The early Model T hackers were really pioneers in a realm of creative activity that academics call “user innovation.” It has become subject of systematic study only in the last few years, as researchers examine how this kind of individual endeavor works and try to assess its economic impact.

The approach is a break with the tradition of looking at companies, either large ones or start-up ventures, as the main engines of innovation in the economy.

In Charles Leadbeater’s TEDTalk, learn more about the power of user-driven creativity — then watch Johnny Lee’s TEDTalk on Wii Remore hacks or Joshua Klein’s demo of crow hacks and get inspired to do your own.

Photo: Henry Ford Museum / New York Times

Watch Joshua Klein’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.

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 >>

How many of you’ve seen the Alfred Hitchcock film, The Birds? Any of you get really freaked out by that? You might wanna leave now. (laughter)

(photo of green machine with crows standing on it)

So, this is a vending machine for crows, and over the past few days, many of you have been asking me, how did you come to this? How did you get started doing this? And it started, as with many great ideas, or many ideas you can’t get rid of anyway, at a cocktail party. About 10 years ago, I was at a cocktail party with a friend of mine, and we’re sitting there, and he was complaining about the crows that he had seen that were all around his yard, and making a big mess. And he was telling me that really, we ought to try and eradicate these things. We gotta kill them, because they’re making a mess. I said that was stupid, you know, maybe we should just train them to do something useful. And he said that was impossible.

And I’m sure I’m in good company by finding that tremendously annoying, when someone tells you it’s impossible, so I spent the next 10 years reading about crows in my spare time (laughter). And after 10 years of this, my wife eventually said, look, you know, you gotta do this thing you’ve been talking about, and build the vending machine. So I did.

But part of the reason that I found this interesting is that I started noticing that we are very aware of all the species that are going extinct on the planet, as a result of human habitation expansion, and no one seems to be paying attention to all the species that are actually living — that are surviving. And I’m talking specifically about synanthropic species, which are species that have adapted specifically for human ecologies. Species like rats, and cockroaches, and crows. And as I started looking at them, I was finding that they had hyper-adapted. They’d become extremely adept at living with us. And in return, we just tried to kill them all the time. And in doing so, we were breeding them for parasitism. We were giving them all sorts of reasons to adapt new ways. So, for example, rats are incredibly responsive breeders. And cockroaches, as anyone who’s tried to get rid of them knows, have become really immune to the poisons that we’re using.

So I thought, let’s build something that’s mutually beneficial, well then let’s build something that we can both benefit from, and find some way to make a new relationship with these species. And so I built the vending machine.

But the story of the vending machine is a little more interesting if you know more about crows. It turns out that crows aren’t just surviving with human beings, they’re actually really thriving. They’re found everywhere on the planet except for the Arctic, and the southern tip of South America, and in all that area, they’re only rarely found breeding more than 5 kilometers away from human beings. So we may not think about them, but they’re always around. And not surprisingly, given the human population growth — more than half of the human population is living in cities now, and out of those, 9/10ths of the human growth population is occurring in cities — we’re seeing a population boom with crows. So bird counts are indicating that we might be seeing up to exponential growth in their numbers. So that’s no great surprise.

But what was really interesting to me was to find out that the birds were adapting in a pretty unusual way. And I’ll give you an example of that.

(movie of crow hopping over to a tube with food in it, grabbing a piece of wire, and trying to fish the food out, without much success)

So this is Betty, she’s a New Caledonian crow. And these crows use sticks in the wild to get insects and whatnot out of pieces of wood. Here she’s trying to get a piece of meat out of a tube. But the researchers had a problem, they messed up, and left just a stick of wire in there. And she hadn’t had the opportunity to do this before, you see it wasn’t working very well. So she adapted. Now this is completely unprompted. She had never seen this done before.

(crow pulls out wire and begins bending it against a rock into a hook shape)

No one taught her to bend this into a hook, no one had shown her how it could happen. But she did it all on her own. So keep in mind that she’s never seen this done.

