 So I'd like to open this up to discussion. Are there any questions? Hi. I know that your comments about measurement are something you probably follow more to the spirit than to the letter, but what would be your response to claims that measurement in types of projects such as these increases efficiency? Like, if you know that one type of model is more effective than the other, then you can divert more resources towards that, for example. I couldn't in any way deny that that's true. I mean, that's certainly if you measure something and it's like a running race where everybody is just a little bit ahead of each other. And so I'm not arguing against measurement in that case. What I'm arguing against is the kind of projects you do should be so big and the results should be so big and your visions for those results should be so big. And I see so many people in this world, particularly the measurement prone people, doing these kind of things and then they spend all their energy measuring it. And it just seems to me that it's not to say you shouldn't measure it all, but the spirit of it is just missing the big changes. And it's the benefactors, the grant organizations all push it. And it's, I just think, wrong. Going back to what you said earlier about preferring publicness, I just wondered where is anonymous speech in this and the value of anonymous speech in a free society? The value of anonymous sources for journalists? Because it seems to me that there is a great value in publicness and in information being available to everybody. But at the same time, there's also a place for privacy in a democracy. And I wonder if you could speak to that. Gee, I'd love to defer to somebody who will speak much better to it. That's just, I'm not a student of anonymous speech. It's one way or the other. I feel I benefit from it. I feel sometimes I see people wickedly hurt by it. But it's, I'm sure, like Jeff Jarvis, I would rather hear from Jeff on it than... Anonymity is a part and parcel of free speech. The ability to speak in any form and to have that action is absolutely vital to protect. Privacy is vital to protect. And it's related to privacy. My only point is that there's also obviously benefit to publicness and we talk too much about what bad could happen. And in anonymity, I think it's getting too much of a bad reputation now because of trolls, right? That people are saying nasty things and if they just stood up behind their names, everything would be okay. And I used to make fun of that. I don't so much anymore. I think one of the insights of Facebook is that real identity and real relationships add value to this. But in any of that, anonymity has an important role in a democracy for sources and whistleblowers and people without privilege who fear being able to speak and being able to connect with other people as a result of anonymity. So it must be protected. Hi. This is not directed at anyone in particular. But I was thinking about Lisa Nakamura's book, Cyber Types, where she talks about how the, I don't know if anyone's familiar, pretty old, but the idea that ideas of race and religion and sort of social norms are translated into an online community. And so even for people, how do I phrase this in the best way? I think that when we're talking about privacy and we're talking about privilege and we're talking about publicness, we're talking about it very much from an ivory tower without a realization that there are things that are inscribed in, for example, language and the ways in which we communicate and academic language versus vernaculars that can really alter how people perform themselves in the online spaces. And I think that's worth thinking about and discussing that there are processes of education and of imbuing knowledge that don't allow for these to be the kind of free democratic spaces that I think they were possibly envisioned to be. And so when you idealize the public space as a place where everyone can be safe to share their opinions equally without fear of imprisonment, murder, or defamation, that feels really, really far away for me. Could I ask Nicholas a question? It goes to this measurement idea and this extraordinary description of a whole country with kids with these laptops and your expectation that something really big will result. When will we see it? What will it be? How will we measure? How will we perceive it? Well, first of all, it's already visible and you can see in the country, and I urge anybody who's close to Uruguay to go to Uruguay because I have a friend, some of you may know, he's here periodically to teach, Antonio Batra, who went to Uruguay recently and went to a very poor village on the coast and went into somebody's hut and the woman had seven children and five of them had laptops and they were running their little network at home and this was a really poor house and the mother said just completely, that in next year the sixth one will be five years old and we'll have six laptops at home. Those kids are growing up so differently. They all have internet addresses, email addresses at school, Wi-Fi at school and often Wi-Fi at home. Their curiosity, the way they approach problems, the way they look at things from different ways. Yes, they play games but they own the laptop so they use it not just a few hours at school, they use it for movies, they use it for all sorts of things. I think you're going to see a nation in about 10 years, 15 years is the real time when it counts. There's going to be far more creative than many other nations. Uruguay could be the first truly creative nation because kids grew up this way. In between the sorts of things that you might measure which are being measured and they measure a lot down there and you can go to their websites and if you can read Spanish you'll find a lot more