 Okay well thank you everybody for being here. I'm David Kirkpatrick. I have a company called Techonomy that curates conversations as much like this one as possible. I think we're really going to have a great conversation here and I really am a believer in and a curator of conversations about technology transforming everything because I really think it's happening more than most leaders realize and I'm very pleased to be here with Joy Ito who probably as much as anyone is making that case on a methodical basis globally right now. He's really an extraordinary person in terms of his influence thus far and his activities in the tech realm over decades. So he started as an entrepreneur in Japan and let me just this is very incomplete but I'm going to tell you some of the things he's done. He helped start the first Internet Service Provider in Japan which was called PSI Net Japan. He started or started or co-started Infoseek Japan which was the first search engine in Japan. Then he was very involved in a company called Six Apart in the US which was a big big key blogging software company in the earlier phases of the Internet and one of the first companies probably of any type that really kind of made a institutional product commitment to giving individuals a voice on the global Internet so that was actually kind of a breakthrough company. He was very associated with that. Then as an investor he's invested in Flickr, Twitter, Kickstarter and a number of other very important companies and then on top of all that he has become head of the Media Lab at MIT which as I'm sure most of you know is one of the great sources of innovative thinking in the world today and it was especially noteworthy when he got that job running a major research institution at one of the world's leading academic centers because he doesn't even have an undergraduate college degree. Is that correct? Not to mention he doesn't have a graduate degree. He doesn't even have an undergraduate degree. So anyway he also has a new book out that he's co-written called Whiplash which I'm just going to read a few thoughts out of it before I go to start asking him things. Some of these will result in questions later possibly but when I was reading it on Audible I was just scribbling away at some of the things that jump out. In the first couple chapters of the book there's a few phrases that are just really memorable. One is that he says Moore's law plus the Internet equals an explosive force in society. Not a shocking idea but well said. Then he talks a lot about this idea of emergence and pull as a guiding tool for how we ought to advance society and I'm going to ask him about that. In fact I better write down the word pull so that you can define what that means. But a phrase that goes along with that is emergence over authority. He's not a believer in authority. He thinks people without college degrees should be able to run academic institution. And then the other stuff that's really fun that we'll get into is he talks about the willing that admitting what we don't know is one of the great assets of success in the modern economy and that a key function that we have to learn is the willingness to be foolish and to look foolish because otherwise we're never going to advance. So Joy. Thank you David. Great. Thank you for giving me so much great stuff to say to introduce you. So when you talk about pull which is one of the key things I know you're interested in now and that the book really I think very emphatically and repeatedly tries to explain as a critical function of modern society. What do you mean and why is it so important? So first I want to credit John Hagel and John City Brown who had this great book called the Power of Pull. And that's where I got my inspiration. But the idea is to pull things as you need them rather than stocking and holding them. So it's actually you can trace it back to the early Japanese manufacturing which is sort of just in time inventory instead of stocking a bunch of stuff that may you know run out of need. What you do is you sort of get all of the suppliers to give you the stuff just in time. But what happens on the internet and more and more in the information systems is that the network allows you to pull ideas, pull resources as you need them. And so the problem is like if you learn a computer programming language that you don't use for 10 years, it's likely not to be the best programming language in 10 years. There's innovation that happens on the edges where your company touches the consumer or where the media touches the user. And instead of having a central R&D that focuses on something for 10 years and then sort of pushes it out to the edges, what you do is you pull the innovation from the edges. And this is you know whether you're talking about Google 20% time or you and it's not a new idea. I mean 3M's famous masking tape story about a field engineer figuring it out. And then having that save the company through the depression is also an example of the power of pull. So power of pull is less command and control and a lot more sort of pulling things from the edges. But another key component that's absolutely central to the idea that pull works is and you are such a deep believer in this that individuals have more power, more capability, more authority in the world we live in. And that's somewhat the structure of modern society which you've been a apostle of for a long time. So talk about that part. Yeah and I think this ties to the idea of emergence. So the example that I often give is after the earthquake in Japan, my family was in Japan near where the radioactive cloud was going. And there are a lot of people on the internet trying to figure out how to measure the radiation, how to talk about the radiation. And what we did was we found all the, we