-
On March 10th, 2011,
-
I was in Cambridge at the MIT Media Lab
-
meeting with faculty, students and staff,
-
and we were trying to figure out whether
-
I should be the next director.
-
That night, at midnight,
-
a magnitude 9 earthquake
-
hit off of the Pacific coast of Japan.
-
My wife and family were in Japan,
-
and as the news started to come in,
-
I was panicking.
-
I was looking at the news streams
-
and listening to the press conferences
-
of the government officials
-
and the Tokyo Power Company,
-
and hearing about this explosion
-
at the nuclear reactors
-
and this cloud of fallout
-
that was headed towards our house
-
which was only about 200 kilometers away.
-
And the people on TV weren't telling us
-
anything that we wanted to hear.
-
I wanted to know what was going on with the reactor,
-
what was going on with the radiation,
-
whether my family was in danger.
-
So I did was instinctively felt like the right thing
-
which was to go onto the Internet
-
and try to figure out
-
if I could take matters into my own hands.
-
On the Net, I found there were a lot of other people
-
like me trying to figure out what was going on,
-
and together we sort of loosely formed a group
-
and we called it Safecast,
-
and we decided we were going to try
-
to measure the radiation
-
and get the data out to everybody else,
-
because it was clear that the government
-
wasn't going to be doing this for us.
-
Three years later,
-
we have 16 million data points,
-
we have designed our own Geiger counters
-
that you can download the designs
-
and plug it into the network.
-
We have an app that shows you
-
most of the radiation in Japan
and other parts of the world.
-
We are arguably one of the most successful
-
citizen science projects in the world,
-
and we have created
-
the largest open data set of radiation measurements.
-
And the interesting thing here
-
is how did — (Applause) — Thank you.
-
How did a bunch of amateurs
-
who really didn't know what we were doing
-
somehow come together
-
and do what NGOs and the government
-
were completely incapable of doing?
-
And I would suggest that this has something to do
-
with the Internet. It's not a fluke.
-
It wasn't luck, and it wasn't because it was us.
-
It helped that it was an event
-
that pulled everybody together,
-
but it was a new way of doing things
-
that was enabled by the Internet
-
and a lot of the other things that were going on,
-
and I want to talk a little bit about
-
what those new principles are.
-
So remember before the Internet? (Laughter)
-
I call this B.I. Okay?
-
Okay, so in B.I., life was simple.
-
Things were Euclidian, Newtonian,
-
somewhat predictable.
-
People actually tried to predict the future,
-
even the economists.
-
And then the Internet happened,
-
and the world became extremely complex,
-
extremely low-cost, extremely fast,
-
and those Newtonian laws
-
that we so dearly cherished
-
turned out to be just local ordinances,
-
and what we found was that in this
-
completely unpredictable world
-
that most of the people who were surviving
-
were working with sort of a different set of principles,
-
and I want to talk a little bit about that.
-
Before the Internet, if you remember,
-
when we tried to create services,
-
what you would do is you'd create
-
the hardware layer and the
network layer and the software
-
and it would cost millions of dollars
-
to do anything that was substantial.
-
So when it costs millions of dollars
to do something substantial,
-
what you would do is you'd get an MBA
-
who would write a plan
-
and get the money
-
from V.C.s, or big companies,
-
and then you'd hire the designers and the engineers,
-
and they'd build the thing.
-
This is the before-Internet, B.I. innovation model.
-
What happened after the Internet was
-
the cost of innovation went down so much
-
because the cost of collaboration,
the cost of distribution,
-
the cost of communication, and Moore's Law
-
made it so that the cost of trying a new thing
-
became nearly zero,
-
and so you would have Google, Facebook, Yahoo,
-
students that didn't have permission,
-
permission-less innovation,
-
didn't have permission, didn't have PowerPoints,
-
they just built the thing,
-
then they raised the money,
-
and then they sort of figured out a business plan
-
and maybe later they hired some MBAs.
