mindfulness meditation can also help to manage disorders like PTSD, anxiety, and Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). This last one particularly has shown incredible results, and Goleman cites one exercise a teacher in a rough neighborhood of New York City practices routinely with their class of seven-year-old kids, over half of which have special needs like ADD and autism. That daily ritual keeps the class environment calm and constructive, and is empowering the children with self-control strategies early on. The scientific research evidence on the benefits of meditation is already compelling, and there are major studies underway, which Goleman expects will reveal many more insights that can be used to instruct creative, educational, and mental health practices. Daniel Goleman and Richard J. Davidson are the authors of Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body.
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Transcript: What’s surprising, at least to scientists, is that the benefits from meditation show up right from the beginning. You can do, for example, mindfulness—that’s a very popular meditation—if you do mindfulness practice ten minutes a day or ten minutes three times over the course of a day something remarkable happens to your attention, and it has to do with the fact that we’re all multitasking these days. People on average look at their email about 50 times a day, they look at their Facebook 20-something times a day and that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's Instagram, there's your phone calls, there’s whatever it is you have to do. And what this means for attention is that we’re challenged. Focused attention is an endangered species, however, we need that focus to get work done well. So it’s a real problem and meditation, it turns out, even at the beginning, has some of the answers.
It goes like this: when you’re really intensely focused on that one thing you have to do or you want to do—the paper you’re writing or the project you’re working on—then you think, 'Oh, I better check my email,' and then that leads to your Facebook and that leads to the phone call, it leads to—we call this multitasking. The brain actually does not do multitasking, it doesn’t do several things at once in parallel, rather it works in serial and it switches very rapidly from one thing to the next. Then when you go back to that project or whatever it was you were so focused on, your concentration had been at a very high level before you started doing the other things, now it’s much lower and it takes a while to ramp up to that same level, unless—and this is so interesting—unless you’ve done that ten minutes of mindfulness; focused on your breath, for example, just watched it in and out, noticed when your mind wandered, brought it back. That’s the basic move in meditation. And if you do that it turns out just ten minutes of practice nullifies that loss of concentration.
Because meditation has been found to work so well with anxiety and depression and possibly PTSD, where that’s being looked into, one of the areas that seems promising is meditation with Attention Deficit Disorder. In a way this is a no-brainer because at base, in essence, every kind of meditation retrains attention and what Attention Deficit Disorder is is a problem with attention. So there’s now a whole host of studies underway, mainly with kids because it’s where ADD tends to show up first, where they’re helping them strengthen the muscle of attention. I was in a classroom of seven year olds in Spanish Harlem, this is a very impoverished area of New York City, and those kids live in housing projects, they have very troubled lives and some of them had ADD—in fact half the kids in that classroom had what are called special needs, ranging from ADD to autism.
How to build a company where the best ideas win | Ray DalioWhat if you knew what your coworkers really thought about you and what they were really like? Ray Dalio makes the business case for using radical transparency and algorithmic decision-making to create an idea meritocracy where people can speak up and say what they really think -- even calling out the boss is fair game. Learn more about how these strategies helped Dalio create one of the world's most successful hedge funds and how you might harness the power of data-driven group decision-making.
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How I found myself through music | Anika Paulson"Music is everywhere, and it is in everything," says musician, student and TED-Ed Clubs star Anika Paulson. Guitar in hand, she plays through the beats of her life in an exploration of how music connects us and makes us what we are.
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The secret to living longer may be your social life | Susan PinkerThe Italian island of Sardinia has more than six times as many centenarians as the mainland and ten times as many as North America. Why? According to longevity researcher Susan Pinker, it's not a sunny disposition or a low-fat, gluten-free diet that keeps the islanders alive so long -- it's their emphasis on close personal relationships and face-to-face interactions. Learn more about super longevity as Pinker explains what it takes to live to 100 and beyond.
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Former CIA Operative Reveals 3 Roots of Terrorism: Wages, Liberty, Language | Amaryllis FoxHow do you spot terrorism before it happens? Look for patterns in what might seem like unlikely places. Like the living wage of a border guard, for instance.
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Amaryllis Fox: I think one of the really scary and overwhelming things about terrorism can be the idea that it’s this giant boogeyman that is really difficult to comprehend, and is terrifying, and comes along in the night out of nowhere and steals your family members or loved ones away.
And for me my life’s work has really been understanding the small logical puzzle pieces that when taken together create that boogeyman so that you can take it apart into manageable pieces and actually begin to understand what drives these inconceivable actions.
So, when you take this overwhelming boogeyman of terrorism and you begin to tease it apart based on the data and look for patterns that turn up again and again each time a terrorist plot is planned in a different territory throughout the historical data, you begin to notice patterns that might not seem obvious to begin with.
So, things like the percentage beneath livable wage that a border guard gets paid which, of course, gives rise to the possibility of accepting a bribe to let somebody just sneak across the border or hand a package to you.
If that bribe is the difference between being able to feed your kids that month or not it’s a pretty understandable small choice for that individual actor and yet has given rise to perhaps a terrorist act being able to take place even though the law of the territory should have prevented it.
So, another example would be the rate of change of things like freedom of the press or freedom of speech—Not the scores themselves, but the rate of change—which goes to the difficulty that societies experience when they suddenly open up and allow liberties that many of the more traditional members of society haven’t been accustomed to in the past.
There are strategies for taking communities through those evolutions, but without those strategies in place it can seem very jarring.
And we experience that even in a mature democracy like ours, where when certain changes take place quickly it can take portions of the community time to be comfortable with them and to catch up in a political environment.
Another example would be the ratio of hookah bars to madrasas, and there you begin to see, you know, tensions between more traditional, religious elements in society and a younger demographic.
In many countries where you have more than 50 percent in that youth demographic, there’s a big cultural rift there that can often give rise to lack of understanding or the feeling that young people are not being incorporated into society and need some other outlet for their feelings of frustration (and eventually rage).
Another really interesting one that we see is: how good machine translation is for a local language.
So often we think that libraries in the olden days and now the provision of hardware and internet access points can be a great tool in the fight against extremism.
All of a sudden young people in a given area have access to the sum total of human knowledge. How great is that? And yet if the language that’s spoken, the dialect in that region is not very well translated by Google Translator or other artificial intelligence programs, then really access to the internet for the majority of young people who don’t necessarily speak another language or dialect is not terribly meaningful, because they’re generally seeing sites that for small dialects are actually created in their vicinity and may not offer perspectives that are particularly different from what they’re hearing around them in a given day.
Richard Dawkins: No Civilized Person Accepts Slavery, So Why Do We Accept Animal Cruelty?Do animals feel pain? Well, yes. Obviously. They may even feel pain a lot stronger than humans do.
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Richard Dawkins: There’s quite a lot in Science in the Soul about the ethics of the way we treat nonhuman animals. I say nonhuman because, of course, we are animals we’re not plants, we’re not fungi, we’re not bacteria, we are animals.
There is a double standard in our ethics at present, which builds a wall around our own species Homo Sapiens, which is rather un-evolutionary if you think about the fact that we are close cousins of chimpanzees, if you think about the fact that we are descended from a common ancestor that lived only about six or seven million years ago.
If you want to erect a moral wall around our species and say, for example, that a human embryo, even a very beginning human embryo (long before it develops a nervous system) is somehow worthy of more moral consideration than an adult chimpanzee, then that is a rather un-evolutionary view point. If you look back in our ancestry, at what point would you draw the line?
Would you give... if there were Australopithecus—almost certainly our ancestor Australopithecus three million years ago—if you were to meet one if one had survived in the African jungle, would you give it the same moral consideration as the rest of us or would you say “No, no—that has the same moral consideration as a chimpanzee”?
If we look back in history a couple of centuries ago most people accepted slavery and nowadays, of course, that's a horrifying thought.
No civilized person today accepts slavery. And if you look back further still we had the appalling things that the Romans were doing in the Colosseum with spectator sport, watching people killing other people, lions killing people, regarding it as fun entertainment to take the children out to.
We’re certainly getting better, as Steven Pinker has said in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, and Michael Shermer in his book on The Moral Arc, so we’re changing a lot and it’s sort of a fairly obvious thing to do to look in the future and say “What will our future descendants think when they look back at us the way we look back at our slave-owning ancestors with horror? What will our descendants look back in our time?
And I think the obvious candidate would be the way we treat nonhuman animals. My view would be that we want to avoid suffering; therefore the criteria would be “Can this creature suffer?” This is the criteria that Jeremy Bentham the great moral philosopher laid out: “Can they suffer?” There’s every reason to think that mammals, at least and probably many more, can suffer perhaps as much as we can pain.
If you think about what pain is for, biologically speaking, pain is a warning to the animal: “Don’t do that again.”
If the animal does something which results in pain, that is a kind of ritual death—it’s telling the animal, “if you do that again you might die and you might fail to reproduce.”
That’s why natural selection has built pain into our nervous systems, built the capacity to feel pain into our nervous systems.
So don’t mess around with hornets because it’s painful; don’t do that again. Don’t pick up burning coals from the fire; don’t do that again.
There’s absolutely no reason as far as I can see why a nonhuman animal, a dog or a chimpanzee or a cow, should be any less capable of feeling pain than we can, when you think about what pain is actually doing.
A practical way to help the homeless find work and safety | Richard J. BerryWhen Richard J. Berry, the mayor of Albuquerque, saw a man on a street corner holding a cardboard sign that read "Want a job," he decided to take him (and others in his situation) up on it. He and his staff started a citywide initiative to help the homeless by giving them day jobs and a place to sleep -- and the results were incredible. Find out how your city can replicate Albuquerque's model with this frank and optimistic talk.
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7 principles for building better cities | Peter CalthorpeMore than half of the world's population already lives in cities, and another 2.5 billion people are projected to move to urban areas by 2050. The way we build new cities will be at the heart of so much that matters, from climate change to economic vitality to our very well-being and sense of connectedness. Peter Calthorpe is already at work planning the cities of the future and advocating for community design that's focused on human interaction. He shares seven universal principles for solving sprawl and building smarter, more sustainable cities.
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How artists can (finally) get paid in the digital age | Jack ConteIt's been a weird 100 years for artists and creators, says musician and entrepreneur Jack Conte. The traditional ways we've turned art into money (like record sales) have been broken by the internet, leaving musicians, writers and artists wondering how to make a living. With Patreon, Conte has created a way for artists on the internet to get paid by their fans. Could payment platforms like this change what it means to be an artist in the digital age?