found each other on the internet, on mailing lists, on web. And so we got the people mapping the stuff, we got the people making the Geiger counters, we got the volunteers in Japan and very quickly we were, and we had Ray Ozzie happen to have just retired from Microsoft. So he had a bunch of time, he wanted to work on it. So they're like resources of famous people who have time, you have kids who know how to make the tubes for Geiger counters. And then within months we had a group with Geiger counters that we designed on their cars driving around Japan. We've got over five million records now. But at the same time that all of these government systems and these NGOs that were prepared and all ready to go, none of them were successful in deploying these sorts of measurements. And we were just able to sort of pull a ragtag team together. But now what's happened is this group has become one of the best citizen science groups. It's called Safecast. And now all of the scientists that were sort of shaking their fingers at it, it's kind of like Wikipedia. Well, if you're so concerned about our data, come help us. And so it turned into this global movement. And what's neat is it's not like one person. So that's sort of key. It's the individuals. And it's an immersion system where when anybody wanted to work on it, we just sort of co-opted them together. And what's key is that we use the latest technology for everything, whether it's microcontrollers that we used or right now the wireless systems that we use for mesh networking. We use the latest technology and bring all the people as we need them. And the problem is if you create a bureaucracy and you're all planned, you'll be into the third generation, you'll be using old hardware and people will be tired, you won't have passion. And the neat thing is we didn't know anything about radiation or hardware after the earthquake, but we were able to ramp that up within months. And the bottom line is you built a system that was better at monitoring and identifying where the radiation risk existed than what the Japanese government was able to do using its traditional top-down methodology. Well, let me ask you a related question then. Would you say that in some way your whole career has been devoted to sort of empowering the individual and perceiving the power transformation that the world, accelerating this power transformation that the world has undergone since the Internet came along? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think part of it is that I was just an odd, I had, I think every kid learns in a different way. I learned in a peculiar way. I really didn't like to study out things I wasn't interested in, but if I was interested in something I would just learn. And when I was in high school in Japan, I was at the American School, we had just started getting network connectivity. This is sort of before the Internet. This is X-25. And I was, I found video games, I found communities, I found all kinds of things on the network that were much more interesting than the classes I was taking. So I learned that I could get onto the MIT computer even from high school, say, I'm a little Japanese kid from, and I just read your book, Will You Answer Me? And back then, in 1983 and 84, if your professor got a letter, an email from some high school kid in Japan, they would spend a long time writing your very thorough response. And then I'd go to my physics teacher and I'd say, well, but I just got an email from the physics professor at Berkeley, and they said, you're wrong. I wasn't a very popular kid, but what I realized very early on that this was an amazing tool, and then quickly I got into the community. So back then in the early days, Howard Reingold wrote a great book called Virtual Communities. There were, even before the Internet, there were these bulletin boards, and I started hanging out with professors and students all over the world. And so that became my fascination. And then what I realized is that not only can you hang out in communities, these communities can generate things like Wikipedia or communities of creative learning. So my whole life really has been on sort of understanding how communities develop and how communities are self-managed, how culture affects them, and then what communities can do. And so, and communities, again, at scale are societies, and in small sizes, they're really teams. Well, I don't know how much this ties to what you just said, and if you can connect them, I'd be especially interested, but talk to this point I made in introducing you about, you know, how it's impossible to really know what's going on, and that because of that we have to be willing to look foolish as we explore it. So, first of all, the world is messy, and I think our brains try to make it feel like it's not. And if you talk to neuroscientists, a lot of what we think of as consciousness is a way for a brain to give us a self-deception that we meant to do that, that it all sort of makes sense. But it's often a deception that we do afterwards. So sort of that's one thing. And then just to take an example of the internet. So I was, I worked on building many of the layers of the internet with other people, and we worked on ICANN. So Linux, which is the core of most of the servers we use, is kind of a slightly ragtag team of open source and free software people who sort of make that. The name, the main name system, where you sort of, when you type in a URL and it gives you the number, the servers that tell you what number is it connected to, what name, they're run by a bunch of volunteers. I mean, when I was on the ICANN board, somebody attacked the root servers, which is really the address book. And only one survived. This is the F root server run by this guy named Paul Vixie. Okay, just quickly, ICANN