(crow takes the hook and fishes meat out of the tube)

Right. (laughter and applause) Yeah. All right. (more applause)

So that’s the part where the researchers freak out. (laughter)

So, it turns out we’ve been finding more and more that crows are really really intelligent. Their brains are proportionate, in the same proportion as chimpanzee brains are. There’s all kinds of anecdotes for different kinds of intelligence they have. For example, in Sweden, crows will wait for fishermen to drop lines through holes in the ice, and when the fishermen move off, the crows fly down, reel up the lines, and eat the fish, or the bait. It’s pretty annoying for the fishermen.

On an entirely different tack, at University of Washington, they, a few years ago, were doing an experiment where they captured some crows on campus. Some students went out, and netted some crows, brought them in, and were — weighed them, and measured them and whatnot, and then let them back out again. And were entertained to discover that, for the rest of the week, these crows — whenever these particular students walked around campus, these crows would caw at them, and run around and make their life kind of miserable. They were significantly less entertained when this went on for the next week. And the next month. And after summer break. Until they finally graduated and left campus — and glad to get away, I’m sure — came back sometime later, and found the crows still remembered them. So — the moral being, don’t piss off crows. So now, students at the University of Washington that are studying these crows do so with a giant wig and a big mask. (laughter) It’s fairly interesting.

So we know that these crows are really smart, but the more I dug into this the more I found that they actually have an even more significant adaptation.

(film of crow flying –

Narrator: Crows have become highly skilled at making a living in these new urban environments. In this Japanese city, they have devised a way of eating a food that normally they can’t manage — drop it among the traffic.

crow swoops down, dropping a nut onto a crosswalk in oncoming traffic, and dodges cars waiting for one to run over the nut

N: The problem now is collecting the bits without getting run over. Wait for the light to stop the traffic:

crow waits by the curb until the signal changes, then crosses to the middle with the other pedestrians and grabs the nut

N: Then, collect your cracked nut in safety.)

(laughter and applause) Yeah, yeah. Pretty interesting.

So what’s significant about this isn’t that crows are using cars to crack nuts. In fact, that’s old hat for crows. This happened about 10 years ago in a place called Sendai City, at a driving school, in the suburbs of Tokyo. And since that time, all of the crows in the neighborhood are picking up this behavior. And now, every crow within 5 kilometers is standing by a sidewalk waiting to collect its lunch. So they’re learning from each other. And research bears this out. Parents seem to be teaching their young. They’ve learned from their peers, they’ve learned from their enemies. If I have a little extra time, I’ll tell you about a case of crow infidelity that illustrates that nicely. The point being that they’ve developed cultural adaptation. And as we heard yesterday, that’s the Pandora’s Box that’s getting human beings in trouble, and we’re starting to see it with them. They’re able to very quickly and very flexibly adapt to new challenges and new resources in their environment, which is really useful if you live in a city.

So we know that there’s lots of crows. We found out they’re really smart, and we found out that they can teach each other. And when all this came clear to me, I realized the only obvious thing to do is build a vending machine. So that’s what we did. This is a vending machine for crows:

(series of diagrams of crow vending machine)

And it uses Skinnerian training to shape their behavior over four stages. It’s pretty simple. Basically, what happens is that we put this out in a field, or someplace where there’s lots of crows, and we put coins and peanuts all around the base of the machine. And crows eventually come by, and eat the peanuts and get used to the machine being there. And eventually, they eat up all the peanuts, and then they see that there are peanuts here on the feeder tray (refers to tray on machine), and they hop up and help themselves. And then they leave, and the machine spits up more coins and peanuts, and life is really dandy if you’re a crow. Then you can come back anytime and get yourself a peanut.

So when they get really used to that, we move on to the crows coming back. Now they’re used to the sound of the machine, and they keep coming back, and digging out these peanuts from amongst the pile of coins that’s there, and when they get really happy about this, we go ahead and stymie them.