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How I help free innocent people from prison | Ronald SullivanHarvard Law professor Ronald Sullivan fights to free wrongfully convicted people from jail -- in fact, he has freed some 6,000 innocent people over the course of his career. He shares heartbreaking stories of how (and why) people end up being put in jail for something they didn't do, and the consequences in their lives and the lives of others. Watch this essential talk about the duty we all have to make the world a bit more fair every day, however we can.
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How boredom can lead to your most brilliant ideas | Manoush ZomorodiDo you sometimes have your most creative ideas while folding laundry, washing dishes or doing nothing in particular? It's because when your body goes on autopilot, your brain gets busy forming new neural connections that connect ideas and solve problems. Learn to love being bored as Manoush Zomorodi explains the connection between spacing out and creativity.
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Courage is contagious | Damon DavisWhen artist Damon Davis went to join the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after police killed Michael Brown in 2014, he found not only anger but also a sense of love for self and community. His documentary "Whose Streets?" tells the story of the protests from the perspective of the activists who showed up to challenge those who use power to spread fear and hate.
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Bryan Cranston: One Thing All Young People Should Do While They're Still YoungTravel—and experiencing other cultures—opens your mind. Nobody knows this better than Bryan Cranston, who spent two consecutive years (at 19 and 20) on a motorcycle with his brother, exploring America and figuring out what it was that he wanted to do with the rest of his life. Needless to say he became a major figure in American acting. With pivotal roles in Breaking Bad and Trumbo that—no exaggeration here—have helped reshape not only American television but American masculinity, it shows just how meaningful being purposefully lost can be. That way, you can truly find yourself.
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Bryan Cranston: You know Americans have a lot of great qualities, and one of them is a general work ethic. I think we’re a nation of hard workers.
And that being said I think sometimes we reach down too far into our youth and expect them to produce sooner than they should be able to.
I think people gain a tremendous amount of wisdom when they travel, when they wander—when they allow themselves, as I did, to get lost. And maybe you’ll find yourself somewhere. Or at least traveling forces you to be social. You have to get directions, you have to learn where things are, you’re attuned to your environment, you have to be more careful about the weather and where you’re lodging is going to be, where you’re going to eat, how you’re going to get from one place to another.
When you’re there what is it you want to see? How can you find a place for you to actually just rest? It’s an experience like no other. I love to travel and I enjoy not knowing where I am. It’s an unusual thing. I’d purposefully teach that to my daughter, who’s now 24 years old, to not be afraid of not knowing where you are. So I’ll go for a drive or go for a walk in a different city and my wife will say, “Do you know where you’re going?” “Not really. Just kind of exploring different places.” As long as you have a sense of direction you’ll find your way, you’ll figure it out. And I do that in foreign countries as well: Just kind of wander and meander and trust that you’ve paid attention to at least the basic requirement of where you have to get back to in order to find your way home.
But I think it is, I think we look down now to 16 year olds and say, “Where are you going to go to college? What are you going to do for the rest of your life?” And it's like... they’re not fully baked yet! How do they know? Give them a break.
Just say, look, “I think after high school take a year off, take two years off. Join the Peace Corps. Travel. Go figure things out or just enjoy yourself.”
For the first time in their lives they’re adults and they don’t have to be somewhere. They’re not told to be somewhere. Get used to that freedom. Get used to having the need to self-govern yourself, to be able to employ self-discipline—or not. Or you realize “Oh my god, I’m really slovenly! If I’m not told I need to go to class I don’t go.” You might discover something about yourself.
“I need order. I need that. I like that.” Some people love to be, say, “this is where you have to be and this is what you need to do.” Are you that type of person or are you a type of person that wants more freedom in your life? And I think exploration, travel, it provides that.
In 1976 I had just finished my second year of college and realized that, after an experience in an elective acting class, that I wasn’t going to be the policeman I thought I was going to be. It was better if I didn’t continue on with two more years of an Administration of Justice major because I knew I wasn’t going to become a policeman.
So... I thought I better just go figure out what it is I want to do.
And so I hopped on the back of a motorcycle. My brother was in the same position, really. Two young guys who were not quite sure what was in store for them or what avenue they should go down. So we both hopped on our motorcycles and we took off. We left California. I had about 150 bucks in my pocket or something. And soon ran low of funds and we had to get jobs along the way.
Richard Dawkins: No, Not All Opinions Are Equal—Elitism, Lies, and the Limits of DemocracyYou want expert pilots to fly your planes, top doctors to perform your surgeries, the finest musicians in your orchestra, and for the same reason, you should want experts leading the nation, says Richard Dawkins. There has been a backlash against expert knowledge amid the rising wave of populist politics, but Dawkins doesn't think elitism is the dirty word that people are implying. He contends that not all opinions are equal, and that the leaders of the UK were profoundly misguided in allowing a referendum on Brexit to occur. No average citizen—not even Dawkins himself—was fit to decide on whether to leave a federation of states with so much economic and political importance, and decades of complex history attached to it. And much like the 2016 US presidential election, it was a political movement fueled by misinformation. A representative democracy is one thing, where citizens entrust experts to make national and local decisions, but a referendum democracy seems to Dawkins extremely ill-advised, particularly given that the top Google search in the UK the day after the Brexit vote was 'What is the European Union?'. Dawkins isn't shy: he's an elitist, but a rational one. He affirms he would never want a world where your IQ determines how many votes you get, but he sees the clear benefit of making political decisions based on knowledge rather than emotion or misinformation, deliberate or otherwise. Richard Dawkins' newest book is Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist.
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Richard Dawkins: Among the reasons that I heard for people wanting to vote for Brexit were, 'Well, it’s nice to have a change,' and, 'Well, I preferred the old blue passport to the European purple passport.' These are the kinds of reasons people were giving for voting for Brexit. The day after the referendum, the most Goggled question in Britain was: What is the European Union?
During the Brexit campaign one of the leading politicians favoring Brexit, Michael Gove, said to the British people, “You are the experts. Don’t trust experts, you are the expert now.” So ordinary people who have absolutely no knowledge of economics or politics or history decided on a 50 percent majority to vote to Britain out of the European market, out of the European community, which was a very, very complicated, detailed, ramified structure that has been built up over decades. And so in one stroke the British people, who had no knowledge, no expertise, were given the opportunity by a reckless David Cameron to vote us out and they did, by a very narrow margin. This cult of everybody being an expert, all opinions being equally valid is, I think, dangerous and most unfortunate. Of course I have been accused of being an elitist because of this. And yes, when you’re about to have an operation you want an elite surgeon to cut you open, you want an elite anesthetist to put you under. When you’re about to fly you want an elite pilot to fly you. When you’re about to leave a federation of states, which has been built up over decades, you want an elite economist or politician or historian to advise you on it. You don’t want to take the view of just any old man in the street or woman in the street.
I pronounce myself profoundly ill-equipped to vote on the referendum about Brexit. I was ill-equipped and so was the vast majority of the British people ill-equipped. In that sense I think that elitist should stop being a dirty word and we should start to respect elites in whatever field we’re talking about. We want elite musicians to play in our orchestras, et cetera.
I think it’s bad enough to ask non-experts like me to vote in direct referendums, but when we are also being fed false information, or it’s deliberately false information. The Trump administration is actually lying every day and more or less proud of it. In Britain the Brexit campaign had a bus—you may have read about this—they had a bus which had a great big slogan on the side, which said that every day or every week I think it was, some gigantic sum was being paid to the European Union, which if we left Europe would be available for the national health. Now that was an admitted lie, that’s quite simply false, and many people were probably swayed by that consideration to vote to leave the European Union.
Meet the microscopic life in your home -- and on your face | Anne MaddenBehold the microscopic jungle in and around you: tiny organisms living on your cheeks, under your sofa and in the soil in your backyard. We have an adversarial relationship with these microbes -- we sanitize, exterminate and disinfect them -- but according to microbiologist Anne Madden, they're sources of new technologies and medicines waiting to be discovered. These microscopic alchemists aren't gross, Madden says -- they're the future.
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A dance to honor Mother Earth | Jon Boogz and Lil BuckMovement artists Jon Boogz and Lil Buck debut "Honor thy mother," a delicate, powerful performance of spoken word, violin and dance that draws on the tormented relationship between nature and humanity.
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Let's end ageism | Ashton ApplewhiteIt's not the passage of time that makes it so hard to get older. It's ageism, a prejudice that pits us against our future selves -- and each other. Ashton Applewhite urges us to dismantle the dread and mobilize against the last socially acceptable prejudice. "Aging is not a problem to be fixed or a disease to be cured," she says. "It is a natural, powerful, lifelong process that unites us all."
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How your brain decides what is beautiful | Anjan ChatterjeeAnjan Chatterjee uses tools from evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience to study one of nature's most captivating concepts: beauty. Learn more about the science behind why certain configurations of line, color and form excite us in this fascinating, deep look inside your brain.
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Richard Dawkins: The Dangers of CRISPR, Designer Babies, and Artificial Genetic MutationAnnouncement of CRISPR technology, which allows precise editing of the human genome, has been heralded as the future of individualized medicine, and a decried as a slippery slope to engineering individual human qualities. Of course, humans already know how to manipulate animal genomes through selective breeding, but there has been no appetite to try on humans what is the norm for dogs. That's a good thing, says Dawkins. The results could well be dangerous. Does technology as a whole represent a threat to human welfare if it continues to evolve at its current rate? Not so fast, warns Dawkins. Comparing biological evolution to technological progress is an analogy at best. His newest book is Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist.
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Transcript: I think it’s - I’m a believer in the precautionary principle as I’ve just said, and I think we have to worry about possible consequences of things that we do, and the ability to edit our own genomes is one thing we ought to worry about. I’m not sure it’s so much an ethical problem as a more practical problem. What would the consequences be? Would the consequences be bad? And they might be.
I think it’s worth noticing that long before CRISPR long before it became capable of editing our genomes in anyway we have been editing the genomes of domestic animals and plants by artificial selection, not artificial mutation, which is what we’re now talking about, but artificial selection. When you think that a Pekingese is a wolf, a modified wolf, a genetically modified wolf—modified not by directly manipulating genes but by choosing for breeding individuals who have certain characteristics, for example, a small stubbed nose, et cetera, and making a wolf turn into a Pekingese. And we’ve been doing that very successfully with domestic animals like dogs, cows, domestic plants like maize for a long time, we’ve never done that to humans or hardly at all.
Hitler tried it but it’s never really been properly done with humans I’m glad to say. So if we’ve never done that with humans with the easy way, which is artificial selection, it’s not obvious why we would suddenly start doing it the difficult way, which is by direct genetic manipulation. There doesn’t seem to be any great eagerness to do it over the last few centuries anyway.