was the one that governs the internet naming system. He used to be very involved in that. Yeah, so just root servers before the traffic of the internet passes through. So think about it as a switchboard for the internet. It was attacked, and there's a whole bunch of redundancy. But the one that survived was run by a little non-profit in California by this somewhat chromogeny guy named Paul Vixie. And so the government goes to him, I hope I'm allowed to tell the story, because it wasn't before, but it's a while ago. But he basically said, well, they said, we're afraid that some non-profit is running the only one that survived. You've got to let us sort of figure out how to duplicate. He says, you would never be able to duplicate this. And at every layer of the internet, there's some group of people who, if you met, you would, you'd think were kind of weird, running critical infrastructure. So if- People like Howard Rangel do this, like deliberately wears every item of clothes that doesn't match, right? Yeah, and a lot of these people aren't doing it for the money. They're doing it because of the passion, because they love the internet. And so a lot of what we depend on, and we think of, and when you open up a webpage for a bank, you see this really shiny sort of, like a picture of a vault. But in fact, every layer of the internet is a community of people who are doing it because they love it. And obviously there are commercial layers in between. But so much of what we already think of as sort of very structured and critical path depends on a lot of people who aren't doing it because they're afraid of authority and they're not, they're doing it because they want to. And that could be scary if you really thought about it. But you also anticipate more of that is inevitable. And I think that's one of the points I'm trying to make in the book is that a lot of what we think of as sort of rock solid isn't, but it works. And it actually works better than if you tried to make them rock solid. That was sort of my resilience over strength. You sort of have to assume failure. So the internet is designed by, by design is a system so that when it fails it recovers very quickly, which is a much better way to design systems than assuming they won't fail. But when you look at the systems of authority in the world which certainly are very evident here at Davos and you know the leaders of the world tend to convert here, do you think that they tend to think they know what's going on more than they actually do? Yes. And there's a famous joke where they say, you know, everybody bullshits their boss about 10% and then you go up and up and up and by the time you get to the CEO it's mostly, you could, you know, that's a great formula. The more authority you have, the less, the more opaque things are because people tend not to tell you the truth, right? And what I think the, so as a, as a, you know, director of the media lab what I focus on and because I used to work in a nightclub and this is where I learned this. I was a DJ in a nightclub and I learned that I can get people on the dance floor, off the dance floor, in the club, out of the club by the music I play. And so I use that metaphor when I work at the media lab. I'm trying to, all I have is the ability to tweak the culture. I sort of change the music. Do we do, you know, Friday lunches? Do we change the, move the furniture around? And by, by tweaking the culture you get, you can get people to start to feel like they have permission to do things. And part of it is also this is a nightclub thing, certain people you don't lend in, certain people you kick out, that's also pretty important. But the key is how do you get the culture buzzing? And one of the key things is the permission to question authority and think for yourself. So I often use the term disobedience robust. Our faculty meeting I think is the, a faculty meeting where we can have the vigorous disagreements. I mean, we have polar opposite beliefs, but somehow we cherish the other. And so, so we, when we did a faculty search, we had one of the things, Nicholas Negaraponte, the founder was running and it was a professor of other. You had to have two fields that were orthogonal that you were interested in. You couldn't do, if you could do your work anywhere else and any other institution don't apply. And, and you had to be sort of different from anything we had. And we were looking at one of the candidates and we were, oh, this person's awesome. This is really neat how they get it. And then, and then Nicholas said, that's not other. That's another. And we said, no way. Right. So, so, so the idea that, you know, most institutions are afraid of the other. But at the Media Lab, we embrace other and then we allow them to, and this requires a pretty confident culture to be able to allow people to feel that they can express their disobedience and their questioning of authority. And that has to be built into the DNA. And I think good nightclubs and punk rock is like, so there are certain cultures that have that punk rock. It's really important. I love punk rock. But I want to go to a specific, one of several specific technologies I hope we can explore in this conversation. And that's blockchain. And the reason is that in your book, and it's related to the points you've just been making, and I'd like to, again, you to connect this thought. You say with your co-author that blockchain is likely to restructure the relationship between individuals and society more or less, or individuals and governance broadly. Why is that likely? And what is blockchain and why is it likely to do that? And how does it fit into this world you're describing? So I'm an internet guy, so maybe this metaphor works for me better than for others. But I think the best way is to think about it like