 Thank you so much excellencies huge pleasure for me to be here a great pleasure for me to follow my dear friend Jeff Sacks whom I agree with on on almost all things as I do on what he just said. Let me actually expand on what he was talking about and talk about how it feels it seems to me that broadband has the potential to really solve two very dramatic problems that that are going to confront the the world of education. The first is simply of scale of being able to provide enough education to enough people around the world. If you look at the number of people who are moving into the age cohort that requires some kind of post high school training of some kind the numbers are just staggering and with the one exception of China there is no country that has really even remotely begun to address what it would take in terms of the expansion of physical capacity to educate these people and even China is struggling with despite the fact that it is essentially starting a university a week really probably closer to a university a month. The problem of human capital how do you train those many teachers to create that kind of access. The only solution to it it seems to me is to really fully embrace the the online revolution and recognize how it is going to be able to provide that kind of education. So I gave the example in my talk yesterday of Bob Schiller the famous economist just like Jeff Sachs who told me that last year in his it was the first year he offered an online course and in that course the number of people who took the course took it completed it did all that test received a diploma was larger than the number of people he has ever taught in 32 years of teaching at Yale and that is by the way a tough course right that there are a number of courses that I think the numbers would be even higher for that the quality level can be seen in this the founder of Coursera Andrew Ng is a computer science professor at Stanford he pointed out that last year I think something like 40,000 people took his course all over the world the top 500 spots not one of them was held by a Stanford undergraduate who was physically in his course in other words all the top 500 students were somewhere out there online not at Stanford and so you see in that the capacity for the expansion the capacity to tap and cultivate human talent and intelligence all over the world but there is another enormous advantage to this historically we have always thought of scale and quality as being inversely correlated in education that is the best education was private one-on-one tutorial that you know the rich provided to their children the next best thing would be schools where you have one to one teacher and maybe eight students and you know big public state-funded schools would have maybe one one teacher and 50 60 students maybe a class with 300 students and that was seen as worse and worse and worse what technology is doing is it is possible it is making it possible to imagine that scale and quality can now be positively correlated rather than inversely correlated why because the data that you receive from the fact that tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of people are taking these courses will allow you to reshape the courses in a way that actually customizes the course for each individual taking the course so imagine I'm taking a mathematics course I take my first quiz I get the fourth question wrong because 1 million people have taken the same course online you now you know that if the person got the fourth question wrong it means they didn't understand lecture 2 part 3 and the computer sends you back and says can you watch this module again and now take this question this quiz again and so on and so what you end up with the course I am taking is completely different from the course my neighbor is taking and it's completely different from the one you're taking you end up with a highly customized experience far more customized and personalized than it would be if you were simply sitting in a large class even at Stanford or at Harvard listening to do one one professor and so what you are now providing is a better more customized higher quality education than you could receive even at the best Ivy League University that is the promise of big data and that is the promise of big data when applied to this kind of educational system I think you can imagine how this you know the opportunities here this online courses and MOOCs I think got ahead of themselves a little people began to imagine that they were going to transform the world and then people started noticing that a very small number of the people who who started the courses completed which is very misleading because this is an product on the internet open and free to anyone requiring of nothing so for example a course that Jeff sacks teaches at Columbia can only be taken in the physical capacity by people who have already been scorned through an enormous screening hurdle which is called the Columbia application process and it is only those people who can even attend the lecture and by the way even once they do there is a large drop-off from the first lecture to say the people taking the course probably not in the case of Jeff sacks because he's a very good lecturer but for many people there is a so-called shopping period and you know you end up with 40% of the people here you have the world's shopping period as it were of complete people who were coming in from God knows where with no qualifications if you end up with a 5% completion rate which is what they're finding that is still tremendous and given that you're starting with numbers sometimes in the hundreds of thousands this is still an enormous expansion but it now gets me to my second point which is the really innovative element of online education I think is going to be in the way in which it completely unbundles and re-orients the way we think about education by which I mean we tend to think of education as something that is provided by an educational institution to a group of people who have been accredited and you know that is how it goes but let's look at what is happening in the real world online what is increasingly happening is that people are providing their skills their talents as teachers and uploading them as it were on to the internet and people are watching listening learning to those skills I'm thinking of YouTube videos I'm thinking of all kinds of websites like how stuff works I'm thinking of a new education company that actually acts as a eBay that provides a platform a software platform between instructors and students and has now 20 million students I believe but when I say instructors it's important to understand what I mean I mean anyone who thinks he or she is an instructor in any subject he or she thinks they have a talent in and so you can imagine a lot of them are computer coding and things like that a lot of them are actually wellness and health related a lot of them are how to appreciate music how to read a poem all these things are being uploaded on to the internet and people are learning what I think this addresses as a second great gap that education faces which is the lifelong learning challenge we are moving into a world in which you can train somebody for a job but is that job gonna be around five years from now is that company going