Where are all the aliens?
I saw a UFO once. I was eight or nine, playing in the street with a friend who was a couple of years older, and we saw a featureless silver disc hovering over the houses. We watched it for a few seconds, and then it shot away incredibly quickly. Even as a kid, I got angry it was ignoring the laws of physics. We ran inside to tell the grown-ups, and they were skeptical -- you'd be skeptical too, right? I got my own back a few years later: one of those grown-ups told me, "Last night I saw a flying saucer. I was coming out of the pub after a few drinks." I stopped him there. I said, "I can explain that sighting."
Psychologists have shown we can't trust our brains to tell the truth. It's easy to fool ourselves. I saw something, but what's more likely -- that I saw an alien spacecraft, or that my brain misinterpreted the data my eyes were giving it? Ever since though I've wondered: Why don't we see flying saucers flitting around? At the very least, why don't we see life out there in the cosmos? It's a puzzle, and I've discussed it with dozens of experts from different disciplines over the past three decades. And there's no consensus. Frank Drake began searching for alien signals back in 1960 -- so far, nothing. And with each passing year, this nonobservation, this lack of evidence for any alien activity gets more puzzling because we should see them, shouldn't we?
The universe is 13.8 billion years old, give or take. If we represent the age of the universe by one year, then our species came into being about 12 minutes before midnight, 31st December. Western civilization has existed for a few seconds. Extraterrestrial civilizations could have started in the summer months. Imagine a summer civilization developing a level of technology more advanced than ours, but tech based on accepted physics though, I'm not talking wormholes or warp drives -- whatever -- just an extrapolation of the sort of tech that TED celebrates. That civilization could program self-replicating probes to visit every planetary system in the galaxy. If they launched the first probes just after midnight one August day, then before breakfast same day, they could have colonized the galaxy. Intergalactic colonization isn't much more difficult, it just takes longer. A civilization from any one of millions of galaxies could have colonized our galaxy.
Seems far-fetched? Maybe it is, but wouldn't aliens engage in some recognizable activity -- put worldlets around a star to capture free sunlight, collaborate on a Wikipedia Galactica, or just shout out to the universe, "We're here"?
So where is everybody? It's a puzzle because we do expect these civilizations to exist, don't we? After all, there could be a trillion planets in the galaxy -- maybe more.
You don't need any special knowledge to consider this question, and I've explored it with lots of people over the years. And I've found they often frame their thinking in terms of the barriers that would need to be cleared if a planet is to host a communicative civilization. And they usually identify four key barriers.
Habitability -- that's the first barrier. We need a terrestrial planet in that just right "Goldilocks zone," where water flows as a liquid. They're out there. In 2016, astronomers confirmed there's a planet in the habitable zone of the closest star, Proxima Centauri -- so close that Breakthrough Starshot project plans to send probes there. We'd become a starfaring species. But not all worlds are habitable. Some will be too close to a star and they'll fry, some will be too far away and they'll freeze.
Abiogenesis -- the creation of life from nonlife -- that's the second barrier. The basic building blocks of life aren't unique to Earth: amino acids have been found in comets, complex organic molecules in interstellar dust clouds, water in exoplanetary systems. The ingredients are there, we just don't know how they combine to create life, and presumably there will be worlds on which life doesn't start.
The development of technological civilization is a third barrier. Some say we already share our planet with alien intelligences. A 2011 study showed that elephants can cooperate to solve problems. A 2010 study showed that an octopus in captivity can recognize different humans. 2017 studies show that ravens can plan for future events -- wonderful, clever creatures -- but they can't contemplate the Breakthrough Starshot project, and if we vanished today, they wouldn't go on to implement Breakthrough Starshot -- why should they? Evolution doesn't have space travel as an end goal. There will be worlds where life doesn't give rise to advanced technology.
Communication across space -- that's a fourth barrier. Maybe advanced civilizations choose to explore inner space rather than outer space, or engineer at small distances rather than large. Or maybe they just don't want to risk an encounter with a potentially more advanced and hostile neighbor. There'll be worlds where, for whatever reason, civilizations either stay silent or don't spend long trying to communicate.
As for the height of the barriers, your guess is as good as anyone's. In my experience, when people sit down and do the math, they typically conclude there are thousands of civilizations in the galaxy. But then we're back to the puzzle: Where is everybody? By definition, UFOs -- including the one I saw -- are unidentified. We can't simply infer they're spacecraft. You can still have some fun playing with the idea aliens are here. Some say a summer civilization did colonize the galaxy and seeded Earth with life ... others, that we're living in a cosmic wilderness preserve -- a zoo. Yet others -- that we're living in a simulation. Programmers just haven't revealed the aliens yet. Most of my colleagues though argue that E.T. is out there, we just need to keep looking, and this makes sense. Space is vast. Identifying a signal is hard, and we haven't been looking that long. Without doubt, we should spend more on the search. It's about understanding our place in the universe. It's too important a question to ignore.
But there's an obvious answer: we're alone. It's just us. There could be a trillion planets in the galaxy. Is it plausible we're the only creatures capable of contemplating this question? Well, yes, because in this context, we don't know whether a trillion is a big number. In 2000, Peter Ward and Don Brownlee proposed the Rare Earth idea. Remember those four barriers that people use to estimate the number of civilizations? Ward and Brownlee said there might be more.
Let's look at one possible barrier. It's a recent suggestion by David Waltham, a geophysicist. This is my very simplified version of Dave's much more sophisticated argument. We are able to be here now because Earth's previous inhabitants enjoyed four billion years of good weather -- ups and downs but more or less clement. But long-term climate stability is strange, if only because astronomical influences can push a planet towards freezing or frying. There's a hint our moon has helped, and that's interesting because the prevailing theory is that the moon came into being when Theia, a body the size of Mars, crashed into a newly formed Earth. The outcome of that crash could have been a quite different Earth-Moon system. We ended up with a large moon and that permitted Earth to have both a stable axial tilt and a slow rotation rate. Both factors influence climate and the suggestion is that they've helped moderate climate change. Great for us, right? But Waltham showed that if the moon were just a few miles bigger, things would be different. Earth's spin axis would now wander chaotically. There'd be episodes of rapid climate change -- not good for complex life. The moon is just the right size: big but not too big. A "Goldilocks" moon around a "Goldilocks" planet -- a barrier perhaps.
