 Thank you, Dr. Bell, although I am a little concerned about the voices in your head. I, too, would like to take the opportunity to acknowledge the Ngunnawal people and acknowledge their elders past, present, and emerging, because we're very lucky that we can actually have this meeting on their land to talk about. Also, it's an important thing. So I could tell you a little bit about myself, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to let the talk, in that sense, be quite revealing. This is one of those rare opportunities that I get as a speaker, where I don't have a particular brief. The client did not necessarily have a destination. So I get to talk about whatever I like to talk about. And these sorts of talks are my favorite. They tend to be the ones that I sweat over the most. And it's because in these talks, I get to speak to my passion. Now, I had someone ask me recently, Mark, what's your passion? And I babbled on. And I mean babbled, because I made no sense. There was no linearity. I was just sort of rambling for 20 minutes. And it's because I was effectively avoiding answering the question. Because, in fact, the last thing that you want to do in most public situations is share the things that are closest to your heart, because you don't want to get rejected for them. And so you tend to keep those things close, even though, you know, someone's always going to say, your baby's ugly, whatever, you deal with that. But that's actually what we're going to do for the next hour or so. So we're going to ask, so what is it that is close to me? What am I passionate about? What have I been obsessed with for this entire lifetime that I've spent in technology? All of that time, if I take a look at the arc of my career, and I've been aware of this long enough that I can start to sort of aim the career, I have been working towards something. It was almost impossible to articulate what that thing was 35, 36 years ago. I didn't have language for it back then. The world barely had language for that thing back then. But that world of 35, 36 years ago had a unique tool and was on the threshold of a couple of other tools. So let me tell you a little story. Harvard Business School, 1979, fellows in there getting his MBA, and he's listening to a lecture by a college professor, and the college professor is using, and there was a chalkboard, and he was drawing out a set of tables on a chalkboard and putting formulas into these tables on the chalkboard. And as he was doing this in front of the classroom, he'd realized he'd made an error in one of the table, formulas in one of the tables on this chalkboard, and he went back and he corrected the formula, and then he had to correct all of the other cells that were connected to the formula that he made the error in. And the person watching this from the back of the room went, wait a minute, there's a better way to do this. That fellow was named Dan Bricklin, and he invented something called Visikelk, which was the first modern spreadsheet program. Now, there's a plaque on the classroom at Harvard now celebrating this moment. Here's the thing. The entire world that you and I live in has been completely shaped by the spreadsheet. It's entered our language in some interesting ways. We talk these days about running the numbers on something. You can't run the numbers on something unless you have something to run the numbers on. And the spreadsheet is the glue that holds the financial, the calculated aspects of civilization in our grasp. It makes calculations that were previously either too complicated or too error prone because they had too many steps possible. And so it's taken a whole sort of numerical simulation and reduced it to the point where it has now become a pervasive framework for civilization. And along the way, it created Apple. You would not know what Apple is today. You would not be using an iPhone today. You would not be using a Mac and Cosh today. If Visikelk didn't come out first for the Apple, all right? That was the quote-unquote killer app. It's the very first killer app. And so there's this one-to-one relationship between the spreadsheet as a thing, how people were using it, and the take-up of personal computing. That's how fundamental it is. But it's even more fundamental because if we truly do, and we do truly live in a time where we call things late capitalism, late capitalism has one identifying characteristic, which is that you know the price of everything. That is the one singular characteristic of late capitalism. Well, the way you calculate that price is with a spreadsheet. So you can't really have the world that we live in today where we know the price of everything and the value of a few things without an actual spreadsheet. You need to admit both the pervasive of the spreadsheet and the perversity of a world that has been formed by that spreadsheet because when all you have is spreadsheets, everything looks like numbers. But it wouldn't be possible to manage the civilization that we're in. By the way, how perfect is that image? It would not be possible to manage the civilization that we're in right now without that super tool. That's the first of the modern generation of super tools. But that's just barely prelude. So, 1982, I was lucky enough to be visiting a friend at MIT who had just finished this weird gathering that had gone on at MIT called Xanacon, which was a whole bunch of people working on Project Xanadu. Now, how many of you have heard of Project Xanadu? Okay, yeah, that's about what I was expecting. All right, let me explain a little bit about Project Xanadu. Project Xanadu was an effort to create a single, cohesive, linked