TEDxUCL - Innovation and the Meaning of Life
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Presented during TEDxUCL 2013. The narrative is in the notes, and you'll be able to see them properly if you download it.
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TEDxUCL - Innovation and the Meaning of Life
Editor's Notes
- This is one of my favourite photographs. It’s called the Pale Blue Dot.It’s a picture taken of Earth in 1990 by Voyager 1 as it left our solar system. At nearly 4 billion miles away Earth is merely a pale blue dot – a fraction of a pixel.--------------------------------------------------------Notes on the Pale Blue DotThe Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 spacecraft from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles) from Earth, as part of the solar system Family Portrait series of images. In the photograph, Earth is shown as a tiny dot (0.12 pixel in size) against the vastness of space.[2] The Voyager 1 spacecraft, which had completed its primary mission and was leaving the Solar System, was commanded by NASA to turn its camera around and to take a photograph of Earth across a great expanse of space, at the request of Carl Sagan.
- Here we are.Carl Sagan so eloquently states that aggregate of all joy and suffering of every human that has ever existed happened on this fraction of a pixel.It’s from this perspective that I’d like you to think about this talk. That on the one hand, we’re a thin film of life on a speck of dust orbiting an average star amongst gazillions of others; that in the grand scope of the cosmos our lives are completely insignificant. Yet, on the other hand I want you to think about how precious life is; how insanely privileged we are to be able to learn about our place in the universe and experience the magnificent things that our species can achieve.-----------------------------------------------------------------Extract for Carl SaganFrom this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
- Ten years ago something happened to me that changed my life.I realised that I was going to die.Now, we all know that we’re going to die one day, but knowing it is very different to realising it.I calculated that I had about 500 months left to live. In fact, give or take a few hundred months, all of us have about 500 months left.Think about the tens, hundreds and even thousands of things you want to do in your life; the number movies you want to see, books you want read, cities you want to explore, restaurants you want to try, products you want to buy, and people you want to meet. And that doesn’t even include all of the stuff that’s going to be created over the next 50 years, nor does it include all of the stuff you’ll want to do with your friends, families, children and grandchildren.Suddenly, 500 months becomes a very small number. So I did what any rational person would do when they realise they’re about to die…….I panicked.After I pulled myself together, I decided that the best thing to do was invest some of my months into figuring out what life was really all about.I figured that if I studied Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, Politics, Economics and Physiology it would give me a better understand of what it means to be human, and discover what I should be doing to live a fulfilling life during the precious little time I have left.I quickly realised that the answer to this question has been known and developed for thousands of years; that is can be found in the teachings and writings of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, Jeremy Bentham, Freud, Darwin and Dawkins, amongst many others.The answer to what one should do with ones life is this……………
- Maximise Good.We are automatically compelledto do what we think will make us the happiest, and we associate what makes us happy with that which is good. That every decision that you make you believe will bring you the most amount of happiness.This isn’t some ground-breaking insight or mystical truth. We all seem to already know this. In fact, whenever you ask someone what they want in life, we almost always get the same answer each time which is “to be happy”, sometimes extend with “and to help others be happy”.I know this sounds like the same old “meaning of life” cliché that you’ve all probably already heard dozens of times, which is “to find out what makes you happy and pursue it with a passion”.But perhaps the reason why we find this so hard to do is that in reality life is complicated.
- For example, different things make us happy at different times and in different circumstances.It doesn't take much research into Motivation Theory before you find models like “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs” which try to categorise the types of things that motivate us.They range from basic Physiological and Emotional needs, such as food, sleep, shelter, friendship….to the higher Intellectual, Aesthetic and Creative needs, such as learning, experiencing beauty, and helping othersAnd whilst there’s still debate about some of the details about what motivates us, this framework is a very good place to start when trying to understand what we need to make us happy.For example, you might really enjoy reading a book, but if you haven't had any food in three days then you’ll prioritise eating a bowl of rice over getting through just one more chapter.The value that we place on things changes depending on our circumstances; and how much money, effort or even pain we are prepared to spend on satisfying a need also changes.