You can imagine more barriers. For instance, simple cells came into being billions of years ago ... but perhaps the development of complex life needed a series of unlikely events. Once life on Earth had access to multicellularity and sophisticated genetic structures, and sex, new opportunities opened up: animals became possible. But maybe it's the fate of many planets for life to settle at the level of simple cells.
Purely for the purposes of illustration, let me suggest four more barriers to add to the four that people said blocked the path to communicative civilization. Again, purely for the purposes of illustration, suppose there's a one-in-a-thousand chance of making it across each of the barriers. Of course there might be different ways of navigating the barriers, and some chances will be better than one in a thousand. Equally, there might be more barriers and some chances might be one in a million. Let's just see what happens in this picture.
If the galaxy contains a trillion planets, how many will host a civilization capable of contemplating like us projects such as Breakthrough Starshot? Habitability -- right sort of planet around the right sort of star -- the trillion becomes a billion. Stability -- a climate that stays benign for eons -- the billion becomes a million. Life must start -- the million becomes a thousand. Complex life forms must arise -- the thousand becomes one. Sophisticated tool use must develop -- that's one planet in a thousand galaxies. To understand the universe, they'll have to develop the techniques of science and mathematics -- that's one planet in a million galaxies. To reach the stars, they'll have to be social creatures, capable of discussing abstract concepts with each other using complex grammar -- one planet in a billion galaxies. And they have to avoid disaster -- not just self-inflicted but from the skies, too. That planet around Proxima Centauri, last year it got blasted by a flare. One planet in a trillion galaxies, just as in the visible universe.
I think we're alone. Those colleagues of mine who agree we're alone often see a barrier ahead -- bioterror, global warming, war. A universe that's silent because technology itself forms the barrier to the development of a truly advanced civilization. Depressing, right?
I'm arguing the exact opposite. I grew up watching "Star Trek" and "Forbidden Planet," and I saw a UFO once, so this idea of cosmic loneliness I certainly find slightly wistful. But for me, the silence of the universe is shouting, "We're the creatures who got lucky." All barriers are behind us. We're the only species that's cleared them -- the only species capable of determining its own destiny. And if we learn to appreciate how special our planet is, how important it is to look after our home and to find others, how incredibly fortunate we all are simply to be aware of the universe, humanity might survive for a while. And all those amazing things we dreamed aliens might have done in the past, that could be our future.
Thank you very much.
How we could teach our bodies to heal faster
What if you could take a pill or a vaccine and, just like getting over a cold, you could heal your wounds faster? Today, if we have an operation or an accident, we're in the hospital for weeks, and often left with scars and painful side effects of our inability to regenerate or regrow healthy, uninjured organs. I work to create materials that instruct our immune system to give us the signals to grow new tissues. Just like vaccines instruct our body to fight disease, we could instead instruct our immune system to build tissues and more quickly heal wounds.
Now, regrowing body parts out of nowhere might seem like magic, but there are several organisms that can achieve this feat. Some lizards can regrow their tails, the humble salamander can completely regenerate their arm, and even us mere humans can regrow our liver after losing more than half of its original mass.
To make this magic a bit closer to reality, I'm investigating how our body can heal wounds and build tissue through instructions from the immune system. From a scrape on your knee to that annoying sinus infection, our immune system defends our body from danger. I'm an immunologist, and by using what I know about our body's defense system, I was able to identify key players in our fight to build back our cuts and bruises.
When looking at materials that are currently being tested for their abilities to help regrow muscle, our team noticed that after treating an injured muscle with these materials, there was a large number of immune cells in that material and the surrounding muscle. So in this case, instead of the immune cells rushing off towards infection to fight bacteria, they're rushing toward an injury. I discovered a specific type of immune cell, the helper T cell, was present inside that material that I implanted and absolutely critical for wound healing.
Now, just like when you were a kid and you'd break your pencil and try and tape it back together again, we can heal, but it might not be in the most functional way, and we'll get a scar. So if we don't have these helper T cells, instead of healthy muscle, our muscle develops fat cells inside of it, and if there's fat in our muscle, it isn't as strong. Now, using our immune system, our body could grow back without these scars and look like what it was before we were even injured.
I'm working to create materials that give us the signals to build new tissue by changing the immune response. We know that any time a material is implanted in our body, the immune system will respond to it. This ranges from pacemakers to insulin pumps to the materials that engineers are using to try and build new tissue. So when I place that material, or scaffold, in the body, the immune system creates a small environment of cells and proteins that can change the way that our stem cells behave. Now, just like the weather affects our daily activities, like going for a run or staying inside and binge-watching an entire TV show on Netflix, the immune environment of a scaffold affects the way that our stem cells grow and develop. If we have the wrong signals, say the Netflix signals, we get fat cells instead of muscle. These scaffolds are made of a variety of different things, from plastics to naturally derived materials, nanofibers of varying thicknesses, sponges that are more or less porous, gels of different stiffnesses. And researchers can even make the materials release different signals over time. So in other words, we can orchestrate this Broadway show of cells by giving them the correct stage, cues and props that can be changed for different tissues, just like a producer would change the set for "Les Mis" versus "Little Shop of Horrors." I'm combining specific types of signals that mimic how our body responds to injury to help us regenerate. In the future, we could see a scar-proof band-aid, a moldable muscle filler or even a wound-healing vaccine.