knowledge base for the human race. If that sounds vaguely familiar to something you use today, there's a reason for that. Now, during that weekend, when I was visiting my friend, he said, oh, he was telling me about the project. He said, oh, this is really great book that you should go read about it called Literary Machines. Probably have this in the library here. That book changed my life. I was working in computing before this, but after I read this book, I understood what I was trying to do in computing, which was to create hypertext, to create systems to support hypertext. Why? Because these systems would enable the collective use of human knowledge. They would create a framework and a system that could support all of human knowledge. And this book went into extensive detail about how all of this would work in all sorts of different ways. And because I was a software engineer in 1982, I could do something about it. So I immediately started to work on designing hypertext systems. And they're all basically the brainchild that fell out in the upper left-hand corner. That's Ted Nelson, who's sort of the father of all of this. He wrote a book in the 70s called Computer Lib, Drain Machines, which will also be in the library, which is where he first talks about some of it, and then Literary Machines. And he founded this project, which was in some sense one of the first real open source projects to create Xanadu, the Xanadu system. And I was like, oh my god, this is going to be amazing. I've just got my first Macintosh in 84. I was like, I have to build a hypertext system for the Macintosh so that when Xanadu comes online, it will plug in and we'll have Xanadu on the Macintosh, and it'll all be great and everything. And so I wrote a front end for the Macintosh for Xanadu as a hypertext system. And Xanadu never shipped. And it never shipped because for the team, it was never good enough. It was never good enough to ship. There was always another feature they needed to add, something else they needed to do right. The perfect is the enemy of the good people and never forget that. So I shelved that project as a failed dream. I tried to do it, but the thing is, even if you get hypertext working on a computer, and remember a computer in 1986, 1987, you know how much storage it had? 20 megabytes. I have PDFs that are bigger than that. This slide deck is bigger than that. And so linking 20 megabytes of information is not interesting for hypertext to be interesting and has to live on in network. And of course we'll come to that eventually because they did solve that problem. I moved on. I was like, okay, that's a great dream. I can't fulfill this dream right now. A couple of years later, a fellow who was working for me handed me a copy of a magazine called Mando 2000. You probably have that in the library. And Issue 2 has an interview with a fellow named Jaren Lanier. Jaren Lanier is popularly known as the father of virtual reality. And in this interview, he gives a single line that again changed my life. And I can divide my life into before I heard this line and after I heard this line. He says VR, which is what he's talking about in the interview, VR is not the television of the future. It's the telephone of the future. So there's this idea that it's not just a medium for sending, but it's an idea of a medium for communication. And at that point I became completely obsessed with working on virtual reality and on virtual reality systems, the reason why I have a patent in early virtual reality, because I was obsessed not just with virtual reality, but I've also had this very strong ethic of making technology as accessible as possible to as many people as possible, whether that's hypertext or in this case virtual reality. In the early 90s, virtual reality systems cost a few million dollars. And I decided it would be a great idea if it could cost a few thousand dollars. There were a whole bunch of technical problems that had to be solved along the way. We were well on the way to solving those problems. And then another small company called Sega came along and said actually we're going to solve this problem and give this to kids everywhere at Christmas 1993, but we will license all of the technology you've already invented. And we all went away very, very happy until they actually manufactured a few hundred of these, sent these out for testing, and their lawyers came back and said all the kids are going to get sick. You're opening yourselves up to the biggest product lawsuit in history and the project was quietly shelved. And that was another one of my dreams because I could see this idea just for virtual reality of sort of just being in the virtual world. That wasn't why I cared about this. I was trying to carry through with this idea from Jared Linear that this is a communication medium, that this is a medium for interacting with other people, for sharing with other people, for learning with other people, for playing with other people. By the way, in 2019 this is still something people almost never do in virtual reality. Is it because it's hard or is it because people just haven't been focused on that? I don't know. That's always been my vision for it. But I had to shelve this vision for a while. Fortunately, part of the solution to my problem came along because there was this guy in Geneva who had solved the hypertext problem at scale by developing a network hypertext system that was built on the Internet, which is still a relatively new and shiny thing at this point in time. So we come to our next super tool, the World Wide Web. Now, this is the original paper describing the World Wide Web. It was 30 years old last month. His