than I can but the sort of things they look at is how many kids don't go from fail the grade they're in and have to stay back a grade. It used to be a relatively significant number, it's almost disappeared. So you get results like that that are pretty interesting measurements and make them but I think that the boldness of doing it is what's going to change the country and we're going to see things, you know, results that are really quite astonishing. Tell you a quick Uruguay story. When Tabare Vasquez's name, the president, announced that he was going to do every child there was a teacher who had taught for 30 years in primary school who heard this and said, I've been teaching for 30 years, I'm not going to start teaching with a laptop. And so she went to the Social Security Office and she asked for early retirement and they said, you know, come back in 10 days and it takes 10 days to process it and in the intervening time the laptop arrived in her classroom and within two days she saw the energy of her classroom change, she saw the kids change, she went right back to the Social Security Office and said, change that, I want late retirement and what happened in her class shortly thereafter, she had assigned a project to do something on cows, this little girl goes home, a little disappointed she hadn't gotten a leg up on the project and her father said, you know, you're really lucky because tonight our cow is giving birth and our laptop has a little video camera on it and so she went and stayed up and filmed the birth of the cow as her project and brought it to school the next day and this was by far the best project and the kids collectively figured out how to upload it to YouTube which they did and if you tied Vaca or Agua or something it'll come up and it got 100,000 hits, the teacher said come on, I never thought my silly homework problem would have 100,000 hits and again the self-esteem of the child and all of that I think those are the things that are the big results and you get a nation that grows up with kids with that kind of self-esteem and that kind of ease and you look at it and see something from multiple points of view and I don't know the answer, go find it, let's work on it together, be more collaborative I mean, you're going to have very few defectors in Agua Could I ask what programs are actually on your computers and what are the kids doing with these computers when they get them? How do they know how to use them? What do you mean how do they know how to use them? It's genetic. In fact, we're going to run a real experiment very scientifically soon where we drop these things out of helicopters into villages that have no schools and see if kids can read after a year but every kid knows how to open up a laptop and start using it so using a laptop is really quite simple but what they do with it actually is relatively countries specific by chance the Uruguayan children tend to use it to surf the web and for entertainment and other stuff the kids in Ethiopia tend to write computer programs more and kids in Peru do a lot of book reading In our case, I would say of the 3 million 2.5 million are connected It's hard Audience members trying to I have a quick question for Martin I believe but also for Nick as well so it seems to me these are like two great approaches we've heard one is build a great tool of course with a big vision in mind the one laptop per child initiative and see what happens and experiment with it and make investments and so forth The other approach is actually to study in a very scientific way human behavior we had the case of cooperation as an example and at the end of your talk you alluded to the possibility of incorporating some of the learnings into the design of institutions Now the question is in a way that results at least for me from this exchange can we bring the two things together and actually improve so have the power, the vision the big ideas on the one hand side and really also the force to implement while being still not measuring but being smart and strategic about it based on some of the insights that you were talking about and how difficult is this translation actually from findings in science about human behavior and then adopting these findings in the design of initiatives, institutions and strategies Yeah that's a hard question for me to answer because like listening to your talk I find it completely amazing that you sort of do something out there and I'm sitting here asking myself what do I do out there I'm fascinated by understanding mathematics For me I want to understand the mathematics of evolution and I do apply it to questions like human cancer like virus infections so we started the evolution of these processes we started the evolution of HIV treatment in 1995 so our mathematical analysis led the medical community very quickly to adopt multiple drug therapy now we are doing similar studies for targeted cancer therapy but in the specific question maybe in the specific field of cooperation I think that we would like to bring the mathematical models closer together with experimental observations so we not only conduct experiments here in the Boston area, in the Harvard Business School but we sometimes go also to other countries and then we look at differences so for example in our field many people like punishment I'm very skeptical about punishment I don't think punishment is a good way to actually get cooperation because it leads to many other problems so we study reward and reward works extremely well here in Boston for example where people play a public goods game and then afterwards they have the option of private interactions and so they reward those who contributed to the public good and they do not have a positive cooperation with somebody who withholds cooperation in public