(confused crow looking for peanuts at empty machine)

And we move to the third stage, where we only give them a coin. Now like most of us who have gotten used to a good thing, this really pisses them off. So they do what they do in nature when they’re looking for something — they sweep things out of the way with their beak. And they do that here, and this knocks the coins down the slot, and when that happens, they get a peanut. And so this goes on for some time, the crows learn that all they have to do is show up, wait for the coin to come out, put the coin in the slot, and then they get the peanut. And when they’re really good and comfortable with that,

(crow looking at empty tray, spies penny on ground)

we move to the final stage, in which they show up and nothing happens. And this is where we see the difference between crows and other animals. Squirrels, for example, would show up, look for the peanut, go away. Come back, look for the peanut, go away. They do this maybe half a dozen times before they get bored, and then they go off and play in traffic. Crows, on the other hand, show up, and they try and figure it out. They know that this machine’s been messing with them, through three different stages of behavior, they figure it’s gotta have more to it. So they poke at it, and peck at it, and whatnot, and eventually some crow gets a bright idea that hey, there’s lots of coins lying around — from the first stage, lying around on the ground — hops down, picks it up, drops it in the slot — and then we’re off to the races. That crow enjoys a temporary monopoly on peanuts, until his friends figure out how to do it, and then there we go.

So, what’s significant about this to me isn’t that we can train crows to pick up peanuts. Mind you, there’s 216 million dollars worth of change lost every year, but I’m not sure I can depend on that R.O.I. from crows. Instead, I think we should look a little bit larger.

(picture of crow, equal sign, and heart shaped cartoon earth)

I think that crows can be trained to do other things. For example, why not train them to pick up garbage after stadium events? Or find expensive components from discarded electronics? Or maybe do search and rescue? The main thing — the main point of all this for me is that we can find mutually beneficial systems for these species. We can find ways to interact with these other species that doesn’t involve exterminating them, but involves finding an equilibrium with them that’s a useful balance. Thanks very much.

"What’s out there?" is the question of this session. First to try to give an answer is particle physicist Brian Cox, from the University of Manchester. He also work on the CERN‘s LHC ATLAS, part of one of the most ambitious scientific experiments currently taking place in the world, the construction of the Large Hadron Collider (see my notes and pictures from a visit to the LHC last year, including explanation of the science involved) and spends alot of time trying to make heady scientific concepts understandable to the public.

The Large Hadron Collider will be switched on later this year. It is a particle accelerator 27 km in circonference, being built at an average depth of 100 meters under the Swiss-French border near Geneva. It is fitted with several giant detectors (ATLAS is the one in the photo above, notice the man in the foreground for scale) that are essentially digital cameras, trying to capture the collision of particles as they travel at high speed in opposing directions. With the LHC scientists are trying to re-create the conditions that were present less than one-billionth of a second after the Big Bang. Why do so? Particle physicists are ambitious, and the aim of particle physics is to understand what everything is made of and why it sticks together.
Way back in the early times of the universe, things — we believe — were very simple. It’s made of 12 particles of matters (quarks, protons, gluons, neutrinos, electrons). These particles has been discovered in the last century. The first one, the electron, in 1897. One of the greatest achievements of the XX century is the "standard model", which is a beautiful mathematical equation that explains the universe. Except that there are several "H" in there, which stands for the Higgs particle, that hasn’t been observed yet. It’s a theoretical particle, a prediction for the existence of one. What the Higgs does, it gives mass to the fundamental particles (refer to my earlier post for more). The whole universe is full of Higgs fields. That’s what the LHC is been built to search for. It can also discover other things, including possibly giving evidence to a theory called supersymmetry that suggests that the forces of nature unified together back at the Big Bang.

Particle physics and cosmology has given us a beautiful narrative, almost a creation story, from where the universe started 13.7 billion years ago. (Brian does a two-minutes "history of the universe" based on the image above). The artifacts that surround us are the things that hydrogen atoms do when given 13.7 billion years — and the right laws of physics. If you believe this story, our civilization has emerged purely as the creation of the laws of physics.

Over the last 49 years ocean explorer Robert Ballard has made more than 120 deep-sea expeditions, developing and using cutting-edge technologies to find shipwrecks and unearth their lost histories — including the Titanic and the Bismarck.