boss, Robert Kayo, a lovely fellow, writes at the top, vague, but interesting. That was the first assessment of the Web. The Web is so foundational. We no longer acknowledge it. But almost everything, almost everything that we experience that is not actual visceral in front of your face experience comes to us via the Web. There's really no more that you can say about it than that. It has simply become the background. And that background has had a couple of interesting consequences, the most notable of which is something that I'm going to call intelligence amplification. Now, I don't want you to assume that intelligence amplification means that everyone is getting smarter. Because we have ample proof that the Web is an ignorance amplifier, an equal portion to the fact that it's a smartness, or aggregate intelligence amplifier. Both aspects are always present. But you definitely have this aspect of amplification as being an essential part of it. But the capacity of the Web, the baseline capacity, is that it's given every single person who has access to it, which is roughly 4 billion people right now, but will come to that. It has given us all the capacity to operate on the best available information at any given moment in time that's available to any of the other 4 billion people who are also on the Web. And that is a huge deal. That is a big deal. That is why the Web has become the background. And it's a new thing. It's a new type of knowledge formation. It's a new type of collective activity. And of course, it's improbable, but it's also improbably summed up in that most improbable of things, which is Wikipedia. You know, Wikipedia, I can give you a billion reasons why Wikipedia should not exist. And yet it does. And it keeps on getting better and it keeps on getting more useful. And it's this idea that this high quality information can become the pervasive support to all of our activities in the world. Now it's always up to us at any moment whether we choose to avail ourselves of that information or which choices we're making on how we do that. That's a whole psychoanalytic question. That's got nothing to do with the raw capacity. So that's the second of our super tools. We have the spreadsheet. We have the Web. And then, well, the third super tool actually owes its existence to the second super tool. So 2007, in January, Steve Jobs is on stage debuting this thing called an iPhone. Hour long talk about the iPhone. He spends 90 seconds talking about mobile Safari. And you can go back and watch this. It's online because I've done this and I've timed out these 90 seconds talking about it, which tells you that even the person who was a single driving force behind the iPhone didn't understand what he was doing. He knew he was doing it, but he didn't understand what the conjunction of the Web and the smartphone would be, which is to create a new class of super tool. And that new class of super tool, which is the Web plus the complete ubiquity of a tool like the smartphone that detaches the Web from all space and all time and puts it everywhere, has become the post-modern equivalent of what the metal axehead did to civilizations, say, seven, eight thousand years ago. And that super tool goes from non-existence to universal ubiquity with four billion people now using it in 12 years, 12 years. And we all are sort of aware of this. And we're all sort of like, wow, that's really impressive now. That's not impressive. That's instantaneous. And the reason it's instantaneous is because of the nature of the tool that it's built on. Remember what I said about the Web. The Web creates this fabric for knowledge and for knowledge sharing. And when a new addition comes along that accelerates the capacity of that knowledge sharing, it flows through that network at the same time. The network wises up to it. The network adopts that new tool. And so we've got this across four billion adults in 12 years. And there's the raw number. So total number of active mobile internet users, four billion. And there's only four and a half billion total internet users. So that is telling us something about the role the smartphone is playing here. Okay. So the three super tools that have already existed are the spreadsheet, the Web, and the smartphone. And each of these are so fundamental to our lived experience now. It is difficult to imagine our world without them because they have changed us. They have changed us utterly. They have changed the way we think so much that it becomes impossible for us to think that we can think without them. No, of course we can. But it becomes difficult to imagine it. And so they've become the environment. They've become the background. In some sense, everything refers back to them. Okay. So that's the half of the story that's happened, that's already happened. That brings us to the present. It's the story of how the super tools that I've identified have changed us utterly and are still changing us. Because as the book says, we may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us. Now, there's this wonderful quote from Marshall McLuhan. First we shape our tools thereafter they shape us. Note that date, 1967. As near as we can tell, Marshall McLuhan never said this. He never said it in 1967. It's one of those things that he should have said, but apparently never did. And this is one of the beautiful things about the internet is that it does present us ignorance dressed as fact. Oh well. I'm going to give you a corollary to this which sets us up for where we're going now. First we shape our super tools. Thereafter our super tools shape us. And this is reflected in the design of the next generation of