TEDBlog October, 2009 Archive
15 October 2009
Q&A with Rory Sutherland: An advertarian's take on the world
The TED Blog caught up with ad man Rory Sutherland the evening before we posted his TEDTalk. Drawing on the work of behavioral economists, Nobel Prize winners and others, he talked at length about his personal philosophy of Advertarianism, about President Obama and the healthcare debate, and even threw in some analysis on the future of media use and advertising. Not bad, considering it was well past bedtime in the UK.
You call yourself an “Advertarian.” Would you like to explain what that means?
Now, there’s a thought experiment that behavioral economists perform, one in which a man invents a brilliant new way for scanning X-rays — so you can do cancer scans and X-rays at one tenth of the previous cost and at twice the speed — and everybody heralds him as a hero. Then, it’s revealed that there isn’t any clever technology. All he does is scan the X-rays and then email them off to the Philippines, where highly trained, low-cost employees do the actual scanning of the X-rays manually, just as before, only at one tenth of the salary. And the argument that’s used by economists is that people are absolutely scandalized by this, everyone thinks is this absolutely outrageous, and “What a terrible man!” Yet, bizarrely, the effects are identical. The effect of offshoring to a low-wage economy is the same as a technological innovation. Indistinguishable. You might even argue that the second course is better, at least if you’re a Filipino in need of a reasonably well-paid job. But, interestingly, we judge them morally on a very different level. We’re very subjective about that, and the means and the intentionality make a big difference.
And I have a parallel example, where I say, “Imagine there’s a device that costs about 50p per household, per year, and if you install it in your house, it decreases the chance of a house fire by 30 percent.” And everybody goes, “That’s an absolutely brilliant idea. I want to buy one of those. And, actually, I think the government should pay for it and they should issue one to all households.” But, it’s not technically a device: it’s actually a TV commercial. To run the ad costs about 50p per household, per year, and it actually decreases the likelihood of household fires by 30 percent. There is a TV commercial that’s had precisely that effect. And then people go, “No, that’s not quite the same.” And the question you have to ask is, “Why is it not the same?” In other words, why do we regard solutions that involve, to a small extent, tampering with our heads or just supplying information or supplying persuasion … why do we regard those solutions as lesser value than those that involve technology, for example?
It’s not that marketing-driven or advertising-led solutions can solve everything. That’s absolutely not true. What seems strange to me, though, is that people don’t at least try them first. Instead, governments try to solve their problems by compulsion. My view is that we should try and solve the problem by persuasion, and if that fails we can try compulsion or harder-level nudging. For this reason, I think the book Nudge is one of the most important books of the last five to ten years.
One of the small successes of my TEDTalk is that it’s now Conservative Party policy to spend no more money on speed cameras, but to spend the money on those vehicle-activated signs instead. So, I’ve had a small amount of advertarian success, with at least the prospective next government here in Britain. I’m purely philosophical about this. I’m not an advertarian in the sense that I believe that all problems can be solved this way. But, I think it’s best just to try.
Technology makes for easier persuasion and nudging — what B.J. Fogg at Stanford calls persuasive technology — and makes it far more potent. So, the British government’s Central Office of Information, they’ve said, “Look we’ve tried advertising with seatbelts for years. It didn’t really work. And so, we made it illegal not to wear a seatbelt and everybody wore one.” It’s interesting, of course, that at the time when we made it compulsory to wear seatbelts, there wasn’t the technology cheaply available to make a car go “bing” for 60 seconds, or even indefinitely, if you didn’t put your seatbelt on. Now, I would argue that making it a legal requirement that all new cars go “bing” for 90 seconds if you don’t put your seatbelt on when you drive off is a nudge, but it’s not really an infringement of liberties.
Senior people in government spend years getting their hands on very large budgets with which they want to do very big things, and quite often there’s a disproportionality, as the things that make an enormous difference are actually quite trivial. For example, Terminal 5 at Heathrow is magnificent. As a piece of architecture, it’s fabulous. But, the signage is dreadful. It’s a Kafka-esque nightmare of really appalling directions and confusion.
All large organizations need a Director of Trivia or a Director of Detail — a very senior person with a large budget and great powers, but whose job is actually to take care of little irritants. Most board directors and government ministers, their sense of self-aggrandizement is too great for them to actually get involved here. You haven’t spent all those years becoming a government minister to improve form design, yet what Nudge would say is that if you want people to follow your policy, designing really attractive forms and interfaces is probably a better way of achieving your end than spending loads of time legislating or creating expensive incentives. The world needs people going around and sorting out little interface issues. If pelican crossings (crosswalks) had “Cancel” buttons, they would be more efficient. The thing is, you press the button and then realize there’s a gap in the traffic, you jaywalk across, and then all the cars have to stop for no one to cross the street. All you need there is a simple “Cancel” button so that if you decide to make a run for it you don’t stop all the traffic. And there are hundreds more little problems like these that are unnecessary irritants in our daily lives.
