OEB 2015 - Opening Plenary - Ian Goldin

(Ian Goldin) Great, thank you: it's
wonderful to be with educators

who care about the intersection
of learning and technology,

because that's going to shape the future.

Whether we're able
to get this right or not

will determine whether we have
a glorious 21st century

or a period of unmitigated risks.

The walls are coming down everywhere and
it's difficult to not think about this,

being so close to it, here in Berlin,

25 years ago, these walls coming down.

But it's not just about physical walls
coming down,

it's about mental walls,
it's about financial walls,

it's about technological walls.

All the walls are coming down,
and it's that

which makes this the most exciting century
in the history of humanity.

It changes all of our lives
in surprising ways.

And it's certainly changed mine.

I was living in Paris
when this wall came down.

I didn't imagine that it would touch me
personally.

I thought it was about Eastern Europe,
about the Cold War, about something else.

But within 6 months, I would,
much to my surprise,

I was invited to have dinner with
President Mandela in Paris.

He wasn't president then,
he had just been released from prison.

But he was released
because the Cold War ended.

And the defining feature of this period
we live in our lives

is that what happens elsewhere will
dramatically affect us in new ways.

It's this change that results
from the walls coming down.

And it's this change that will shape
education going forward

and technological progress.

And of course, the other fundamental
period of -- in this time --

is technology, technology,
which got off the ground

at the same time as the Berlin Wall
came down, over 25 years.

This exponential growth in
virtual connectivity.

And now we have a world of 5 billion
literate, educated people

whereas we had a world, only 30 years ago,

of well less than a billion
connected people.

Four billion more literate
connected people in the world,

and this is the engine of change,

where the people in the slums of Mumbai,
Soweto's Al Pano (check)

or in apartments in Berlin,

they will contribute to change
in surprising new ways.

And they're coming together.

There is a release of individual genius.

If you believe in the random distribution
of exceptional capabilities, which I do,

there is just more people out there,
educated, connected, giving, learning.

But I also believe in collective genius,

the capabilities of people
coming together,

to form teams,
to learn from each other

through the methods that
we learned about this morning.

and in other ways.

So new cures for cancer being developed
in 24-hour cycles around the world.

My lab in Oxford doing this with people
in Beijing and San Francisco, in Palo Alto

and all over, in real time.

There is no sleep on innovation any more.

And that's the power, the engine,
which brings change.

So if you think you've seen
a lot of change

be ready for much more surprises.

This is the slowest time in history
you will know.

It's going to get faster,
the pace of change greater,

the surprises more intense.

It's always going to be

more and more difficult
to predict what's next.

Uncertainty will grow because
the pace of change is growing.

Because the walls have come down,

there are two billion more people
in the world since 1990.

And that's because ideas have traveled,
simple ideas,

like washing your hands prevents
contagious diseases;

really complicated ideas
like those embedded in vaccines

in new cures for cancer
and many other things.

Two billion more people coming together,
most of them now urbanized,

and even those that aren't
physically together,

virtually together.

A quite extraordinary moment
in human history,

one where we've come together
as a community,

like we were 150'000 years ago,
when we lived in villages together,

our ancestors in East Africa,
and the dispersed around the world

and now, reconnected.

And it's this reconnection which,
I believe, gives us the potential.

But do we learn from it?

And are we able to think of ourselves
in new ways,

because we're connecting in new ways?

Is this wall coming down changing the way
we are and we think?

Or do we still think like individualists
in our nation states,

pursuing our own self-interest
and those of our countries,

not realizing that now,
we are in a different game?

Now we're in a game in which
we have to cooperate,

where we have to think about others,

where our actions, for the first time,
spill over in dramatic new ways

and affect people
on the other side of the planet.

This pace of education means that
not only are we liberating ourselves,

but we're liberating people from
all sorts of past habits.

And this change is leading
to quick changes in social norms.

Acceptance of gay marriage
is one of those,

but there'll be many, many, many others.