super tools. What we're inside of now, what our material culture more or less at a global level is inside of, is a feedback loop. And it's the peri super tool, the middle super tool feedback loop that's growing tighter and tighter and tighter. So if we want to understand what's going to happen over the next billion seconds, over the next 30 years, what I want to do is to introduce three super tools that are the reflections and responses to the three super tools that I've already indicated exist. And these super tools themselves are actually going to come together to function as a new background, as a new environment, just as the spreadsheet the web and the smartphone did. So let's walk through this looking glass to see what the reflection of these super tools are. Now it is theorized, Dr. Bell, by some anthropologists that all innovations are inherently conservative. Then in fact we innovate because we want to keep on doing what we're already doing, but the environment has changed and so we have to find some new way of doing this. It's actually in a very paradoxical way an act of self-preservation. And you can see this very clearly in the first of these new super tools. Now over the last 24 months we have become increasingly aware that our souls are being spirited away by our smartphones. And I mean this in the real, tangibly, right? Because our attention is being monopolized, our emotions are being manipulated, our wants and needs are being measured and shaped. We have a lot of evidence for this now. And it's put us in quite a bind because let's face it, we love our smartphones. We do. We do. We know it's bad for us. A smartphone is the new smoking. That's not my idea, but this is a new trope. And a super tool that's going to come along to save us from this. And it's a super tool that is simultaneously new and old. It actually goes all the way back to 1968, 50 years ago if you want to find out about the genesis of this super tool. Listen to episode 2 of 1968 with the World Begin which I did with Genevieve last year. It's called Augmented Reality and so this is the first augmented reality system. It's called the Sword of Damocles. It was created in 1968 by Ivan Sutherland when he was a professor at Harvard. Now, what is augmented reality? Augmented reality is being able to seamlessly blend a computer generated environment into the real world environment. So it's not just virtual reality where you have a completely synthetic environment. In fact, you have to have a complete, accurate mapping of the real world and then mix that seamlessly with the virtual world. And the degree of difficulty on that both in the sensing and the computation required is incredible. Because AR has to continuously scan and map the environment. Now, we can do it these days because how many of you unlock your phones with your faces? Well, that's that same technology. So the technology is actually kind of cheap now and so some of the enabling technologies for augmented reality are falling into place and where this is all going, if you take a look at that as the very first version in 1968, where this is all going in a few years, looks like something like a very clever pair of sunglasses with heaps of computing power and fantastic displays and the sensors they need to completely blend the real world with the synthetic world. And the paradox here is that this is going to be hailed as the device that freezes from the hegemony of the smartphone. Because we're no longer going to be looking down all the time because we will have wrapped the display around our heads. In other words, we free ourselves by making the entire world a screen. And this is what I'm saying about innovations being conservative and yet and yet. And let's not understate the nature of this super tool. This allows the effective rewriting of reality. Full stop. That's what augmented reality is. And that opens up a can of worms. That's not this talk. If you want to go Google last days of reality on the Internet you'll see that I have written about that extensively. So it's qualitatively different from any tool that's come before. Because it's consensus reality that's being rewritten. It's not virtual reality, which is your own personal reality that's being rewritten. And if you change consensus reality, at least the way people are experiencing it, then you change reality. Okay, now let's say we magiced up a set of those spectacles like the magic leap spectacles which already exist. You could buy them for a few thousand dollars and if you put them on, what do you see? Really? Right now? Today? Big fat nothing. If you're lucky, you might see a Pikachu. Because Pokemon Go is a version of augmented reality. It's just using your smartphone camera because we don't have the spectacles yet. But by and large, this world through these lenses, this mixture of the real world and the synthetic world, it's empty because the world lacks a quality that I've... I came up with this on the flight down. I'm happy because I was looking for the words. The world lacks digital depth. That's kind of happened by accident. But what's about to happen is not going to be accidental. I want you to consider, the web created this incredible demand for information in which we would be using to operate our lives to make the best possible decisions at any moment in time. And the smartphone then gave the ubiquity to that information. So we got the information and then we made that information ubiquitously available. Okay, so now we're getting the device that can make the digital depth of the world instantly available. And the first thing that will become very present to people is that there's nothing to look