Now, we aren't going to wake up tomorrow and be able to heal like Wolverine. Probably not next Tuesday, either. But with these advances, and working with our immune system to help build tissue and heal wounds, we could begin seeing products on the market that work with our body's defense system to help us regenerate, and maybe one day be able to keep pace with a salamander.
Thank you.
You aren't at the mercy of your emotions -- your brain creates them
My research lab sits about a mile from where several bombs exploded during the Boston Marathon in 2013. The surviving bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev of Chechnya, was tried, convicted and sentenced to death.
Now, when a jury has to make the decision between life in prison and the death penalty, they base their decision largely on whether or not the defendant feels remorseful for his actions. Tsarnaev spoke words of apology, but when jurors looked at his face, all they saw was a stone-faced stare. Now, Tsarnaev is guilty, there's no doubt about that. He murdered and maimed innocent people, and I'm not here to debate that. My heart goes out to all the people who suffered. But as a scientist, I have to tell you that jurors do not and cannot detect remorse or any other emotion in anybody ever. Neither can I, and neither can you, and that's because emotions are not what we think they are. They are not universally expressed and recognized. They are not hardwired brain reactions that are uncontrollable. We have misunderstood the nature of emotion for a very long time, and understanding what emotions really are has important consequences for all of us.
I have studied emotions as a scientist for the past 25 years, and in my lab, we have probed human faces by measuring electrical signals that cause your facial muscles to contract to make facial expressions. We have scrutinized the human body in emotion. We have analyzed hundreds of physiology studies involving thousands of test subjects. We've scanned hundreds of brains, and examined every brain imaging study on emotion that has been published in the past 20 years. And the results of all of this research are overwhelmingly consistent. It may feel to you like your emotions are hardwired and they just trigger and happen to you, but they don't. You might believe that your brain is prewired with emotion circuits, that you're born with emotion circuits, but you're not. In fact, none of us in this room have emotion circuits in our brain. In fact, no brain on this planet contains emotion circuits.
So what are emotions, really? Well, strap on your seat belt, because ... emotions are guesses. They are guesses that your brain constructs in the moment where billions of brain cells are working together, and you have more control over those guesses than you might imagine that you do.
Now, if that sounds preposterous to you, or, you know, kind of crazy, I'm right there with you, because frankly, if I hadn't seen the evidence for myself, decades of evidence for myself, I am fairly sure that I wouldn't believe it either. But the bottom line is that emotions are not built into your brain at birth. They are just built.
To see what I mean, have a look at this. Right now, your brain is working like crazy. Your neurons are firing like mad trying to make meaning out of this so that you see something other than black and white blobs. Your brain is sifting through a lifetime of experience, making thousands of guesses at the same time, weighing the probabilities, trying to answer the question, "What is this most like?" not "What is it?" but "What is this most like in my past experience?" And this is all happening in the blink of an eye. Now if your brain is still struggling to find a good match and you still see black and white blobs, then you are in a state called "experiential blindness," and I am going to cure you of your blindness. This is my favorite part. Are you ready to be cured?
(Cheers)
All right. Here we go.
(Gasps)
All right. So now many of you see a snake, and why is that? Because as your brain is sifting through your past experience, there's new knowledge there, the knowledge that came from the photograph. And what's really cool is that that knowledge which you just acquired moments ago is changing how you experience these blobs right now. So your brain is constructing the image of a snake where there is no snake, and this kind of a hallucination is what neuroscientists like me call "predictions." Predictions are basically the way your brain works. It's business as usual for your brain. Predictions are the basis of every experience that you have. They are the basis of every action that you take. In fact, predictions are what allow you to understand the words that I'm speaking as they come out of my --
Audience: Mouth. Lisa Feldman Barrett: Mouth. Exactly.
Predictions are primal. They help us to make sense of the world in a quick and efficient way. So your brain does not react to the world. Using past experience, your brain predicts and constructs your experience of the world.
The way that we see emotions in others are deeply rooted in predictions. So to us, it feels like we just look at someone's face, and we just read the emotion that's there in their facial expressions the way that we would read words on a page. But actually, under the hood, your brain is predicting. It's using past experience based on similar situations to try to make meaning. This time, you're not making meaning of blobs, you're making meaning of facial movements like the curl of a lip or the raise of an eyebrow. And that stone-faced stare? That might be someone who is a remorseless killer, but a stone-faced stare might also mean that someone is stoically accepting defeat, which is in fact what Chechen culture prescribes for someone in Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's situation.
So the lesson here is that emotions that you seem to detect in other people actually come in part from what's inside your own head. And this is true in the courtroom, but it's also true in the classroom, in the bedroom, and in the boardroom.
And so here's my concern: tech companies which shall remain nameless ... well, maybe not. You know, Google, Facebook --
are spending millions of research dollars to build emotion-detection systems, and they are fundamentally asking the wrong question, because they're trying to detect emotions in the face and the body, but emotions aren't in your face and body. Physical movements have no intrinsic emotional meaning. We have to make them meaningful. A human or something else has to connect them to the context, and that makes them meaningful. That's how we know that a smile might mean sadness and a cry might mean happiness, and a stoic, still face might mean that you are angrily plotting the demise of your enemy. Now, if I haven't already gone out on a limb, I'll just edge out on that limb a little further and tell you that the way that you experience your own emotion is exactly the same process. Your brain is basically making predictions, guesses, that it's constructing in the moment with billions of neurons working together.
Now your brain does come prewired to make some feelings, simple feelings that come from the physiology of your body. So when you're born, you can make feelings like calmness and agitation, excitement, comfort, discomfort. But these simple feelings are not emotions. They're actually with you every waking moment of your life. They are simple summaries of what's going on inside your body, kind of like a barometer. But they have very little detail, and you need that detail to know what to do next. What do you about these feelings? And so how does your brain give you that detail? Well, that's what predictions are. Predictions link the sensations in your body that give you these simple feelings with what's going on around you in the world so that you know what to do. And sometimes, those constructions are emotions.
