 Hello, and welcome today to this one-on-one session, An Insight and Idea with Joey Ito, the director of the MIT Media Lab. Welcome. Welcome. Thank you. I'm Rana Faroohar. I'm the assistant managing editor for Economics and Business at Time Magazine. I'm very pleased to welcome you all here today. We're going to have a half an hour discussion, which is going to be broadcast live and streamed as well on the Davos website. So, Joey, you are so many things. It's hard to know where to start in your bio. You are an entrepreneur. You are a tech educator. You're a VC. You're the director of the Media Lab. But among the many things that you are, you're also a college dropout. And I would love to start with that, because I think that that is an incredible thing in your background. Tell me. So when I was, a lot of it is timing, a lot of it is personality. So for instance, my sister and I grew up in a very similar environment, very privileged. She's a straight A student, double PhD, Magna Cum Laude. Is she older by the way? She's younger, actually. Oh. And I was stumbling through, and I was very interested in media, in content, in computer networks and math. And I couldn't figure out a way to build the education that I wanted within the structure of the school. And also, I just had a very short-sighted personality, because my sister could see 25 years in the future and say, if I want to be that, this is what I have to do now. And that's a particular kind of personality. And I was only interested in things that helped me do what I wanted to do right now. It's a very short-sighted way of thinking about it. But my sister calls that interest-driven learning versus sort of learning that you build on top of yourself. So it was the field that I was in, which was kind of this mishmash of stuff that wasn't in any particular discipline. And also, my personality, which was I was driven by my intuition and my passion rather than this idea of trying to construct something for myself. And those two things led me to a path where I spent a lot of time in universities and I spent my life immersed with academics. So it wasn't that I wasn't very academic, but it was just that I pieced together my sort of my education on my own. And I was lucky because my parents supported it and the internet came at just the right time, so I could communicate with the people I wanted and I was able to collude it together. Was there a moment at which you realized that that kind of very structured, formal path wasn't for you? Well, it never really was. I mean, from when I was, I ran away from kindergarten until they kicked me out. And so it never really worked ever. And I had some great teachers and things like that. But I remember it was actually, there was a moment in college where I was trying to drop out and my mother asked the chairman of Canon, Kaku, Kaku at the time. And he said, well, if your son's going into computers, he may not need a degree. And I thank Chairman Kaku for that, because he was the one that allowed my mother to let me go. But having said that, I will say, and this isn't because I'm at university now, I think that dropping out of college isn't the right decision for most people. So I don't want to use the fact that I'm a college dropout as a, I don't, that's not something I'm proud of. And I think that probably two or three people should drop out every year. Maybe it's good for them. But for the most part, people will make less money and have less opportunity if they don't have a degree. So I don't sort of tout that as something people should. I take your point, although it's worth mentioning that a number of famous entrepreneurs have actually taken that path. And that's what I mean, is I think if you happen to be that person, it was better for you to have dropped out. But there are a lot of people who drop out, who don't succeed. For whom it would have been better to finish. Well, we're going to come back to the education question. But I want to talk a little bit about your position at the MIT Media Lab, because a lot of people know about the Media Lab. They know about Nicholas Necroponte. It's got quite a reputation. He had a reputation. Tell us what's different now. What are you doing with the Media Lab? How does it differ from the mandate of the past? And what are your goals? So if you remember, the Media Lab was created in 1985. So this was before the Macintosh. This was before internet really kind of became a social thing. And so when Nicholas said being digital, things are going to become digital. Computers are going to become social. And the idea of bringing user interface to technology was a new thing. So the Media Lab in the early days, it was about networks and social, but it was a lot about man-machine interface, about empowering the individual. It was really taking those elements that created what the internet is today. But it was a lot of it was sort of about objects. Now that we have the network, and now we have the interfaces, now we have all the people. What I'm trying to do is shift a part of the focus away from the objects. I'm saying instead of objects, let's focus on networks. Instead of individuals, let's look at communities. Instead of making the Media Lab, even though it's not intentional, the Media Lab does become kind of a container because there's a lot of smart people, lots of toys, and you can kind of sit there and get a lot done there, but I'm trying to make the Media Lab more of a platform. So it's trying to connect it to the internet and diversify the inputs. Also, the core of our funding comes from big companies. And so sort of by default, we're talking to big companies all the time. And so although we do a lot in a lot of different places, the focus