at. So the presence of these devices is going to make us very hungry for a spectacle which is not simply just answering your latest Facebook message or your Slack conversation. We will be looking out on the world and we will expect that world to be revealed in its full digital depth. We'll want to see it. And there are a lot of names for what that world means and recently wired right about it and called it mirror worlds. Again, I call it digital depth. Maybe you should think of it as a form of imminence, that it's data being manifest in the real world. Because each material thing actually has its data double. It's just that we can't actually see that data double. But to be material is equally to be data. Now I need to point this out with a very real world example that a lot of you will be familiar with because it may all sound highly theoretical. It is not. Let me show you the engine of a 2019 Mercedes. Only you can't really see the engine of a 2019 Mercedes because Mercedes designs it so that you kind of can't. It is a seamless surface. For those of you who are familiar with delusional ontology, it is a body without organs, right? It is seamless and smooth. And so you're presented with this surface. There's no visible connection to the mechanism here, which is in fact on this thing fantastically complex and probably knows how to cheat when it's plugged into a pollution meter. And even the parts that are seen are incompletely described because they're under the dominion of obscure control systems. And so it's a big lump. When you open up the bonnet to a modern automobile, when you look at your smartphone, it is a big lump. Pretty lump, well designed, schmick, but it's a lump. And yet we know that that's not true. We know that a mechanic can plug into the ODB port and to other ports that Mercedes provides and it reveals at least some of what's going on underneath that protective shell. And that in miniature describes the entire world that we live in in 2019. The world looks empty of data to us. It is anything but empty of data. Now, comprehensibility is another question. But prior to the existence of these augmented reality spectacles, we had no way for the world to reveal its data in situ, right? You couldn't look on something and see the data that was revealed. And after augmented reality, that will seem like the most natural and the most obvious use. So just as the smartphone has led to the spectacles, the web now leads to this new revelation of data, of data about the world, within the world, imminent and revealed in place. Okay, so here's a bit of a prediction and a bit of a hope on my part. Just as it was the project of the last billion seconds, that last 30 years to populate the dimensionless space of human connection. With all human knowledge, and we haven't got all of it yet, but we've got a nice portion of it. And that that became the entity that we call the web today. So it's going to be our project over the next billion seconds to populate real space with everything that's known about it, where it is. In other words, to bring digital depth to the world. And that's actually a bigger job than bringing the web to life. Because the web is big as it is. Well, you think of it as an entree and we're actually now getting into the mains. And some of this creation, some of this population of the world is going to be done automatically. Some of it's going to be done autonomously. Much of it will be done by us. And this is interesting because it means we will be speaking four things. And I know Dr. Bell finds that problematic. And rightfully so, because when you speak four things, you don't speak in their voice and you don't speak to their actual needs. Because you probably haven't even bothered to learn what they are. Nonetheless, this is going to happen. So our best approach as we're doing this is to at least be conscious of the biases that we're embedding when we're creating that digital depth about the world. And we have to be aware of how our biases determine what we choose to reveal and what we choose to hide. Okay. So as this happens, we'll encounter something that we'll see or rather than I saw in the early days of 1994. Now, I got onto the web sort of full-time in September of 1993. And that actually took a specific workstation with a specific piece of software because the web was not commonplace yet. In October, when I was having a consulting gig at Apple, I would come home. This is the last week in October in 1993. I would come home every night, boot up my modem, get online, and I would surf the web. And there was a master index of all the websites. And at the end of the week, I had surfed the entire web. Hand on heart. Because it was possible to do that in 1993. By around Jan... By the way, I kept on. I kept it up. By around late January 1994, more things were being added on a daily basis to the list of websites because there was a master list of websites that I had time to follow. And so what you saw was that there was a sort of gradual pulling away, that the web was auto-catalyzing. It was growing faster and faster. And it became too big for anyone to know about it. That's about to happen again. We're sitting at this threshold moment, not from the human web of data, but from digital depth, from this revelation of data about the world. And that digital depth will deepen and it will approach sort of Mariana trench-like depths. And so we're now entering this period of time, probably only going to be a few years total, but when we can see enough, and just seeing enough is going to give us a hunger to see more, which means it's going to be auto-catalytic. So that the more that's in there, the more