So for example, if you were to walk into a bakery, your brain might predict that you will encounter the delicious aroma of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. I know my brain would predict the delicious aroma of freshly baked chocolate cookies. And our brains might cause our stomachs to churn a little bit, to prepare for eating those cookies. And if we are correct, if in fact some cookies have just come out of the oven, then our brains will have constructed hunger, and we are prepared to munch down those cookies and digest them in a very efficient way, meaning that we can eat a lot of them, which would be a really good thing.
You guys are not laughing enough. I'm totally serious.
But here's the thing. That churning stomach, if it occurs in a different situation, it can have a completely different meaning. So if your brain were to predict a churning stomach in, say, a hospital room while you're waiting for test results, then your brain will be constructing dread or worry or anxiety, and it might cause you to, maybe, wring your hands or take a deep breath or even cry. Right? Same physical sensation, same churning stomach, different experience.
And so the lesson here is that emotions which seem to happen to you are actually made by you. You are not at the mercy of mythical emotion circuits which are buried deep inside some ancient part of your brain. You have more control over your emotions than you think you do. I don't mean that you can just snap your fingers and change how you feel the way that you would change your clothes, but your brain is wired so that if you change the ingredients that your brain uses to make emotion, then you can transform your emotional life. So if you change those ingredients today, you're basically teaching your brain how to predict differently tomorrow, and this is what I call being the architect of your experience.
So here's an example. All of us have had a nervous feeling before a test, right? But some people experience crippling anxiety before a test. They have test anxiety. Based on past experiences of taking tests, their brains predict a hammering heartbeat, sweaty hands, so much so that they are unable to actually take the test. They don't perform well, and sometimes they not only fail courses but they actually might fail college. But here's the thing: a hammering heartbeat is not necessarily anxiety. It could be that your body is preparing to do battle and ace that test ... or, you know, give a talk in front of hundreds of people on a stage where you're being filmed.
I'm serious.
And research shows that when students learn to make this kind of energized determination instead of anxiety, they perform better on tests. And that determination seeds their brain to predict differently in the future so that they can get their butterflies flying in formation. And if they do that often enough, they not only can pass a test but it will be easier for them to pass their courses, and they might even finish college, which has a huge impact on their future earning potential. So I call this emotional intelligence in action.
Now you can cultivate this emotional intelligence yourself and use it in your everyday life. So just, you know, imagine waking up in the morning. I'm sure you've had this experience. I know I have. You wake up and as you're emerging into consciousness, you feel this horrible dread, you know, this real wretchedness, and immediately, your mind starts to race. You start to think about all the crap that you have to do at work and you have that mountain of email which you will never dig yourself out of ever, the phone calls you have to return, and that important meeting across town, and you're going to have to fight traffic, you'll be late picking your kids up, your dog is sick, and what are you going to make for dinner? Oh my God. What is wrong with your life? What is wrong with my life?
That mind racing is prediction. Your brain is searching to find an explanation for those sensations in your body that you experience as wretchedness, just like you did with the blobby image. So your brain is trying to explain what caused those sensations so that you know what to do about them. But those sensations might not be an indication that anything is wrong with your life. They might have a purely physical cause. Maybe you're tired. Maybe you didn't sleep enough. Maybe you're hungry. Maybe you're dehydrated. The next time that you feel intense distress, ask yourself: Could this have a purely physical cause? Is it possible that you can transform emotional suffering into just mere physical discomfort?
Now I am not suggesting to you that you can just perform a couple of Jedi mind tricks and talk yourself out of being depressed or anxious or any kind of serious condition. But I am telling you that you have more control over your emotions than you might imagine, and that you have the capacity to turn down the dial on emotional suffering and its consequences for your life by learning how to construct your experiences differently. And all of us can do this and with a little practice, we can get really good at it, like driving. At first, it takes a lot of effort, but eventually it becomes pretty automatic.
Now I don't know about you, but I find this to be a really empowering and inspiring message, and the fact that it's backed up by decades of research makes me also happy as a scientist. But I have to also warn you that it does come with some fine print, because more control also means more responsibility. If you are not at the mercy of mythical emotion circuits which are buried deep inside your brain somewhere and which trigger automatically, then who's responsible, who is responsible when you behave badly? You are. Not because you're culpable for your emotions, but because the actions and the experiences that you make today become your brain's predictions for tomorrow. Sometimes we are responsible for something not because we're to blame but because we're the only ones who can change it.
Now responsibility is a big word. It's so big, in fact, that sometimes people feel the need to resist the scientific evidence that emotions are built and not built in. The idea that we are responsible for our own emotions seems very hard to swallow. But what I'm suggesting to you is you don't have to choke on that idea. You just take a deep breath, maybe get yourself a glass of water if you need to, and embrace it. Embrace that responsibility, because it is the path to a healthier body, a more just and informed legal system, and a more flexible and potent emotional life.
Thank you.
Want to be more creative? Go for a walk
The creative process -- you know this -- from the first idea to the final product, is a long process. It's super-iterative, lots of refinement, blood, sweat, tears and years. And we're not saying you're going to go out for a walk and come back with the Sistine Chapel in your left hand. So what frame of the creative process did we focus on? Just this first part. Just brainstorming, coming up with a new idea. We actually ran four studies with a variety of people. You were either walking indoors or outdoors. And all of these studies found the same conclusion. I'm only going to tell you about one of them today.
One of the tests we used for creativity was alternate uses. In this test, you have four minutes. Your job is to come up with as many other ways to use common everyday objects as you can think of. So, for example, what else would you do with a key, other than to use it for opening up a lock? Clearly, you could use it as a third eyeball for a giraffe, right? Maybe. That's sort of interesting, kind of new. But is it creative? So people came up with as many ideas as they could, and we had to decide: Is this creative or not?