has been really sort of interacting with industry, which we're good at. I do want to diversify that a lot more. So we're working with foundations, with individual philanthropists on the funding side and on the impact side, working in underdeveloped communities, like I'm working in East Detroit and in Africa and India. And we've done that in the past, but it's sort of been one-off. I'm trying to make that much more of a strategic initiative to diversify where we're going and where we're getting our inputs from. So decentralizing and desiloing, I think, is something that you sound like you think a lot about. Yeah, and it's always been kind of the DNA of the Media Lab to be sort of that way. But now that we've got tools like the internet and we have a lot of sort of technology that can be implemented to take the DNA of the Media Lab and sort of amplify it more, I think. So talk to me about some of the project areas. You said you have three main areas of focus. Let's spell those out and get into some examples of real-world projects. So we have 26 groups and they're all different. So the word that we use as a requirement for student faculty is they have to be anti-disciplinary, which means that if you can do what you want to do in any other department or in any other place in the world, you don't belong at the Media Lab. And so by definition, you have to be a misfit and you can't be like anybody else. So given that, we have 26 groups that are doing things that nobody else is doing and then we have about 350 projects, but that's sort of random. And so what we're trying to do is build areas where we're initiative areas. And so one that we are just starting to talk about here at this meeting is the Center for Extreme Bionics. So we have a lot of faculty working on the brain, on robotic prosthesis, on all kinds of cellular level and mechanical interfaces for the body. So it's electrical, mechanical, chemical interfaces to the body so we can augment the body to try to get rid of every disability that exists. And then eventually, there's some ethical issues with this, is to augment the body to make us sort of superhuman. So that's one area that I think is exciting. Another is learning. So you've heard our president talking about the online courses and things like that. So that's the sort of learning through the future of instruction. The Media Lab is very much learning through construction rather than instruction. So we think that everyone should be a teacher. So I called it the 7 Billion Teacher Project and that it should be much more peer oriented, much more networked, much more experience oriented. So while the other folks at MIT are working on the online course stuff, we're really working on, well, what's the social part of learning and what is learning through doing? So that's another area is redefining and re-understanding learning. And then the third area is, we're calling it city science. So cities is a big deal for everyone right now but I think that people are looking at the city from the perspective of policy makers or from architecture but I think if you look at it from the perspective of the Media Lab which is technology, social networks, sort of this much more flexible people-centric system and then you add the technology to it, cities look very different in 10 years and I think that that perspective is really important. So those three areas I think are initiative areas that this year we're very focused on. So going first to this area of extreme bionics which is, sounds amazing. I mean to make someone super human it makes me actually think of this concept of singularity that's been out there. What do you think about that? Is there any crossover between your ideas? So the technology stuff we're very, we overlap a lot with the folks that work with the singularity folks in terms of the science. But we're, I'm personally at least, very on the other side of the singularity folks because I don't believe that immortality is a good thing. I don't think that, so one of the design, well I think one of the design principles that we have to have for science and technology is you have to think about the effect on the entire system of every science and technology intervention and I think in the past we've been focusing on efficiency, speed and really just the what does this thing do for me? How do I make money because of this intervention? How do I make this particular thing I'm doing efficient? But you don't think about the ecological, social, network effect of what you do. And I think in the future every single science and technology intervention that we do should have at least a net positive or net neutral impact on everything else. And so the problem is when you start introducing ideas like immortality and other things like that you really have to think about what does it do to the system and you have to kind of iterate and move into that. And so what I'd like to do is to start working on science and technology at the Media Lab where the design principle really isn't about trying to make the world more efficient but trying to make the entire system much more using the word for the conference more resilient, robust and things like that rather than just making things faster. And that's quite a profound idea because it touches on our entire sort of neoclassical economic model. It touches on the kind of man machine issues. Maybe we could just start with this idea of how technology and sort of our cognitive abilities interact because I've heard you talk about how you think that in some cases technology might need to slow down or be dampened. Yeah, and I think that's the sort of the neoclassic more is better thing that I think everyone already realizes that it's kind of