the internet. So the internet, you had email, which was a wonderful tool that sort of crushed certain types of hierarchies, allowed you to email the president of the company or the president of a country. And the internet, the email really pushed the dissemination of the internet protocol. And once the internet protocol had been disseminated, people started building the web and eBay and Amazon and now Google and Facebook. But the killer app for getting the web out, getting the internet out, there really was, I think, email. Similarly, Bitcoin is, I think, the killer app for pushing out the blockchain. And the blockchain is like the internet in that it's the infrastructure that is built by Bitcoin, but is also the thing that delivers Bitcoin. Maybe a little definition. Just explain more detail what Bitcoin is, what blockchain is. I know most people in your private heard it, but it always bears more definition, because I always forget how to explain it. Absolutely. So the blockchain is, we call it a public ledger. So it's like if you imagine a sheet of paper, a ledger where you have lots of transactions, and what happens is there are these things called miners, which do, if you imagine that they're running a whole bunch of calculations to try to win a puzzle contest. And winning the puzzle contest has a side effect of cryptographically locking in that page of transactions so that it can't be fiddled with. And it ties it to the previous page. And so there are pages and pages of this ledger that are being created by these tons of servers that are all racing to try to win this contest. And occasionally you win the contest. And as a reward for winning the contest, you get some Bitcoin. But the history of the ledger cannot be altered. It cannot be altered. Yeah. And so the biggest difference between the internet and blockchain is the internet is just about sending information around and you can, it's just a communication network. The blockchain is to try to create a mutable record of everything that happens that can never be changed. And right now we do those sorts of things by having banks and governments and notaries and trusted people handle the sort of does this person own this title? How much money do you have in the bank? Are you married to this person? And so on and so forth. The blockchain is really interesting in that by using the calculations of these miners, it's able to create a general public leisure without having to trust anyone. And in fact there are Yeah. But first, let me interrupt. The blockchain was invented along with Bitcoin as a methodology that was necessary for Bitcoin to operate. So that's, that's right. So, so, so Bitcoin is the currency that's used as a reward for mining the creating these, the system and then the reward itself, the Bitcoin can then be traded as currency. The neat thing, so the ledger talks about basically puts in who's transferring Bitcoin to who. So the basic form is just a digital currency in a completely decentralized way which is generated by these miners but other people can use it. But the blockchain itself just like the email network that was created using the internet can now be used for other things. So you can do changing of titles. The ideas you could maybe put smart contracts on top of it. Record keeping of any kind. Record keeping of any kind. Moving assets. And that's the main problem with the internet is I can send the same file to you as I send to Rebecca. And the whole point is that one person can send the same thing to millions of people and copy. The thing about the blockchain is that you can't copy things. So, but the the key thing is that so on the internet it's hard to move assets around. That was why it was so difficult for copyright. And so one of the applications now that people are thinking about for Bitcoin is keeping track of who's copyrighted is, who's house it is, who's card it is. So this is very good for creating assets out of information. The same way that the internet has changed society. You have errors free. You have ISIS. You have good things. You have bad things. So one of the things that I learned so what early days of the internet when we first met I was pretty optimistic. I thought that the internet was designed in a way that it would just democratize everything. And Rebecca's here we did this thing called global voices. If everyone could just talk we would have peace. Turns out not to be true, right? It turns out bad things happen, good things happen. So I now I'm a little bit wiser at 50 years old and I feel like the Bitcoin is really interesting because you don't need central banks. You might, they might want to use it too. But it takes the notion of fiat currency of systems of exchange sort of the notary all these things that required authority to sort of stamp the approval that this is the official ledger and has decentralized that. So just in the same way that the internet has both created opportunities as well as destabilized authority I think the blockchain will have a similar effect. It will have good things but it will have bad things. But to go to this point of restructuring the nature of the individual's relationship to society you're saying because it will allow individuals to authenticate all kinds of ownership behavioral I mean like the authentication of all kinds without the requirement of a government it really allows for a certain kind of autonomy of the individual that has not been possible. So like a super easy example would be if you were a musician I'll just use India because India is interested in this space and you make a song and you post it onto the internet but what you do is you post it with some sort of tool that says if you want to pay me here's my Bitcoin address and you let's say you download on your browser or you use it in your