 Any questions? Hi. I'll use the mic or just chat. Yeah, I'll use the mic. I will put this here. Okay. So, not quite a question. Do you have a question? Maybe I'll answer it later. No. But do you want one then? Or do you think about this? So three things. One. The big difference is that the protests don't really do anything. But I grew up in Australia in a very corrupt government in the 80s and we protested. We marched. We got beaten by police. We got arrested. And the government changed. And I think that was very much a part of it. So it's true that the protests have come at some personal cost but I don't think that they should necessarily be ruled out. It's possible that I'm not advocating anyone to do this in Singapore. Different circumstances are of course different for different things and I wouldn't do it in a country that isn't my own. I guess you have your own places where you think you should fight. But I think protests are not necessarily a dead end. It was one comment. The second was on a sort of slightly depressing tone of I guess, sorry I can't pronounce your name properly, the last speaker who said that things are getting much worse. I think things are far from perfect. But again in my lifetime in Australia black people went from being non-citizens to citizens. Women got the vote in the last 100 years. I think that now we're fighting about freedom to access intellectual property is a happy thing. It's better than fighting for the right for women to vote for example. We've actually made some progress. And the final thing was one of the ways we could change, so I'm an academic, I write papers and in our subfield of computational linguistics we opened up all our journals. So we basically took control from the publishers and we said we will release it partly it's because we don't want to read our journals anyway. I wrote one of your EBMT papers recently. I can't remember what it's about. It was there for you to read because we made this fight. We said it makes sense to release things and we will release things. So without changing the legislation you can also make I think useful changes. Although changing legislation would also be a fantastic thing. Let's respond briefly. I agree that the relationship that things have gotten better in some ways but and I don't know the situation in Singapore although, excuse me for pronouncing the name incorrectly I did see a case of ordinary linguistics recently that indicates that maybe there are still some complexities going on. With that said if I look at America and I look at Europe which I know much better in the U.S. we've gone from a political system that was nearly corrupt in a long ways 150 years ago to a political system now we have no more illegal private politicians in America. It's wonderful. We've legalized all of the private and there are structural issues which run incredibly deep in the state captured here. The previous figure to me mentioned looking at the women's suffrage movements as an example for how that fight happened. You know what the women's suffrage movement did? They got out in the streets and they fought and I don't mean they fought as in they went to march for placards. They did that too. I mean they broke windows. They got arrested. They got murdered by the police in numbers and that was what it took. It took an actual fight. It took inconveniencing those in power to a degree that not changing became impossible. That is what it takes. Now I don't necessarily think that street protest is the best option. I do not certainly do not know enough about the Singaporean context and again any comment on what makes sense there I also don't think that this notion that we can simply for example petition the rich to share their money with other people and that if we send them a really nice letter, we send them a nice enough letter, they'll just kind of hand over their money to the court. Now this is not how history works. I believe that as we are in a time of systemic change and as we are dealing with many systems that have different ways of leverage, there are places where we can provoke that leverage but we will need to do that. Okay. What I was trying to communicate there was I was trying to be like a gaslight and like bite you all because I don't understand how these mechanisms work and as successful as like fighting my beef greatly and as successful as protesting my beef I don't really get something I don't really feel comfortable about something unless I get the system I get the system involved and I can predict it to an extent at which if I make some fixed change I can have an outcome which I can anticipate in events and okay so the thing when you say okay so you fight a person and you inconvenience them to an extent and that's my condition I don't really understand how that works at a mechanical level and it seems in particular incompatible with full knowledge of the military capacity of the state and government and maybe someone can explain that to me but because I'm really confused. If we look at whatever so let's see what he did very successful and what he did very successfully was the killing of soba and it's not easy to kill Bill that's going to be passed into law there's so much momentum there's so much money going to it that so much political will to get something passed into law it's really hard to kill but he did it and if we watch and take what is there as on face value he didn't do it by street protest per se he was doing it through a very scientific method of getting the voters to speak to their representatives and also the big money corporations to show their dissatisfaction to the political representatives at this point it gets boring because it's politics but there was a systemic way in which he did it and so understanding the law making process at least I can talk about that although it's not politics if anybody here is a political science person please raise your hand and save us he basically was able to have a political system and able to manipulate how the result came out it's really wonderful if he had been alive to be able to do that and so many other laws that could have been changed in a very similar way I think the great thing is that they've done it, they've opened and all of us saw how it was done and now we have to find a way how we can do that