WEBVTT 00:00:00.495 --> 00:00:03.270 In two weeks time, that's the ninth anniversary 00:00:03.270 --> 00:00:07.370 of the day I first stepped out onto that hallowed "Jeopardy" set. 00:00:07.370 --> 00:00:09.220 I mean, nine years is a long time. 00:00:09.220 --> 00:00:11.138 And given "Jeopardy's" average demographics, 00:00:11.138 --> 00:00:12.430 I think what that means 00:00:12.430 --> 00:00:15.621 is most of the people who saw me on that show are now dead. 00:00:15.621 --> 00:00:17.804 (Laughter) 00:00:17.804 --> 00:00:19.243 But not all, a few are still alive. 00:00:19.243 --> 00:00:21.756 Occasionally I still get recognized at the mall or whatever. 00:00:21.756 --> 00:00:24.458 And when I do, it's as a bit of a know-it-all. 00:00:24.458 --> 00:00:26.912 I think that ship has sailed, it's too late for me. 00:00:26.912 --> 00:00:29.103 For better or for worse, that's what I'm going to be known as, 00:00:29.103 --> 00:00:32.337 as the guy who knew a lot of weird stuff. NOTE Paragraph 00:00:32.337 --> 00:00:34.625 And I can't complain about this. 00:00:34.625 --> 00:00:37.038 I feel like that was always sort of my destiny, 00:00:37.038 --> 00:00:40.505 although I had for many years been pretty deeply in the trivia closet. 00:00:40.505 --> 00:00:43.271 If nothing else, you realize very quickly as a teenager, 00:00:43.271 --> 00:00:46.459 it is not a hit with girls to know Captain Kirk's middle name. 00:00:46.459 --> 00:00:47.624 (Laughter) 00:00:47.624 --> 00:00:51.855 And as a result, I was sort of the deeply closeted kind of know-it-all for many years. 00:00:51.855 --> 00:00:55.079 But if you go further back, if you look at it, it's all there. 00:00:55.079 --> 00:00:58.208 I was the kind of kid who was always bugging Mom and Dad 00:00:58.208 --> 00:01:01.140 with whatever great fact I had just read about -- 00:01:01.140 --> 00:01:02.841 Haley's comet or giant squids 00:01:02.841 --> 00:01:06.770 or the size of the world's biggest pumpkin pie or whatever it was. 00:01:06.770 --> 00:01:09.987 I now have a 10-year-old of my own who's exactly the same. 00:01:09.987 --> 00:01:14.088 And I know how deeply annoying it is, so karma does work. 00:01:14.088 --> 00:01:15.588 (Laughter) NOTE Paragraph 00:01:15.588 --> 00:01:18.421 And I loved game shows, fascinated with game shows. 00:01:18.421 --> 00:01:21.827 I remember crying on my first day of kindergarten back in 1979 00:01:21.827 --> 00:01:24.352 because it had just hit me, as badly as I wanted to go to school, 00:01:24.352 --> 00:01:27.685 that I was also going to miss "Hollywood Squares" and "Family Feud." 00:01:27.685 --> 00:01:31.912 I was going to miss my game shows. 00:01:31.912 --> 00:01:33.602 And later, in the mid-'80s, 00:01:33.602 --> 00:01:35.213 when "Jeopardy" came back on the air, 00:01:35.213 --> 00:01:39.286 I remember running home from school every day to watch the show. 00:01:39.286 --> 00:01:44.788 It was my favorite show, even before it paid for my house. 00:01:44.788 --> 00:01:47.202 And we lived overseas, we lived in South Korea where my dad was working, 00:01:47.202 --> 00:01:49.619 where there was only one English language TV channel. 00:01:49.619 --> 00:01:50.869 There was Armed Forces TV, 00:01:50.869 --> 00:01:53.035 and if you didn't speak Korean, that's what you were watching. 00:01:53.035 --> 00:01:56.351 So me and all my friends would run home every day and watch "Jeopardy." NOTE Paragraph 00:01:56.351 --> 00:01:59.352 I was always that kind of obsessed trivia kid. 00:01:59.352 --> 00:02:04.535 I remember being able to play Trivial Pursuit against my parents back in the '80s 00:02:04.535 --> 00:02:07.369 and holding my own, back when that was a fad. 00:02:07.369 --> 00:02:09.417 There's a weird sense of mastery you get 00:02:09.417 --> 00:02:12.662 when you know some bit of boomer trivia that Mom and Dad don't know. 00:02:12.662 --> 00:02:16.218 You know some Beatles factoid that Dad didn't know. 00:02:16.218 --> 00:02:19.202 And you think, ah hah, knowledge really is power -- 00:02:19.202 --> 00:02:26.386 the right fact deployed at exactly the right place. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:26.386 --> 00:02:28.202 I never had a guidance counselor 00:02:28.202 --> 00:02:30.586 who thought this was a legitimate career path, 00:02:30.586 --> 00:02:33.035 that thought you could major in trivia 00:02:33.035 --> 00:02:36.452 or be a professional ex-game show contestant. 00:02:36.452 --> 00:02:38.852 And so I sold out way too young. 00:02:38.852 --> 00:02:40.286 I didn't try to figure out what one does with that. 00:02:40.286 --> 00:02:42.751 I studied computers because I heard that was the thing, 00:02:42.751 --> 00:02:44.612 and I became a computer programmer -- 00:02:44.612 --> 00:02:46.411 not an especially good one, 00:02:46.411 --> 00:02:51.420 not an especially happy one at the time when I was first on "Jeopardy" in 2004. 00:02:51.420 --> 00:02:52.745 But that's what I was doing. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:52.745 --> 00:02:55.585 And it made it doubly ironic -- my computer background -- 00:02:55.585 --> 00:02:59.801 a few years later, I think 2009 or so, 00:02:59.801 --> 00:03:02.339 when I got another phone call from "Jeopardy" saying, 00:03:02.339 --> 00:03:04.662 "It's early days yet, but IBM tells us 00:03:04.662 --> 00:03:09.746 they want to build a supercomputer to beat you at 'Jeopardy.' 00:03:09.746 --> 00:03:11.244 Are you up for this?" 00:03:11.244 --> 00:03:12.834 This was the first I'd heard of it. 00:03:12.834 --> 00:03:15.502 And of course I said yes, for several reasons. 00:03:15.502 --> 00:03:17.754 One, because playing "Jeopardy" is a great time. 00:03:17.754 --> 00:03:21.395 It's fun. It's the most fun you can have with your pants on. 00:03:21.426 --> 00:03:23.430 (Laughter) 00:03:23.430 --> 00:03:24.835 And I would do it for nothing. 00:03:24.835 --> 00:03:26.568 I don't think they know that, luckily, 00:03:26.568 --> 00:03:29.786 but I would go back and play for Arby's coupons. 00:03:29.786 --> 00:03:31.918 I just love "Jeopardy," and I always have. 00:03:31.918 --> 00:03:36.152 And second of all, because I'm a nerdy guy and this seemed like the future. 00:03:36.152 --> 00:03:38.018 People playing computers on game shows 00:03:38.018 --> 00:03:41.070 was the kind of thing I always imagined would happen in the future, 00:03:41.070 --> 00:03:42.618 and now I could be on the stage with it. 00:03:42.618 --> 00:03:43.702 I was not going to say no. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:43.702 --> 00:03:44.835 The third reason I said yes 00:03:44.835 --> 00:03:47.435 is because I was pretty confident that I was going to win. 00:03:47.435 --> 00:03:49.571 I had taken some artificial intelligence classes. 00:03:49.571 --> 00:03:53.901 I knew there were no computers that could do what you need to do to win on "Jeopardy." 00:03:53.901 --> 00:03:57.101 People don't realize how tough it is to write that kind of program 00:03:57.101 --> 00:04:00.661 that can read a "Jeopardy" clue in a natural language like English 00:04:00.661 --> 00:04:04.286 and understand all the double meanings, the puns, the red herrings, 00:04:04.286 --> 00:04:06.853 unpack the meaning of the clue. 00:04:06.853 --> 00:04:11.494 The kind of thing that a three- or four-year-old human, little kid could do, 00:04:11.494 --> 00:04:13.719 very hard for a computer. 00:04:13.719 --> 00:04:16.828 And I thought, well this is going to be child's play. 00:04:16.828 --> 00:04:21.752 Yes, I will come destroy the computer and defend my species. 