You're standing at the ready inside the goal when suddenly, you feel an intense itch on the back of your head.
We've all experienced the annoyance of an inconvenient itch, but have you ever pondered why we itch in the first place?
The average person experiences dozens of individual itches each day.
They can be triggered by all sorts of things, including allergic reactions, dryness, and even some diseases.
And then there are the mysterious ones that pop up for no reason at all, or just from talking about itching.
You're scratching your head right now, aren't you?
Anyhow, let's take one of the most common sources: bug bites.
When a mosquito bites you, it releases a compound into your body called an anticoagulant that prevents your blood from clotting.
That compound, which we're mildly allergic to, triggers the release of histamine, a chemical that makes our capillaries swell.
This enables increased blood flow, which helpfully accelerates the body's immune response to this perceived threat.
That explains the swelling, and it's the same reason pollen can make your eyes puff up.
Histamine also activates the nerves involved in itching, which is why bug bites make you scratch.
But the itchy sensation itself isn't yet fully understood.
In fact, much of what we do know comes from studying the mechanics of itching in mice.
Researchers have discovered that itch signals in their skin are transmitted via a subclass of the nerves that are associated with pain.
These dedicated nerves produce a molecule called natriuretic polypetide B, which triggers a signal that's carried up the spinal cord to the brain, where it creates the feeling of an itch.
When we scratch, the action of our fingernails on the skin causes a low level pain signal that overrides the itching sensation.
It's almost like a distraction, which creates the sensation of relief.
But is there actually an evolutionary purpose to the itch, or is it simply there to annoy us?
The leading theory is that our skin has evolved to be acutely aware of touch so that we're equipped to deal with risks from the outside world.
Think about it.
Our automatic scratching response would dislodge anything harmful that's potentially lurking on our skin, like a harmful sting, a biting insect, or the tendrils of a poisonous plant.
This might explain why we don't feel itching inside our bodies, like in our intestines, which is safe from these external threats, though imagine how maddening that would be.
In some people, glitches in the pathways responsible for all of this can cause excessive itching that can actually harm their health.
One extreme example is a psychological condition called delusory parasitosis where people believe their bodies are infested with mites or fleas scurrying over and under their skin, making them itch incessantly.
Another phenomenon called phantom itching can occur in patients who've had amputations.
Because this injury has so severely damaged the nervous system, it confuses the body's normal nerve signaling and creates sensations in limbs that are no longer there.
Doctors are now finding ways to treat these itching anomalies.
In amputees, mirrors are used to reflect the remaining limb, which the patient scratches.
That creates an illusion that tricks the brain into thinking the imaginary itch has been satisfied.
Oddly enough, that actually works.
Researchers are also searching for the genes involved in itching and developing treatments to try and block the pathway of an itch in extreme cases.
If having an unscratchable itch feels like your own personal hell, Dante agreed.
The Italian poet wrote about a section of hell where people were punished by being left in pits to itch for all eternity.
Subtitle Provided by JUFE MOOC Studio M Subtitle Provided by JUFE MOOC Studio M Good morning, I'm going to talk about architecture and prefabrication.
How a house could be built?
And how we could improve with the current technology, the quality of our living spaces, the affordablility, and share these with greater markets and people.
We think that this is, the present and the future of architecture.
And, this house that we've built in Madrid, is our manifesto, our starting point.
We prefabricated towards this house, You're seeing a civilian engineering parts, that perfectly assembled and balanced, to demonstrate that how prefabrication could be, the way to create amazing, inspiring, and affordable spaces to live.
This house was based in these engineering parts, balanced in consonance and in harmony, in equilibrium with this rock of granite of 20 tons that put all their parts together.
This is our house in Madrid.
The Hemeroscopium House that is full of air, and full of life, to enable it, the structure, that as you can see, defers very little the house and the structure that created it.
This house is a space to share with our family, It's a space to share in conspiracy, in communal with outdoors.
in very intimate relationship with nature.
This is the space that we were living in Spain and space that we would like to have here in Boston when we came at the full of harmony.
This house has been built in Madrid, and when we came to Boston, we were looking for a same space, a similar space to live.
We started struggling with "0", in the search of housings around.