corrosive. The idea that the more money you have, the better it is. And I think this may be a Buddhist way of thinking about it but just having twice as much family doesn't make you twice as happy. And I think the idea is that what you want is you want a vibrant system that is you don't want it to stall out but you want it to be dynamic and resilient. And I think that robustness and resilience is a much more interesting way to think about growing a system. And if you look at the kids that work at the Media Lab, the people who are there, they're not there to make more money. And that's what's also kind of interesting because they're starting to embody this design method, not all of the students, but the idea of trying to figure out ways that aren't, because fundamentally, and this is a theme of the World Economic Forum for the past number of years, is how do you deal with fluctuation amplification? You don't deal with it by making it more efficient, right? And I think we all know that. But the thing is, you have to put that design principle all the way down into the atomic units of the science and technology. Because the problem is that unless the scientists and the technologists understand that every single decision they make has an ethical impact, you're never gonna get your arms around it. You can't sort of, you know, ethicize it after the fact, right? And so, and Lawrence Lessig wrote about this in his book, Code, which is, you know, the architecture of the computer network and the code is like the law and the architecture is political. And when he said that, a lot of programmers came and said, well, I don't wanna be political. He says, tough nuggies, you are. Every decision you make when you write code, you're making a political decision. And it's the same thing for the scientists. I think they have to sort of live that and has to be built into the process. I wanna come back to your work with Lessig and also the Creative Commons, but I'm curious, are you a believer in happiness GDP? Because it sounds like there's some overlap there. I think that it's kind of an oxymoron. I mean, I think that you kind of, if you're happy, I don't know if you wanna measure, I'm happier than you, so yeah, I win. That's not the kind of happiness I think that we're looking for, but I think that if you think about sort of the idea of measuring happiness, and there's this wonderful series of indexes that a lot of people show where, both in Japan and in the US, when you show the economy growing, the happiness is about flat. So we kind of show that just because you make more money doesn't make you happier. So it is interesting, but I'm not sure exactly how you measure happiness, and then it gets to another thing that I have, which is I sit on a couple of foundation boards and I'm always fighting foundations about their metrics as well. I mean, I think metrics are important when you kind of know what you want, but if you can't do anything unless you have metrics, you can't really discover anything new. And this is what's key about the Media Lab. So our core funding is undirected research. So our students and our faculty don't have to ask permission and they don't have to explain how they're gonna be measured. We just let them go. And once they've figured out what they're doing, so I call it practice over theory. We don't come up with a grand theory of metrics because the problem with the grant driven, metrics driven research is I'm gonna build this, here's how I'm gonna measure it, give me the money. By definition, you already know the answer before you go. The problem with that is it's incremental and what we're trying to do, and so we judge our projects by uniqueness, impact, and magic. And the word magic is it's gotta be surprising. It's gotta be in a space that's not explored and it's gotta be sort of in this white space. And so if you can figure out what the metrics are, then it's already kind of limiting where that exploration is gonna go. And so to me, metrics are important for certain types of incremental work, but for really sort of non-linear research, I think the idea of measuring is actually kind of incremental. I can imagine how if you're given a grant and it's for a specific purpose, that would lead to incremental innovation rather than something really game-changing. But in the kind of model you're working with, how do you keep it from being all over the place? It does end up kind of all over the place, but if the cost of, first of all, if you're not asking permission to run proposals, so the cost of innovation is very low. So a lot of kids will sit there on the mailing list and talk about something, and instead of just talking about it by the afternoon, they've built a prototype and then they've iterated because the cost of trying stuff now with the 3D prototyping and the software is so low that it's usually cheaper to try it than to sit around and try to figure it out. And then if you have a robot person and a designer and a person interested in learning, it's a lot easier for them to build a robot together and figure out how it's gonna work than to sit around and write an academic paper together and try to theorize it first. It's often better to build it first. That's really interesting because that's picking up on something I've been hearing throughout the forum with the rise of sensors, automated manufacturing, kind of real-time information, the quantitative life that innovation is speeding up and maybe becoming more efficient. Yeah, and again, I don't know, I wouldn't necessarily use the word efficient because I think what's happening is you're gonna place more bets. Fewer of them are gonna be successful, but the successful ones are sort of asymmetrically