A lot of people have problems with what they call designer babies. You could imagine a future scenario in which people go to a doctor and say, "Doctor, we want our baby to be a musical genius. Please edit the genes so that we have the same genes as the Bach family had or something like that to make them into a musical genius." I mean that horrifies many people.
It’s got totally obvious why that’s anymore horrifying than parents who are ambitious for the musical future of their child forcing the child to practice the piano three hours a day. There are differences, of course, forcing it to practice is maybe unpleasant for the child but it doesn’t go into the next generation, changing the genes does so there is a difference there. But at least people who shudder with horror at a designer baby who’s a musical genius, people who shudderat horror at that, why don’t you shudder with horror at forcing a child to have music lessons when it doesn’t want to or practice music when it doesn’t want to?
I think although there is an analogy between technological evolution and biological evolution, it’s dangerous to push that analogy too far. I’ve just been decrying the view that everybody is an expert. And I’m not an expert in technology and I think that every scientist needs to admit when they don’t know. The analogy is there, things change gradually, the evolution of the airplane starting from the Wright brothers in the beginning of the 20th century until the present, it’s been spectacularly fast but it is gradual evolution and it looks, to some extent, like biological evolution. But whether it occurs by natural selection that’s open to argument. You could say that it does occur by a form of natural selection, but it’s not the same kind of natural selection. So I don’t regard myself as a biological evolutionist as qualified to talk about technological evolution. I’m interested in the analogy but I think it only is an analogy and it doesn’t go too far.
How AI can enhance our memory, work and social lives | Tom GruberHow smart can our machines make us? Tom Gruber, co-creator of Siri, wants to make "humanistic AI" that augments and collaborates with us instead of competing with (or replacing) us. He shares his vision for a future where AI helps us achieve superhuman performance in perception, creativity and cognitive function -- from turbocharging our design skills to helping us remember everything we've ever read and the name of everyone we've ever met. "We are in the middle of a renaissance in AI," Gruber says. "Every time a machine gets smarter, we get smarter."
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Bryan Cranston: How Love, Drugs, and Power Informed My "Breaking Bad" Performance as Walter WhiteRead more at BigThink.com:
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Transcript: I mean the purpose of writing my book was to express myself, to continue being a storyteller. These are two stories. It’s called Life in Parts because of the parts we play. Not only the parts I played in my profession but also the parts we play as human beings. I’m a father. I’m a husband. I’m a brother. I’m a citizen, a neighbor, and all those things. And we all are. We all present ourselves that way. I also wanted to write honestly because I thought if I’m not telling the truth then what’s the point. It’s masturbatory which has its place in your life but not in this case. I wanted to present it to say okay, here’s when I was afraid. Here’s when I was insecure. This is times when it was really trying on me or testing me. The two incidents that you mention I was married once before to a lovely young woman who we just, we weren’t suited for each other. And so we separated. We parted ways. And out of that four year togetherness I was newly single. And within a month or so I was on an audition and I met this woman named Ava whose name I changed. And she was aggressive and assertive and beautiful and I was kind of taken aback. And we got together quickly and we were boyfriend and girlfriend before I could blink.
[0:12:52.9] And then I realized there was something off about her. And what was off about her is that she was addicted to drugs. But I never knew exactly what kind of drugs. I was really very ignorant about drugs because I was on that track to become a police officer and I just never indulged. I’d smoke pot once in a while but it was never my thing so it didn’t appeal to me. And I’ve never done any other drug than that. So I was very ignorant on that but I noticed her behavior was different. She would be sweating one moment and then she’s fine and then she’s down and then she’s up. IT’s like there’s something very strange going on. And I tried to get out of the relationship and she was so powerful she refused the breakup. When I decided I was going to breakup with her I thought of the possible scenarios. She could be angry. She could be pleading. She could agree with me. Yeah, I think it’s best we should breakup. There could be any number of things. And I thought about how I would react depending on what reaction she would give. The only thing that I didn’t count on is that she said no. Just calmly said so, we’re not breaking up. I don’t know what to do with that. And she was so aggressive and assertive that she just kept pulling me into her life and it was crazy. It’s a longer story but she started stalking me and showed up at work. I was working on a soap opera at the time in New York and she showed up at work and she was thrown out of the studio.
[0:14:45.5] And she would leave these messages on my answering machine in those days. This is the early eighties. And threatening me that she was going to have me killed and when I lease expect it. She would say I can find you any time. Look, I was at the floor of your show. That’s how easy. And I was really like she’s right. And she was very smart and it was like oh my god, at any moment she could have someone just kill me. And she said specifically that. The one Achilles heel that she had was that she loved her mother deeply. And I had met her mother a couple of times and she’s a lovely lady. And one time I picked up the phone. I usually didn’t answer the phone but I picked up the phone and it was her. I went oh god. And I just told her I said look Ava, don’t ever call me again. Leave me alone. No more threats. I have all these threats on my answering machine. If you continue with this I will tell your mother. I will let your mother listen to your threatening my life. Silence. Silence on the phone. Then she came back on and said I want that tape. I want that tape. And she’s screaming obscenities. And I went Ava, listen to me. I promise you I will erase these tapes if you leave me alone. But if you don’t I will give them to your mother. But if you leave me alone your mother will never hear them. I promise you that.
Overcome Your Fear of Failure: Booze, Bombing, and Reverse Psychology | Ari ShaffirFear of failure is a real thing, and so are the ways of overcoming it. Comedian Ari Shaffir names ways of understanding fear, accepting it, and inviting it into your experience—all as a way to succeed.
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Transcript: It’s almost—the worst thing you can do in almost any experience is have too much expectations. You can have thoughts of how it might be going to go, but then if it doesn’t what are you going to do?
Like Tiger Woods used to have this thing where he’d close his eyes, I think some sports therapist told him to close your eyes and imagine a perfect shot like your perfect backswing hitting it perfectly landing on the green four feet from the cup. And he would do that, imagine and then go and do it. That’s his expectation. But sometimes he’d shank one into the high grass and he can’t just go, “Well I thought I’d be on the green.” He’d be like “It’s a new moment, I’m in the high grass, and I’ve got to figure out a way to fucking get out of that over the sand with water behind it and hit this new shot.” You can have expectations but don’t stick to them.
Stage fright is a real thing. It’s debilitating to some people. Liz Phair, I think, she never toured because she had stage fright, which was too bad. She was great. She’s a musician. Maybe it’s a bad example. But I used to be really frightened.
My first time onstage I had to do like two shots, guzzle a beer and then sip another beer just to get my hands down to like that from that. It’s a real thing. I know some people have taken beta-blockers, they’ve taken pills to like get rid of that fear. I think with experience you just get over it.
I had a time at the DC Improv where I was coming out from backstage and I threw up in my mouth and I had to fucking swallow it back down. It was like, “This next guy, he’s originally from—“, as they’re saying that it was like “Please welcome…”
I had to go out there like that. And I wasn’t expecting it but that was real. I don’t know what happened I just got nervous. And then there was a time where I went home to do some like job-job, so I was maybe a year, two years into comedy, went home to do this job, came back and was—I haven’t thought about this in a while, I was overcome by fright. I couldn’t get back onstage. I couldn’t to do it.
I would drive from my apartment in West L.A. 30 minutes toward The Comedy Store; find parking; get out of my car; walk to The Comedy Store (because you get an employee spot every week and I was an employee so you get your three minutes and it was the highlight of your week). And I would park; go in; turn around, get back into my car, and go home without getting onstage.
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to do. It’s like a real thing.
Remember Lost when he said how he dealt with fear when he gave himself five seconds to let the fear in and then—not the last two years of Lost but the first five good years.
So what I did was—that was going to be the end for me. If I can’t go onstage I can’t be a comic, so what I did was I told myself like “Do something where it’s going to go bad, where you know that ahead of time. Because like what’s the worst that can happen?” that kind of thing. If you tell somebody ask that girl out what’s the worst that can happen? She’ll say no and you’re like yeah but there’s like a bigger fear. And then once you’ve asked a girl out enough times, excuse me a woman, out enough times and you’ve gotten rejected a bunch of times you’re like “Oh that's not that big a deal.” What’s she going to say? “I have a boyfriend” or “I don't really want to”? It's like okay it's like a little piece of “that didn't feel good” and then it's fine, but experience gives you that.
So I went to The Comedy Store, I said I’m not going to say a word, in my head I’m like I’m not going to say anything for my whole time I’m onstage and I’m just going to see what happens. So I went in, I put my tape recorder down, I like pressed record and then I was like, “…” and then I kept looking around and just three minutes of silence.
Like this can’t go well, so like it’s not going to affect me if it doesn’t because I’m trying to tank it, but then I could get onstage, I could feel what it’s like in front of the crowd. I actually got a couple laughs, just off like shrugs and stuff and how ridiculous it was. And it was the fucking open mic so it was like the bar wasn’t set too high. And then after that I was able to get back onstage again. I was like “That’s the worst? I can handle the worst, so now let me go.”
How computers learn to recognize objects instantly | Joseph RedmonTen years ago, researchers thought that getting a computer to tell the difference between a cat and a dog would be almost impossible. Today, computer vision systems do it with greater than 99 percent accuracy. How? Joseph Redmon works on the YOLO (You Only Look Once) system, an open-source method of object detection that can identify objects in images and video -- from zebras to stop signs -- with lightning-quick speed. In a remarkable live demo, Redmon shows off this important step forward for applications like self-driving cars, robotics and even cancer detection.
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The stories behind The New Yorker's iconic covers | Françoise MoulyMeet Françoise Mouly, The New Yorker's art director. For the past 24 years, she's helped decide what appears on the magazine's famous cover, from the black-on-black depiction of the Twin Towers the week after 9/11 to a recent, Russia-influenced riff on the magazine's mascot, Eustace Tilley. In this visual retrospective, Mouly considers how a simple drawing can cut through the torrent of images that we see every day and elegantly capture the feeling (and the sensibility) of a moment in time.
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Increase Your Brain's Will Power: Achieve Goals, Stay Focused, Resist Temptation | David EaglemanThe only thing between you and your better self is your brain. Programmed to maximize short term reward, we often find ourselves struggling between what we want in the moment and what we'll gain in the long term if we forgo immediate gratification. As neuroscientist David Eagleman reveals, the ancient wisdom of Ulysses remains useful today as a way to contextualize current scientific research. Before temptation strikes, it pays to have a plan for when it arrives. By making a contract with your future self—as Ulysses did with his crew—you can avoid occasions of indulgence. And when you do give into immediate satisfaction, you can build in supports to keep it from wreaking havoc on your life.