The definition of creativity that a lot of people go with is "appropriate novelty." For something to be appropriate, it has to be realistic, so unfortunately, you can't use a key as an eyeball. Boo! But "novel," the second thing, is that nobody had to have said it. So for us, it had to be appropriate first, and then for novelty, nobody else in the entire population that we surveyed could have said it. So you might think you could use a key to scratch somebody's car, but if somebody else said that, you didn't get credit for it. Neither of you did. However, only one person said this: "If you were dying and it were a murder mystery, and you had to carve the name of the murderer into the ground with your dying words." One person said this.
And it's a creative idea, because it's appropriate and it's novel.
You either did this test and came up with ideas while you were seated or while you were walking on a treadmill.
They did the test twice, with different objects. Three groups: the first group sat first and then sat again for the second test. The second group sat first and then did the second test while walking on a treadmill. The third group -- and this is interesting -- they walked on the treadmill first, and then they sat. OK, so the two groups that sat together for the first test, they looked pretty similar to each other, and they averaged about 20 creative ideas per person. The group that was walking on the treadmill did almost twice as well. And they were just walking on a treadmill in a windowless room. Remember, they took the test twice. The people who sat twice for that second test didn't get any better; practice didn't help. But these same people who were sitting and then went on the treadmill got a boost from walking. Here's the interesting thing. The people who were walking on the treadmill still had a residue effect of the walking, and they were still creative afterwards. So the implication of this is that you should go for a walk before your next big meeting and just start brainstorming right away.
We have five tips for you that will help make this the best effect possible. First, you want to pick a problem or a topic to brainstorm. So, this is not the shower effect, when you're in the shower and all of a sudden, a new idea pops out of the shampoo bottle. This is something you're thinking about ahead of time. They're intentionally thinking about brainstorming a different perspective on the walk.
Secondly -- I get asked this a lot: Is this OK while running? Well, the answer for me is that if I were running, the only new idea I would have would be to stop running, so ...
But if running for you is a comfortable pace, good. It turns out, whatever physical activity is not taking a lot of attention. So just walking at a comfortable pace is a good choice.
Also, you want to come up with as many ideas as you can. One key of creativity is to not lock on that first idea. Keep going. Keep coming up with new ones, until you pick one or two to pursue.
You might worry that you don't want to write them down, because what if you forget them? So the idea here is to speak them. Everybody was speaking their new ideas. So you can put your headphones on and record through your phone and then just pretend you're having a creative conversation, right? Because the act of writing your idea down is already a filter. You're going to be like, "Is this good enough to write down?" And then you write it down. So just speak as many as you can, record them and think about them later.
And finally: don't do this forever. Right? If you're on the walk and that idea's not coming to you, come back to it later at another time.
I think we're coming up on a break right now, so I have an idea: Why don't you grab a leash and take your thoughts for a walk?
Thank you.
The nightmare videos of children's YouTube -- and what's wrong with the internet today
I'm James. I'm a writer and artist, and I make work about technology. I do things like draw life-size outlines of military drones in city streets around the world, so that people can start to think and get their heads around these really quite hard-to-see and hard-to-think-about technologies. I make things like neural networks that predict the results of elections based on weather reports, because I'm intrigued about what the actual possibilities of these weird new technologies are. Last year, I built my own self-driving car. But because I don't really trust technology, I also designed a trap for it.
And I do these things mostly because I find them completely fascinating, but also because I think when we talk about technology, we're largely talking about ourselves and the way that we understand the world. So here's a story about technology.
This is a "surprise egg" video. It's basically a video of someone opening up loads of chocolate eggs and showing the toys inside to the viewer. That's it. That's all it does for seven long minutes. And I want you to notice two things about this. First of all, this video has 30 million views.
And the other thing is, it comes from a channel that has 6.3 million subscribers, that has a total of eight billion views, and it's all just more videos like this -- 30 million people watching a guy opening up these eggs. It sounds pretty weird, but if you search for "surprise eggs" on YouTube, it'll tell you there's 10 million of these videos, and I think that's an undercount. I think there's way, way more of these. If you keep searching, they're endless. There's millions and millions of these videos in increasingly baroque combinations of brands and materials, and there's more and more of them being uploaded every single day. Like, this is a strange world. Right?
But the thing is, it's not adults who are watching these videos. It's kids, small children. These videos are like crack for little kids. There's something about the repetition, the constant little dopamine hit of the reveal, that completely hooks them in. And little kids watch these videos over and over and over again, and they do it for hours and hours and hours. And if you try and take the screen away from them, they'll scream and scream and scream. If you don't believe me -- and I've already seen people in the audience nodding -- if you don't believe me, find someone with small children and ask them, and they'll know about the surprise egg videos. So this is where we start. It's 2018, and someone, or lots of people, are using the same mechanism that, like, Facebook and Instagram are using to get you to keep checking that app, and they're using it on YouTube to hack the brains of very small children in return for advertising revenue.
At least, I hope that's what they're doing. I hope that's what they're doing it for, because there's easier ways of making ad revenue on YouTube. You can just make stuff up or steal stuff. So if you search for really popular kids' cartoons like "Peppa Pig" or "Paw Patrol," you'll find there's millions and millions of these online as well. Of course, most of them aren't posted by the original content creators. They come from loads and loads of different random accounts, and it's impossible to know who's posting them or what their motives might be. Does that sound kind of familiar? Because it's exactly the same mechanism that's happening across most of our digital services, where it's impossible to know where this information is coming from. It's basically fake news for kids, and we're training them from birth to click on the very first link that comes along, regardless of what the source is. That's doesn't seem like a terribly good idea.
Here's another thing that's really big on kids' YouTube. This is called the "Finger Family Song." I just heard someone groan in the audience. This is the "Finger Family Song." This is the very first one I could find. It's from 2007, and it only has 200,000 views, which is, like, nothing in this game. But it has this insanely earwormy tune, which I'm not going to play to you, because it will sear itself into your brain in the same way that it seared itself into mine, and I'm not going to do that to you. But like the surprise eggs, it's got inside kids' heads and addicted them to it. So within a few years, these finger family videos start appearing everywhere, and you get versions in different languages with popular kids' cartoons using food or, frankly, using whatever kind of animation elements you seem to have lying around. And once again, there are millions and millions and millions of these videos available online in all of these kind of insane combinations. And the more time you start to spend with them, the crazier and crazier you start to feel that you might be.