00:04:21.752 --> 00:04:23.603 (Laughter) NOTE Paragraph 00:04:23.603 --> 00:04:25.203 But as the years went on, 00:04:25.203 --> 00:04:28.994 as IBM started throwing money and manpower and processor speed at this, 00:04:28.994 --> 00:04:31.085 I started to get occasional updates from them, 00:04:31.085 --> 00:04:32.870 and I started to get a little more worried. 00:04:32.870 --> 00:04:38.953 I remember a journal article about this new question answering software that had a graph. 00:04:38.953 --> 00:04:42.870 It was a scatter chart showing performance on "Jeopardy," 00:04:42.870 --> 00:04:46.521 tens of thousands of dots representing "Jeopardy" champions up at the top 00:04:46.521 --> 00:04:48.803 with their performance plotted on number of -- 00:04:48.803 --> 00:04:52.869 I was going to say questions answered, but answers questioned, I guess, 00:04:52.869 --> 00:04:54.828 clues responded to -- 00:04:54.828 --> 00:04:57.219 versus the accuracy of those answers. 00:04:57.219 --> 00:05:00.578 So there's a certain performance level that the computer would need to get to. 00:05:00.578 --> 00:05:02.369 And at first, it was very low. 00:05:02.369 --> 00:05:05.736 There was no software that could compete at this kind of arena. 00:05:05.736 --> 00:05:07.920 But then you see the line start to go up. 00:05:07.920 --> 00:05:10.403 And it's getting very close to what they call the winner's cloud. 00:05:10.403 --> 00:05:12.077 And I noticed in the upper right of the scatter chart 00:05:12.077 --> 00:05:18.202 some darker dots, some black dots, that were a different color. 00:05:18.202 --> 00:05:19.770 And thought, what are these? 00:05:19.770 --> 00:05:23.662 "The black dots in the upper right represent 74-time 'Jeopardy' champion Ken Jennings." 00:05:23.662 --> 00:05:25.854 And I saw this line coming for me. 00:05:25.854 --> 00:05:26.954 And I realized, this is it. 00:05:26.954 --> 00:05:28.994 This is what it looks like when the future comes for you. 00:05:28.994 --> 00:05:30.937 (Laughter) 00:05:30.937 --> 00:05:33.119 It's not the Terminator's gun sight; 00:05:33.119 --> 00:05:37.286 it's a little line coming closer and closer to the thing you can do, 00:05:37.286 --> 00:05:40.421 the only thing that makes you special, the thing you're best at. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:40.421 --> 00:05:45.173 And when the game eventually happened about a year later, 00:05:45.173 --> 00:05:48.036 it was very different than the "Jeopardy" games I'd been used to. 00:05:48.036 --> 00:05:50.537 We were not playing in L.A. on the regular "Jeopardy" set. 00:05:50.537 --> 00:05:52.803 Watson does not travel. 00:05:52.803 --> 00:05:53.903 Watson's actually huge. 00:05:53.903 --> 00:05:58.436 It's thousands of processors, a terabyte of memory, 00:05:58.436 --> 00:05:59.854 trillions of bytes of memory. 00:05:59.854 --> 00:06:02.287 We got to walk through his climate-controlled server room. 00:06:02.287 --> 00:06:05.912 The only other "Jeopardy" contestant to this day I've ever been inside. 00:06:05.912 --> 00:06:09.236 And so Watson does not travel. 00:06:09.236 --> 00:06:13.270 You must come to it; you must make the pilgrimage. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:13.270 --> 00:06:15.327 So me and the other human player 00:06:15.327 --> 00:06:18.535 wound up at this secret IBM research lab 00:06:18.535 --> 00:06:21.083 in the middle of these snowy woods in Westchester County 00:06:21.083 --> 00:06:22.665 to play the computer. 00:06:22.665 --> 00:06:24.715 And we realized right away 00:06:24.715 --> 00:06:27.614 that the computer had a big home court advantage. 00:06:27.614 --> 00:06:29.965 There was a big Watson logo in the middle of the stage. 