This video is part of a collaborative series with the Hope & Optimism initiative, which supports interdisciplinary academic research into significant questions that remain under-explored. The three-year initiative will provide over $2 million for philosophers, philosophers of religion, and social scientists to generate original, high-quality, collaborative research on topics related to optimism and hopefulness. Discover the public components of the Hope & Optimism project, and how you can contribute, at http://www.hopeoptimism.com.
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Go back 3,000 years to Ulysses, who fought in the Trojan War and was coming home to his island of Ithaca on his ships with his men, and he realized that he had this amazing opportunity, which is he was going to pass the Island of the Sirens. And he knew that the sirens sang so beautifully and were so seductive that mortal men would crash their ships into the rocks, and they’d all die every time. If you heard the song of the sirens you were going to die.
He wanted to hear the song of the sirens, so what did he do? The Ulysses of present sound mind made a contract with the future Ulysses. He said, “I know that guy is going to behave badly when he hears the siren’s song.” So what did he do? He lashed himself to the mast, exactly, and he filled his men’s ears with beeswax, and he said, "No matter what I do, keep on rowing." Just ignore everything, keep on going. And that way he got to hear the siren’s song but he didn’t crash in the rocks because he was lashed to the mast. And so this is what is known as a “Ulysses contract”, which is your present self making a contract with your future self. Penning in, constraining the behavior of your future self so that it has to do the right thing given your long-term thinking that you’re doing now. And so when it comes to something like the cookies, the Ulysses contract, it’s more than “I’m going to eat it or not eat it.” It can be something like, “Okay, look, if I eat cookies, I’m going to promise my spouse that I’ll go to the gym tonight.” That’s the kind of way that we can bring these sorts of things into our own life.
And so I'll give you several examples. I want to say is so what we’ve seen so far is that there’s this great seduction in the now.
And so if we want to do something where we actually are navigating our future selves in a better way we have to establish these kinds of contracts with ourselves. This is one of the most important sort of life lessons that I’ve got. I mean take something like New Year’s resolutions. Everybody has really good New Year’s resolutions and believes they’re going to do it. And by the end of January for almost everybody these things have fallen away. Why? It’s not because you didn’t mean it in January. It’s because you didn’t set up the structures in your life, the Ulysses contracts to make sure that that went through. It’s not enough to make a promise and a resolution with good intention. You need to understand what’s actually happening so that you can do something about it.
So what I want to do is suggest actionable steps by which we can actually keep our resolutions to ourselves a little bit longer.
So the first one is building fences around yourself by minimizing temptation. So, for example, in Alcoholics Anonymous the very first thing they tell you is you’ve got to clear all the alcohol out of your house. Why? It’s because on a festive Friday night or a lonely Sunday night you’re going to go and drink. Even if you think, “No, I’m done. I’m not going to drink but I’m going to keep those in there.”
With smokers the first thing they’re told in these rehab programs is: don’t hang out with other smokers. With drug addicts who are trying to quit the first thing they’re told in drug rehab programs is: make sure you never carry more than 20 bucks of cash with you.
What six years in captivity taught me about fear and faith (English subtitles) | Ingrid Betancourt(Full English subtitles are available for this talk -- click the CC button in the bottom right of your screen to turn subtitles on.)
In 2002, the Colombian guerrilla movement known as the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) kidnapped Ingrid Betancourt in the middle of her presidential campaign. For the next six years, Betancourt was held hostage in jungle prison camps where she was ravaged by malaria, fleas, hunger and human cruelty until her rescue by the Colombian government. In this deeply personal talk, the politician turned writer explains what it's like to live in a perpetual state of fear -- and how her faith sustained her. (In Spanish with English subtitles.)
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Richard Dawkins: 2 Flaws Plague Unscientific Belief, from Trump & Alt-Right to Religious DoctrineWhat's it like to be worshipped by the Alt-Right? Not good, especially if you're a passionate rationalist like Richard Dawkins. He was very recently accused of Islamophobia by KPFA radio—which is why some of the Alt-Right have flocked toward him—however Dawkins released a statement calling any alleged "abusive speech" by him preposterous, and clarified his views: “I have indeed strongly condemned the misogyny, homophobia, and violence of Islamism, of which Muslims—particularly Muslim women—are the prime victims. I make no apologies for denouncing those oppressive cruelties, and I will continue to do so.” Here he responds to how unpleasant it is to have your rational thoughts and your name hijacked by political extremists, and he expresses his disdain for President Trump's policies, specifically the 'Muslim ban'. With that as context, he proceeds to do what he does best: use science to investigate the idea of supernatural gods as the creators of the universe—which is a scientific hypothesis, he states, but one of the failed kind. Dawkins explains that we already have a superb theory of why living things have come into being—Darwinian evolution—and the evils that can come from too much faith. Richard Dawkins' most recent book is Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist.
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Transcript: It’s very unfortunate when you inadvertently find people agreeing with you who they’re the last people who wish to agree with you. I mean I despise Trump. I despise everything that he stands for. But it’s perfectly true that many people think that I ought to be on his side because he has these draconian illiberal horrible policies towards Muslims, trying to stop Muslims entering the country. What a horrible thing to do. What an impolite unwise illiberal inhumane thing to do. And so I’m embarrassed if people on the alt-right agree with something that I say for the wrong reasons.
There’s not a great deal about religion in Science in the Soul. Most of what I have to say about that is in my earlier book The God Delusion, so I can rehearse that if you wish. To me as a scientist the main argument is a scientific one. I think that the hypothesis that the universe was created by a supernatural intelligence is a scientific hypothesis, it’s a bad hypothesis, it’s a false hypothesis, but it has to be judged on its scientific merits.
The universe would be a very different kind of universe if there was a supernatural creative intelligence in it than if there wasn’t. So much of my argument is a scientific argument. There is no positive reason to believe in anything supernatural. If you look at all the reasons that have been offered none of them stand up, none of them hold water.
We have in the form of Darwinian evolution we have a superb theory of why living things have come into being, why they are the way they are, why they look as though they’ve been designed and they undoubtedly do look as though they’ve been designed. The illusion of design in living things is immensely powerful and it’s no wonder that until Darwinian came along almost everybody believed that it was created by a supernatural intelligence.
But we now have Darwin, we now have Darwin and his successors. We now know how life came about. And the complexity and the beauty, the elegance and the illusion of design of life has always been by far the most powerful argument for the existence of supernatural gods and that is completely blown out of the water.
The secondary argument is whether religion has evil effects, whether religion as bad effects and on balance I think it does. The real problem is that religious faith prides itself on not needing support. You can’t argue somebody out of their faith they simply say that’s my faith you have to accept it. And that means that if their faith tells them, if their religious upbringing tells them that they must do bad things like blow things up, kill apostates, throw gay people off high buildings, et cetera, if their religion tells them that then you can’t argue them out of it because it comes from their faith, and faith by definition has no argument, faith by definition and shelter behind the wall that says no it’s my faith I don’t have to defend it it’s just there, it’s just faith, that I think is potentially very evil.
Can art amend history? | Titus KapharArtist Titus Kaphar makes paintings and sculptures that wrestle with the struggles of the past while speaking to the diversity and advances of the present. In an unforgettable live workshop, Kaphar takes a brush full of white paint to a replica of a 17th-century Frans Hals painting, obscuring parts of the composition and bringing its hidden story into view. There's a narrative coded in art like this, Kaphar says. What happens when we shift our focus and confront unspoken truths?
Learn more about the speaker: https://www.ted.com/speakers/titus_kaphar
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Meet Spot, the robot dog that can run, hop and open doors | Marc RaibertThat science fiction future where robots can do what people and animals do may be closer than you think. Marc Raibert, founder of Boston Dynamics, is developing advanced robots that can gallop like a cheetah, negotiate 10 inches of snow, walk upright on two legs and even open doors and deliver packages. Join Raibert for a live demo of SpotMini, a nimble robot that maps the space around it, handles objects, climbs stairs -- and could soon be helping you out around the house.
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Gods, Monotheism, and Ideologies All Failed. But the Human Brain Could Still Succeed. | Joscha BachRead more at BigThink.com:
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What Kind of Thinker Are You? A Hiker or a Race Car Driver? | Barbara OakleyRead more at BigThink.com:
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Why People Live in Dysfunctional Patterns: Domestic Abuse, Family & Workplace Conflict | Dan ShapiroSigmund Freud initially thought humans operated on the 'pleasure principle'—that we run toward pleasure and run away from pain. However, this didn't quite align with what he saw in his office. There, he worked with people who escaped abusive relationships only to end up in a new relationship with the same dangerous dynamic. Many of us have the same fight with a coworker or a loved one, in different forms, over and over again. This led Freud to a turning point in his theory: he dubbed this phenomenon the repetition compulsion, a psychological trap where we repeat the same dysfunctional behavior or fall into the same traumatic circumstances, over and over again. In the video above, Harvard professor Dan Shapiro explains that there is a way to break this cycle of dysfunction and have healthier relationships. It's not easy, but it's worth doing to live a happier and less stressful life. As Sam Harris describes in his book, Waking Up: “My mind begins to seem like a video game: I can either play it intelligently, learning more in each round, or I can be killed in the same spot by the same monster, again and again.” Understanding the way that you fight, and what your conflict triggers are, will stop you living the same destructive patterns on a loop. Dan Shapiro's latest book is Negotiating the Nonnegotiable: How to Resolve Your Most Emotionally Charged Conflicts.
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Transcript: So how many times have you found yourself at work and you get into the same conflict again and again with that same person at work? Or how many weekends have you spent arguing with your spouse or your kid at home? The conflict might be different from day to day, week to week, but the dynamic is the same. This is what Sigmund Freud originally called the repetition compulsion. And this is the fact that we all tend to repeat the same dysfunctional patterns of behavior again and again and again and again even though our conscious mind says, “Don’t do that, don’t do that, don’t say that, don’t say that!”—this is the repetition compulsion, and it’s more than just a habit. This is a special feature of how our minds tend to work.
Initially Sigmund Freud thought that we human beings, we operate on what he called the pleasure principle. We love pleasure and we like to move away from pain. And then he started working with a whole bunch of people who actually seemed to move from one painful relationship to another.
So you find yourself in one domestic abuse relationship, you get out of it, but then you move to another. You find yourself in a dysfunctional relationship with your subordinates in one organization. You move to a different organization: "But they’re dysfunctional here as well!"