in Singapore because we know that if we go outside the presidential palace Istana and we carry black guards basically we get arrested that has already been shown and then after you get arrested he really does much but what he did seem to be very effective so if there's something that we can learn from that and I'm not a person who can advise on that so I can't help you but if there's anyone who understands politics and technology as well we need there's no way of predicting outcomes we have to go into this knowing that we have no idea exactly what the outcomes of our actions will be and that's fine we have to learn to live with structural uncertainty and actually one of the reasons that I think that this is good that there is uncertainty that's good that we don't necessarily know exactly how things are going to come out is that we it turns out are much better at living with uncertainty individual humans and networks of humans are much better at living with uncertainty than institutions and markets are than the structures that we see oppressing us in the world and that is an advantage that we can can very much use to our left there's a question over there Cedric has a thing Cedric turn on the mic how is it you're going to have to project your voice to me Cedric with no knowledge I think it's important to work on this and I'm thinking about but the big thing for me can you come here the big thing for me I suspect that most of us here are technologists am I right and we've spent our time talking about the technology that Eric's painting what his life story was so Eric for me was a huge inspiration I think for Vikram as well both of us shared very similar views on him and we followed him much like you know fans of the wrong fans or followers of users but what I want to remind everyone of at least I mean we have lots of ego discussions but Eric was a beacon for a lot of people because he showed that people it's time sorry Eric was a beacon of hope for many people because he showed that with the right amount of leverage and with the will to believe that you can change things you can actually change things now I know as technologists we often like live in our little startup of a privilege where we can work everywhere in the world and we think that we just build the solutions to the problems and someone somewhere will apply those solutions to so forth problems but Eric was very inspirational for me because he showed that it's not enough to just build solutions you have to go on and actually look for ways to hide that to the world I think I would like if you remember that a lot of his life story was just the will to believe that you can change things and that you have a responsibility to change things instead of just being a technologist and like living in your little privilege bubble thinking that you would change the world by sitting down and writing code because some problems in the world are not like I mean you can't solve them with code or with protocol and that's what I have to say Okay so as an externally declared Aaron's work Down Boy I should mention one of the thoughts that he had about affecting change in your job in the year or so before we lost him Aaron Swartz was active on a community web blog called Less Wrong and one of the things he wrote about and one of the things he really cared about there was optimal philanthropy and the goal there is saying I have a shit ton of cash or maybe I did but then I was not lost right and I wanted to give this away in a way that does the most good and there's this organization that says okay so I'm going to investigate these thousands of charities and I'm going to take maybe two that do the most good that most effectively in the utilitarian sense do well in human lives and I'm going to count these out and in the case in which you're in the middle of the world and you like working in technology directly rather than leveraging that in other areas and you have people who are using your stuff there's an opportunity for you to affect positive change without really changing your lifestyle I think that's kind of cool If we look at something like Skype has had an amazing impact on the world and it has meant that we now see international remittances people sending money back to their families at home I've gone from being well under half of what International 4A was to now being something like eight times and you can trace that directly along the line of communications across nations getting cheap and so this is a really interesting example of where having a structural shift that's purely technology driven has completely has had massive political implications so I don't think it's true like, you know, we're going to start up, right Colwood? Do that, absolutely do that I'm not saying that you have to go be a protestor in the street because that is not necessarily the best way to change systems that affect us but understand the world that you want to live in a dream of what that world looks like and then figure out how to go build that world don't just build the things that are easy that are getting to make you money that are going to let you IPO build things that actually actively build the world you want to see whatever they are I have a question for just the end of the session here thank you very much for your very rousing for talking at the end Ella and also for the big group but eventually we will have a very homophobic homophobic debate and good questions from the floor I would like to say just one thing and that is you really I think it's echoed here as well you can't change anything by sitting below everything has to be done but I don't know and that's why I thought that even though I don't want to defend myself it would be great to talk and see what came there are a lot of things that and for me to talk about for example no one talks about so in order to discuss what matters connect people you can't see a way to start just by talking that's actually how this team came to power like all of us have more than 24 hours we got nothing together because we had to shift the space we actually organized this in the under 24 hours which was quite like a short repeat and then thank you very much for also talking about the session there it is if you let me speak please come up talk to them while the rest of us come