And that's where I kind of launched into this, that feeling of deep strangeness and deep lack of understanding of how this thing was constructed that seems to be presented around me. Because it's impossible to know where these things are coming from. Like, who is making them? Some of them appear to be made of teams of professional animators. Some of them are just randomly assembled by software. Some of them are quite wholesome-looking young kids' entertainers. And some of them are from people who really clearly shouldn't be around children at all.
And once again, this impossibility of figuring out who's making this stuff -- like, this is a bot? Is this a person? Is this a troll? What does it mean that we can't tell the difference between these things anymore? And again, doesn't that uncertainty feel kind of familiar right now?
So the main way people get views on their videos -- and remember, views mean money -- is that they stuff the titles of these videos with these popular terms. So you take, like, "surprise eggs" and then you add "Paw Patrol," "Easter egg," or whatever these things are, all of these words from other popular videos into your title, until you end up with this kind of meaningless mash of language that doesn't make sense to humans at all. Because of course it's only really tiny kids who are watching your video, and what the hell do they know? Your real audience for this stuff is software. It's the algorithms. It's the software that YouTube uses to select which videos are like other videos, to make them popular, to make them recommended. And that's why you end up with this kind of completely meaningless mash, both of title and of content.
But the thing is, you have to remember, there really are still people within this algorithmically optimized system, people who are kind of increasingly forced to act out these increasingly bizarre combinations of words, like a desperate improvisation artist responding to the combined screams of a million toddlers at once. There are real people trapped within these systems, and that's the other deeply strange thing about this algorithmically driven culture, because even if you're human, you have to end up behaving like a machine just to survive.
And also, on the other side of the screen, there still are these little kids watching this stuff, stuck, their full attention grabbed by these weird mechanisms. And most of these kids are too small to even use a website. They're just kind of hammering on the screen with their little hands. And so there's autoplay, where it just keeps playing these videos over and over and over in a loop, endlessly for hours and hours at a time. And there's so much weirdness in the system now that autoplay takes you to some pretty strange places. This is how, within a dozen steps, you can go from a cute video of a counting train to masturbating Mickey Mouse. Yeah. I'm sorry about that. This does get worse. This is what happens when all of these different keywords, all these different pieces of attention, this desperate generation of content, all comes together into a single place. This is where all those deeply weird keywords come home to roost. You cross-breed the finger family video with some live-action superhero stuff, you add in some weird, trollish in-jokes or something, and suddenly, you come to a very weird place indeed.
The stuff that tends to upset parents is the stuff that has kind of violent or sexual content, right? Children's cartoons getting assaulted, getting killed, weird pranks that actually genuinely terrify children. What you have is software pulling in all of these different influences to automatically generate kids' worst nightmares. And this stuff really, really does affect small children. Parents report their children being traumatized, becoming afraid of the dark, becoming afraid of their favorite cartoon characters. If you take one thing away from this, it's that if you have small children, keep them the hell away from YouTube.
(Applause)
But the other thing, the thing that really gets to me about this, is that I'm not sure we even really understand how we got to this point. We've taken all of this influence, all of these things, and munged them together in a way that no one really intended. And yet, this is also the way that we're building the entire world. We're taking all of this data, a lot of it bad data, a lot of historical data full of prejudice, full of all of our worst impulses of history, and we're building that into huge data sets and then we're automating it. And we're munging it together into things like credit reports, into insurance premiums, into things like predictive policing systems, into sentencing guidelines. This is the way we're actually constructing the world today out of this data. And I don't know what's worse, that we built a system that seems to be entirely optimized for the absolute worst aspects of human behavior, or that we seem to have done it by accident, without even realizing that we were doing it, because we didn't really understand the systems that we were building, and we didn't really understand how to do anything differently with it.
There's a couple of things I think that really seem to be driving this most fully on YouTube, and the first of those is advertising, which is the monetization of attention without any real other variables at work, any care for the people who are actually developing this content, the centralization of the power, the separation of those things. And I think however you feel about the use of advertising to kind of support stuff, the sight of grown men in diapers rolling around in the sand in the hope that an algorithm that they don't really understand will give them money for it suggests that this probably isn't the thing that we should be basing our society and culture upon, and the way in which we should be funding it.
And the other thing that's kind of the major driver of this is automation, which is the deployment of all of this technology as soon as it arrives, without any kind of oversight, and then once it's out there, kind of throwing up our hands and going, "Hey, it's not us, it's the technology." Like, "We're not involved in it." That's not really good enough, because this stuff isn't just algorithmically governed, it's also algorithmically policed. When YouTube first started to pay attention to this, the first thing they said they'd do about it was that they'd deploy better machine learning algorithms to moderate the content. Well, machine learning, as any expert in it will tell you, is basically what we've started to call software that we don't really understand how it works. And I think we have enough of that already. We shouldn't be leaving this stuff up to AI to decide what's appropriate or not, because we know what happens. It'll start censoring other things. It'll start censoring queer content. It'll start censoring legitimate public speech. What's allowed in these discourses, it shouldn't be something that's left up to unaccountable systems. It's part of a discussion all of us should be having.
But I'd leave a reminder that the alternative isn't very pleasant, either. YouTube also announced recently that they're going to release a version of their kids' app that would be entirely moderated by humans. Facebook -- Zuckerberg said much the same thing at Congress, when pressed about how they were going to moderate their stuff. He said they'd have humans doing it. And what that really means is, instead of having toddlers being the first person to see this stuff, you're going to have underpaid, precarious contract workers without proper mental health support being damaged by it as well.