people will want things to be in there and the more stuff that they're going to add and it will bring depth upon depth upon depth. And that ends with us seeing too much. Now there was a point in time in 1995 where you did not really need a search engine to use the web. You could use Yahoo, which had a category list, to sort of find what you were looking for. But there was this period of time when the web was big, but not too big. And then the web just became too big and the only way that you could really start to think about the web was in the free text search box first of all, to Vista, and then of Google. And that's where this ends up because eventually there is so much data in the world about the world that any view of the world is blinding. It is simply overwhelming. And so this is an interesting dilemma. And the interesting thing is with a dilemma, you can't solve a dilemma. You can only endure a dilemma. And there's a precedent for how you might solve or endure this dilemma. In 2012, Facebook was actually confronting exactly the same problem in the newsfeed in that so many people had joined Facebook that you would open up your newsfeed on a daily basis and there would just be too much stuff there. And people weren't able to digest the newsfeed because all their friends were doing whatever they were doing. And so Facebook made the decision to curate the newsfeed. And that's led to all of the problems Facebook's having today. That's another talk. But what Facebook did is they worked out a technique to dim that blinding light into an engaging glow. That's what they did. That's their fully prepared to do that again in augmented reality. I did not doctor this photo. This is Mark Zuckerberg promising that Facebook will be at the forefront of augmented reality because trust me, he wants to be able to filter your view of the world because he knows what he's going to do with it. It's another talk. But here we are. And this is going to be long before that next billion seconds have run out the clock. We have all of these spectacles and we have a world densely illuminated with data so that every time we put on the spectacles we're effectively blinded by what we've done to the world. And you cannot operate in blindness any more than you can operate in the darkness that we're in right now. And so remember what I said earlier. All innovations are inherently conservative and this is where we come to our third and final super tool. And it's going to be created by this demand to filter this overabundance of a light which was created by the existence of the AR spectacles which was created by the existence of the smartphone which was created by the existence of the web and you can sort of see how this whole thing breathes itself into being. And so we are going to need a super tool to manage the unthinkable density of digital depth. And which we're creating and which is creating itself. And way out here, way, way, way out here the boundaries between the tool and the user of the tool become less well-defined. And there is almost reflexively these days when you see that kind of class of problem you say, oh my God, we'll throw AI at it. Tell me I'm wrong. I know. But what even is the problem here? Is this an AI class problem? Should AI be telling us what we want to see? What we can see? What's important to see? Isn't that what Facebook got horribly wrong? Won't that simply become another form of blindness? And this of course is exactly part of the reason that 3AI exists, to ask these questions maybe to define some approaches which will yield some answers. And I'm not... Oh, yes there is. Because I'm not going to reject AI out of hand. And rather I'm going to say that it's necessary and insufficient. Because it's not a story of artificial intelligence. It's a story of human, it's a human story of artificial intelligence. I need to illustrate with an example that I have been using a lot lately. Some of you will be familiar with it. Some of the rest of you will not. So a couple years ago, Google decided that it was going to teach a computer to play the game of Go. 2500 years old, one of the basic singular qualities that a cultured gentleman in Chinese civilization had to be able to have 2,000 years ago was to play a good game of Go. And how did they do that? So basically what they did is they taught the computer the rules of Go, but they used machine learning when the computer played Go, it would analyze every move that it made to determine whether it was in a better position after it made that move or a worse position. And it would do the same thing with the opponent and then they gave it really crappy human beings to play. And the human beings plastered the floor with the computer because the computer didn't know what it was doing and the computer lost a lot, but it kept on learning from every single move and from every single mistake that it made, it learned and it learned and finally it got good enough to sort of be okay at maybe occasionally winning against really bad human players and then the folks at Google gave it better human players and at this point they just said, oh, we got something to go in here, it's at least okay. And here's the thing about Go, you can't brute force Go, you cannot think a person. Computer cannot think a person with chess because it could simply look ahead, X number of moves. You know how many possible moves there are on a Go board? 