00:06:29.965 --> 00:06:32.632 Like you're going to play the Chicago Bulls, 00:06:32.632 --> 00:06:34.932 and there's the thing in the middle of their court. 00:06:34.932 --> 00:06:38.168 And the crowd was full of IBM V.P.s and programmers 00:06:38.168 --> 00:06:40.065 cheering on their little darling, 00:06:40.065 --> 00:06:42.431 having poured millions of dollars into this 00:06:42.431 --> 00:06:45.369 hoping against hope that the humans screw up, 00:06:45.369 --> 00:06:47.166 and holding up "Go Watson" signs 00:06:47.166 --> 00:06:51.814 and just applauding like pageant moms every time their little darling got one right. 00:06:51.814 --> 00:06:57.681 I think guys had "W-A-T-S-O-N" written on their bellies in grease paint. 00:06:57.681 --> 00:07:03.085 If you can imagine computer programmers with the letters "W-A-T-S-O-N" written on their gut, 00:07:03.085 --> 00:07:04.752 it's an unpleasant sight. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:04.752 --> 00:07:07.799 But they were right. They were exactly right. 00:07:07.799 --> 00:07:10.215 I don't want to spoil it, if you still have this sitting on your DVR, 00:07:10.215 --> 00:07:13.382 but Watson won handily. 00:07:13.382 --> 00:07:16.249 And I remember standing there behind the podium 00:07:16.249 --> 00:07:19.014 as I could hear that little insectoid thumb clicking. 00:07:19.014 --> 00:07:22.383 It had a robot thumb that was clicking on the buzzer. 00:07:22.383 --> 00:07:26.498 And you could hear that little tick, tick, tick, tick. 00:07:26.498 --> 00:07:29.251 And I remember thinking, this is it. 00:07:29.251 --> 00:07:30.848 I felt obsolete. 00:07:30.848 --> 00:07:33.899 I felt like a Detroit factory worker of the '80s 00:07:33.899 --> 00:07:36.750 seeing a robot that could now do his job on the assembly line. 00:07:36.750 --> 00:07:41.841 I felt like quiz show contestant was now the first job that had become obsolete 00:07:41.841 --> 00:07:45.620 under this new regime of thinking computers. 00:07:45.620 --> 00:07:47.577 And it hasn't been the last. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:47.577 --> 00:07:50.219 If you watch the news, you'll see occasionally -- 00:07:50.219 --> 00:07:51.911 and I see this all the time -- 00:07:51.911 --> 00:07:56.669 that pharmacists now, there's a machine that can fill prescriptions automatically 00:07:56.669 --> 00:07:59.078 without actually needing a human pharmacist. 00:07:59.078 --> 00:08:01.269 And a lot of law firms are getting rid of paralegals 00:08:01.269 --> 00:08:05.661 because there's software that can sum up case laws and legal briefs and decisions. 00:08:05.661 --> 00:08:08.169 You don't need human assistants for that anymore. 00:08:08.169 --> 00:08:11.302 I read the other day about a program where you feed it a box score 00:08:11.302 --> 00:08:13.086 from a baseball or football game 00:08:13.086 --> 00:08:15.662 and it spits out a news article as if a human had watched the game 00:08:15.662 --> 00:08:17.087 and was commenting on it. 00:08:17.087 --> 00:08:21.086 And obviously these new technologies can't do as clever or creative a job 00:08:21.086 --> 00:08:22.521 as the humans they're replacing, 00:08:22.521 --> 00:08:26.338 but they're faster, and crucially, they're much, much cheaper. 00:08:26.338 --> 00:08:31.355 So it makes me wonder what the economic effects of this might be. 00:08:31.355 --> 00:08:34.701 I've read economists saying that, as a result of these new technologies, 00:08:34.701 --> 00:08:36.826 we'll enter a new golden age of leisure 00:08:36.826 --> 00:08:39.119 when we'll all have time for the things we really love 00:08:39.119 --> 00:08:46.091 because all these onerous tasks will be taken over by Watson and his digital brethren. 