Maybe it’s not just everybody else. Maybe, in part, it’s you. This is the repetition compulsion. Now how do you deal with this thing? The first thing to do is to become aware of it. What is the typical pattern that you tend to fall in. I mean, think right now of a difficult relationship in your own life. It could be in your personal life, it could be in your professional life. How do you deal with conflict in that relationship? How does it start? Does the other side start by saying some little subtle comment that gets under your nerves? And then you decide to walk away for 15 minutes, your face starts to get red, you come back 15 minutes later: “You’re such a jerk!” And you respond like that.
Or is it that one side says something and then you say something back and you very quickly confront? What’s the pattern that you find yourself typically getting into? Note that pattern. That’s your cycle of discord. And there typically is some sort of common thread or trigger, something that tends to commonly trigger those kinds of conflicts. It might be that in your relationship you always feel second rung. “You’re always trying to act so superior to me.” Or it might be that you always feel excluded, and the moment the other side says anything that even subtly demonstrates exclusion, now you’re back in that cycle of discord.
So how do you deal with the repetition compulsion? The first step is to become aware of your cycle of discord. Who says what? Who says what next? Because the moment you know that pattern, you can decide to break any little node in that cycle and you break the whole cycle.
Why I still have hope for coral reefs | Kristen MarhaverCorals in the Pacific Ocean have been dying at an alarming rate, particularly from bleaching brought on by increased water temperatures. But it's not too late to act, says TED Fellow Kristen Marhaver. She points to the Caribbean -- given time, stable temperatures and strong protection, corals there have shown the ability to survive and recover from trauma. Marhaver reminds us why we need to keep working to protect the precious corals we have left. "Corals have always been playing the long game," she says, "and now so are we."
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What a Trip to the Psychiatric Ward Taught Me about the Nature of Reality | Yiyun Liovelist and author Yiyun Li tells deeply felt stories from her stay in a psychiatric hospital, after two suicide attempts. The patients Li shared space with taught her a great deal about living in a world that is sometimes lacking in apparent meaning, and how close reality and unreality truly are. For anyone who has ever felt that "patients running the asylum" is an apt analogy for human society, Li shares the stories behind individuals too readily dismissed or forgotten about. Whether in the field of psychology or politics, tension between orthodoxy and imagination will continue to exist. But if we can find ways to keep our imagination alive, we can thrive in a world that is calling out for answers. Yiyun Li's newest book is Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life
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Transcript: A few months ago my teenage son told me, he said, “I had an exhausting dream.” And I said, “Oh? What happened?” And he said, “I dreamed that I was a negative number and I couldn’t figure out my square root.” And to comfort him, and also to alleviate this existential crisis, I said, “Well there is a way. Wait until you know the imaginary number.” And he said, “Mom, I’m not stupid. I know imaginary numbers.” He said, “But I just don’t like that troublesome ‘i’.” And I thought, “You know, that troublesome ‘i’, who would blame him?”
So, during the 16th and 17th centuries, when imaginary numbers were first introduced, some of the mathematicians looked down upon imaginary numbers as fictitious or useless. So here’s a cartoon I borrowed from my younger son’s math room. It says: Pi says, “Get real.” And the imaginary number says, “Be rational.”
I feel like—I’m sorry, I just have to add—I feel like Sean Spicer now, you know.
Rational versus real. This is, of course—there is a lot to say about that pair. We can go to philosophy. We can go to psychology, neuroscience and many other branches to study this confrontation. The conflict and the affinity between the two.
Coming from a writer’s point of view I want to share a few stories. A few years ago I was hospitalized twice for suicide attempts. And here are a few stories I brought from the hospital.
The first woman I saw when I entered the ward, I’ll give her a name: Lena. She was in her late twenties and she had a budding career in the fashion industry. My first impression of her was that she moved very slowly. Every gesture, every step. Why, I didn’t know. And in a place where people are oftentimes cloaked in paper gowns carelessly, she dressed as impeccably as she could. But Lena was the quietest, most un-self-assuming, and most elegant person there.
During the following weeks we befriended each other and she told me a little about her childhood. She was born in a family of five siblings. He father was in the Serbian army. Her mother was an Albanian orphan from Kosovo and was said to walk around begging until she met Lena’s father and married him.
After the Kosovo war Lena’s mother disappeared. “Where did she go?” I asked her. And she said they thought her mother, without telling them, returned to Kosovo. “Did your father think of looking for her?” I asked. And Lena said no. Why did Lena’s mother leave? I didn’t ask her. It’s one of those big whys we’ll never find an answer to. Instead we talked about other things. As an aspiring designer, Lena would give me fashion advice and prescribe to me all the outfits I should get when I leave the hospital and how to wear them. At the time I thought, “Why do I want to think about how to roll my sleeves up elegantly when I can see little point in living?”
I never asked Lena why she was in the hospital. I don’t think that’s a question anyone asks of anyone unless information is volunteered. Then one day shortly before she left, she said to me, “Do you think there’s anything wrong with me? What’s wrong with me is I have a broken heart. That is not enough reason to put me in the hospital on those medications.”
A broken heart. We can’t ask Lena, “Why is your heart broken?” We can’t ask her, “Why is it other people with broken hearts don’t end up here when broken hearts are an everyday phenomena?” Because that is as if to say, “There’s something the matter with how your heart is broken. Perhaps it’s done wrongly.” It’s as though to say, “There are rational reactions when a heart is broken, and your reactions are not rational.”
You owe it to yourself to experience a total solar eclipse | David BaronOn August 21, 2017, the moon's shadow will race from Oregon to South Carolina in what some consider to be the most awe-inspiring spectacle in all of nature: a total solar eclipse. Umbraphile David Baron chases these rare events across the globe, and in this ode to the bliss of seeing the solar corona, he explains why you owe it to yourself to witness one, too.
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3 Ways to Express Your Thoughts So That Everyone Will Understand You | Alan AldaAlan Alda doesn't want you to take "pro tips" from anyone—not even Alan Alda. When it comes to his area of expertise—public speaking and empathetic communication—there are no hacks or shortcuts; if you want to be a world-class public speaker, you have to earn those stripes through the process of deeply understanding what it is to talk, listen, and connect. Alda calls tips intellectual abstractions; it's akin to the difference between information and knowledge, between parroting a few words in French and speaking the actual language. But, when pushed by yours truly at Big Think, Alda does give up the goods (willingly—we promise no Alan Aldas were harmed in the making of this video). His best tip to become a better communicator is what he calls the three rules of three. Listen to his practical hints for becoming a communication pro but, as he remarks, try to get there organically through the process. Alan Alda's most recent book is If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?
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Transcript: I don't really like tips; tips about communicating well, tips about writing. What I would prefer is a process that transforms you so the tips take place automatically.
I mean for instance, very often a tip is given: “When you're speaking to a crowd, vary the pace of your speech, vary the volume.”
Well, those are two good things, but if they happen mechanically it gets to be kind of boring. Some people are encouraged when they're coached: “At this point leave where you're standing and walk over there and take a pause.”
Well, maybe that makes sense in terms of how it's written; at the end of that paragraph you want to make a space before the next paragraph, but it doesn't necessarily make sense in terms of how you're talking and relating to the people you're talking with.
That—relating to them—should be the source of a pause, the source of moving, because it comes out of the thought process I'm going through and it comes out of the thought process I sense you're going through. Have you understood that last part? So now I'm thinking, if you have what's the next thing that I can tack onto that that will mean something to you? And if you haven't, should I clarify it a little more? So there's a dynamic relationship between us that leads to a change in pace, to a change in volume and that kind of thing.
A tip is just an intellectualization of that, which might be okay to give somebody once they've got the grounding in the ability to connect, but it ought to come out of the connection. It shouldn't be a checkbox that you tick off.
So I really don’t like tips. If I'm pressed really hard there are three tips that I do kind of follow. Probably it's a good idea to follow these tips after you get used to being connected to somebody, but there are three things that I like to do, I call it the three rules of three.
So the first rule is, I try only to say three important things when I talk to people. No more than three. If it's one thing that's maybe even better, but usually there's a lot to say. When I make notes on what I want to talk about, if I see I'm going on past three to four and five I start eliminating them or seeing if I can fold them into the other things. Because three things are really all I can remember and I don't work from notes when I talk to people and I advise other people not to. I never read it because reading just excommunicates you; it's not communication it's excommunication, in my view. So I can't remember more than three things, and I don't think they can remember more than three things, so what's the point of telling them stuff they're not going to remember? So I stick to three. That's rule number one of the rule of three things.
The second rule is, if I have a difficult thing to understand, if there's something I think is not going to be that easy to get, I try to say it in three different ways because I think if you come in from different angles you have a better chance of getting a three-dimensional view of this difficult idea, so I try to say it three different ways.
And the third tip, which I always forget, is that if I have a difficult thing that's hard to get, I try to say it three times through the talk, so that the first time you hear it you start to get used to it, the second time it's familiar and the third time you say, “Oh yeah, right. Okay.”
You smell with your body, not just your nose | Jennifer PluznickDo your kidneys have a sense of smell? Turns out, the same tiny scent detectors found in your nose are also found in some pretty unexpected places -- like your muscles, kidneys and even your lungs. In this quick talk (filled with weird facts), physiologist Jennifer Pluznick explains why they're there and what they do.
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A simple new blood test that can catch cancer early | Jimmy LinJimmy Lin is developing technologies to catch cancer months to years before current methods. He shares a breakthrough technique that looks for small signals of cancer's presence via a simple blood test, detecting the recurrence of some forms of the disease 100 days earlier than traditional methods. It could be a ray of hope in a fight where early detection makes all the difference.
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How cohousing can make us happier (and live longer) | Grace KimLoneliness doesn't always stem from being alone. For architect Grace Kim, loneliness is a function of how socially connected we feel to the people around us -- and it's often the result of the homes we live in. She shares an age-old antidote to isolation: cohousing, a way of living where people choose to share space with their neighbors, get to know them, and look after them. Rethink your home and how you live in it with this eye-opening talk.
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Facebook vs. Google: The Battle of Self Projection versus Who We Really AreTo know who someone really is, don't look at their Facebook wall—look at their Google Search data. This is off-limits information to most people (definitely for the best), but data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has analyzed what's behind that curtain. His findings echo what you may intuitively feel: skepticism over how incredible everyone's life looks on Facebook, compared to your own. He cautions people not to compare yourself to that rosy standard for a pretty simple reason: it's a bundle of lies and exaggerations. Facebook presents who we want to be, but Google Search knows who we really are. Davidowitz calls it a "revolutionary truth serum", one that reveals that on Facebook husbands are described as "amazing" and "so cute", but in the confessional booth of Google Search, they are "gay" "jerks". Ouch. What it boils down to is that bragging is lying, but searching for knowledge is truthful. That, and that Facebook and Google might be the best social experiments ever designed. Stephens-Davidowitz is the author of Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are.