10 trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion. That's 10 with 60 zeros. There ain't no computer fast enough anywhere in this universe to do that. The only way you can learn how to play Go is by learning how to play Go. And so AlphaGo gets good enough to be able to start to beat reasonably okay players and then they start to give it really good players and then May 2017, two years ago, it's KG who's the best human player, the best the ninth Don Grandmaster of Go and all the AI experts are figuring that at best AlphaGo will win one of the five matches scheduled and that is KG at the moment he's lost the fifth match out of five. Now, is that the end of human beings playing Go because all of a sudden AlphaGo can do it better? And the answer is no. I'm going to give you two solutions to this problem. First off, if you are KG and you have just been obliterated by a computer program that everyone said was going to take about 20 years until it was going to be good enough to beat you, if you do that, do you just hang up your Go board and are you done? Or do you realize that you have just been handed an opponent that you can't beat which if you're the best human player you're in very short supply of? You need an opponent that's going to be really hard to beat. You're going to need it really well and so all of a sudden what happens is KG starts playing against AlphaGo and all of a sudden KG goes from the highest human ranked player he starts going up from there so he might be, no one is quite clear on this, the highest human Go player of all time because he's got an opponent that's actually really good that he can be learning from and playing against. So that's one kind of adversarial partnership between a human and a computer but there's another kind that's even more interesting. So human player over here, AlphaGo over here AlphaGo always going to wipe the deck with a person AlphaGo versus AlphaGo, it's going to be one or the other it's probably going to be 50-50 all things be equal because the computer is playing itself. Person plus AlphaGo versus AlphaGo you think well it's human really doesn't factor into that so it's always just going to be 50-50 and you would be completely wrong. Human plus AlphaGo wipes deck with AlphaGo Why? Because the way a human plays Go and the way AlphaGo plays Go are complementary and each see things in the strategy that the other is unable to detect and so what they found is that the partnership of the AlphaGo super tool with a person wipes the deck with the super tool by itself and this has led to now what we call pair Go where you have Go Grandmasters paired with AlphaGo playing other Grandmasters paired with AlphaGo and these Go matches are unlike any other Go games that have ever been played and if you think this is a new thing we haven't seen this before consider the way we work with every one of the existing super tools, spreadsheets change the way we think so does the web, so does the smartphone so will AR spectacles, so will adding digital depth to the world, so will this new super tool and so in completing our reversals because we've reversed the smartphone into AR we've reversed the web into digital depth we're now reversing the spreadsheet into a new tool that becomes utterly indispensable to managing our view of the world because this tool is going to take all of that data that incredible density of data, that blinding light and it's going to move it into new and comprehensible contexts that are going to be managed both by the artificial intelligence which is going to be handling the focus and the complexity and by the human intelligence which is going to be offering context and direction and both of those are needed each of them complements the other and neither works really well without the other and this new environment becomes the dominant environment and that's going to happen again long before the next billion seconds have passed and it's hard to describe this super tool except as an evolving relationship it's a partnership between human intelligence and machine intelligence each amplifies the capacity and the value of the other that's exactly the model that's presented in pair play go and we can look for metaphors to talk about this world because we don't really have them yet but if you look back 20 years to the matrix how does Neo see the world? it's that symbolically because Neo sees the world as data he's the one so he can do it and of course McLuhan famously said that artists are the early warning systems of the culture and so of course the Wachowsky saw this first and we'll see this in this partnership we'll see as we've never seen before but to what point? these tools confer enormous power far greater power than anything we've ever known and we can blind ourselves with that power I mean we've blinded ourselves with spreadsheets we've blinded ourselves with the web we've blinded ourselves with smartphones we can also use these tools to build levers to move the world and this is for me where it all becomes very personal so from the time I was young, a teenager I was a huge fan of the work of Buckminster Fuller now he's kind of a strange bird he dedicated himself very early in his career to working on projects that would bring success to all of humanity and Fuller characterized this as an engineering and design problem one that could be solved with what he called comprehensive anticipatory design science and his most famous invention, the geodesic dome it points to what he meant which is designing the greatest strength using the minimal amount of materials and he loved these material dimensions he turned out a whole series of them but he had a larger vision that was at play which is that he wanted us to understand and manage the earth as a whole system the phrase spaceship earth is a bucky Fuller phrase and he wanted to be able to do that so that we could do our best to maximize human benefit while minimizing