00:08:46.091 --> 00:08:47.805 I've heard other people say quite the opposite, 00:08:47.805 --> 00:08:50.021 that this is yet another tier of the middle class 00:08:50.021 --> 00:08:55.055 that's having the thing they can do taken away from them by a new technology 00:08:55.055 --> 00:08:56.619 and that this is actually something ominous, 00:08:56.619 --> 00:08:58.124 something that we should worry about. NOTE Paragraph 00:08:58.124 --> 00:08:59.973 I'm not an economist myself. 00:08:59.973 --> 00:09:03.245 All I know is how it felt to be the guy put out of work. 00:09:03.245 --> 00:09:06.305 And it was friggin' demoralizing. It was terrible. 00:09:06.305 --> 00:09:08.536 Here's the one thing that I was ever good at, 00:09:08.536 --> 00:09:12.689 and all it took was IBM pouring tens of millions of dollars and its smartest people 00:09:12.689 --> 00:09:15.222 and thousands of processors working in parallel 00:09:15.222 --> 00:09:17.306 and they could do the same thing. 00:09:17.306 --> 00:09:20.537 They could do it a little bit faster and a little better on national TV, 00:09:20.537 --> 00:09:23.272 and "I'm sorry, Ken. We don't need you anymore." 00:09:23.272 --> 00:09:27.005 And it made me think, what does this mean, 00:09:27.005 --> 00:09:28.744 if we're going to be able to start outsourcing, 00:09:28.744 --> 00:09:32.369 not just lower unimportant brain functions. 00:09:32.369 --> 00:09:34.844 I'm sure many of you remember a distant time 00:09:34.844 --> 00:09:37.671 when we had to know phone numbers, when we knew our friends' phone numbers. 00:09:37.671 --> 00:09:39.662 And suddenly there was a machine that did that, 00:09:39.662 --> 00:09:42.055 and now we don't need to remember that anymore. 00:09:42.055 --> 00:09:43.938 I have read that there's now actually evidence 00:09:43.938 --> 00:09:48.382 that the hippocampus, the part of our brain that handles spacial relationships, 00:09:48.382 --> 00:09:50.036 physically shrinks and atrophies 00:09:50.036 --> 00:09:52.638 in people who use tools like GPS, 00:09:52.638 --> 00:09:55.202 because we're not exercising our sense of direction anymore. 00:09:55.202 --> 00:09:57.536 We're just obeying a little talking voice on our dashboard. 00:09:57.536 --> 00:10:00.140 And as a result, a part of our brain that's supposed to do that kind of stuff 00:10:00.140 --> 00:10:01.953 gets smaller and dumber. 00:10:01.953 --> 00:10:05.744 And it made me think, what happens when computers are now better 00:10:05.744 --> 00:10:09.244 at knowing and remembering stuff than we are? 00:10:09.244 --> 00:10:13.320 Is all of our brain going to start to shrink and atrophy like that? 00:10:13.320 --> 00:10:17.087 Are we as a culture going to start to value knowledge less? 00:10:17.087 --> 00:10:20.959 As somebody who has always believed in the importance of the stuff that we know, 00:10:20.959 --> 00:10:28.183 this was a terrifying idea to me. NOTE Paragraph 00:10:28.183 --> 00:10:33.160 The more I thought about it, I realized, no, it's still important. 00:10:33.160 --> 00:10:35.369 The things we know are still important. 00:10:35.369 --> 00:10:38.371 I came to believe there were two advantages 00:10:38.371 --> 00:10:42.042 that those of us who have these things in our head have 00:10:42.042 --> 00:10:46.868 over somebody who says, "Oh, yeah. I can Google that. Hold on a second." 00:10:46.868 --> 00:10:49.536 There's an advantage of volume, and there's an advantage of time. NOTE Paragraph 00:10:49.536 --> 00:10:51.092 The advantage of volume, first, 00:10:51.092 --> 00:10:53.724 just has to do with the complexity of the world nowadays. 00:10:53.724 --> 00:10:55.141 There's so much information out there. 00:10:55.141 --> 00:10:56.425 Being a Renaissance man or woman, 00:10:56.425 --> 00:10:58.591 that's something that was only possible in the Renaissance. 