And I think we can all do quite a lot better than that.
(Applause)
The thought, I think, that brings those two things together, really, for me, is agency. It's like, how much do we really understand -- by agency, I mean: how we know how to act in our own best interests. Which -- it's almost impossible to do in these systems that we don't really fully understand. Inequality of power always leads to violence. And we can see inside these systems that inequality of understanding does the same thing. If there's one thing that we can do to start to improve these systems, it's to make them more legible to the people who use them, so that all of us have a common understanding of what's actually going on here.
The thing, though, I think most about these systems is that this isn't, as I hope I've explained, really about YouTube. It's about everything. These issues of accountability and agency, of opacity and complexity, of the violence and exploitation that inherently results from the concentration of power in a few hands -- these are much, much larger issues. And they're issues not just of YouTube and not just of technology in general, and they're not even new. They've been with us for ages. But we finally built this system, this global system, the internet, that's actually showing them to us in this extraordinary way, making them undeniable. Technology has this extraordinary capacity to both instantiate and continue all of our most extraordinary, often hidden desires and biases and encoding them into the world, but it also writes them down so that we can see them, so that we can't pretend they don't exist anymore. We need to stop thinking about technology as a solution to all of our problems, but think of it as a guide to what those problems actually are, so we can start thinking about them properly and start to address them.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Thank you.
(Applause)
Helen Walters: James, thank you for coming and giving us that talk. So it's interesting: when you think about the films where the robotic overlords take over, it's all a bit more glamorous than what you're describing. But I wonder -- in those films, you have the resistance mounting. Is there a resistance mounting towards this stuff? Do you see any positive signs, green shoots of resistance?
James Bridle: I don't know about direct resistance, because I think this stuff is super long-term. I think it's baked into culture in really deep ways. A friend of mine, Eleanor Saitta, always says that any technological problems of sufficient scale and scope are political problems first of all. So all of these things we're working to address within this are not going to be addressed just by building the technology better, but actually by changing the society that's producing these technologies. So no, right now, I think we've got a hell of a long way to go. But as I said, I think by unpacking them, by explaining them, by talking about them super honestly, we can actually start to at least begin that process.
HW: And so when you talk about legibility and digital literacy, I find it difficult to imagine that we need to place the burden of digital literacy on users themselves. But whose responsibility is education in this new world?
JB: Again, I think this responsibility is kind of up to all of us, that everything we do, everything we build, everything we make, needs to be made in a consensual discussion with everyone who's avoiding it; that we're not building systems intended to trick and surprise people into doing the right thing, but that they're actually involved in every step in educating them, because each of these systems is educational. That's what I'm hopeful about, about even this really grim stuff, that if you can take it and look at it properly, it's actually in itself a piece of education that allows you to start seeing how complex systems come together and work and maybe be able to apply that knowledge elsewhere in the world.
HW: James, it's such an important discussion, and I know many people here are really open and prepared to have it, so thanks for starting off our morning.
JB: Thanks very much. Cheers.
The story of 'Oumuamua, the first visitor from another star system
NASA's always on the lookout for possible asteroid collision hazards, so the Pan-STARRS telescope is scanning the sky every night. Each morning, candidate objects are examined by Pan-STARRS staff and usually discovered to be no big deal. But on October 19, 2017, Pan-STARRS spotted an object moving rapidly between the stars, and this time the usual follow-up measurements of position and speed showed something completely different. By October 22nd, we had enough data to realize that this object wasn't from our solar system.
Holy cow. That's when I got the phone call, the phone call that all solar system astronomers are waiting for. Let me tell you how exciting this was.
(Laughter)
NASA's been expecting to see an interstellar comet pass through the solar system since the 1970s, but until now, we'd never seen anything. Our own solar system is huge, so even getting a package from the nearest star system 4.4 light years away would take over 50,000 years. So this is a really big deal. The interstellar visitor entered our solar system from above the plane of the planets, coming from the direction of the constellation Lyra, and it passed closest to the Sun on September 9th, passing inside the orbit of Mercury. Now this isn't a particularly close approach or unusual distance. It's just much easier to see objects close by. On October 14th, before we discovered it, it made its closest approach to the Earth, within about 15 million miles. This is really close by astronomical standards.
Now rather than call this by its unwieldy catalog name, we briefly called it "Rama," after the cylindrical spacecraft that passed through the solar system in Arthur C. Clarke's classic science fiction story in 1973. But this wasn't quite right either, so in honor of it being discovered by a telescope in Hawaii, we consulted two experts on Hawaiian culture -- a Hawaiian navigator and a linguist -- to propose a name. And they suggested "'Oumuamua," which means scout or messenger from the distant past reaching out to us.
Now this discovery was important for many reasons, but to me the most significant is for what 'Oumuamua can tell us about the past of our solar system. The process of the birth of a new solar system and the growth of planets can be a violent and messy business. Leftover icy and rocky debris gets ejected from the new solar system as the giant planets migrate through the dusty disk out of which they're formed.
Now have you ever felt an emotional chill, something that's so exciting that a shiver runs up and down your spine? Or something that's very emotionally moving? Well this was it for me. This was my wow moment. We actually had a piece of material from another solar system coming close enough for us to observe.
So what would you like to know about 'Oumuamua, the very first visitor from another star system? Well, I could think of a million things, but there's what you want and what you can have, and 'Oumuamua was moving away and fading very rapidly. In the span of about a week, it had dropped in brightness by a factor of [10]. So this is about all the time we were going to have to study it easily. So we had to distill the process of getting telescope time -- normally a very competitive, peer-reviewed proposal process that can take up to months -- down to less than a few days. So began a "polite" competition for resources. OK, let me not mince words. It was a fierce battle. We dropped everything, working around the clock, trying to craft perfectly crafted proposal words to send to the observatory directors. Well, good news. We got the time.