MIT where I work, POPLab is found that everyone want to be closer with good schools like this one, and we discovered how insane the prices are, how expensive these houses become, and also how these houses were responding to a(n) old American dream.
a lifestyle, a technology, and a formal unspecialized exact was not there where we understood house should be.
And also when you come as an migrant to United States, you don't have financial history and this was part of the problem that we have to solve so we actually went low to high.
In the sea of browser, and we found the cheapest place in the area -- I think it was a cheapest place in Massachusetts and this was how our dream house.
A three base garage very...
unfinished yet, but with a lot of potential.
(laugh) so we thought that we could build a house of our dreams I recruited a group of young architects, and tell them "let's build the technology that could be available and fit the house in Brookline."
It was the same being, but very light, that could be lifted and transported easily, and that could be estrangedly insulated to the weather in Boston.
So we got hands on, and without being skilled to build a house, we crafted a prefabrication putting together their technologies from their North-Amarican tradition of building houses, with our European ones.
Framing but in steel instead of in wood.
creating thick walls but very light filled with forth and insulating materials that could be clad with cement boards.
It's a different material plate, but what we created was a very affordable lightweight technology that could be packed in a container, because we are going to the move to United States but not only moving our staff, our furnishing, our memory, we are going to move their full house.
So we packed it in containers, And we made the trip to United States, Their house in one side and our family in the other one.
When we arrived to Brookline, two blocks away from this place, It was like receiving an Amazon pack, instead of a goodie where the full house that we had to and pack.
Craned and assembled together.
This is what we did in Madrid, but with these pieces that came with the kitchen, the bathroom, the closets, the furnishing, everything was embedded into these walls.
These walls had to be assembled with total precision as a Swiss watch.
And it took 7 days, of craning, and putting all these parts together in perfect balance.
We think that this is the way, architecture should move on to make it really affordable, real technological, and overall, exciting.
We think that architecture has to inspire and create a point of space that make our lives better.
There the house was constructed above a garage, but the garage is still there.
It's coated with a thin layer of vegetation that hopefully will grow next spring.
But it was recycle, it wasn't turned on, we just created a big room above, where all our family could again enjoy all their activities without separating ourselves into rooms.
A big room where we could have our meals, play, study, do some work, and where we could enjoy also, the light and the vistas from the neighbors, trees, and where at night, even all that activity after their dinner, could be transformed in to a fantastic bedroom.
The bed comes from the wall and we still enjoy that big space, that we created above.
Good night.
(applause).
(applause).
Power.
That is the word that comes to mind.
We're the new technologists.
We have a lot of data, so we have a lot of power.
How much power do we have?
Scene from a movie: "Apocalypse Now" -- great movie.
We've got to get our hero, Captain Willard, to the mouth of the Nung River so he can go pursue Colonel Kurtz.
The way we're going to do this is fly him in and drop him off.
So the scene: the sky is filled with this fleet of helicopters carrying him in.
And there's this loud, thrilling music in the background, this wild music.
♫ Dum da ta da dum ♫ ♫ Dum da ta da dum ♫ ♫ Da ta da da ♫ That's a lot of power.
That's the kind of power I feel in this room.
That's the kind of power we have because of all of the data that we have.
Let's take an example.
What can we do with just one person's data?
What can we do with that guy's data?
I can look at your financial records.
I can tell if you pay your bills on time.
I know if you're good to give a loan to.
I can look at your medical records; I can see if your pump is still pumping -- see if you're good to offer insurance to.
I can look at your clicking patterns.
When you come to my website, I actually know what you're going to do already because I've seen you visit millions of websites before.
And I'm sorry to tell you, you're like a poker player, you have a tell.
I can tell with data analysis what you're going to do before you even do it.
I know what you like.
I know who you are, and that's even before I look at your mail or your phone.
Those are the kinds of things we can do with the data that we have.
But I'm not actually here to talk about what we can do.
I'm here to talk about what we should do.
What's the right thing to do?
Now I see some puzzled looks like, "Why are you asking us what's the right thing to do?
We're just building this stuff.
Somebody else is using it."
Fair enough.
But it brings me back.