successful. This is sort of the venture capital model that once every three or four years, you hit a huge home run, but you don't have that many incremental successes, but the cost of trying is low because, and it's similar, this is why my DNA and the Media Lab DNA work well, that's the internet DNA, which is rough consensus running code. Stop talking about it, just write it and then iterate on it. And that's the old Nicholas Negroponte demo or die. You just do the demo, don't sit and what they used to call publish and perish. So going to some of the other projects you're working on, you mentioned reinventing education, which sounds incredibly ambitious. Yeah, well, I think that we're sort of looking at ourselves. We have a lab at the Media Lab called Lifelong Kindergarten because we think that kindergarten is where the kids are learning the most because they're passionate, they can do whatever they want. And as they start to become forced to be obedient and forced to do as they're told, you're sort of crushed. I mean, this is an old Ken Robinson thing, it's not a new thing, but you realize that as you are training kids to become obedient members of a mass production, industrial society, only a small number of people are supposed to be creative and the rest of the people are supposed to do as they're told, I mean, roughly speaking. But in today's society, now that we have more and more automation on the manufacturing side, you want people to be more creative. And so the kindergarten thing, which is people messing around is actually a much more creative way to learn. And if you think about the way we assess people, we assess people as individuals. What could you do if you didn't have a computer, you were on the mountain by yourself, you couldn't talk to anybody, then that's how you're scored, right? That's your thesis, that's your tests. But in fact, most of the time, you can look for things on the internet, you can ask your friends, cheating is actually a feature, right? And so the idea of collaborating, the idea, I mean, there's actually a study that shows that people who cheat actually remember this stuff better later. But the thing is that success as an adult is about how resourceful you are and getting people to help you do things, and getting people excited about stuff. But those are all unassessed things, right? So what happens right now, if you have a world where people who create jobs look for certain degrees, the degrees require certain types of assessments, and those assessments drive education, and people spend their life in school trying to get out to try to get that degree to get the job. Well, so when the first year PhDs came in this year, I said, well, when you graduate, if I said psych and I took away your degree, I want you to be able to look back and say it was still worth it, otherwise don't come, because the whole idea is that the process of being there together is how we learn. And so that's how the Media Lab works. And so as we look at how the kids at the Media Lab, because we've basically eliminated most of our classes, and people just learn through doing and through collaborating. And the degree, Media Arts and Sciences, there's really no job listings for the degree. The kids already know when they get in that that's not the degree isn't the way they're gonna get their job. But then we think about, well, what does this look like for K to 12? Well, this looks like for kids. And if you look at kids playing Puckerman with each other, you know, they're teaching each other. And the older kids are teaching the younger kids. And it turns out with no parents around, they teach each other better. And so what is it that when you take the teacher out of the room and you empower kids on social media, that they're actually teaching each other? And how can we empower them to enable that? The tricky part is that with the current model of assessments and structure in individuals, it doesn't really work. And so we're a little bit out of band in that we're not really in the school reform side. We're a little bit more on kind of the tool side. But it's an area that I think can have science and technology in it. And there are a lot of sociologists and others, my sister's actually in this field studying this. But at the Media Lab, we're trying to understand it from the perspective of how does technology, how does interface and how do the social networks affect learning and how can we maybe contribute? So you've taken a lot of these ideas out into the real world into some very difficult populations. I know you have a project in Detroit, you're working around youth unemployment, around mass incarceration. Can you tell us about some of the kids you're dealing with and some of the ideas that they're bringing to the lab? So we had a really interesting project where we were working with IDEO, which is one of our members. And we initially, well the initial idea was to get chief innovation officers into the field to learn that just doing something is faster than thinking about it. So we planned this idea of going into downtown Detroit for two and a half days and just building stuff and going. But as we went there, we realized that plopping in with a bunch of technology wasn't gonna work. And so we turned it around into what we call a co-design project. So we went for a few weeks and we identified some key things like there are street lights don't exist and there aren't enough street lights or there's urban farming or there are air quality monitoring and stuff like that. And so what we did is we found a lot of local kids. One of the kids had been incarcerated for 19 years and there were urban farmers. But we tried to stay under the radar. We tried to go with really