to be around is that industry going to be around we don't know I give you an example there are currently jobs very good jobs that people have for online marketing on Twitter there this is actually a job that you can you can train for will it exist five years from now I don't know will Twitter exist five years from or will that job be actually online marketing on Snapchat right so this kind of bottom-up distributed education can respond much more quickly to the challenges and demands of the market than a Harvard Yale or Princeton or Columbia can and it is it's not education in the sense of learning ancient Greek and Latin but it does feel a very important need that people are going to have to upgrade their skills to upgrade their knowledge and by the way to continue a process of lifelong learning and enrichment that's where the poems and and music come in but this I think is something we've only just begin to begin to scratch the surface off and I think it has also that the possibility of tapping human talent at a completely different way than people have done there's a wonderful book called abundance by a writer Peter Diamandopoulos and he talks about this the promise of crowdsourcing and online education in this way there was for a long time people have tried to figure out who are good at a very technical task of folding proteins folding protein molecules a very difficult thing mostly done by graduate students at biochemistry labs they decided why don't we open it up give people some instructions and what did you need to do and just see there are the good protein folders out there in the world and they had the contest and it turned out that the world's best protein folder was a grade school teacher in England who did this at nights for fun and she literally was better than any graduate student in biochemistry and any you know of the storied universities in the world what that talk I think what that touches on is the extraordinary opportunity we have here to tap into human talent everybody is an expert at one thing probably and if that one thing is of some value and can be communicated and can be articulated it can be taught and people can learn from it and you know what a what a what a fascinating idea for the world that we all have the capacity to teach something we all have the capacity to learn from someone and that that can produce you know all kinds of things by the way this one company that does it that does this platform I was describing I can't remember the name of it the CEOs is here what he was telling me that the top 10 teachers instructors again self appointed self now personally make collectively 30 million dollars a year so when you think about the job potential the economic activity that you can generate by being able to produce these kind of matchups it feels to me that is the kind of promise that online has my final point to you is to look at where it could make a huge impact and how it will make a difference I was in India two weeks ago and I think what is happening in India is one of the great revolutions that is taking place in the world right now India has very bad broadband access for those of you who've been you know why India has very bad infrastructure of every kind broadband is no different anything that requires you know permissions and digging holes and you know dealing with all the the difficulties that that involves in a messy developing democracy India tends to do badly at and so it has bad broadband infrastructure I would guess honestly India has maybe 150 million people who have access to broadband internet big cities upper middle-class people what is happening in India is a 4g rollout that is the largest 4g rollout in the world you have four big companies led by reliance the largest company in India doing it on a massive scale reliance alone is building a hundred and fifty thousand cell phone towers by 2018 they've already built 90,000 Parthi will do another will probably match it the net result is 800 million people will have 4g access in India by 2018 1.1 or 1.2 billion by by 2020 and the numbers right now are pretty they're online they're they're on track to achieve this the 4g is better than 4g in the United States because they leapfrog is very good high quality video and so all of a sudden you're going to have a population twice the size of Europe that has access to high quality internet and I don't think we really know what the impact of that will be it's a different you know country than obviously it's a much poorer society as a country than even China but it is also a country very plugged into the world because of language you know about 300 million Indians have some working knowledge of English it has asked it hasn't it's a much more open system you know and that's why Google and Facebook and Amazon will be there is no great firewall that the Indian government maintains that that blocks out foreign sites foreign servers and so all of that suggests that you're going to have something very very interesting happen in India over the next five to ten years and I think it would be fascinating to see whether these you know whether this promise ends up being being seen most fully in one of the poorest countries in the world thank you thank you for sharing was interesting perspectives with the members of the broadband Commission's maybe just two comments I mean your perspective about scale and quality and the promise of technology to actually reverse the relationship between scale and quality and to provide the personalized learning on a large scale which is indeed you know quite a new I would say world for education also what you said about you know the possibility to actually identify value and share human talent which I think is a very also humanistic perspective which I think is is is very much also in line with the the ideas and that the broadband Commission is is promoting also through access to to broadband so I think we have a few maybe ten minutes for some some questions so I will invite commissioners to take the floor for some further exchange with with or invite Farid Zakaria. Professor Saak, I see your please on I just want to say I want to say bravo and of course the Farid captured it perfectly it also suggests that India may be the greatest transformation ground because the Indian government will see that with this 4G rollout it also has the opportunity to finish up the work that it started with the art horror and with the other systems for the massive scaled complete transformation and of course it's got the the talent inside to do it so we may be witnessing the most dramatic transformation of a society to online that is imaginable. Thank you we have much granades. Yes thank you very impressive speech my questions is my question is really around vocational training and digital inclusion when we talk about people becoming or going online and creating good stuff you know in the as a great example I'm pretty sure that not everyone is as fluent as we think they are on handling a mobile phone or being part of this new digital society I'm pretty sure that several people several hundreds of million of people are sort of less apt in being a software developer or working you know with their intellect however with hands they would possibly be more interested in working with some sort of manual labor so the question