YouTube song you could say oh I want to pay that person so it would go from if you're using say Brave it could go from the Bitcoin wallet in your browser directly into the wallet of the woman who made the song and then she could go with her phone to the corner store and and pay for her milk right and so typically you would have had governments and banks doing transfers you would have had a music rights collection agency in between but you could do all of this just in software peer to peer so that's just on the on the money side but you could do a similar thing so the energy there's an idea that one of our guys at the media like Michael Casey has been working on which is if you had a solar panel and the solar panel you pay Bitcoin to get energy from the veteran and the solar panel and then the solar panel has a digital contract so that if somebody wanted to make a whole array of solar panels they could sell the rights to the solar panels online and you could buy a solar panel that was there and then anybody who bought energy from the solar panel you get money directly and then you could sell buy and sell the rights of the solar panel on the market so you could imagine a capital flow directly to India without a whole bunch of layers of finance and other people in between that could be sort of moved moved around and you can do this with derivatives and all these other things now obviously there are regulatory issues what happens with scammers so there's a whole governance layer that we haven't really figured out yet but similarly to the internet I think the like the U.S. was very successful when Iron Magazine and others sort of let the internet go without too much regulation at the beginning so you allowed a lot of interesting ideas to pop up and after the ideas popped up and we sort of saw what the lay of the land was and the regular sort of regular skaters came in and said okay well let's do this let's think about net neutrality I think we need to be careful because Bitcoin because it has more to do with money and there are more regulators that are interested in it and also because it has to do with money there are tons of people investing in this so one sort of word of warning that I would have is that I think Bitcoin is still very early it's kind of like before we had figured out the internet protocol it's a very mushy set of standards it's like like 1989 on the internet but people are investing as if it's 1997 so I think there's kind of a bubble in this sort of fintech space right now and I'm a little bit concerned that we're not ready for it yeah well I know that you have some strong opinions about the relative importance of some of these derivative technologies like what's the one that we were discussing Ethereum Ethereum right sorry for not remembering that and but there's a number of sort of blockchain like systems that have been proposed as commercial alternatives because for various reasons they're said to be better and you don't really see too much promise in that well I see so what's really important about the internet so we've got this thing called Ethernet which is the wires we've got TCPIP which is the protocol each of these layers were communities of experts and they weren't necessarily the best technology but they were the ones that people decided to choose I think that there is no other sort of Bitcoin like cryptocurrency that has had the attention and has the community signs that Bitcoin has so even though it's hard to deal with and it's slow I think Bitcoin is likely to become the default but they're not moving very quickly so a lot of the features that Ethereum has is a great place to experiment but the key point here is that I think there are big fintech companies getting created just like Time Warner and the telephone companies made Minitel and these sort of monolithic multimedia systems you'll get some great ideas there but what's happening on Bitcoin is we're building the layers one by one like we are on the internet and some companies like AOL if you remember or even CompuServe they used other technologies but they eventually moved over to the internet I think that most of the things will eventually move over to Bitcoin and I think Ethereum might survive as a thing but I think that the majority of the people who are really really well versed in this are working on the Bitcoin core but it is clear that you believe that for this world where empowerment at the bottom is so critical and Pohl is a managerial methodology we need to use that Bitcoin and Blockchain both are absolutely essential technologies we are going to use moving forward and I think so I mean I think that when you talk to central bankers when you talk to other people the technical people are looking at it very carefully I think you can think about it as the internet but you can also think of Bitcoin and kind of like the Linux kernel and the Linux kernel is made by a bunch of free open source software people but it's used in so many different things so if you think about Bitcoin becoming the engine that a central bank could use to issue its own fiat currency I think that's that's definitely a possibility okay good I want to try to pull a bunch of ideas together here we've only got relatively few minutes left sadly but you know I was in a session which I was talking to you about last night which was for a bunch of the journalists here where we were talking about genetic modification and brain manipulation the development of AIs the use of quantum systems to try to replicate brain function and one of the things that came out for me and I think it's come out at a lot of the fourth industrial revolution sessions here at Davos is this idea that we are kind of gaining in various domains what might be said to be kind of quasi godlike powers as humans to do things to