The Advertarian philosophy doesn’t solve all this; it’s just a little thing I made up. But, I do think that you should always try to solve a problem first through voluntary means or persuasive means before resorting to heavy-handed compulsion.
When you bring up advertising and government, the first thing that comes to mind is President Obama’s campaign last year. What did you think of his campaigning style, as well as what he’s doing in government right now? Is there anything you think he should be doing differently?
It’s very interesting. I think he ran a brilliant campaign using both social media and mass media. It’s actually a much more conventional advertising campaign than a lot of people have said. There was an enormous amount of money spent on advertising. And, it was interesting that to some extent he portrayed himself as the underdog, even though he was better funded than anyone. He played that off very cleverly. Because he wasn’t a long-time politician, he could play this game of “little old me” when actually, he had bucketloads of money to campaign with.
What’s peculiar in this case is that he’s failed to take the American people with him on health reform in the way that he undoubtedly co-opted them and created a popular movement around his election campaign. It must be remembered that, in the United States, there are immensely powerful lobby groups who weren’t in action against his election in the same way.
But, Obama did have the amazing effect of getting the British to rise up in defense of the National Health Service. The British are mostly critical of the health service and spend a lot of time complaining about it, but when various things came out in the United States more or less suggesting that we have committee meetings to decide whether you die or not, people found that such a ridiculous misrepresentation of the situation that they leapt to the defense of the system.
Now, just bear in mind that by European standards I’m quite right wing. Not by American standards, but by European standards I’m thought to be quite libertarian and quite keen on free-market solutions. But, there is a simple fact that, strangely, you can’t point out to Americans, which is that when you go to Canada, it’s not like everybody’s dying. They pay vastly less for prescription drugs, because they’re purchased centrally.
Incidentally, what no one actually says is that the United States spends an insane amount of money on health. A brutally statistical discovery, as found by the statistician Robin Hanson, claims that, above a certain level of expenditure, there is no correlation between money spent on healthcare and longevity. So, actually, when you spend above a certain amount per person on health, longevity doesn’t actually improve. And, Hanson’s theory is that excessive intervention by medicine outweighs the benefits of overfunding.
Most people think that the more you spend on healthcare, the better your healthcare is, but it’s not true. Now, it’s not that every heart surgeon is going, “Oh yes, a couple more of these heart operations and I’ll be able to pay for a yacht.” Rather, if you’ve spent 40 years practicing heart surgery and becoming a brilliant heart surgeon, you are unusually biased towards seeing solutions in heart surgery, just as legislators are overly biased to seeing solutions in legislation and people who are engineers are overly biased to seeing the solutions to the world’s ills lying in engineering. And so, overmedication and excessive intervention by doctors in the United States is probably a downside of how much money is poured into healthcare. The bias to intervention is always there in a case where you can either do nothing or do something. People always prefer something. The doctor’s recommendation of “Actually, I’d just leave it. It’ll probably go away,” is never one with which people are comfortable.
However, the inordinate amount of money spent on healthcare in the United States has enormous spillover benefit for other countries. The research and pharmaceutical development that’s funded by the large percentage of GDP devoted to US healthcare ultimately benefits the rest of the world enormously. So, in some ways, as a Brit, I would be quite keen for the United States to carry on with its current barking level of health expenditure.
The fundamental problem that Obama has in this — and the British also had this for the previous 100 years — is that when you’re top dog nation, you don’t think that anything could be better anywhere else. I mean, if France had come to us and said, “Actually, you ought to drink wine and not beer,” we would never have accepted that. The very idea comes across as unpatriotic. I’ve met Americans who themselves are quite chippy about the United States, but if you ever go and actually say, “I think your restrictions on drinking out-of-doors are a bit silly,” they get quite jumpy about it. In truth, there are 50 million Italians who sit outside drinking wine, in the open air, and their incidence of alcoholism is probably lower than the US.
I think Paul Romer has the answer, in truth. I thought Paul Romer’s speech at TED was actually magnificent. The idea of charter cities: absolutely fascinating. To change something at a national level is impossible. What you need to do is create cities that operate on new models and new institutions, and trial the new thing at that scale and then, effectively, let it spread outwards. That’s an interesting question, whether you should try it state by state in some form.
Is your advice to Obama that he should sit and have a talk with Paul Romer?
Yes, exactly that. I think so.
It’s a fundamental question about making change happen. In truth, much as people in central government love to issue strategy because it’s what they’re there for, a lot of important change happens from the bottom up. Where Britain’s conservatives have been quite good is in looking round the world for good ideas, in the sense that there are some very good Swedish ideas on education involving starting your own school that they’re currently looking at.
READ MORE: Rory Sutherland explains 360 degree branding, why the distance the technology can put between us is actually useful and talks Mad Men (more…)
15 October 2009
Supercomputing the brain's secrets: Henry Markram on TED.com
Henry Markram says the mysteries of the mind can be solved — soon. Mental illness, memory, perception: they’re made of neurons and electric signals, and he plans to find them with a supercomputer that models all the brain’s 100,000,000,000,000 synapses.(Recorded at TEDGlobal, July 2009, Oxford, UK. Duration: 14:51)
Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/44
Watch Henry Markram’s talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 500+ TEDTalks.
