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A long time ago,
I tried to be a mathematician.

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I didn't succeed very well,

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but I was studying
strange spaces and surfaces.

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The term "hyper-reflective space"

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probably doesn't mean
anything to most of you,

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but an example I remember is a sphere

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in which the distance, if you go
right through it to the other side,

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is exactly the same as the distance
you would walk if you'd go around it.

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(Laughter)

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This is obviously impossible;
on Earth this would not work.

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But in math these things are possible.

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And the amazing thing is,
once you start working on that

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and thinking about it
day and night, on and on,

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after a while it becomes possible.

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Your mind makes these things possible.

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And you see a space
where those things work.

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And then, the next step
is easy: oh, why not?

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And maybe there are aspects
of our reality that are like that.

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Let's try and find some;
why wouldn't we then investigate that?

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And so, utopian visions,
they are a bit like that.

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Maybe that's why I like them so much.

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Utopian visions, they have
this provocative novelty

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with respect to where we are now,

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and they make you think, well,
what if this could be possible,

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and then, why not, why wouldn't we try?

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So, who would have thought,
and definitely not me,

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that now, years and years and years -

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I'm talking about 30 years
after these mathematics experiences -

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the visionary thinking
and these utopian visions,

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they are really the stuff I'm working with
every day in the Commission.

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So, novel ideas, radical things,

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a "wow-factor" to make you
fall off your chair;

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that's the bread and butter
of my research.

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Not my research,
but my work in the Commission.

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I've done research as well before
on wow-factors, but that's another thing.

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So, indeed in the Commission
we received in that program

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that was just mentioned, FET,
Future and Emerging Technologies,

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- I've worked there for 10–12 years now -

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we receive proposals
with these crazy ideas,

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on average, two - three per day.

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So, in the ten years, I think, I can say
I've seen a couple of thousands of them.

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Can you imagine,
a couple of thousand crazy ideas?

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Not all crazy, not all
equally breakthrough,

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not all equally realistic,

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but things that make you think,
things where you say, "Wow!"

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Now, don't ask me to name the individuals,

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but what sticks in the mind
is how it all fits together,

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what are the big schemes that come out
of these different proposals.

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So, 500 years ago, every speaker
will probably repeat this,

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"Utopia."

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When Thomas More wrote this,

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there wasn't much of technology around,

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but it reminds me of something
that I received this morning

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and I have a suspicion - ah, indeed -

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Thomas More sent his "Utopia"
as a proposal to my program.

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He's looking for money.
Hm, would we fund it?

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Let's see. Let's have a look.

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Oh, my God, this doesn't look good.

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No deliverables, no timeline,

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resource table missing,

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(Laughter)

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collaborative research among -
what is it? - three member states

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or associated countries,
the third country is called "Utopia?"

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I couldn't find it in my databases,
it probably doesn't exist.

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This is a hoax, no, this cannot be true.

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So, no, no way, we should not
fund this kind of stuff.

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Of course, that's the cynical answer.

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Cynical answer in how you imagine
maybe how we work.

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But if the question would be:
Should this kind of work be funded,

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and are we funding it?

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Then my answer's definitely "Yes."

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We need more attention
to utopian thinking,

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other than the nitty-gritty kind
of innovation work

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that we now do much too often
in our projects.

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That's really what the work of me

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and the colleagues that I work
with is all about:

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to come up with more of these visions.


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It's incredibly important.

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It was already said in the introduction:
Today, more than ever,

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we need alternatives
to the status-quo of our societies.

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If not, we will be prone
to populist things,

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we will have only
a few alternatives to think about,

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we will not inspire the young
to explore new directions, and so on.

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So, it's extremely important to do that.

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And of course, when More
wrote his "Utopia,"

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he didn't have so much
technological elements,

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so he had to use the tools that he had.

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And the tools at that time, for him,
were laws, institutions, social practices.

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So he described his Utopia in those terms.

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Today it's very different,
we have mass technologies,

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and they are, to a large extent,
the ways that shape our societies.