the impacts of those benefits and it sounds super easy just wave your wand, that's all going to happen but of course the world is complex and he spent most of his career doing what he could to develop ever more sophisticated and complete models of the earth he called it the world game and he even proposed, and I love this idea he proposed an early version of what we might think of today as Google Earth it's a half kilometer wide globe which correctly portrays the earth's surface down to the resolution where you could see your own home that was the point of the scale everyone could see their own home on this whole planet and the planet could be apprehended as a single thing and he wanted it strung out on the east river right next to the United Nations building because he knew that that change in scale would change our understanding Fuller never had the kinds of tools that he needed for the complexity of the world but he knew that those tools would inevitably come and interestingly before he died he predicted on the timeline of innovation he knew that the next tool would come along in 1989 that brings me to the second of my heroes so back at the end of World War II bright young engineer named Douglas Engelbart came to understand that the world was growing more complex and that it was growing more complex at an accelerating rate and that complexity would soon transcend human capacity to manage that complexity and that would eventually mean collapse because the world would simply outrun our ability to manage it and Engelbart studied that problem methodically and in 1962 he published a monograph called Augmenting Human Intellect they will have that here it is also online it is among the most influential contributions to the field of computing because it points to the coming symbiosis between human and artificial intelligence and on December 9th 1968 in what became known as the mother of all demos which you'll hear about at length in our series 1968 when the world changed Engelbart showed the world what kind of super tools we were going to need to manage a complex world and there's a key part of this demo that's almost an afterthought it's just a tick on a list of features and he shows the concept of a link and he takes this mouse and he clicks on a word and it goes to another document now mind you he had invented the mouse as well so being able to click on a word yes that's a hyperlink that's hypertext that complex weaving fabric of human thought that he knew we would need to be able to manage all of our complexity and it took 20 years from 1968 to 1989 for that fundamental insight to actually reach scale in the world wide web 1989 remember Fuller called it he said the next super tool is going to come along in 1989 and Bucky never lived to see it but Tim Berners-Lee via Engelbart he delivered the super tool to manage the incredible richness and complexity of the world and although they approached this problem from very different domains Bucky and Doug were working toward the same goal they were working toward a sustainable human civilization they both wanted to save the world now in truth the world doesn't need saving we're the ones who need saving we can build the super tools to support a sustainable human civilization and that at least for myself that seems like a thing worth doing because we're going to need those super tools to help us see the world I mean the genius of Bucky's giant globe and that's basically it laid out is that it creates this apprehensible scale relationship between the human being on the planet that's something that we don't natively possess it gives us a new sense because we're too small and the planet is too big and so that makes it very difficult for us to intuit our consequential relationships in the world we're blind to them and this is where our super tools will be able to give us sight to the tantalizing possibility of making these relationships comprehensible and not solely in ourselves but in partnership with these artificial intelligences each of us seeing and co-creating the whole view seeing and acting at global scale now sounds a little megalomaniacal if you put it that way and it would be if, well, if I was the only one with a super tool or Dr. Bell was the only one with a super tool but that's not how these super tools work these super tools will be living everywhere they will be living with everyone and we need them so that we can see what is happening so that we can know what needs to be done and so that we have the capacity to do it and so if we want to succeed as a species on this planet we need to build the super tools that can help us succeed that's what Bucky wanted we need to build the super tools that can help us understand that's what Doug wanted and that at least seems like a decent beginning and I'd like to add my own verb to that because we need a generation of tools that can help us see we're flying blind and we cannot do that anymore we are too bright and too capable and too powerful to operate blindly we need to see which means we're going to need to make the tools of sight now I'm not saying I'm equal to either of those giants but I am capable enough to do my little bit here to help that vision into reality and to me that seems like something worth doing and it's kept me moving across a career that's been more than 35 years which is why this talk is as personal as it is because this is it and I'm at the point in my own career where I can actually step forward and I can actually own this vision this is something worth doing and I can do what I can to keep the super tool project moving forward into a more human world that's what I'm passionate about thank you