good games so it works well then we go to Romania and we did the same experiment there and the outcome was fascinating people gave up on the public good but only cooperated in private they kind of didn't link the two games and the people there said to us this makes complete sense because people distrust that a public situation will ever lead to a productive outcome but know that in my private interactions I can count on productive outcomes and so we could then ask the question how can we use such insights to help society to lead confidence in public projects but that's not my... Okay, yes My question goes to both Charlie and to Negropani I absolutely agree with you that the thing that I hate about privacy is it's always been sort of afterthought and it's something that's been in the way of things and we use the legacy environments that we have are always trying to ease the tension so that something else can happen but... and then when I fast forward to the one lap per child I'm kind of amazed because the different... one of the huge differences in the question of privacy in an agricultural society the question of privacy isn't normally individual privacy it's usually group privacy and family, my culture because in fact the group has to... they're so dependent on each other for survival that there can't be privacy privacy often gets in the way of the trust that they need and so in agricultural societies there's this idea of group privacy but eventually in the same kind of afterthought one lap per child is going to hit privacy barriers around the group because these children linked to each other are sharing information across they're breaking a kind of natural cultural boundary and they're taking that culture into a different space and one question will be I wonder what the privacy clashes will be what the harms will look like and what the space of remedies will be because they're likely not... they may or may not be the same as ours and I was wondering if you had any insight in that I'm not sure we've had enough experience to have a really deep insight but what we have done though is we've taken privacy of the child very seriously and both in the hardware so for example you can't remotely tap into the camera and you can't remotely record without the child knowing there's real circuits in there for that and you can also elect the government elects the security where if the laptop is stolen you can disable it and turn it into a brick and the child can report it as stolen and that machine is taken out of service remotely so the child doesn't blame for something that they didn't do so again these are technical things that people have thought about and embedded in it but time is going to tell more I'm not sure it's so much privacy as the cultural differences that exist today that will not exist tomorrow and that's a much longer term issue I really enjoy the cooperation talk because I think the web sort of the spread of the internet has allowed this side of human behavior to be a lot more visible which I think has really helped break the hegemony of the utility function maximizing individual I've never met and according to those theories Wikipedia is not possible all sorts of things are not possible so I'm really curious about how this kind of development of the kind of work you guys are doing in evolutionary biology and sort of human society and analysis is informed by this new visibility of a very basic human fact this kind of we are cooperative social animals I like to say we're somewhere between ants and dogs we don't like to admit it but it's where we are so how does that interact with what you observe what kind of data you use and does it influence your thinking about this? So we like to compare the human behavior with animal behavior so we ask what kind of cooperation do we see in the animal world and how does this agree or in what sense is human cooperation different and of these five mechanisms that I mentioned there all can actually be used by animals to a certain extent and some actually by animals to a much greater extent but the one that we have in an unlimited way is the indirect reciprocity because it ties in with human language and the indirect reciprocity we see in the animal world must rely on direct observation because we do not really have any examples where animals could communicate this information of their own experience so what humans can do is they don't rely on their own personal experience with someone in order to make a decision whether or not it is possible to cooperate with this person or not I think the web can help us a lot to distribute this information about people and about companies and institutions rapidly and to evaluate their actions and to criticize the actions and then these people have the feeling we are being watched and we have to be careful regarding our reputation I think that's a very excellent note to close off because it helps us to remember that so many of the words that we are using today have many different perspectives depending on how you look at it the way that the pictures of the laptops have different perspectives depending on how you look at it so we started out with the assumption that cooperation is often something, well, who is against cooperation but on the other hand one of the things to keep in mind is that with all the talk we have of privacy the cooperation that exists in these models is perhaps in many ways indistinguishable from coercion so it's a very interesting piece to look at because what we have with the web is this infinite reputation a permanent history where everyone knows everything you've done in every place it will certainly make you cooperate with the norms of the society so one of the things we're left with is this question of is cooperation a good thing? Thank you