authentic kids who were really living in the tough neighborhoods. And then we went in with IDEO and our students and some people from industry. And we came in with some ideas of like, for instance, just as an example, the street lights, if they're connected to the grid they get regulated. If they're made out of metal, they're stolen. So we said, okay, well, it's probably a plastic photovoltaic light. But once we got there and we started co-designing with these kids, we realized, well, it wasn't the fact that there wasn't light. It was that people didn't feel the community around them so they didn't feel safe. And it turned out if they were lit up, that was more important than the street being lit up. And then we realized that we couldn't build photovoltaic stuff and that the only thing within walking distance of these kids were liquor shops. And the only thing in the, and churches and the only thing in the liquor shops well, it turns out they're flashlights. So as the kids were messing around and we were talking to them and they were helping us design, we realized that we could go strip down these flashlights and build wearables. And then we had these eight-year-old kids getting really excited and we had this chief innovation officer of Lockheed Martin teaching these eight-year-old kids how to solder. And by the end, all these kids had these wearable things going on and they were running around and we had pivoted away from trying to build these photovoltaic lights to teaching, creating a program to teach these kids how to make wearable light outfits out of these flashlights from the liquor stores. And the neat things, so a couple neat things that happened. So there were some kids from the street that said, wow, this is so amazing. I wanna become a designer too. And I was sitting next to an MIT kid and I felt smart because I was contributing. I'm gonna go and learn. And so wanting to learn is more, is much harder than learning once you wanna learn because there's so many tools online to learn. So to me, that was key. Our kids from the Media Lab came in with all these ideas of what they were gonna do and everything was completely different because the constraints were different what people wanted. So they came back saying they learned more than they'd ever learned in anything they'd done recently. And the industry people were just completely fascinated obviously because they got to sit there and watch that the user, the people could actually, this is the key of code design. So old design is the engineer design and then the user-centric design is like Apple, where you care about the user. And then participatory design is when you listen to the user. Codesign is when you get the user to design stuff. And what was neat about Detroit was we had these kids who had no experience designing. At the end of two and a half days feeling that they had designed each of these things, that they owned each of these things. And then the idea of people who were used to doing ideas realized that, wow, in two and a half days we can go from just completely pivoting around the ideas to having something deployed in the field. And so it was a really empowering moment for all of us. And then I picked up a few, so one of the kids who's been there, he's not kid, he's in his 40s now, but he's been incarcerated for 19 years. He's now a fellow at the Media Lab. He's an amazing community leader there. And he went in and he learned through sort of reading. So now he's spending time at the Media Lab, he's helping our students go to downtown Detroit and getting access to a completely different community than they'd ever have access to. But then he's bringing kids from Detroit to the Media Lab. And so this is an example of kind of a connection that normally wouldn't have happened through our industry connections. Do you find that this user-based design actually helps you get more quickly to this goal of having every product or service that's coming out of the center have a net positive in terms of its social value? Yeah, so that's the obvious one, which is that you're designing stuff in each place for the people, by the people. So that's obviously good for them. But thinking in terms of like if you think about where it's super customization and with 3D printers and the future of manufacturing, we're gonna be manufacturing things everywhere instead of centralized. Every single person is gonna become a designer. And so if you think about that future, if you think about companies, companies need to understand co-design. And even today, if you're a bank, I've told my students, don't sit and talk to our sponsor who's a bank manager and ask them what their customer thinks. Let's go and work with their bank's customers, design the thing with the bank's customers and then go to the bank and say, your customer designed this, they will use it and pitch it to them. And so the idea is to go where the customer is because now the design tools, this is the point is that the technology's gotten so good and the design patterns have gotten so easy that in two and a half days, just about anybody can become a designer. And so the idea is that instead of trying to figure out what your customer wants, just let them make it. And again, there's a tremendous diversity and so a lot of companies are gonna become, I think, sort of platforms. So the brands are really important because you still have trust and you have to create sort of ugly proof design modules so that they can design stuff. But I think that the more you can allow the user to be a designer, the better your company is gonna be. And so it has a commercial impact as well. And so what I'm trying to do is teach the kids in our staff co-design, working on this very