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We have to take that aspect now
completely on board,

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and create completely new utopian visions

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that are both societal, and take
those tools that More used,

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but that also take technologies
as a shaping power into account.

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And in fact, they do.

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I mean, our current democracies
wouldn't work without printing,

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without fast communication,
without transport, it simply doesn't fit.

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And when technologies change,
societies change,

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and then, the policies have to follow.

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For the moment that's what they do;
they always scramble behind

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because there is no anticipative thinking
of what the world might be like.

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And so, thinking about these Utopias
in a constructive and proactive way

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is something that we dearly need.

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Now, the link between utopias
and technology is not new.

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There are many examples around.

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This is the focus that we take
in the program that I work for:

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What are these utopian visions
inspired by technology

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that are sometimes, and often, dystopian -
Big Brother is a well-known example,

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and Thomas More would have been
more than happy to incorporate

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Big Brother's visions into his Utopia,
because it fits perfectly.

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But he didn't have those things
at that time, so, that's one thing.

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What are some of these things?

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We are way behind now the age
of the machines,

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we are now in much more sophisticated
machines, and the best known example,

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is of course, is the computer.

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If I look at many of these ideas
that we receive,

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then there is an underlying assumption
that comes in a few variations,

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that is really very important.

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The button to reset your world comes
actually from Telecom Italia advertisement

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where they had that in a newspaper.


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Now, I saw that and, well,

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the underlying assumption there is really,
that the world is a kind of a computer,

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that you can push a button and reset it
like your laptop or anything else.

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This comes in many variations:
the world as a computer.

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Can you think of the world as a computer

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without necessarily claiming
that it is a computer?

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This is inspiring you by the word
"computer" to study the world.

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A bit more sophisticated
is the world in a computer.

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Many, many projects,
and project proposals for that matter,

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that we receive are about that;

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about every discipline
that is currently studied in science

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has its computational variety:
computational biology,

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computational economy,
computational "x", computational anything.

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That is all that you can do,
all those things are also in a computer.

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But the most fundamental one
is to claim that the world is a computer.

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And in the true sense, namely
it's not a machine, but a computer,

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and the difference is that
the computer is programmable,

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it's a general programmable
machine, right?

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So, if you take that then it means
that you can program the world.

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The world, this world, you can program it.

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And if we could understand how
we would be able to create our future,

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because the only thing that this world
that is a computer computes is the future.

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Every time, tik-tik-tik,
it computes its future.

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So, if you'd be able to program it,
you could steer the future.

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These are underlying visions
that we really see in our programme,

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often made explicit in bits and pieces,
rarely on the whole made explicit.

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But it's important
to capture them, I think.

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Another one is the NBIC-Convergence.

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This is an old one: It's 15 years
or older, it comes from the US,

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and much of Silicon Valley
still strives on this kind of idea.

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It's the idea that at the lowest level
of the building blocks -

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of neurons, materials,
thinking and so on -

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the things become interchangeable
if you do it right.

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So, you could replace
a human neuron by a chip,

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assuming it has exactly the same
functionality, it will not matter to you.

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Then, this interchangeability
between bits, atoms, neurons, genes -

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BANG, as we sometimes call it as well -

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is the underlying thing there.

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Lots of projects trying
to materialise that.

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And it leads to things
that are not only human repair,

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which is what a lot of it is inspired for,
for the medical care,

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but also human augmentation;
making people better.

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This is an example of a project where
we really managed to, not we,

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but people really managed to put
a bi-directional link with feeling

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unto a human prosthesis,
a world-first that was done.

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A bit more crazy and more recent
is this kind of thing:

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hyper-interaction, connected brain,
read-write brain.

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Lots of projects that we now see

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are starting to look at how to get
information out of the brain,

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and that's getting
more or less easy, technologically.

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Interpreting it remains difficult,

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but also how to get information
into the brain.

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And the vision that is behind that,

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for instance, is direct brain-to-brain
communication; no censors, no wires,

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no language, no whatever,
maybe a cable or wireless,

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and my thinking goes into your heads.