Get TED delivered:
Subscribe to the TEDTalks video podcast via RSS >>
Subscribe to the iTunes video podcast
Subscribe to the iTunes audio podcast
Get updates via Twitter >>
Join our Facebook fan page >>
Subscribe to the TED Blog >>
14 October 2009
Life lessons from an ad man: Rory Sutherland on TED.com
Advertising adds value to a product by changing our perception, rather than the product itself. Rory Sutherland makes the daring assertion that a change in perceived value can be just as satisfying as what we consider “real” value — and his conclusion has interesting consequences for how we look at life. (Recorded at TEDGlobal, July 2009, Oxford, UK. Duration: 16:39)
Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/40
Watch Rory Sutherland’s talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 500+ TEDTalks.
Get TED delivered:
Subscribe to the TEDTalks video podcast via RSS >>
Subscribe to the iTunes video podcast
Subscribe to the iTunes audio podcast
Get updates via Twitter >>
Join our Facebook fan page >>
Subscribe to the TED Blog >>
13 October 2009
TED and Reddit interview Evgeny Morozov
Today, Internet scientist Evgeny Morozov answers questions from the latest Reddit-powered, TED community-driven interview. Enjoy!
rras asks: Do I see any novel and telling reactions and counter-reactions from individuals or groups in response to governments’ manipulation efforts?
Digital activism is only possible because creative and tech-savvy activists are usually one step ahead of authorities. Part of my thesis has been that authorities are getting more and more sophisticated, which makes the lives of digital activists much more difficult (and much less secure). Chances are that we’ll only know about the most secure and effective means of communication and activism once they have stopped being effective; once they jump the shark, they essentially become useless to activists because authorities are keeping a close eye on them as well. This is why I have been so skeptical about the ability of Twitter and Facebook to bring change to authoritarian regimes — they are simply too visible and well-known; chances are, secret services have already developed data mining tools to figure out what’s going on there.
That said, I should also point out that my good friend Ethan Zuckerman has a different theory: uber-popular sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter also make it easier for digital activists to conceal their real activities in the never-ending stream of cat pictures and funny videos (that’s what Zuckerman calls “Cute Cat Theory“). There are some striking examples confirming this hunch: Iranian activists, for example, have once been very active on GoodReads, a social network for book-lovers, where they have carved up space for their political discussions — and their activists have gone unnoticed to the Iranian regime (after all, they can’t be suspicious about every single site, and a network for book lovers sounds innocent enough even by their standards).
On the broader question of fighting manipulation, there are definitely efforts to collect and publicize lists of bloggers/usernames that might be cooperating with the regime or advancing its talking points. This is fairly ineffective: all it takes is to set up a new account (that’s a bit more problematic for bloggers with established reputations, though, so there are instances when such tactics can be effective). The larger issue here is that those who usually blog/campaign against the government can easily be labeled as “agents of the West” — and there is usually plenty of evidence to support that claim (some anti-government bloggers/digital activists in places like China or Russia or Iran cooperate with various NGOs, attend seminars held by US embassies, etc — and all of that often looks suspicious to their enemies). So the other side — the pro-Western, secular, democracy-loving activists — can be seen as agents of “manipulation” as well. It’s definitely not a one-way street.
silverwater asks: How do we combat anti-critical thinking online and get people out of the bubbles that they form online?
The question about online bubbles is a tricky one. One man’s bubble is another man’s “issue group.” Political scientists have long debated when and how exactly deliberation ends and participation starts; the role that the Internet plays in this is still very poorly understood. It’s certainly true that many social movements would rather not permit too much critical thinking among their members, simply because these movements emerged to fight for achieving a particular goal (e.g., it’s hard to imagine the pro-choice movement pausing to reconsider a new passage from the Bible every time they get criticized for their views).
That said, I do believe that there are many people — they may as well be in the majority — who have not yet fully made up their minds about certain issues — or they could be easily swayed from their current positions by new evidence. It is certainly possible that the proliferation of social networks and blogs may help us cling to the positions we are already likely to embrace (much along the lines of what Cass Sunstein has argued in his book Republic.com). Whenever you try to apply that view in the authoritarian context, reasoning gets even trickier, for their citizens’ other choices are state-controlled media like television or newspapers; it’s not at all clear whether allowing for greater polarization in online discussions is much worse than having people get brainwashed on a daily basis.
Getting people out of their bubbles and exposing them to new information (that they either don’t know or that can significantly challenge their views) is essentially a question of how to engineer serendipity. Random surfing offered by sites like StumbleUpon offers one elegant approach to this. However, I think that many of those who have struggled with “engineering serendipity” in the past have eventually discovered that they need some past data to make a good prediction as to what may be considered “new” or “fresh” by a given user. Thus, they essentially recognize that they need past browsing histories — preferably with some indication of what is liked and what is disliked — to make a good prediction about what to serve next. However, if you look at this really closely, it does look like the good-old bubble: you are, of course, discovering new stuff, but this stuff is served to you because you already liked something. But, again, we are only beginning to experiment with such systems — and there are many new and very powerful players here (Netflix is definitely one of them).