00:10:58.591 --> 00:10:59.857 Now it's really not possible 00:10:59.857 --> 00:11:02.941 to be reasonably educated on every field of human endeavor. 00:11:02.941 --> 00:11:04.545 There's just too much. 00:11:04.545 --> 00:11:07.042 They say that the scope of human information 00:11:07.042 --> 00:11:09.091 is now doubling every 18 months or so, 00:11:09.091 --> 00:11:11.627 the sum total of human information. 00:11:11.627 --> 00:11:15.209 That means between now and late 2014, 00:11:15.209 --> 00:11:18.676 we will generate as much information, in terms of gigabytes, 00:11:18.676 --> 00:11:22.756 as all of humanity has in all the previous millenia put together. 00:11:22.756 --> 00:11:24.827 It's doubling every 18 months now. 00:11:24.827 --> 00:11:28.186 This is terrifying because a lot of the big decisions we make 00:11:28.186 --> 00:11:31.462 require the mastery of lots of different kinds of facts. 00:11:31.462 --> 00:11:36.494 A decision like where do I go to school? What should I major in? 00:11:36.494 --> 00:11:37.928 Who do I vote for? 00:11:37.928 --> 00:11:39.694 Do I take this job or that one? 00:11:39.694 --> 00:11:43.328 These are the decisions that require correct judgments 00:11:43.328 --> 00:11:45.448 about many different kinds of facts. 00:11:45.448 --> 00:11:47.185 If we have those facts at our mental fingertips, 00:11:47.185 --> 00:11:49.885 we're going to be able to make informed decisions. 00:11:49.885 --> 00:11:52.552 If, on the other hand, we need to look them all up, 00:11:52.552 --> 00:11:54.412 we may be in trouble. 00:11:54.412 --> 00:11:56.350 According to a National Geographic survey I just saw, 00:11:56.350 --> 00:11:58.670 somewhere along the lines of 80 percent 00:11:58.670 --> 00:12:02.685 of the people who vote in a U.S. presidential election about issues like foreign policy 00:12:02.685 --> 00:12:05.652 cannot find Iraq or Afghanistan on a map. 00:12:05.652 --> 00:12:08.218 If you can't do that first step, 00:12:08.218 --> 00:12:11.253 are you really going to look up the other thousand facts you're going to need to know 00:12:11.253 --> 00:12:14.219 to master your knowledge of U.S. foreign policy? 00:12:14.219 --> 00:12:15.484 Quite probably not. 00:12:15.484 --> 00:12:16.801 At some point you're just going to be like, 00:12:16.801 --> 00:12:18.668 "You know what? There's too much to know. Screw it." 00:12:18.668 --> 00:12:20.468 And you'll make a less informed decision. NOTE Paragraph 00:12:20.468 --> 00:12:23.952 The other issue is the advantage of time that you have 00:12:23.952 --> 00:12:25.886 if you have all these things at your fingertips. 00:12:25.886 --> 00:12:29.302 I always think of the story of a little girl named Tilly Smith. 00:12:29.302 --> 00:12:31.985 She was a 10-year-old girl from Surrey, England 00:12:31.985 --> 00:12:35.318 on vacation with her parents a few years ago in Phuket, Thailand. 00:12:35.318 --> 00:12:36.968 She runs up to them on the beach one morning 00:12:36.968 --> 00:12:39.553 and says, "Mom, Dad, we've got to get off the beach." 00:12:39.553 --> 00:12:42.100 And they say, "What do you mean? We just got here." 00:12:42.100 --> 00:12:45.200 And she said, "In Mr. Kearney's geography class last month, 00:12:45.200 --> 00:12:48.135 he told us that when the tide goes out abruptly out to sea 00:12:48.135 --> 00:12:49.827 and you see the waves churning way out there, 00:12:49.827 --> 00:12:54.025 that's the sign of a tsunami, and you need to clear the beach." 