"The US has two exploration programs: NASA, tasked with exploring the space, and NOAA, the national oceanic administration. If you compare NASA’s budget, it’s 1600 times bigger than NOAA’s. Why are we ignoring the oceans, 72% of our planet? Most of the southern hemisphere is unexplored. We had more ships down there during Captain Cook era than now. I’ve built several submarine vehicles. On a good day we may have 4 or 5 human beings at the average height of the Earth. In 1975 we went down 9000 thousand feet into the ocean floor, the eternal darkness where you don’t have photosynthesis, therefore no plant life, and little animal life — or so we thought. We discovered that there are tens of thousands of active volcanoes. We discovered a profusion of life that should not exist. Giant tube worms. Large clam beds. Then we started creating robots for accelerating the exploration. And we could find incredible limestone formation, upside-down pools, etc. Recently, diving off in the Gulf of Mexico, we found pools of water, volcanoes of methane, flows of lava. There is more than natural history under the oceans, there are shipwrecks: we realized that the deep see is the largest museum on Earth, ships that sank transporting fabulous artifacts. Fortunately we’ve been able to convince the US Congress and we could get a NOAA ship, and its mission is to go where NOAA has not gone yet, the islands in the Pacific that are under US control — we have maps of Venus but not of the ocean in that regions. The beauty of all this, is that we can disseminate it to children. Through the Jason Project, every year over 1 million students are connected to explorers and scientists, participating live in explorations. We want to create the classes of tomorrow. tech that allows people to follow along as he explores the seas

Andreas Heinecke, a human rights activist from Germany who focuses on overcoming cultural and communication barriers, talks about "Dialogue in the Dark”, an exhibition where participants experience darkness and blind people teach them how to see.

Mycologist Paul Stamets believes that mushrooms could an intergalactic colonizing species. Well, almost. He believes that fungi, and particularly the mycelium (the vegetative part of mushrooms) contains solutions for some of the Earth’s environmental and health-related problems. For instant, fungi produce strong antibiotics; they can be used against flu viruses; mycelium can be used to naturally "clean up" petroleum-saturated soils; revamp pesticides; and generating ethanol (he has patented many of these mushroom-related technologies). Preserving the genome of fungis is absolutely crucial for human health.

Animal behaviorist Joshua Klein is a biological hacker (he also hacks computers), and he talks about crows.
Some species are hyperadaptive to the conditions created by humans — think at rats becoming immune to the poisons we produce. Crows aren thriving. They’re found everywhere on the planet except for the Poles. Crows are intelligent, their brains are proportional in the same way that chimpanzee’s are. He shows a crow that tries to pull something out of a glass, and can’t, so it bends a stick into a crook. Another showing a crow "using" passing cars to crack nuts (putting the nut on the road and waiting for a car to drive over it). Moreover, it turns out that after a while the crows started teaching each-other and imitating each-other how to do these things.
Exploiting the fact that crows are attracted to shiny things, Josh built a machine that trains crows in several stages to pick up lost change and deposit it in a slot in return for peanuts (photo right). The device tests the intelligence of the birds, and Josh wonders whether "they could for example be trained to pick up garbage after sports events" of similar things — the idea being that "we could find useful tasks for these fast-multiplying animals, instead of trying to limit or exterminate them".

Richard Preston is one of the few humans to have climbed Hyperion, a nearly 115-meter-tall redwood tree that is the tallest thing living on Earth. Discovered in 2006, it is located in a remote area of the Redwood National Park in California (the exact location has not been disclosed to protect the tree’s ecosystem). He is the author of "The wild trees", about the still-not-well-known forests of the American Northwest.
The north coast of California has rainforests. Sequoias (photo left) are the tallest organisms on Earth, these are trees that could stand out in midtown Manhattan. The oldest living redwoods are perhaps 2500 years old, roughly the age of the Parthenon. In the 1970s to the early 1990s, most of that forest has been cut down in bursts of logging. Now about 4% of the original rainforest remains — and it’s still under-explored. About 30 feet (10 meters) is the diameter of a big redwood, articulating itself upwards into space for over 330 feet (110 meters). This species moves at "redwood time". To us they seem to be immobile, but they continue to move, to develop. Preston began climbing these threes with his children, sleeping there, discovering a whole ecology in their branches (Preston calls it "canopy soil") with growing complexity, flying buttresses (redwoods grow back into themselves to strengthen the crown of the tree), a fractal-like capacity to reiterate (to repeat their shape again and again), but also deadly parasites that are killing off trees and possibly a whole ecosystem of Eastern hemlocks in the Northwest.
What can the redwoods tell us about ourselves? They can tell us about human time, the flickering and the shortness of it.