-
So the Internet caused innovation,
-
at least in software and services,
-
to go from an MBA-driven innovation model
-
to a designer-engineer driven innovation model,
-
and it pushed innovation to the edges,
-
to the dorm rooms, to the start-ups,
-
away from the large institutions,
-
the stodgy old institutions that had the power
-
and the money and the authority.
-
And we all know this. We all know
this happened on the Internet.
-
It turns out it's happening in other things, too.
-
Let me give you some examples.
-
So at the Media Lab, we don't just do hardware.
-
We do all kinds of things.
-
We do biology, we do hardware,
-
and Nicholas Negroponte
famously said "Demo or Die,"
-
as opposed to "Publish or Perish,"
-
which was the traditional academic way of thinking.
-
And he often said, the demo only has to work once,
-
because the primary mode of us impacting the world
-
was through large companies
-
being inspired by us
-
and creating products like
the Kindle or Lego Mindstorms.
-
But today, with the ability
-
to deploy things into the real world at such low cost,
-
I'm changing the motto now,
-
and this is the official public statement.
-
I'm officially saying, "Deploy or Die."
-
You have to get the stuff into the real world
-
for it to really count,
-
and sometimes it will be large companies,
-
and Nicholas can talk about satellites.
-
(Applause)
-
Thank you.
-
But we should be getting out their ourselves
-
and not depending on large
institutions to do it for us.
-
So last year, we sent a bunch
of students to Shenzhen,
-
and they sat on the factory floors
-
with the innovators in Shenzhen, and it was amazing.
-
What was happening there
-
was you would have these manufacturing devices,
-
and they weren't making prototypes or PowerPoints.
-
They were fiddling with the manufacturing equipment
-
and innovating right on the
manufacturing equipment.
-
The factory was in the designer,
-
and the designer was literally in the factory.
-
And so what you would do is,
-
you'd go down to the stalls
-
and you would see these cell phones.
-
So instead of starting little websites
-
like the kids in Palo Alto do,
-
the kids in Shenzhen make new cell phones.
-
They make new cell phones like kids in Palo Alto
-
make websites,
-
and so there's like a rain forest
-
of innovation going on in the cell phone.
-
What they do is, they make a cell phone,
-
go down to the stall, they sell some,
-
they look at the other kids' stuff, go up,
-
make a couple thousand more, go down.
-
Doesn't this sound like a software thing?
-
It sounds like agile software development,
-
A/B testing and iteration,
-
and what we thought you could only do with software
-
kids in Shenzhen are doing this in hardware.
-
My next fellow, I hope, is going to be
-
one of these innovators from Shenzhen.
-
And so what you see is
-
that is pushing innovation to the edges.
-
We talk about 3D printers and stuff like that,
-
and that's great, but this is Lemour.
-
She is one of our favorite graduates,
-
and she is standing in front of a Samsung
-
Techwin Pick and Place Machine.
-
This thing can put 23,000 components per hour
-
onto an electronics board.
-
This is a factory in a box.
-
So what used to take a factory full of workers
-
working by hand
-
in this little box in New York,
-
she's able to have effectively—
-
She doesn't actually have to go to Shenzhen
-
to do this manufacturing.
-
She can buy this box and she can manufacture it.
-
So manufacturing, the cost of innovation,
-
the cost of prototyping, distribution,
manufacturing, hardware,
-
is getting so low
-
that innovation is being pushed to the edges
-
and students and start-ups are being able to build it.
-
This is a recent thing, but this will happen
-
and this will change
-
just like it did with software.
-
Sorona is a DuPont process
-
that uses a genetically engineered microbe
-
to turn corn sugar into polyester.
-
It's 30 percent more efficient
than the fossil fuel method,
-
and it's much better for the environment.
-
Genetic engineering and bioengineering
-
is creating a whole bunch
-
of great new opportunities
-
for chemistry, for computation, for memory.
-
We will probably be doing a lot,
obviously doing health things,
-
but we will probably be growing chairs
-
and buildings soon.
-
The problem is, Sorona costs
about 400 million dollars
-
and took seven years to build.
-
It kind of reminds you of the old mainframe days.
-
The thing is, the cost of innovation
-
in bioengineering is also going down.