is do you think that vocational training will also have a future when it comes to to online training and if so how would that look it's a very good question because in the world of bits and bytes you can you can teach anything online in a world that interacts with atoms as well you need some physical instruction I think what's going to happen is there will be hybrid models you are beginning to see that happen already where people do some of the learning online and then they they do some part of it in in in the real world you know there are places where you can go where you have you have kind of achieved a certain capacity or competence you've watched the videos as it were you know let's say it's plumbing and then you you actually get a chance to to complete the process in the physical world I but I think that the potential probably is more limited there let's be honest you know but one thing I worry about is that there are going to be fewer of those jobs in the future than we think I'll tell you going to India one of the things I was struck by I think I mentioned this yesterday I was talking I'll say it here because it's a prior it's a it's a private conversation I was talking to Mukesh Ambani the head of reliance India's largest company and he was talking about his worries about manufacturing you know everyone has this hope that manufacturing is going to be the next the next path for development and he said I look at all the people I know building factories in India and in every case they're building factories that have ten times the output a hundred times the output of the original factory with 10% of the labor and the reason is you cannot achieve global specifications and quality without massive order may automation and robotics so we need to start thinking about I mean it may be that China will prove to be the last country to have industrialized in that classic mech and model model that we know which is urbanization the peasants move to the cities the cities have big factories they work at these big factories generate a lot of pollution and then we've generated enough wealth to clean up the pollution maybe we're going to need a a different model which is more disaggregated where people don't leave the villages they don't they there there are jobs in some way created there and that those jobs are partly post-industrial not entirely but part you know there is there is some greater component there that is that has a post-industrial quality to it but you know the market is very good at being able to produce these kind of hybrid models that we were talking about I just think that we're probably in for a more complicated phase of development than people realize I give you one statistic that you can see India and China and India and Africa have both been growing pretty well for the last decade manufacturing as a percentage of GDP in both India and Africa has actually declined over the last ten years so even though 7 plus percent growth manufacturing as a percentage of GDP has declined it's never happened before in the developing economy Professor Marenzi for the last question thank you first of all I'm excited and my wife and I are a very great fan of yours so when she knows that I spoke to you she'll be very happy so the the the issue of earlier today we discussed the issue of ICT in in the achievement or implementing the sustainable development goals you just spoke about the issue of education and the expanded it so can you say few words about sustainable development and ICT I don't think I have I have more to add on something like that than somebody like Jeff Sachs it it seems to me that you know for this is one of those cases where the world needs to to credit itself for having achieved a fair amount in the last 10 or 15 years I think that if when people if you look back to those goals the millennium goal goals when they were set out very few people thought they would be achieved you know just the sustainable development aspect adds a new difficult and demanding challenge which is how do you how do you do it in a way that is truly sustainable it seems to me we need a technological miracle but I believe that there are technological miracles underway there is simply no way you are going to achieve true sustainable growth without energy that has essentially zero carbon emissions and is cheaper than coal if it's not if it doesn't have zero carbon emissions it doesn't help with climate on the climate change front and if it isn't cheaper than coal India and China will not do it but the good news is I think you are getting several possibilities on that front you have had a dramatic transformation of solar you having a smaller but significant change in wind you are seeing battery technology improve really for the first time in it a quite at a quantum level none of it has quite come together yet in it to achieve the goal I was suggesting which is zero emissions and and cheaper than coal but that has got to be the goal and I believe I think that the big missing piece here and again I deferred to Jeff who knows a lot more about this than I do but the big missing piece here is if we think this is really important and we believe that technology is going to be the solution I don't think we are investing nearly as much in the technology in the research and even in the initial implementation if you look at the kind of investment that the United States government made in the computer business in the 1950s and early 60s it dwarfs in scale what is being done now with clean energy 65% of all silicon chips produced in the 1950s were bought by the US Air Force basically the computer the entire computer industry was funded by the Defense Department and then later NASA that was done for Cold War reasons but I think we need some similar energy behind the idea of clean energy and a sense of the magnitude of the issues and I cannot recall a time when massive expenditures of in research and technology and early implementation have gone awry we have this myth that it's all you know the government shouldn't pick winners and losers that it all goes badly give you one simple example the government made an investment in Solindra this solar company which went bad and everybody heard about it it was about five hundred million dollars as I recall the the amount of the fewest government at the same time made an equivalent investment same thing in Tesla Elon Musk's car company that has you know just if you look at the market value of that it's gone up 25 30 times of course the peculiar way we fund these things when they go badly the taxpayer pays and when it goes well mr. Musk becomes a billionaire so we we we socialize the loss but we privatize the gain but doesn't change the fundamental fact which is that the same government made the same you know that that picked a loser in Solindra picked a winner in Tesla and of course any venture capitalist would tell you you have nine failures and you have one success and you're a successful company so I think we need that is the fundamental gap I see we need a much much larger investment with a goal set out clearly with resources to achieve it and then things happen you know yeah I know people sometimes say you can't throw money at a problem well in research and technology actually you throw enough money at problems and you know magic does happen