00:12:54.025 --> 00:12:56.220 What would you do if your 10-year-old daughter came up to you with this? 00:12:56.220 --> 00:12:57.564 Her parents thought about it, 00:12:57.564 --> 00:12:59.698 and they finally, to their credit, decided to believe her. 00:12:59.698 --> 00:13:01.713 They told the lifeguard, they went back to the hotel, 00:13:01.713 --> 00:13:05.597 and the lifeguard cleared over 100 people off the beach, luckily, 00:13:05.597 --> 00:13:08.502 because that was the day of the Boxing Day tsunami, 00:13:08.502 --> 00:13:10.097 the day after Christmas, 2004, 00:13:10.097 --> 00:13:14.063 that killed thousands of people in Southeast Asia and around the Indian Ocean. 00:13:14.063 --> 00:13:16.537 But not on that beach, not on Mai Khao Beach, 00:13:16.537 --> 00:13:21.751 because this little girl had remembered one fact from her geography teacher a month before. NOTE Paragraph 00:13:21.751 --> 00:13:23.848 Now when facts come in handy like that -- 00:13:23.848 --> 00:13:27.463 I love that story because it shows you the power of one fact, 00:13:27.463 --> 00:13:31.735 one remembered fact in exactly the right place at the right time -- 00:13:31.735 --> 00:13:34.480 normally something that's easier to see on game shows than in real life. 00:13:34.480 --> 00:13:36.583 But in this case it happened in real life. 00:13:36.583 --> 00:13:38.202 And it happens in real life all the time. 00:13:38.202 --> 00:13:40.416 It's not always a tsunami, often it's a social situation. 00:13:40.416 --> 00:13:45.129 It's a meeting or job interview or first date 00:13:45.129 --> 00:13:46.803 or some relationship that gets lubricated 00:13:46.803 --> 00:13:50.183 because two people realize they share some common piece of knowledge. 00:13:50.183 --> 00:13:52.734 You say where you're from, and I say, "Oh, yeah." 00:13:52.734 --> 00:13:54.367 Or your alma mater or your job, 00:13:54.367 --> 00:13:56.284 and I know just a little something about it, 00:13:56.284 --> 00:13:57.833 enough to get the ball rolling. 00:13:57.833 --> 00:13:59.702 People love that shared connection that gets created 00:13:59.702 --> 00:14:01.994 when somebody knows something about you. 00:14:01.994 --> 00:14:06.004 It's like they took the time to get to know you before you even met. 00:14:06.004 --> 00:14:07.416 That's often the advantage of time. 00:14:07.416 --> 00:14:08.901 And it's not effective if you say, "Well, hold on. 00:14:08.901 --> 00:14:14.465 You're from Fargo, North Dakota. Let me see what comes up. 00:14:14.465 --> 00:14:16.367 Oh, yeah. Roger Maris was from Fargo." 00:14:16.367 --> 00:14:19.400 That doesn't work. That's just annoying. 00:14:19.400 --> 00:14:21.847 (Laughter) NOTE Paragraph 00:14:21.847 --> 00:14:27.549 The great 18th-century British theologian and thinker, friend of Dr. Johnson, 00:14:27.549 --> 00:14:33.917 Samuel Parr once said, "It's always better to know a thing than not to know it." 00:14:33.917 --> 00:14:38.450 And if I have lived my life by any kind of creed, it's probably that. 00:14:38.450 --> 00:14:43.983 I have always believed that the things we know -- that knowledge is an absolute good, 00:14:43.983 --> 00:14:46.783 that the things we have learned and carry with us in our heads 00:14:46.783 --> 00:14:48.801 are what make us who we are, 00:14:48.801 --> 00:14:51.318 as individuals and as a species. 00:14:51.318 --> 00:14:55.415 I don't know if I want to live in a world where knowledge is obsolete. 00:14:55.415 --> 00:14:58.751 I don't want to live in a world where cultural literacy has been replaced 00:14:58.751 --> 00:15:00.661 by these little bubbles of specialty, 00:15:00.661 --> 00:15:04.167 so that none of us know about the common associations 00:15:04.167 --> 00:15:06.683 that used to bind our civilization together. 00:15:06.683 --> 00:15:08.617 I don't want to be the last trivia know-it-all 00:15:08.617 --> 00:15:10.035 sitting on a mountain somewhere, 00:15:10.035 --> 00:15:14.400 reciting to himself the state capitals and the names of "Simpsons" episodes 00:15:14.400 --> 00:15:18.066 and the lyrics of Abba songs. 