Iwan_Berry asks: Could the Internet become a dictatorship of its own?
I doubt it. It’s far too decentralized and disorganized — by set-up — to become a dictatorship. It might have been possible if the ultimate dream of cyber-utopians — that the Internet would, indeed, become the Global Village, envisioned by McLuhan — were to come true, but I don’t think we are anywhere near that. Besides, even the problems of spin that I outlined in my talk are probably solvable in the long run. Just think about it: with all the money that advertising and marketing companies had to spend on “search engine optimization,” they still didn’t defeat Google, and it continues serving quite decent search results (there are of course, exceptions, where political pressures force Google into tinkering with them — like the situation with China — but it’s a problem of politics, not technology).
What I am much more concerned about is that more and more authoritarian governments realize that Internet governance is a strategic field, where they need to be present. As ICANN gets democratized (i.e., the US loses control over it), it’s not all guaranteed that the Chinese or Russian interests wouldn’t prevail there. Some of them may be benign but some may call for more pervasive surveillance and monitoring. That’s what scares me much, much more than the possibility of “Internet dictatorship” per se.
00boyina asks: During the Iranian election crisis, many in America and other parts of the West tried to shut down Iranian government websites with denial-of-service attacks. Do you think there is any value in this tactic?
In my opinion, this was one of those examples where good intentions backfired badly. First, I find it hard to believe that the Iranian government wouldn’t figure out a way to get their messages heard if they really wanted it; in the worst-case scenario, they would just set up a blog account on any of the popular and free blogging services. Would “hacktivists” also be breaking into those?
Second, my understanding of the situation — after talking to several Internet experts — is that the attacks against the Iranian government’s websites also significantly slowed down the Internet speeds for other Iranians. In practice, this means that ordinary Iranians protesting in the streets potentially had difficulties uploading their photos and videos to the Internet or communicating with each other.
Third — and I think most important of all — now the use of cyber-attacks for political purposes has been completely legitimized. I am not aware of any legal action taken by the Department of Justice or the FBI or any other agency against those who were planning and executing attacks on the Iranian targets. Well, fine; they probably thought it was “hacktivism” and they had the right to express themselves. But it would be impossible to, for example, hold Russia responsible for not going after its own hackers after Georgia or Estonia get attacked next. Furthermore, it would be impossible for the US to claim any higher moral ground here. So, all in all, I think cyber-attacks on Iranian targets were a very bad idea — and I am sure we’ll be dealing with its consequences in the month to come.
S2S2S2S2S2 asks: Do you feel optimistic about the future of democracy or do you feel technical society will erode it?
If you look at it from a global perspective, of course, I agree that the world is more “democratic” than it was 20 years ago — no matter what we mean by “democratic.” It’s also certainly more prosperous. I think it would be silly to challenge either of those assumptions, simply because the evidence proves it rather conclusively.
Now, the real question here is whether the world is as democratic today as we expected after the fall of the Berlin Wall. From where I stand, this is a “no” and it’s important to investigate why. That’s where the embrace of technology and new media by authoritarian regime kicks in. I think that the ruptures we are seeing in the fabric of most authoritarian states are not caused by technology; they are caused by globalization. Whether states would be able to use technology to patch those ruptures is a very challenging question; personally, I’d say there is a very high chance they’ll succeed, at least in the short term. Undoubtedly, some regimes will fall — but not all of them, and perhaps fewer of them than we think.
What I think would happen is that more and more regimes will gravitate towards the Singaporean model, where they will be able to guarantee prosperity for their citizens, but the price for it would be set too high, at least in terms of civil liberties and freedom of expression. Most Russians and Chinese would probably be fine with it; I agree it’s definitely better than the regimes they had 20 or 30 years ago. Will they be like model liberal democracies like those in North America or Western Europe? Probably not — and it may have been naive to expect so in the first place.
supercargo asks: Is there still value in the connections people can make across national boundaries that are enabled by the global interconnectedness the Internet provides?
Well, in theory, of course, there is value in these connections — it would be silly to say no. Today we confront “the other” on a daily basis — they stare at us from their blogs and Facebook profiles. It’s never been easier to know what it’s like to live another life: you don’t have to turn to novels for this; blogs are enough. For the cosmopolitans among us, the Web has provided a never-ending supply of foreign trivia and fetish. But does it mean we’ll suddenly become more tolerant and put an end to all violence around us? I really doubt it. We do not firmly know much about the impact of living in a multi-ethnic community in real life; recent research by Robert Putnam attracted controversy because it suggested that living in a multi-ethnic and diverse community may not necessarily create more trust. I simply do not know how this dynamic will play out in cyberspace; occasionally I do notice spikes in online populism and extremisms — particularly in Eastern Europe — so I am not sure that the Internet will make nationalism “as rare as smallpox,” to quote Nicholas Negroponte.