And so, what we think about
as normal today

will seem very strange
in a few years' time:

the space of change driven by education,

more doctorates being created
in China now

than in the rest of the world
put together every year,

more scientists alive today

than all the scientists
that ever lived in history,

more literate people alive today

than all the literate people
that ever lived in history.

This is the engine of change.

But it's not simply about
more and more progress.

It's not simply that we know

that this is going to get
better and better.

It's about what's next.

We don't know what the future holds.

We live in this extraordinary moment
of our lives

where we've seen exponential growth
in income: that's red.

And we seen this most rapid
increase in population,

and income growth, even more rapid
than population growth, which is why

people have escaped poverty at a pace
that has never happened in history.

Despite the world's population increasing
by two billion over the last 25 years,

the number of desperately poor people
has gone down by about 300 million.

This has never happened before.

This is an incredible time, by far
the best time to be alive.

Just while you're here, your average
life expectancy should increase

by about 10 hours.

That's the pace of progress.

What you're learning,
and what's happening in the labs.

And it's that which makes me
incredibly optimistic.

This is the age of discovery,
this is the new Renaissance.

This is a period of creativity
and technological change

which hasn't been seen for 500 years.

This is from my stem cell lab
in the Oxford Martin School:

the lab technician's skin
turned into a heart cell.

And this is one of the
extraordinary things that's happening

that makes one so excited
about the future.

A future of rising life expectancy,
so children being born today

in Berlin or elsewhere in Europe,
will have life expectancies well over 100,

and not having to worry about the things
that I worry about,

like Alzeheimer's, Parkinson's and dementia.

But what skills are they learning today
that will help them shape this future,

prepare for it, and will still be relevant
in a hundred years time.

It's those skills that you have
the responsibility to help shape.

We can imagine this glorious future,
an extraordinary time in human history.

But we can also realize

that it could come very, very badly
at .... (check 7:49)

I looked at the Renaissance
for inspiration

to try and understand how people
interpreted these choices.

That was a period of
creative exceptionalism,

scientific exceptionalism.

If we think today of the iconic figures,
the Michelangelos, the Da Vincis,

the Copernicuses,

discovering the earth went round the sun,
not the other way round;

fundamentally changing our understanding
of ourselves in the universe

in ways that will happen
in our life times.

Fundamental changes
which lead to Humanism,

Enlightenment and many, many other things,

spurred by technologies.

Then, it was the Gutenberg press.

Simple ideas travel very rapidly.

Until then only monks
could read and write,

in Latin, in their monasteries.

Less than half of 1% of the world
was literate.

There was nothing to read
-- and it was in Latin.

And then, this invention lead
to a whole new way of thinking.

Ideas traveled, people could read
in their own languages

and we had the Renaissance.

We also had the development
of nationalism

because people could identify.

And of course, massive
technological push-back.

The Bonfire of the Vanities,
the burning of books,

not far from here and across Europe.

Destruction of presses,
religious fundamentalism,

extremism,
religious wars for 150 years.

Now if you recall those curves I put up,

of the long trajectory of income growth
and population growth.

But the Renaissance did not figure.

It was a non-event,
it lead to no improvement

in people's welfare in Europe or beyond.

Are we different?

Can we embrace our technologies in ways
that lead to sustained progress?

And there are two things I worry about
in this respect.

First: while the walls have gone down
between societies,

within societies,
the walls are going up everywhere.

All countries are experiencing
rising inequality.

Why is this?

It's because the pace of progress
is so fast at the frontier

that this process of integration
-- some call it globalization --

has lead to such rapid change
that if you aren't on the frontier,

if you don't have the skills,
the mobility, the attitude to change,

to adapt, to grab new things,
you're left further and further behind.

If you're in the wrong place,
with the wrong skills at the wrong time,

or you're too old,
you're left further and further behind.

And so we see in all societies
rising inequality.

And some people have been able to capture
the goods of globalization.

They've been able to park their money,

whether they are a corporation
in Bermuda or somewhere,

when an individual in Monaco
or Lichtenstein or Luxembourg.

And so governments are becoming
less and less able

to tax their citizens
and tax their corporates

and less able to fund education,
health infrastructure

and the other things we need. 11:02