- To make things more complicated, we are terrible at making rational decisions - especially when it comes to what we think will make us happy. This has been studied intensely over the past several decades, and I would encourage you to check out the work of people like Dan Ariely.We have hard-coded cognitive and physical biases that result in irrational decisions; decision to eat dangerous amounts of fat/salt/sugar, or to gamble our earnings when the odds are firmly against us.Aside from these ‘hard-coded irrationalities’, from the moment we’re born we’re told what is good and bad – these socially enforced biases can produce behaviours that are destructive to others and the environment (therefore indirectly being detrimental to ourselves) – like racism, attitudes towards animals, or that success is a function of how much money people earn.The decisions that we make can produce either “positive happiness” or “negative happiness”.Negative happiness is created when doing something that results in decreasing the overall happiness of humanity.Smoking, for example, may satisfy the needs of and individual for a short period of time, but it damages health, damages the environment, and gives money to tobacco companies to help them promote their product to get more people to smoke. All of which the rest of us have to pay for, and which has a negative cyclic impact on society.Positive happiness is created when doing things that result in increasing the overall happiness of humanity. For example the pleasure we get from learning, teaching, discovering and giving. Some of the most positively influential people in history have been doctors, nurses, scientists and engineers – these people seem to have fulfilling lives yet get probably paid very little.Determining whether a decision leads to positive or negative happiness can be hard and complex, but by removing our prejudices, and increasing our knowledge, we are better able reason about the impact of our decisions, and make decisions that result in greater positive happiness.It seems quite fitting that this talk is about “maximising the overall happiness of society” here at UCL, founded by Jeremy Bentham the father of Utilitarianism. But what has all this got to do with Innovation?[In Butan, their governments goal is not to increase GDP, but to increase national happiness.]
- It has plenty to do with Innovation.Let’s look at the definition – Innovation is Creativity that ShipsInnovation is the process is generating ideas and taking the results market. Unfortunately the word Innovation is used too freely, it refers to well established methodologies (such as TRIZ and Synectics) to help people generate ideas and take them through a set of processes to the point where they’re a product or service that can generate value.We have already established that we assign value based on how happy we think something will make us. When we’re making purchases try to determine whether we’re- consume a product from a company that results in negative happiness, or - whether we’re contributing to a company that produce products resulting in positive happiness.By assigning a value to product and services you are supporting the propagating of things that can either have positive or negative happiness. Every purchase is a moral decision.Morality is defined as behaviour that produces good outcomes, and that the virtues are traits that lead to moral behaviour; traits like, prudence, temperance, courage and honesty. Similarly, if you’re innovator, are you create things that produce positive happiness- by enabling people to satisfy their basic needs without negatively effecting them, others or the environment, or- by enabling people to fulfil their higher needs?Are you creating innovations that result in positive or negative happiness?If you’re an entrepreneur, you might get asked the question of whether you’re motivate by cash or king; are you doing it for the money or for power? Well, I would argue that neither of these motivations are necessarily positive. Some of the most successful entrepreneurs create products or services that they want to use. They’re driven by how much happiness the innovation would make to their own lives.
- Rather than just “creating things that ship”, create goods that cultivate a world where people are better able to satisfy their higher needs; ship things that enable others to create.Creating things that ship is a process (it’s the innovation process) – it’s hard and we all know that the odds of success are against usShipping things that create is a purpose (and that purpose is to maximise good) – as an entrepreneur when you’re not purely motivated by money or power (neither of which will likely come for a long time) then having a ‘higher purpose’ is going to help you not give up and even think more creativelyLet’s call this good innovation.There seems to be a lot of bad innovation in the world today. A world where people are:- pacified by drugs, alcohol and junk food- distracted by gossip, money and status- deluded by dogma, religion and the pseudoscience
- We’re living in an age where every company or individual can have global impact, every innovator has the ability to help create a world where:- we don’t damage the environment or cause suffering through greed or ignorance- we create products where the basic needs are met for everyone, and that each person is able to achieve their higher needsI don’t have many months left, and I intend to spend those pushing the boundaries of science, philosophy and technology. Through this, I’d like to help create a world where you all have the freedom to pursue your passions; and that during the blink of existence on this pale blue dot, I’m lucky enough to be able bask in the warmth of your fire.