Besides, watching the “other” — particularly if that “other” is much richer and successful — may also augment the sense of class and ethnic hatred, particularly in our globalized times, when transnational elites have much more in common with each other than they do with their less fortunate fellow citizens. I am pretty sure that radicalized Islamists view Paris Hilton’s Facebook page as the ultimate proof that Western civilization is in decline. I doubt it’s going to make they any more tolerant of our lifestyle.
digitalbuddah asks: What steps can we, the people, take to protect our freedom of expression from being oppressed by a flood of deceitful, malicious, contrived information among social networks, blog comments, blogs, tweets and other outlets of expression?
I do hope that technology will also help to deal with this. Look, for example, at the initiative to color-code Wikipedia entries based on trust (changes that are made by trusted editors will be marked in green; those made by “newbies” will be marked in red, for example). That’s a great system that will give us extra visual cues when browsing this excellent online reference source. I was glad to hear that the Wikipedia community may soon be rolling it out on an experimental basis; I have kept a close eye on that technology for two years now. I do think that more and more communities should be adopting similar ways of locating and visualizing “trust” within their communities.
That said, we should also make sure that we still provide enough space for anonymous contributions. From my own experience I know that people who have something important and controversial to say would rather remain anonymous — and ensure that their online actions cannot be easily “collected” into a profile that can then be assigned a “trust-grade.” That’s the reason why the “spinternet” exists in those states: you can’t have a productive conversation simply based on user reputations: those reputations by default have to remain fluid, if those who possess them do not want to get caught for their dissenting views … I do not expect that tension to go away anytime soon.
dijon asks: Do you think that the problems cited about the democratic nature of the Internet are specific to it, or [are] in fact necessary flaws in democracy as a general concept?
Many of the problems — propaganda and censorship, for example — are not specific to the Internet; they are problems that are inherent to any medium and any space. The Internet, however, certainly amplifies many of them and adds a few idiosyncratic features of its own. Also, I think that these problems tend to be much less important in societies that are already democratic: yes, propaganda and censorship exist even in the US or the UK, but they are not viewed as serious problems the way they are viewed in China or Iran.
There are constant concerns about the undemocratic nature of Wikipedia, Digg, Reddit, too; of course, it’s true that its top users have much more influence than their regular users — but I am not sure that any of these websites would ever be possible if they operated on a “one person/one vote” principle, simply because this would leave many of their top users without any incentives to contribute as actively as they do now. So, lack of democracy on these sites may as well be justified, especially given that anyone can quickly advance to the position of a “top user.”
These largely theoretical debates do not really bother me. I am much more concerned with the fact that many of these sites — or local sites inspired by them — can be used by authoritarian governments to air their talking points but wrap them in the rhetoric of “participatory social media,” thus making them look more credible.
annakarmaz asks: What sort of initiatives can empower civil society groups to address the use of the Internet by repressive regimes?
Even though I’ve been critical of how much attention (and money) is spent on fighting online censorship (as opposed to other, more subtle forms of manipulation), I do believe that developing better, faster and more secure anti-censorship and anti-filtering tools is probably the best way to spend one’s time and money. This is not going to solve all problems, but it will solve the small problem: getting secure and unfiltered Internet access to activists and NGOs on the ground. We’ll still have to deal with the problem of how to ensure that the Internet actually amplifies rather than extirpates activist urges among those who are not yet activists. This is really a one-million-dollar question — and I do not yet have a simple answer to it.
One well-tested way of doing this is to ensure people have access to free educational resources — and I think the Internet could play a significant role here. This is, of course, based on a very utopian view that exposing people to new ideas, knowledge and skills would eventually result in them deciding to fight for human rights and democracy. The other option is that they would actually learn all the skills, join a state-owned oil company, and have a carefree upper middle-class existence. But I do not really think that it’s a question of tools or the Internet; it’s a question to be decided by much broader social forces, which civil society could try to influence, whether via the Internet or through some other means.
PuP5 asks: Are you proposing that, on aggregate, the bad resulting from dictators’ manipulation of the medium outweighs the good resulting in the empowering of citizen-to-citizen communication? If not, then what’s your point?
No, I am not proposing this. I do agree that there is much good that the Internet unleashed, especially in cultural spaces. Even citizens of authoritarian states now have the option of living much richer cultural lives than they could 20 years ago. To a lesser extent, the same conclusions apply to commerce and opportunities for professional development. My point is that authoritarian regimes are evolving — partly under the pressure of cheaper communications, and partly under the pressure of globalization — and much of that change is, probably, for the better.