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Transcript: Google, I think, is a revolutionary data set. I call it digital truth serum because people are so honest to it and they confess things that they might not confess to anybody else to that little white box on a search engine. Facebook is different. Facebook is digital 'brag to my friends about how good my life is' serum, where people try to make themselves look good on Facebook.
So if you compare two magazines, The Atlantic Monthly and the National Enquirer; The Atlantic Monthly is kind of an intellectual, highbrow magazine, with poetry and philosophy and political theory. And the National Enquirer is a lowbrow trashy magazine, with celebrity gossip and rumors and stuff like that. And on average the National Enquirer sells more copies than The Atlantic Monthly, but on Facebook The Atlantic Monthly is 45 times more popular than the National Enquirer because everybody wants their friends to think they’re reading The Atlantic Monthly. They don’t want their friends to think they’re reading the National Enquirer which makes them seem less impressive. And people exaggerate their financial situation. Circus Circus, a budget hotel in Las Vegas, holds about the same number of people as the Bellagio, a luxurious hotel in Vegas. But people are about three times more likely to check-in to the Bellagio than Circus Circus.
So I think on Facebook you get bombarded with these images: Oh, all my friends are staying at the Bellagio. Well, you know, about the same number of them are saying at Circus Circus, they may just not be posting that on Facebook. And I think it’s interesting to compare these two sources, Facebook and Google: Facebook where you’re showing off to your friends, Google where you’re just getting the information you need.
So one of the comparisons I talk about in the book is the ways people describe their husbands on the two sources. The top ways people complete the phrase 'My husband is...' on Facebook is: my husband is the best, my best friend, amazing, so cute and awesome. And on Google the top ways people describe their husband—also one of them is 'awesome' so that checks out—but the other ones are: a jerk, gay, so mean and annoying. So that’s kind of the difference between what people are saying when they’re trying to impress their friends and what people are saying when they’re trying to get information, and maybe being, I think, more honest. Alcoholics Anonymous has this phrase: don’t compare your insides to other people’s outsides. And I think the 21st-century big-data version of that would be: don’t compare your Google searches to other people’s Facebook posts.
Hamilton vs. Madison and the birth of American partisanship | Noah FeldmanThe divisiveness plaguing American politics today is nothing new, says constitutional law scholar Noah Feldman. In fact, it dates back to the early days of the republic, when a dispute between Alexander Hamilton and James Madison led the two Founding Fathers to cut ties and form the country's first political parties. Join Feldman for some fascinating history of American factionalism -- and a hopeful reminder about how the Constitution has proven itself to be greater than partisanship.
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Want a Meaningful Life? Learn to Control Your Mental Attitude | Luc BovensLife throws us curveballs that test our ability to cope, but perhaps none is more curvy than the end of life itself. Philosopher Luc Bovens examines the idea of secular hope, the forms it takes, and the function of it. He asks: what does it mean to live a meaningful life, and is it possible to die as well as you lived?
This video was filmed at the Los Angeles Hope Festival, a collaboration between Big Think and Hope & Optimism. For more on Luc Bovens, go here: http://www.bovens.org/
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Transcript: Well my name is Luc Bovens. I’m teaching at the London School of Economics and I’m actually going to make a move, I'm coming back to the States and I’ll take up a position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on the first of January. And last year or last fall I was in the Hope and Optimism Project in Cornell University and I was very excited to be part of this because I’m currently working on a book project. The book is called 'Coping: A Philosophical Guide'. So what I would like to do is actually bring out a lot of the work that I’ve been doing in moral psychology over the last 20 years and to put it in a format that is accessible to the public, to the general public.
And so the main idea of the book project is the following—well, let me start with this: there is this well-worn prayer of Niebuhr and it says that, 'God gave us the courage to change what we can change, and the serenity to accept what we can’t change, and the wisdom to know the difference between the two.'
And I think this is actually a false dichotomy, because there is something in between accepting the things that we can’t change and changing the things that we are able to change; having the courage to change the things that we are able to change. And what comes in between actually is precisely sort of having a kind of control over the mind. And now hoping is exactly the sort of thing that fits in the space in between courage and serenity.
You’re not changing the world and you’re not just merely accepting things. You’re developing some kind of attitude of coping with hardships, and that’s precisely, I think, what this hoping is all about. Now I think hoping is actually just one of the things that fits in the space between this courage and serenity.
Another thing that I’ve been exploring over the years is what’s often called sour grapes, right. Now sour grapes has a little bit of a bad rap but if you think about it, what you’re really doing—or what the fox is doing when he can’t reach for the grapes, and he turns his back and he says, “Oh, those grapes are sour,”—you can interpret this in many ways and actually when you think of this fable, it’s been written and rewritten in many ways. It may be the case that the fox just says, “Look, you know, these grapes are not ripe yet.” Then he’s actually changing his beliefs in order to deal with his frustration.
But in other versions he actually says, “Look, I don’t really like grapes,” so it seems like he’s changing his taste. He’s changing his desires. That’s a different thing. And then the third thing that the fox might be doing is he says, “Oh, you know, grapes are really for the lowlife animals in the woods.” Then he’s kind of framing the whole thing. So often I think when we’re trying to deal with hardships in life, we’re changing our beliefs, we’re changing our desires or we frame things differently. And depending on what you’re doing, these things are either more or less problematic. I think people often have problems with changing your beliefs at will. Whereas changing the frame with which you look at things in order to make things more acceptable, that seems to be a perfectly alright thing to do.
I mean at one point, actually going back to Marcus Aurelius' 'Meditations'—see Marcus Aurelius had this history of spending a lot of time with soldiers in barracks where, really, where he wanted to be was in Rome, hanging out with people in high society. But he says, 'Look, when you find yourself in a situation like that you have to come to love the people with whom your fate is cast. And you have to love them truly.'
So the idea is he changes his desires. He changes the way that he frames the situation in order to make it acceptable to him. And again that’s a form of coping.
How I fail at being disabled | Susan RobinsonBorn with a genetic visual impairment that has no correction or cure, Susan Robinson is legally blind (or partially sighted, as she prefers it) and entitled to a label she hates: "disabled." In this funny and personal talk, she digs at our hidden biases by explaining five ways she flips expectations of disability upside down.
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The human insights missing from big data | Tricia WangWhy do so many companies make bad decisions, even with access to unprecedented amounts of data? With stories from Nokia to Netflix to the oracles of ancient Greece, Tricia Wang demystifies big data and identifies its pitfalls, suggesting that we focus instead on "thick data" -- precious, unquantifiable insights from actual people -- to make the right business decisions and thrive in the unknown.
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How A.I. Will Deliver Universal Basic Income, Better Jobs, and Kinder Corporations | Joscha BachRead more at BigThink.com: http://bigthink.com/videos/joscha-bach-how-ai-will-reinvent-money-jobs-and-civics
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Joscha Bach: I think the question of whether we should be afraid of strong A.I. taking over and squashing us like bugs because it doesn’t need us for the things that it’s doing is exactly the same question as if we should be afraid of big corporations taking over and squashing us like bugs. Because big corporations are already agents: they are already intelligent agents in some sense. They’re not sentient. They borrow humans right now for their decision making. But they do have goals of their own that are different from the goals of the humans that they employ. They usually live longer. They’re much more powerful than people. And it’s very hard for a person to do anything against a corporation.
Usually if you want to fight a corporation you have to become some major organization or corporation or nation state yourself. So in some sense the agency of an A.I. is going to be the agency of the system that builds it, that employs it. And of course most of the A.I.s that we are going to build will not be little Roombas that clean your floors, but it’s going to be very intelligent systems—corporations, for instance—that will perform exactly according to the logic of these systems. So if we want to have these systems built in such a way that they treat us nicely you have to start right now. And it seems to be a very hard problem to do so.
The job loss because of automation has several aspects. I think the most obvious thing that we should be seeing is: if our jobs can be done by machines, that’s a very, very good thing. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
If I don’t need to clean the street, if I don’t need to drive a car for other people, if I don’t need to work a cash register for other people, if I don’t need to pick goods in a big warehouse and put it into boxes, it’s an extremely good thing.
And the trouble that we have with this is that right now this mode of labor, that people sell their lifetime to some kind of corporation or employer, is not only the way that we are protected, it’s also the way we allocate resources. This is how we measure how much bread you deserve in this world. And I think this is something that we need to change.
Some people suggest that we need a Universal Basic Income. I think it might be good to be able to pay people to be good citizens, which means massive public employment. There are going to be many jobs that can only be done by people and these are those jobs where we are paid for being good, interesting people. For instance good teachers, good scientists, good philosophers, good thinkers, good social people, good nurses, for instance. Good people that raise children. Good people that build restaurants and theaters. Good people that make art. And for all these jobs people have enough productivity to make sure that enough bread comes on the table. The question is how we can distribute this.
There’s going to be much, much more productivity in our future. Actually we already have enough productivity to give everybody in the U.S. an extremely good life. And we haven’t fixed the problem of allocating it, how to distribute these things in the best possible way.
And this is something that we need to deal with in the future, and AI is going to accelerate this need, and I think by and large it might turn out to be a very good thing that we are forced to do this and to address this problem.
If the past is any evidence of the future it might be a very bumpy road, but who knows. Maybe when we are forced to understand that actually we live in an age of abundance it might turn out to be easier than we think.
Right now we are living in a world where we do certain things the way we’ve done them in the past decades—and sometimes in the past centuries—and we perceive that this is the way it “has” to be done. And we often don’t question these ways, so we might think, “If I do work at this particular factory and this is how I earn my bread, how can we keep that state? How can we prevent A.I. from making my job obsolete? How is it possible that I can keep up my standard of living and so on in this world?"
Maybe this is the wrong question to ask. Maybe the right question is: how can we reorganize societies so that I can do the things that I want to do most, that I think are useful to me and other people, that I really, really want to? Because there will be other ways that I can get my bread made and how I can get money or how I can get a roof over my head, that are going to be more awesome and abundant than the ways that we have now.
Why our screens make us less happy | Adam AlterWhat are our screens and devices doing to us? Psychologist Adam Alter has spent the last five years studying how much time screens steal from us and how they're getting away with it. He shares why all those hours you spend staring at your smartphone, tablet or computer might be making you miserable -- and what you can do about it.