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I don't have to stand talking here,
you already know what I'm going to say,

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because - swoosh - our brains communicate.

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This is done in projects
with the real results

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published in very high-level journals,
so in all these things you see

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the co-evolution of the science,
the technology, and the proof of concept:

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making it work in a very simple way,
but at least making the case

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that it could work
in a very general sense.

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So, that's the vision to show the ambition
of some of our projects.

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Synthetic life: this is a project
that is now over, project BION,

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where it was tried to build
a synthetic snail.

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And I don't mean a simulated snail,
but a real physical thing

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that is made of polymers
and all kind of stuff,

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and that behaves as a snail,
that is really alive like a snail.

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And if you can do a snail,
maybe you can do other things,

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and maybe you can go on and on.

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This idea of a synthetic life


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is fairly new in terms
of concrete results.

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There have been things
on small cells, and things like that,

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but to do it on complex device,
on complex beings

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is something that is fairly new.

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Expanding from that,
and these are labels that I put there:

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the Hybrid nature, Gaia++,
inspired by plants.

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These are robots that behave like plants.

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Who would think of a plant as a robot?

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But these are actually moving, they find
their way, find water, and so on.

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And in fact, it turns out that there was
a wave of projects, uncoordinated,

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of people proposing ideas
inspired by plants.

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Plant biology became the discipline
that suddenly popped-up in our projects.

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Never seen before.

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So, you see that there are things
in the world that happen

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and then - pop - these visions,
they crystallize.

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And then, there are what I call
"Les accidents de parcours,"

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that sometimes visions disappear,
they merge, they do all kind of things.

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I'm not going to the details of this
but you can analyse those things,

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that's what we also do: You take visions
like the disappearing computer,

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20 or more years old, that find
their ways in different variations

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that now lead to what is now called
the Internet of things,

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with certain twists, and certain things,
and combinations, and splits, and so on.

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This is a very interesting work
that has value in itself.

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It has value to come up with these visions
and to document them, to label them,

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to create languages to describe them.

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Because if you don't, if you just talk
about the vision, you have no words

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to describe what those things mean.

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Even More had to invent all kinds
of words that didn't exist in English

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to describe what his vision was all about.

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So that's a very interesting work,
it's provocative novelty,

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deep interdisciplinarity; none of these
visions comes from a single discipline,

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and I think the Golden Age
of interdisciplinarity still has to come.

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That is, now the low-hanging fruit
of interdisciplinarity is gone:

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a bit of inspiration here,
bits of biology there,

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but the real deep collaboration
that's now going to happen.

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Then, they are dynamic entities,
they change, they can be adapted,

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and I think, most important,
they have sweeping implications -

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that's something we in Europe
can learn something about.

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If you think about a company like Google:
There's a core technology

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and then it's applied sweepingly
all over the place.

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I've called it "sweeping innovation."

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It's not just applied there, or there,
or there -huh! - suddenly cars.

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"My God, why does Google
start doing cars?"

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But if you think about it, it's obvious.

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Why do they do that, and why they do that?

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It's a huge diversity of things
in which they invest,

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but the core technology is what they have.

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So, this brings me
to my own Utopia, if you want.

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My own Utopia is that there is a revival
of working on utopian visions,

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like I and my colleagues do
within the European Commission

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and in other places.

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Because it's by doing those and putting
the pieces of the puzzle together

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that we see the hundreds, thousands
of ideas that we receive,

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that you can crystalise
these alternatives for today.

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And then, the narrow pipeline
which innovation is today,

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where a little research result,
for instance, leads to a product,

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can be replaced by a much wider,
this wide arrow on the slide,

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by a much wider channel
through which these visions

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actually feed the future society
already today.

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So, these are really tools
to work and to create futures.

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And I think that is my own dream,

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and that's, I think, why I'm still
motivated to work there.

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I'm going to stop here, thank you,
because now I have to reply

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to Thomas More and see
what he thinks about it.

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(Applause)