However, we should not confuse this evolution with the arrival of Western-style democracy, which may, in fact, never arrive. (Francis Fukayama‘s predictions about the “end of history” have never been more wrong than now.) Besides, I don’t like the juxtaposition of “governments vs. citizens.” Suppose that authoritarian governments didn’t do anything online, not even censorship: would their citizens suddenly revolt simply because they had access to Wikipedia’s articles about human rights abuses? I am not so sure. How do we know they’ll actually go for those articles rather than spend their days playing video games or catching up on Western movies? We used to have similar debates about television: Of course, TV can be good for education because there is the History Channel on it, but would you really give your kids unfettered access to it — hoping they will amass tons of knowledge about the Roman Empire on their own?
I think we need to go beyond the simplistic assumptions that simply because the Internet provides the option of “citizen-to-citizen” communication, most citizens would take advantage of it. This idea is wrong, in part, because it assumes a very high degree of familiarity with how democracy works, and what the role of a citizen is in the process. That’s almost never the case in most authoritarian states.
See all the questions you asked Evgeny >>
Read more community-driven interviews on the TED Blog:
+ TED and Reddit interview Sir Ken Robinson
+ TED and Reddit interview Hans Rosling
+ The TED community interviews Seth Godin
13 October 2009
Robots that "show emotion": David Hanson on TED.com
David Hanson‘s robot faces look and act like yours: They recognize and respond to emotion, and make expressions of their own. Here, an “emotional” live demo of the Einstein robot offers a peek at a future where robots truly mimic humans. (Recorded at TED2009, February 2009, Long Beach, California. Duration: 4:58)
Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/3x
12 October 2009
New York City's natural history: Eric Sanderson on TED.com
400 years after Hudson found New York harbor, Eric Sanderson shares how he made a 3D map of Mannahatta’s fascinating pre-city ecology of hills, rivers, wildlife — accurate down to the block — when Times Square was a wetland and you couldn’t get delivery. (Recorded at TEDGlobal, July 2009, Oxford, UK. Duration: 16:09)
Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/3t
Watch Eric Sanderson’s talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 500+ TEDTalks.
Get TED delivered:
Subscribe to the TEDTalks video podcast via RSS >>
Subscribe to the iTunes video podcast
Subscribe to the iTunes audio podcast
Get updates via Twitter >>
Join our Facebook fan page >>
Subscribe to the TED Blog >>
11 October 2009
Last full day to enter TED's short film contest
The deadline is tomorrow, Oct. 12, for TED’s first-ever short film contest. Films selected from this contest will be screened at TEDIndia in early November, for a global audience of thinkers and doers, and possibly also shared here on the TED Blog!
If you’ve got a cool short film, music video, commercial, PSA or data visualization that we should see, and it’s 30 secs to 3 mins long, enter today. Deadline is Oct. 12, 2009. Get more details and the entry form >>
For more of a sense of what we’re looking for, read this short Q&A with contest curator Jonathan Wells. And best of luck to all our entrants. We’re thrilled with the response from around the world.
09 October 2009
New-wave campaigning for climate change
On Saturday, October 17, president Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives will conduct his national cabinet meeting … 20 feet beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean. The president and his ministers will carry out the full monty under the sea with wetsuits, compressed-air tanks and even waterproof pens and paperwork to persuade world leaders of the impending danger of global climate change and the necessity of carbon emissions cuts.
Rising sea levels threaten to submerge the Maldives, an archipelago with an average elevation of 2 meters and a population of 396,000, within this century. For more on the risks of rising sea levels, watch James Balog’s talk on extreme ice loss and Lewis Pugh’s talk on swimming the North Pole. And at TEDIndia in Mysore, we’ll hear from Charles Anderson, a marine biologist who studies ocean life in the Maldives.
09 October 2009
The quirky world of "manspaces": Sam Martin on TED.com
Author Sam Martin shares photos of a quirky world hobby that’s trending with the XY set: the “manspace.” (They’re custom-built hangouts where a man can claim a bit of his own territory to work, relax, be himself.) Grab a cold one and enjoy. (Recorded at TEDGlobal, July 2009, Oxford, UK. Duration: 4:27)
Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/3o
Watch Sam Martin’s talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 500+ TEDTalks.
Get TED delivered:
Subscribe to the TEDTalks video podcast via RSS >>
Subscribe to the iTunes video podcast
Subscribe to the iTunes audio podcast
Get updates via Twitter >>
Join our Facebook fan page >>
Subscribe to the TED Blog >>
08 October 2009
Q&A with Beau Lotto: On seeing yourself see
Neuroscientist and artist Beau Lotto joined the TED Blog for a short Q&A after his 2009 talk from TEDGlobal. He covered some of the fascinating, perception-bending projects he wasn’t able to cover in his talk — an iPhone game that substitutes sound for sight; a new way for composers to experience their music synesthetically — and detailed an ingenious education project that gives children the chance to participate in real science experiments.
I see your studio has created a game called Bing Bong. Tell me about that.
Bing Bong is an iPhone game. It’s a video game in sound. In the game, the player has to catch a ball, but they must do so without seeing it. They must position a paddle to catch the ball, but they can only hear the ball falling, relative to where the paddle is.