00:15:18.066 --> 00:15:22.549 I feel like our civilization works when this is a vast cultural heritage that we all share 00:15:22.549 --> 00:15:25.735 and that we know without having to outsource it to our devices, 00:15:25.735 --> 00:15:28.340 to our search engines and our smartphones. NOTE Paragraph 00:15:28.340 --> 00:15:32.967 In the movies, when computers like Watson start to think, 00:15:32.967 --> 00:15:35.550 things don't always end well. 00:15:35.550 --> 00:15:39.348 Those movies are never about beautiful utopias. 00:15:39.348 --> 00:15:45.083 It's always a terminator or a matrix or an astronaut getting sucked out an airlock in "2001." 00:15:45.083 --> 00:15:48.318 Things always go terribly wrong. 00:15:48.318 --> 00:15:50.250 And I feel like we're sort of at the point now 00:15:50.250 --> 00:15:54.333 where we need to make that choice of what kind of future we want to be living in. 00:15:54.333 --> 00:15:55.850 This is a question of leadership, 00:15:55.850 --> 00:15:59.517 because it becomes a question of who leads the future. 00:15:59.517 --> 00:16:05.700 On the one hand, we can choose between a new golden age 00:16:05.700 --> 00:16:09.002 where information is more universally available 00:16:09.002 --> 00:16:10.663 than it's ever been in human history, 00:16:10.663 --> 00:16:13.034 where we all have the answers to our questions at our fingertips. 00:16:13.034 --> 00:16:14.577 And on the other hand, 00:16:14.577 --> 00:16:17.350 we have the potential to be living in some gloomy dystopia 00:16:17.350 --> 00:16:19.369 where the machines have taken over 00:16:19.369 --> 00:16:22.418 and we've all decided it's not important what we know anymore, 00:16:22.418 --> 00:16:25.033 that knowledge isn't valuable because it's all out there in the cloud, 00:16:25.033 --> 00:16:31.144 and why would we ever bother learning anything new. NOTE Paragraph 00:16:31.144 --> 00:16:34.933 Those are the two choices we have. I know which future I would rather be living in. 00:16:34.933 --> 00:16:37.166 And we can all make that choice. 00:16:37.166 --> 00:16:40.501 We make that choice by being curious, inquisitive people who like to learn, 00:16:40.501 --> 00:16:43.637 who don't just say, "Well, as soon as the bell has rung and the class is over, 00:16:43.637 --> 00:16:44.960 I don't have to learn anymore," 00:16:44.960 --> 00:16:48.037 or "Thank goodness I have my diploma. I'm done learning for a lifetime. 00:16:48.037 --> 00:16:50.396 I don't have to learn new things anymore." 00:16:50.396 --> 00:16:53.703 No, every day we should be striving to learn something new. 00:16:53.703 --> 00:16:57.895 We should have this unquenchable curiosity for the world around us. 00:16:57.895 --> 00:17:00.620 That's where the people you see on "Jeopardy" come from. 00:17:00.620 --> 00:17:03.701 These know-it-alls, they're not Rainman-style savants 00:17:03.701 --> 00:17:05.803 sitting at home memorizing the phone book. 00:17:05.803 --> 00:17:07.119 I've met a lot of them. 00:17:07.119 --> 00:17:08.669 For the most part, they are just normal folks 00:17:08.669 --> 00:17:12.767 who are universally interested in the world around them, curious about everything, 00:17:12.767 --> 00:17:16.086 thirsty for this knowledge about whatever subject. NOTE Paragraph 00:17:16.086 --> 00:17:18.619 We can live in one of these two worlds. 00:17:18.619 --> 00:17:21.920 We can live in a world where our brains, the things that we know, 00:17:21.920 --> 00:17:23.750 continue to be the thing that makes us special, 00:17:23.750 --> 00:17:30.120 or a world in which we've outsourced all of that to evil supercomputers from the future like Watson. 00:17:30.120 --> 00:17:32.768 Ladies and gentlemen, the choice is yours. NOTE Paragraph 00:17:32.768 --> 00:17:35.020 Thank you very much.