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Why You Don't Have Free Will: Your Breakfast Food, Biology, and Culture | Robert Sapolsky'Societal conditioning' might sound like either a grim Orwellian brainwashing technique or a fancy new way to wash your hair, depending on how warped your sense of humor is. But your surroundings—from the breakfast cereal you eat to the very design of the streets you live on—might have much more influence on how you think than most have ever given it credit for. Robert Sapolsky posits that "I picked this shirt today because the culture I come from has these values and my visual color receptors told me that this shirt matches with this." It might be far fetched to some, but consider this: if the street you'd grown up on was wide (say, a Texas highway) and at age 30 you moved to a tiny cobblestone street, you'd feel cramped in. Apply this to everything around you and you'll get a sense of what Sapolsky is talking about.
Robert Sapolsky's most recent book is Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
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Transcript: So somewhere in all of this studying the biology behavior, somewhere in there when you’re realizing activity levels in this part of the brain one second before this act: what you had for breakfast all the way back to like what culture your ancestors evolved to—All of these are influencing your behavior. Most of these variables we’re not even aware of. They’re subliminal. We never would have expected it. Inevitably somewhere in there you’ve got to sit down and start having the Free Will Discussion. So is there any free will in there?
And the polite thing that I’ve sort of said for decades is that “Well, if there is free will, it’s in all the boring places, and those places are getting more and more cramped.” If you want to insist that today you decided to floss your teeth starting on your upper teeth rather than your lower teeth, rather than the other way around, that that is an act of free will—Whatever, I’ll grant that one to you. That’s where the free will is.
In reality I don’t think there’s any free will at all. If you look at the things that come into account as to whether or not someone is going to do the right thing in the next two seconds amid a temptation to do otherwise, the variables in there reflect everything from whether they’re having gas pains that day because of something unpleasant they ate that morning—That makes us more selfish, more impulsive, et cetera—to what epigenetic effects occurred to them when they were a first trimester fetus.
When you look at the number of things we recognize now that are biological—organic—where 500 years ago or five years ago we would have had a harsh moral judgment about it. Instead we now know oh, that’s a biological phenomenon.
When we look at that, either we can say the last 500 years of realizing all of this biology is going to stop right here and there’s never going to be a new piece of knowledge in that area—Yeah, there’s areas of behavior we still can’t explain biologically. But if all you can do is see the logical direction we’re going with that is what we’re going to get to the point is recognizing yeah, we’re biological organisms.
This notion of free will, for want of a less provocative word, is nothing but a myth. What’s going to be really challenging though is to figure out how you structure a society that actually runs humanely built around the notion that we are merely biological organisms. And that one I haven’t a clue. If someone tells me, you know, “Oh, nice shirt you’re wearing today,” and I say “Oh gee, thanks!” I’ve just shown that on some fundamental level I have trouble accepting there’s no such thing as free will. No: actually I picked this shirt today because the culture I come from has these values and my visual, you know, color receptors told me that this shirt matches with this.
You know you still have a reflex to attribute some sort of free will and sort of tiny little domains. If that’s going to prove horrible and too difficult to overcome, that’s fine. Where we need to do the heavy lifting is when we’re making judgments about volition in areas where we harshly judge people. There we really have to do the hard work of thinking through that there’s not a lot of free will going on there.
Can clouds buy us more time to solve climate change? | Kate MarvelClimate change is real, case closed. But there's still a lot we don't understand about it, and the more we know the better chance we have to slow it down. One still-unknown factor: How might clouds play a part? There's a small hope that they could buy us some time to fix things ... or they could make global warming worse. Climate scientist Kate Marvel takes us through the science of clouds and what it might take for Earth to break its own fever.
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How I Overcame Homelessness Twice to Become a Billionaire | John Paul DeJoriaJohn Paul Dejoria has had a rough ride to the top. Yet being homeless twice and being abandoned by his wife early on didn't shake his drive to make it in this word, and he's managed to turn an admittedly difficult hand into a royal flush. These days he's a billionaire several times over with a successful Paul Mitchell haircare line and even a founding stake in Patron tequila brand. So how did he maintain motivation? He remembered giving two dimes to the Salvation Army as a boy, and how his mother told him that those dimes add up and can really help people. This lesson directly helped him overcome a period early in his career where he was collecting bottle caps to get money to eat.
John Paul's latest venture is a documentary on his life called Good Fortune.
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Transcript: A lot of people ask how I got into donating to various causes, and how I got involved in even homelessness along the way, and popped out of it—well it's a very interesting story. My mom has a lot to do with it.
At six years old we didn't have any money; there was my mother, my brother and I. We had a deadbeat dad; left us before we were two, but she took us at Christmas-time to downtown Los Angeles. We had little cars going around in circles, it was pretty cool, and decorations in the window.
She gave my brother and I a dime and told us, "Boys whole half of it each, give it to the man ringing the bell in the bucket." We put it in this bucket, we said, "Mom, why did we give that man a dime? That's like two soda pops." This is 1951, two soda pops, three candy bars.
And mom said, "Boys, that's the Salvation Army. They take care of people that have no place to live and no food. And we don't have a lot of money, but we can afford a dime this year. Boys, always remember in life: give a little something to those in need, they'll always be somebody that's not as well-off as you are. No matter where you are or how far down you are, try and help someone along the way." It stuck with me.
The first time I was homeless I was 22-and-a-half years older and I had a two-and-a-half year old son. I was working as the Master of Ceremonies at the Second Annual Sports Vacation Recreational Vehicle Show and I had a check coming in at the end of the week.
Well, I came home and I drove our one car up to where we lived and as I was getting out of the car and going up towards our apartment door my wife—we were very young, we got married at 20 and 19 years old—my wife was coming down the stairs and she said, "I'm going to storage," and she took the keys. By the time I got through the door I saw my little boy, two and a half years old, kind of just sitting there on top of a pile of clothes with a note that basically said, “I can't handle being a mom anymore. He'll be much better off with you. Good luck.”
Now, what I didn't know also was that she had planned this for a few months. She had not paid the rent for a few months and kept the money and I didn't know that. She wiped out what little we had in the savings account in the bank and took the only car we had. So unbeknownst to me, two days later I was evicted—completely evicted, power shut off, the landlord—she just really timed this one. And I had this little kid with me, two-and-a-half years old, and now I had to be mom and dad and that was really a bummer, I had no car! So I ended up borrowing a 1951 Cadillac with a broken water pump from someone that was very, very dear, had to put water in it every four hours, and that's kind of how we got going.
Second time I was homeless is when I started John Paul Mitchell Systems. I knew I needed $500,000 to start John Paul Mitchell Systems, had to have that. So we had the backer lined up, I had a good job at the time, lived in a nice house, and I left everything I had because $500,000 was coming down the street, I was going to start a company. So I left it all behind. I left what money I had with my wife—we weren't getting along well at all—and the best car. And I took the older car—it was a good one but an older car, it ran good—down the hill to get my money.
Why Donald Trump Is Actually Obama’s Natural Successor"History is decided by the people that show up," and about 60 million people — about 1/5th of the country — showed up to vote for a boorish reality TV star with no experience in politics. It shocked just about everyone, namely the news media and coastal liberals who thought that Hilary Clinton was a shoe-in for the presidency. Michael Slaby—who worked for Obama in the crucial 2012 elections—shows that Trump is part of a direct line from the "hope / change" motif of Barack Obama, albeit on a much darker and aggressive tone. So how do we get back to a level of normality? We engage the majority of America—the 65% of Americans that believe Trump is doing a terrible job—and try and get them to actively participate in politics and show that their voice matters.
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The manipulative tricks tech companies use to capture your attention | Tristan HarrisA handful of people working at a handful of tech companies steer the thoughts of billions of people every day, says design thinker Tristan Harris. From Facebook notifications to Snapstreaks to YouTube autoplays, they're all competing for one thing: your attention. Harris shares how these companies prey on our psychology for their own profit and calls for a design renaissance in which our tech instead encourages us to live out the timeline we want.
The TED Talks channel features the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and more.
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What rivers can tell us about the earth's history | Liz HajekRivers are one of nature's most powerful forces -- they bulldoze mountains and carve up the earth, and their courses are constantly moving. Understanding how they form and how they'll change is important for those that call their banks and deltas home. In this visual-packed talk, geoscientist Liz Hajek shows us how rocks deposited by ancient rivers can be used as a time machine to study the earth's history, so we can figure out how to more sustainably live on it today.
The TED Talks channel features the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and more.
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Why journalists have an obligation to challenge power (with English subtitles) | Jorge Ramos(Full English subtitles are available for this talk -- click the CC button in the bottom right of your screen to turn subtitles on.)
You can kick Jorge Ramos out of your press conference (as Donald Trump infamously did in 2015), but you can never silence him. A reporter for more than 30 years, Ramos believes that a journalist's responsibility is to question and challenge those in power. In this compelling talk -- which earned him a standing ovation midway through -- Ramos explains why, in certain circumstances, he believes journalists must take sides.
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How we can face the future without fear, together | Rabbi Lord Jonathan SacksIt's a fateful moment in history. We've seen divisive elections, divided societies and the growth of extremism -- all fueled by anxiety and uncertainty. "Is there something we can do, each of us, to be able to face the future without fear?" asks Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. In this electrifying talk, the spiritual leader gives us three specific ways we can move from the politics of "me" to the politics of "all of us, together."
The TED Talks channel features the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and more.
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Social Media's Dark Side: How Facebook and Snapchat Try to Steal Our Self-Worth | Tristan HarrisIn the 1970s, at the dawn of personal computers, people like Steve Jobs and the scientists at Xerox PARC talked about computers as "bicycles for our mind". Sure, someone was going to make big money selling these hardware units, but the intention was at heart quite pure; computers would give our minds wheels to go farther than ever before. Our capabilities would be augmented by technology, and we would become smarter and more capable. That ethos has not really stuck, and today we find ourselves in a Pavlovian relationship with push notifications, incapacitated by the multi-directional pull on our attention spans.
We've made it through every new technological wave—newspapers, radio, TV, laptops, cell phones—without the social decay that was widely prophesied, but there's something different about smartphones loaded with apps living in the palm of our hand, says tech ethicist Tristan Harris. It would be a mistake not to recognize how, this time, it really is different. Companies today are not more evil than they were in the 1970s, what's changed is the environment they operate in: the attention economy, where the currency is your eyeballs on their product, for as long as possible—precious exposure that can be sold to advertisers. Unlike the neutral technology we once used, and could walk away from, today's technology uses us. Behind every app—Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat—are 1,000 software designers working every day to update and find new psychological levers to keep you hooked to this product. The most powerful development has been that of 'likes', public feedback that externalized our self-worth onto a score card (this has reached new heights with Snapchat's streaks, which research by Emily Weinstein at Harvard has shown puts extreme stress on kids and adolescents.) "These products start to look and feel more like media that's about maximizing consumption and less like bicycles for our minds," says Harris. Is it too late to do something about the attention economy? To find out more about Tristan Harris, head to http://tristanharris.com.