manipulate systems that we never could before manipulate and yet the bottom line message of all that to me was yet we don't have a clue how to use them and how worried are you about that and what what do you think we should do about that sort of a landscape and do you agree that that's the landscape we're in right so I think that's the key message from the book if you were going to take away one thing it's that the more you know the more you know that we know less I mean the more you know the more you know that we don't really understand what we're going through and whether you're talking about microbiome or or or the relationship in quantum and bio and stuff like that so you have to become extremely humble and the problem is even though we know less and less in a sense we know that we know less our ability to destroy the world is increasing because our power is increasing like today and so we're using the term participant designer so you have to imagine that you're fiddling with something that's part of a number of different complex systems that you have no control over you have to be responsible as a scientist or a policymaker about what you do but you can't control it it's like with AI it's like giving birth to a child and so you're responsible for the child not legally maybe in all cases but you it's your child you better take care of it and if you're a scientist you should worry about how it affects the microbiome how it affects the climate not just on that specific place where you think that you're responsible it's you should be responsible for everything and then the idea that you have an objective view like a scientist is looking at no no you it's the phrase that we like to use is you're not stuck in traffic you are traffic right and so you imagine what it feels like to be designing something where you're also a participant and it's about you as much as everybody else and really focus on yourself try to get the thing that so on the internet we used to say David Weingberger said a small piece is loosely joined and when I invested in Twitter a lot of people that's not a company that's just a feature it's not even a product but the great thing about the internet was all of the great companies figured out how to connect to each other being agile and nimble being responsible for their own thing but also connecting to the system and so I think it's system syncing it's humility it's the idea that you're responsible for everything but and this gets totally to the topic of Davos this year which is responsible and responsive that's the way scientists have to be product designers have to be but you also have throwing a big dose of humility okay but another word that's thrown around a lot in regard to this stuff is governance and it's often said we don't really have much if any how do you think about that how we move towards societal governance of these really fast moving technologies and social changes that result from them so governance is an unfortunate word because it invokes government and governments are not very functional ways to deal with the complexity that we have today so I think there's a governance but governance in the way that nature governs complex systems through feedback loops and through and it's the self-adaptive in self-adaptive complex systems is really important when nature takes a hit it will take different resources in the biodiversity to try to patch that problem that it has and it's adaptive right and so what we want to do and this is ties to the word resilience is we want to create systems that self-heal rather than some central agency says oh we better go send FEMA now we better go send a bunch of aid because there's Ebola then what you want is you want the local systems to be resilient and that's a very different approach than having some authority be in charge of everything okay unfortunately we are very close to being finished here and I would say both Joy and I really believe in dialogue we would have loved to have taken questions but this format doesn't really allow for it but anything that you wanted to talk about when coming in here that we haven't gotten to yet well so this whole conference has been like a lot of it has been about AI and so I don't want to overstate this but just like when 30 years ago when we were talking about the internet and everybody was like what does this have to do with me I think AI is going to affect everything in sort of a similar way but even a more amplified way than the internet did and AI seems like a computer science problem it's not the computer scientists have to make it accessible to us not as a solution I don't want you to sell me an AI system that solves my problem I want the AI people to create tools so that like VisiCalc and spreadsheets allowed the accountants to become creative in the computer AI computer science should allow all of us to take our expertise and express it directly using the tools and actually make our tools so it's about empowering people to understand AI and that literacy because if like the CEO doesn't understand the internet they don't have an internet strategy you can't give it to the AIT guys the same thing with AI it's you don't just hire an AI guy one of the things that a lot of your comments remind me of is another thing that's come up gratifyingly often this year at Davos which is the idea that we don't just need to teach people STEM we also need to emphasize the liberal arts because at all levels of society and particularly those that are inventing it and governing it and leading it a bigger picture view is required and I love the way you articulate that your book is a great way a whiplash for people to follow this thought through further but it was great to talk to you about a joy and I just wish we could have more time and thanks again Thanks David