-
This is desktop gene sequencer.
-
It used to cost millions and millions
of dollars to sequence genes.
-
Now you can do it on a desktop like this,
-
and kids can do this in dorm rooms.
-
This is Gen9 Gene Assembler,
-
and so right now when you try to print a gene,
-
what you do is somebody in a factory
-
with pipettes puts the thing together by hand,
-
you have one error per 100 base pairs,
-
and it takes a long time and costs a lot of money.
-
This new device
-
assembles genes on a chip,
-
and instead of one error per 100 base pairs,
-
it's one error per 10,000 base pairs.
-
In this lab, we will have the world's capacity
-
of gene printing within a year,
-
200 million base pairs a year.
-
This is kind of like when we went
-
from transistor radios wrapped by hand
-
to the Pentium.
-
This is going to become the
Pentium of bioengineering,
-
pushing bioengineering into the hands
-
of dorm rooms and startup companies.
-
So it's happening in software and in hardware
-
and bioengineering,
-
and so this is a fundamental new
way of thinking about innovation.
-
It's a bottom-up innovation, it's democratic,
-
it's chaotic, it's hard to control.
-
It's not bad, but it's very different,
-
and I think the traditional rules that we have
-
for institutions don't work anymore,
-
and most of us here
-
operate with a different set of principles.
-
One of my favorite principles is the power of pull,
-
which is the idea of pulling resources
-
from the network as you need them
-
rather than stocking them into the center
-
and controlling everything.
-
So in the case of the Safecast story,
-
I didn't know anything when
the earthquake happened,
-
but I was able to find Sean
-
who was the hacker space community organizer,
-
and Peter, the analog hardware hacker
-
who made our first Geiger counter,
-
and Dan, who built the Three Mile Island
-
monitoring system after the
Three Mile Island meltdown.
-
And these people I wouldn't have been able to find
-
beforehand and probably were better
-
that I found them just in time from the network.
-
I'm a three-time college dropout,
-
so learning over education
-
is very near and dear to my heart,
-
but to me, education is what people do to you
-
and learning is what you do to yourself.
-
(Applause)
-
And it feels like, and I'm biased,
-
it feels like they're trying to make you memorize
-
the whole Encyclopedia before
they let you go out and play,
-
and to me, I've got the Wikipedia on my cell phone,
-
and it feels like they assume
-
you're going to be on top of some mountain
-
all by yourself with a No. 2 pencil
-
trying to figure out what to do
-
when in fact you're always going to be connected,
-
you're always going to have friends,
-
and you can pull the Wikipedia
up whenever you need it,
-
and what you need to learn is how to learn.
-
In the case of Safecast, a bunch of amateurs
-
when we started three years ago,
-
I would argue that we probably as a group
-
know more than any other organization
-
about how to collect data and publish data
-
and do citizen science.
-
Compass over Maps.
-
So this one, the idea is that the cost of writing a plan
-
or mapping something is getting so expensive
-
and it's not very accurate or useful.
-
So in the Safecast story, we
knew we needed to collect data,
-
we knew we wanted to publish the data,
-
and instead of trying to come up with the exact plan,
-
we first said, oh, let's get Geiger counters.
-
Oh, they've run out.
-
Let's build them. There aren't enough sensors.
-
Okay, then we can make a mobile Geiger counter.
-
We can drive around. We can get volunteers.
-
We don't have enough money. Let's Kickstarter it.
-
We could not have planned this whole thing,
-
but by having a very strong compass,
-
we eventually got to where we were going,
-
and to me it's very similar to
agile software development,
-
but this idea of compasses is very important.
-
So I think the good news is
-
that even though the world is extremely complex,
-
what you need to do is very simple.
-
I think it's about stopping this notion
-
that you need to plan everything,
-
you need to stock everything,
-
and you need to be so prepared,
-
and focus on being connected,
-
always learning,
-
fully aware,
-
and super-present.
-
So I don't like the word "futurist."
-
I think we should be nowists,
-
like we are right now.
-
Thank you.
-
(Applause)