Hopefully, Bing Bong is fun in and of itself — all of my projects have to work at the immediate level, whether that be aesthetic or fun — but, more deeply, it’s a game that’s about getting people to experience the process of having an experience, of seeing themselves see. In doing that, people can better understand how intimately tied they are to their environment, and their interaction with their environment — in other words, their ecology.
How does Bing Bong fit in with your wider research?
Bing Bong is part of a larger program of research, which is sensory substitution or sensory augmentation.
When I say to people that the light that falls onto our eyes is meaningless, people find that really hard to believe. You open your eyes, you look around, you see nothing but meaning; you ask yourself, How could it be meaningless? But that’s of course because you’re not seeing the light that falls onto your eye, but your brain’s perception of that light. You’re seeing that light in the context of the millions of years of evolution that our brains have gone through.
But if I translate that light into sound, and you instead hear the visual information, you directly experience the meaninglessness of it.
Then, through interacting with the world through sensory substitution, you experience yourself literally making sense of it. You begin to hear patterns. Those patterns start having a meaning for you. You’re actually an observer of yourself as you do this.
Through sensory substitution, we can create prosthetics for the visually impaired — to make the world navigable. But we can also do things like make music from color, which is an element that I touched on during my TEDTalk.
The brain almost doesn’t seem to care what type of information it receives — it just starts decoding any information it is given. Do I have that right?
The most fundamental thing the brain does is it evolves to evolve. It adapts to adapt. The brain is wonderfully plastic. Now, it’s a plastic of different levels of flexibility — the brain couldn’t function without some stability as well.
The reason why we survive in the world is not because we evolved to see the world as it is; it’s because we evolved to be able to adapt to a changing world — and to continually redefine normality. And that process even exists at the level of evolution. Evolution itself has evolved to have something called evolvability.
In my lab’s research, we not only work on networks of the brain, but also networks of genes, and networks generally. In doing that, we evolve what we call artificial life systems, or artificial life agents.
If you give these artificial life agents an environment, and in the environment there is a problem, the agent that evolves the solution to the problem faster will out-compete the one that evolved it slower. Both evolved the solution, but the one that did it faster was better. The successful agent is actually more evolvable. Its evolvability helped it survive.
There is evidence that organisms have evolved to be evolvable. They have evolved to be adaptable. This quality is something that is relevant to any adaptive network — not merely the brain.
The aim of much of your work seems to be making science and art accessible to everyone. Talk a bit about that.
As far as I’m concerned, science is nothing more than playing games. And in that case, everyone does science. There’s nothing special about science or the people that do it. The only thing that makes scientists different is that they formalize the process; they have access to certain tools that other people don’t have access to.
In the education center we’re trying to build, we want to give people access — and the confidence — to do real scientific experiments. The education center will be fundamentally about discovery. It might be discoveries that no one else has made. Or it might be just discoveries that are relevant to each individual that participates.
What’s a specific example of the sort of discovery you mean?
The Mother program is about enabling musicians to use musical instruments as an interface to a computer. And what happens is the musician can play the instrument, and the music they play gets visualized — not in the way that, say, iTunes visualizes music; the Mother visualizations are far more complex than that.
The significance here is that the musician can develop an intuition about the visual images that will be created by the way they gesture, the way they move their hands, the way they play their instrument. And what can then happen is, the musician can now create music not just according to what it sounds like, but also according to what it looks like. And that itself can feed back and alter the kind of music that the musician plays. They discover new music by being able to experience their playing through senses other than hearing.
You mentioned an education center. Talk a bit about your current work on education.
I’m doing a project with a friend and collaborator, Dave Strudwick. His background is working with kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, whom he calls “excluded” kids.
I came to him with this concept of “seeing yourself see.” I told him we were exploring this concept in the context of architecture and art. I asked, “What might we be able to do with this, in education?” The premise is that education is fundamental to everything. It’s not just school: it’s everything that humans do. That question led to a series of conversations and meetings about creating a framework for education that we call My School. We call it My School because the people in the school have ownership of the school.
My School is all about education that is specific to the individual. The aim of the education program is to create a curriculum in architecture grounded in the idea of seeing yourself see, emphasizing everything that the education system does — what we call the five Cs: compassion, choice, community, creativity and confidence. Seeing yourself see leads to these five Cs.
The education system is about facilitating people to become aware of how they’re shaped by their experiences. The point is that when our kids are our age, they will be dealing with careers 90% of which do not exist now. They’re going into a world that is incredibly dynamic, unpredictable, uncertain. So, really, the program is about celebrating uncertainty, which was the point of my TEDTalk: giving people the agility of thought to adapt and to thrive in that kind of uncertainty, and to create.
Can you give a specific example of the sort of work you’re doing now with kids?
One particular project is taking the bumble bee arena — we’ve had it as an installation in the Hayward Art Gallery and various other places — and taking it to a school, and going through a process of experimentation with the kids where it’s very much them-led: the kids lead the process.