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Well, there's a really common misconception that technology is neutral and it's up to us to just choose how to use it.
And so we're sitting there and we're scrolling and we find ourselves in this kind of wormhole and then we say, “Oh man, like, I should really have more self-control." And that's partially true, but what we forget when we talk about it that way is that there's a thousand engineers on the other side of the screen whose job it was to get my finger to do that the next time. And there's this whole playbook of techniques that they use to get us to keep using the software more.
Was design always this manipulative? It wasn't always this way. In fact, back in the 1970s and the early '80s at Xerox PARC when Steve Jobs first went over and saw the graphical user interface, the way people talked about computers and what computers were supposed to be was a “bicycle for our minds” that, here we are, you take a human being and they have a certain set of capacities and capabilities, and then you give them a bicycle and they can go to all these new distances, they're empowered to go to these brand-new places and to do these new things, to have these new capacities.
And that's always been the philosophy of people who make technology: how do we create bicycles for our minds to do and empower us to feel and access more?
Now, when the first iPhone was introduced it was also the philosophy of the technology; how do we empower people to do something more? And in those days it wasn't manipulative because there was no competition for attention. Photoshop wasn't trying to maximize how much attention it took from you—it didn't measure its success that way.
And the Internet overall had been, in the very beginning, not designed to maximize attention, it was just putting things out there, putting things out there, creating these message boards.
It wasn't designed with this whole persuasive psychology that emerged later. What happened is that the attention economy and this race for attention got more and more competitive, and the more competitive it got to get people's attention on, let's say a news website, the more they need to add these design principles, these more manipulative design tactics as ways of holding onto your attention.
And so YouTube goes from being a more neutral, honest tool of just, “Here's a video,” to, “Oh, do you want to see these other videos? And do you want to auto-play the next video? And here's some notifications…”
Don't feel sorry for refugees -- believe in them | Luma Mufleh"We have seen advances in every aspect of our lives -- except our humanity," says Luma Mufleh, a Jordanian immigrant and Muslim of Syrian descent who founded the first accredited school for refugees in the United States. Mufleh shares stories of hope and resilience, explaining how she's helping young people from war-torn countries navigate the difficult process of building new homes. Get inspired to make a personal difference in the lives of refugees with this powerful talk. Note: Comments are disabled for this video on YouTube. You are welcome and invited to comment on the talk on TED.com, https://go.ted.com/CyNS.
The TED Talks channel features the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and more.
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Lifesaving scientific tools made of paper | Manu PrakashInventor Manu Prakash turns everyday materials into powerful scientific devices, from paper microscopes to a clever new mosquito tracker. From the TED Fellows stage, he demos Paperfuge, a hand-powered centrifuge inspired by a spinning toy that costs 20 cents to make and can do the work of a $1,000 machine, no electricity required.
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Brain Bias: Why Not to Emulate Geniuses and Their Rigid Thinking Processes | Barbara OakleyHow do you get out of a mental feedback loop? The smartest people—call them geniuses or what you will—tend to shut down outside voices and tend to only listen to sources that they know they'll agree with. But the thing is, this works for geniuses because they are, well, geniuses. Barbara posits that the best thing to do for the other 99.9% of us is to get outside of your own head and be flexible about ideas. Travel more. Even just sitting in a different chair can open new avenues in your head. Your brain craves new stimuli, so give it something to grow on. Ideally, Barbara says, you should listen to people and things that might initially rub you the wrong way, but ultimately get you out of your own mental feedback loop. The best thinking doesn't have to come from emotion—taking a step back and thinking critically about all sides of an issue in a 3-dimensional way is often the best way to think, period.
Barbara Oakley's latest book is Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential.
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Transcript: It turns out that it’s all too easy for us to fall into a sort of rut in our thinking and it can feel so comfortable, so good. We can feel so certain that it’s right that we can’t even realize that we’re stuck in a rut. Part of this is called "Einstellung," right, this kind of effect. And that is this sort of you see one approach to do things and you are convinced it’s right— And even it if isn’t the best approach you just can’t see other approaches because you’ve already locked in that first approach.
And to some extent we do that in everything we do in life because as we grow, as we grow from infants and we’re maturing there are synaptic – we’re born and kind of our earliest years we have lots of synaptic connections. And as we don’t use some of them they just wither away and die. So even by six months of age what happens is you’ve lost the ability to even hear certain sounds of other languages because you haven’t actually used those circuits yourself.
So what you want to do in your life is you want to try to expose yourself to novel stimuli as much as possible. So I mean that doesn’t mean that you have to like live a topsy-turvy life, but try things like sitting at a different place at the dinner table or brush your teeth with the other hand.
And, of course travel is a great way of getting out of your comfort zone. One of the things that I think is very interesting is Nobel Prize Winner Ramon y Cajal had said that—he’s considered the father of modern neuroscience and he’d worked with many geniuses—And he said, you know, “I’ve worked with these geniuses, and,” he said, “I am not a genius.” He said, “What I am is persistent and I’m flexible when I see that the data is telling me something different than I thought it should tell me.”
So he was able to change his mind. Now what happens with really smart people, those geniuses who Ramon y Cajal was referring to is they’re super smart. So they’re used to being right and figuring things out quickly. They tend to jump to conclusions and they haven’t had the experience of changing their minds when they’re wrong because they haven’t been wrong that often. And what that does is that makes them less flexible in the face of changing data or even being more open to different ideas.
So I think it’s really important to try to keep yourself flexible, try to talk to people of different opinions, listen to them. Of course you’ll be forming your own opinions, but you’ll be surprised if you listen carefully how you can find yourself being a more open and caring person just for the fact that you’ve listened.
My background is a little different in that I worked for several years as a Russian translator on Soviet trawlers. So it was an eye-opening experience for me because it allowed me to realize how easy it is for people to get in an echo chamber where they have no idea that there are other opinions and other ideas that are outside their own echo chamber. So I saw that on the trawlers that I worked on. There was no exposure to Western ideas and Western thoughts. And so they were convinced that all capitalists were evil, that people when they got to shore they would be kidnapped and tortured and terrible things would happen to them. And, of course, that wasn’t true at all. And their conceptions of the West were completely wrong. And what I see, another thing was just that they were terrified of saying the wrong thing. It was truly a totalitarian society where if you had “wrong think” you were in big trouble.
A celebration of natural hair | Cheyenne CochraneCheyenne Cochrane explores the role that hair texture has played in the history of being black in America -- from the heat straightening products of the post-Civil War era to the thousands of women today who have decided to stop chasing a conventional beauty standard and start embracing their natural hair. "This is about more than a hairstyle," Cochrane says. "It's about being brave enough not to fold under the pressure of others' expectations."
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Universal Basic Income, the 30-Hour Workweek, and the Economics of Poverty | Michael SlabyRead more at BigThink.com:
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Transcript: Look, I think change is scary. I think there is no way around that. I think what is familiar is easier for people, and not everybody wants disruption and innovation and entrepreneurship; not everybody wants to have seven jobs. That sounds terrible to a lot of people.
I think the idea, the sort of assumption that “everybody is an entrepreneur” is a bit of a mistake. I think many people are willing to be entrepreneurs given no other option, but a lot of those people would rather just have a job. Like not everybody is a founder. That's okay, this is not some failure. Founders are sort of unique animals in sort of our social ecosystem.
But what I think it requires of us as individuals is: this pace of change is unlikely to be slowed down in a way that is productive. It could be slowed down in ways that are super unproductive like being isolationists and protectionist and trying to make a global economy smaller in ways that ultimately hurt more people than it will help. There are ways of slowing down innovation, but I don't think any of them are actually good for people.
I think the reality is we have to get better at teaching flexibility. We have to teach critical thinking and adaptability to students as part of how we're preparing people for the future. We also have to be willing—this is where leadership matters a lot—willing to be more ambitious for ourselves. We tend to think about progress in generational terms, “I want my kids to be better off than I am.” Well, why wait for your kids? Like if it's easier and more effective to make something somewhere else we can take on a bigger problem.
And I believe that we can do that, that we have the capacity to embrace something more ambitious for ourselves now in our lifetime in a way that isn't terrifying and in a way that isn’t—it's about seeing these things as opportunities and addressing the anxiety of trying new things and embracing new things, and that requires leadership that is confidence-inspiring and that speaks to the discomfort that we're in, and that meets us at an emotional level of leadership that I think politicians are pretty scared of a lot of the time.
And I don't think it's just politicians, I think it's also business leaders, I think it's community leaders, I think this is a cultural shift in an attitude toward what “success” looks like and what “work” looks like.
And it may be the case that we're moving into this sort of post-industrial economy, we're sort of in this complicated shift and industrial jobs are moving and changing. Value is no longer linearly correlated with work. So in a typical industrial system, if I work more hours I create more value in a relatively linear equation, which is why an hourly wage makes sense.
But in a world where one more hour of work might create 10X more value, but in the world we're currently in all of that value goes to an investor and none of it goes to me as the worker, hourly wages make no sense.
And it might be the case that if we did a better job sharing in that value creation and spreading the cost of disruption around more effectively maybe we only need to work 30 hours a week, and maybe that is full employment.
Maybe our definition of full employment needs to be revisited just like a lot of our other assumptions. And maybe we don't need seven jobs, maybe we just need it to do a better job sharing the value we're creating, and that leaves more time to be parents.
Like I don't know that we need to take as a given the 40-hour work week. Most other countries don't and they haven't for a long time.
Look, I think that this concept of shared success and collective progress leads us toward a conversation that invites the question of universal basic income. I think it's a really interesting idea. I'm not an expert in it and I'm not convinced that it's the only answer. I think things like requiring companies to do things like profit-sharing is part of the same conversation that ultimately what universal basic income is about; is that we are collectively creating value and we should collectively share in that value. I believe in that 100 percent.
I think that we live in a community where accepting the suffering of any of us makes all of us poorer and makes all of us less well-off. Aand accepting that that is like the default part of the gradient should be unacceptable to us.
Is the answer a check from our government that creates a minimum layer? Maybe. That may be exactly the kind of public good that the government should create. The question is: who gets it, and how, and when, and what are the cutoffs?