closely with IDEO, but then to try to transfer this back to some of our corporate customers and that sort of closes the whole loop of our ecosystem. So you mentioned to me a while ago that you thought a couple of the most socially useful designs were the bicycle, which I think we could all agree on, but also Twitter. What's the connective tissue there? Well, so David Weinberger has this great book and he calls it Small Pieces Loosely Joined. And so the internet is a bunch of humble little small pieces loosely joined. There's no one on the internet that tries to control the whole of it. And I remember when Twitter came out, when I invested in Twitter, a lot of people said, well, it's not a real company. It's a feature. The real companies are like AOL and all these other things that do everything. But the thing is when you're in a network and you've got YouTube and you've got Facebook and you've got all these other things, lots of little features together make the whole network. And the thing is that it's got to be interoperable. You've got to be kind of humble and it's got to be kind of open. And that's sort of the internet philosophy. It turns out bicycles have a similar thing. So if you talk to Julia from Ushahidi, who is here and she's one of our fellows as well, and you go to iHUB, they have a bicycle hacking thing going on in Nairobi that's crazy because bicycles are sort of standard and the parts are standard and they hack bicycles, turn them into just about anything. So the bicycles are kind of a physical version of this sort of standardized parts thing. And once you start to share bicycle hacking technology, then that's kind of like open source software for bicycles. And it turns out the kids in Detroit have a bike shop and I'm trying to connect them to the Nairobi. I think the Nairobi one's a little bit more advanced than what you showed them. I want to give you a chance to talk a little bit about the smart cities and what cities are going to look like in the next five, 10, 20 years? What do you see from the lab? Well, we're looking at a variety of different directions but I think there's the obvious trends where people are owning their cars less, there's more flexibility. But just think about from the perspective of, like, because I think the way that we think is, okay, here is a terminal. So now what's the app for the terminal? Well, assume everybody already has, everyone here has an app. So if you already have an app, then why does the bus stop have to be at the same place at the same time all the time? Why can't our hubs of traffic be mobile? And why can't we incentivize people to drop off their rented bikes at the place with less bikes because you get a little bit cheaper? And if you think about the world in terms of people who are using apps, people who are swarming around, and then you start to build on top of that much more flexible infrastructure. And also the idea that buildings could be much more flexible and dynamic and to think about it from the perspective of software. So it's kind of like when the iPhone came out or when the Nest, I don't know if you know the thermostat that Tony Fidel has made. If you think about the world from a software perspective, the hardware looks really different. But I think in the past, people look at the world from hardware and then try to run software on top of it. And so what we're trying to do is look at the city from sort of a software perspective and then try to build the hardware in a dynamic way around it. And then also there's a lot of sort of work around sort of urban farming and sort of the way people walk around in cities and things like that. And I think that the idea of looking at things as social networks and networks of people and things like that that are much more dynamic is one of the elements that we're focusing on. So a lot of people are counting on mass urbanization in places like China and other parts of the emerging world to create a lot of growth, to be the wave of the future. What challenges do you see? What problems do you see? And is there anything in the lab that you're thinking about that could help? Yeah, so we're talking to a lot of the newer cities that are being built and we also have been working with some of the rebuilding of the cities in Japan. You know, I think the key is really about trying to create smaller, more local sort of food cycles, thinking about energy in a really different way. But also, I mean, and again, all of our faculty don't necessarily agree, so I'm speaking from my own perspective, but you know, I think the other really important thing is that I think people are much more willing to make fundamental lifestyle changes than people who plan things tend to believe people do. For instance, like people will go become vegetarian and people will walk or people will switch much more aggressively. And so this gets back to my co-design thing, which is if you empower the people to be able to start thinking about the city in a much, in a completely different way, then you'll start to break the mold. And I think what we really need to do is start experimenting with very different types of ways of thinking about cities and not thinking about them in sort of the traditional delineated ways. And I think part of it is really about making smaller blocks of things and things like that. So I'm gonna ask you one final question. If you were to take Davos in the world economic form and put it in the media lab, what would be your analysis? What's working? What would you evolve? If we put Davos in the media lab, I think we would do a lot more doing and a lot less talking. Well, perhaps that's a good place to stop. Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here today.