We started getting them to think about questions such as, “If you were asking someone a question, but they couldn’t communicate an answer except through their behavior, how would you find the answer?” We created games and puzzles to help them figure out how they might solve a problem like that.
We showed them that they can do this sort of puzzle not just with people, but also with other creatures, such as bumble bees. We got them thinking about what kinds of questions they might want to ask a bumble bee if they could. In doing so, they had to put themselves in the perspective of a bumble bee: What’s important, what might be interesting to a bumble bee?
The kids came up with a list of questions. They collectively decided on one of those questions. Then they designed a set of experiments to ask that question of a bumble bee using the bee arena.
We installed the arena in an old Norman church next to their school, and I carried out their experiments over the next two weeks. The process is still going on; in total, it’s been about three and a half months. The actual experiment took about two and a half weeks. The experiments took place on Sundays during church services. There was a funeral at one point. The whole community got involved. People from the community would come up. Parents would come by before and after school.
We got the data, and then the kids analyzed the data. Then they began writing up the paper. I would open up my laptop and say, “What do we write?” We’ve now just finished the paper. Everything is in kid-speak. For instance, they wanted to start the paper with “Once upon a time,” which we’ve done. In one of the methods sections, they had to describe the second test for the bumble bees, and they said [ominously] “Bum bum bummmmmmm!” So, that’s in there too.
All the figures are hand drawings in crayon.
We’ll be submitting it for publication by the end of this week. If it’s published, there will be 25 authors, all of whom are 8 years old or younger. If it’s published, it means they should all get master’s degrees, because by definition they’ve all made a unique contribution to science.
It will be interesting to find out whether, in fact, their paper will be published. Being someone who does bee research, I know the findings are unique. But a “real” science paper has references in it. You contextualize the study. You say, “This is what’s been done before, this is what we’ve done, and this is what it now means in the context of what other people have done.” Of course, as this is a paper by 8-year-olds, they don’t have that context. They don’t know the literature.
Will the community publish a paper with genuine results, but without the contextualization? It’s an interesting question. Their introduction to the paper is what led them to do the experiment. Their discussion is what the results of the experiment might mean to them, and what it might mean to the bumble bees. So, the paper might never get published because it’s in kid-speak and it’s not contextualized — but the data is strong.
I wanted to switch gears and circle back to your work on perception. Several TEDTalks feature illusions. How do you respond to artists and scientists who use illusions to show that you can “hack” the human mind?
There’s an artist — I won’t bother naming him — who was up for a prize, and he often used illusions in his work. One critic said his work demonstrated the “fragility” of the human senses. Artists and others often use illusions to demonstrate how our senses are susceptible. But, as I said in my TEDTalk, if our senses were fragile, we wouldn’t be here.
The whole concept of an illusion is predicated on a misconception. The misconception is that we evolved to see the world as it is, and that to see the world differently from “as it is” is an illusion. But the point of my TEDTalk is that we actually can’t see the world as it actually is. We have no direct access to the physical world. All we can ever do is see it the way it was once useful to see.
Illusion is more a state of the world than it is a state of mind. What’s being presented to you is an unusual situation. What you see is what would have been useful, given that situation in the past. That’s significant because artists often use context in order to manipulate what people see. But they often don’t go beyond that.
The far more interesting question is not that “context matters” — not that we see illusions — but why we see them. When you see illusions, you’re entertaining two realities at the same time. You’re seeing one reality (two gray squares look different) but you also know another reality (that the gray squares are, in fact, physically the same).
You’re in the position, at that moment, of actually experiencing yourself having an experience.
Do you find that your work is in conflict with philosophy on perception or consciousness? Are angry philosophy students knocking on your door?
Well, first of all, philosophy isn’t going to answer many of these questions about perception.
I have a very good friend, Tom Polger, who is a philosopher, and he and I have written a paper on why we see four colors. He was a great person to talk to — a very interesting person, generally. The debates were complimentary.
If anything, my research is about taking these concepts in philosophy and trying to ground them. One idea is as good as any other — but if you can ground them in true, real experiences, and then share these experiences with the public in a way that is intuitive.
So no, my work isn’t in conflict with philosophy in that way. I don’t get very many angry philosophy students.
What’s the takeaway from your work, as a whole — the big lesson you want your art and science to teach?
The lesson is that the brain evolved to continually re-define normality, and that understanding that creates the capacity for compassion and creativity. What’s true at the simplest level, seeing lightness — it doesn’t get any simpler than seeing lightness; even jellyfish see lightness — has got to be true all the way up.
Find more Q&As on the TED Blog:
+ Oliver Sacks on neurological curiosities
+ Bruce Bueno de Mesquita on Iran’s nuclear program
+ Garik Israelian on the secrets of spectroscopy
Find stories on the TED Blog about:
Become a Fan of TED
on Facebook
Follow TED on Twitter:
@TEDNews | @TEDTalks
Subscribe to TED RSS feeds:
TED Blog | More RSS Options