Now, from a perfectly selfish point of view, the first thing we might like to know is how massive 'Oumuamua is. Because after all, it passed very close to the Earth, and we didn't know about it until afterwards. How bad would this have been had it not missed the Earth? Well, the impact energy depends on the square of the velocity times its mass, and the mass depends on how big it is and what it's made of. So how big is 'Oumuamua, and what's its shape? Well, we can get this from its brightness. Now, if you don't believe me, think of comparing the brightness of a firefly in your backyard to the navigation lights on a distant airplane. You know the airplane is much brighter -- it just appears faint because it's so far away. We're also going to need to know how reflective the surface of 'Oumuamua is, and we don't have any clue, but it's reasonable to assume it's very similar to small asteroids and comets in our solar system, or in technical terms, something between the reflectivity of charcoal and wet sand.
Nowadays, most of the big telescopes are used in what's called a service mode, meaning we have to carefully develop all the instructions and send them to the telescope operator, and then anxiously wait for the data to come back, praying to the weather gods. Now I bet most of you don't have careers that critically depend on whether or not it's cloudy last night. Well, we weren't going to get any second chances here. Because the weather was great, 'Oumuamua decided not to be. Its brightness wasn't constant. Now here we see 'Oumuamua racing between the stars. It's centered in the middle. The stars are trailed out because the telescope is following its motion. It started faint and then it got brighter, fainter, brighter, and fainter again, as sunlight is reflected off of four sides of an oblong object.
The extreme brightness change led us to an unbelievable conclusion about its shape. As shown in this artist's impression, 'Oumuamua is apparently very long and narrow, with an axis ratio of about 10 to one. Assuming it's dark, this means it's about half a mile long. Nothing else in our solar system looks like this. We only have a handful of objects that even have an axis ratio bigger than five to one. So we don't know how this forms, but it may be part of its birth process in its home solar system.
'Oumuamua was varying in brightness every 7.34 hours, or so we thought. As more data started to come in from other teams, they were reporting different numbers. Why is it the more we learn about something, the harder it gets to interpret? Well, it turns out that 'Oumuamua is not rotating in a simple way. It's wobbling like a top. So while it is rotating around its short axis, it's also rolling around the long axis and nodding up and down. This very energetic, excited motion is almost certainly the result of it being violently tossed out of its home solar system. Now how we interpret the shape from its brightness depends very critically on how it's spinning, so now we have to rethink what it may look like, and as shown in this beautiful painting by space artist Bill Hartmann, we think that 'Oumuamua may be more of a flattened oval.
So let's get back to the energetics. What is it made of? Well, ideally we would love to have a piece of 'Oumuamua into the laboratory, so we could study it in detail. But since even private industry can't manage to launch a spacecraft within a week to something like this, astronomers have to rely on remote observations. So astronomers will look at how the light interacts with the surface. Some colors may get absorbed, giving it a chemical fingerprint, whereas other colors may not. On the other hand, some substances may just reflect more blue or red light efficiently. In the case of 'Oumuamua, it reflected more red light, making it look very much like the organic rich surface of the comet recently visited by the Rosetta spacecraft. But not everything that looks reddish has the same composition. In fact, minerals that have tiny little bits of iron in the surface can also look red, as does the dark side of Saturn's moon Iapetus, shown in these images from the Cassini spacecraft. Nickel-iron meteorites, in other words, metal, can also look red. So while we don't know what's on the surface, we know even less about what's on the inside. However, we do know that it must at least be strong enough to not fly apart as it rotates, so it probably has a density similar to that of rocky asteroids; perhaps even denser, like metal.
Well, at the very least, I want to show you one of the beautiful color images that we got from one of the ground-based telescopes. All right, I admit, it's not all that spectacular.
(Laughter)
We just don't have the resolution. Even Hubble Space Telescope doesn't present a much better view. But the importance of the Hubble data was not because of the images, but because it extended our observations out to two and a half months from the discovery, meaning we get more positions along the orbit, which will hopefully let us figure out where 'Oumuamua came from.
So what exactly is 'Oumuamua? We firmly believe it's likely to be a leftover archaeological remnant from the process of the birth of another planetary system, some celestial driftwood. Some scientists think that maybe 'Oumuamua formed very close to a star that was much denser than our own, and the star's tidal forces shredded planetary material early in the solar system's history. Still others suggest that maybe this is something that formed during the death throes of a star, perhaps during a supernova explosion, as planetary material got shredded.
Whatever it is, we believe it's a natural object, but we can't actually prove that it's not something artificial. The color, the strange shape, the tumbling motion could all have other explanations. Now while we don't believe this is alien technology, why not do the obvious experiment and search for a radio signal? That's exactly what the Breakthrough Listen project did, but so far, 'Oumuamua has remained completely quiet.
Now could we send a spacecraft to 'Oumuamua and answer this question once and for all? Yes, we do actually have the technology, but it would be a long and expensive voyage, and we would get there so far from the Sun that the final approach trajectory would be very difficult.
So I think 'Oumuamua probably has many more things to teach us, and in fact there might be more surprises in store as scientists such as myself continue to work with the data. More importantly, I think this visitor from afar has really brought home the point that our solar system isn't isolated. We're part of a much larger environment, and in fact, we may even be surrounded by interstellar visitors and not even know it. This unexpected gift has perhaps raised more questions than its provided answers, but we were the first to say hello to a visitor from another solar system.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Jedidah Isler: Thanks, Karen. I of course enjoyed that talk very much. Thank you. As I recall, we found it pretty late in its journey towards us. Will future technologies like the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope help us detect these things sooner?
Karen Meech: Yeah. We're hoping that we'll start to see a lot of these things, and ideally, you'd love to find one as it's approaching the Sun, because you want to have time to do all the science, or even more ideal, you'd get a spacecraft ready to go, parked somewhere in the L4 or L5 position, somewhere near Earth, so that when something comes by, you can chase it.
JI: Awesome, thanks so much. Let's thank Karen again.