I think about World War II -- some of our great technologists then, some of our great physicists, studying nuclear fission and fusion -- just nuclear stuff.
We gather together these physicists in Los Alamos to see what they'll build.
We want the people building the technology thinking about what we should be doing with the technology.
So what should we be doing with that guy's data?
Should we be collecting it, gathering it, so we can make his online experience better?
So we can make money?
So we can protect ourselves if he was up to no good?
Or should we respect his privacy, protect his dignity and leave him alone?
Which one is it?
How should we figure it out?
I know: crowdsource.
Let's crowdsource this.
So to get people warmed up, let's start with an easy question -- something I'm sure everybody here has an opinion about: iPhone versus Android.
Let's do a show of hands -- iPhone.
Uh huh.
Android.
You'd think with a bunch of smart people we wouldn't be such suckers just for the pretty phones.
(Laughter) Next question, a little bit harder.
Should we be collecting all of that guy's data to make his experiences better and to protect ourselves in case he's up to no good?
Or should we leave him alone?
Collect his data.
Leave him alone.
You're safe.
It's fine.
(Laughter) Okay, last question -- harder question -- when trying to evaluate what we should do in this case, should we use a Kantian deontological moral framework, or should we use a Millian consequentialist one?
Kant.
Mill.
Not as many votes.
(Laughter) Yeah, that's a terrifying result.
Terrifying, because we have stronger opinions about our hand-held devices than about the moral framework we should use to guide our decisions.
How do we know what to do with all the power we have if we don't have a moral framework?
We know more about mobile operating systems, but what we really need is a moral operating system.
What's a moral operating system?
We all know right and wrong, right?
You feel good when you do something right, you feel bad when you do something wrong.
Our parents teach us that: praise with the good, scold with the bad.
But how do we figure out what's right and wrong?
And from day to day, we have the techniques that we use.
Maybe we just follow our gut.
Maybe we take a vote -- we crowdsource.
Or maybe we punt -- ask the legal department, see what they say.
In other words, it's kind of random, kind of ad hoc, how we figure out what we should do.
And maybe, if we want to be on surer footing, what we really want is a moral framework that will help guide us there, that will tell us what kinds of things are right and wrong in the first place, and how would we know in a given situation what to do.
So let's get a moral framework.
We're numbers people, living by numbers.
How can we use numbers as the basis for a moral framework?
I know a guy who did exactly that.
A brilliant guy -- he's been dead 2,500 years.
Plato, that's right.
Remember him -- old philosopher?
You were sleeping during that class.
And Plato, he had a lot of the same concerns that we did.
He was worried about right and wrong.
He wanted to know what is just.
But he was worried that all we seem to be doing is trading opinions about this.
He says something's just.
She says something else is just.
It's kind of convincing when he talks and when she talks too.
I'm just going back and forth; I'm not getting anywhere.
I don't want opinions; I want knowledge.
I want to know the truth about justice -- like we have truths in math.
In math, we know the objective facts.
Take a number, any number -- two.
Favorite number.
I love that number.
There are truths about two.
If you've got two of something, you add two more, you get four.
That's true no matter what thing you're talking about.
It's an objective truth about the form of two, the abstract form.
When you have two of anything -- two eyes, two ears, two noses, just two protrusions -- those all partake of the form of two.
They all participate in the truths that two has.
They all have two-ness in them.
And therefore, it's not a matter of opinion.
What if, Plato thought, ethics was like math?
What if there were a pure form of justice?
What if there are truths about justice, and you could just look around in this world and see which things participated, partook of that form of justice?
Then you would know what was really just and what wasn't.
It wouldn't be a matter of just opinion or just appearances.
That's a stunning vision.
I mean, think about that.
How grand.
How ambitious.
That's as ambitious as we are.
He wants to solve ethics.
He wants objective truths.
If you think that way, you have a Platonist moral framework.
If you don't think that way, well, you have a lot of company in the history of Western philosophy, because the tidy idea, you know, people criticized it.
Aristotle, in particular, he was not amused.
He thought it was impractical.
Aristotle said, "We should seek only so much precision in each subject as that subject allows."
Aristotle thought ethics wasn't a lot like math.
He thought ethics was a matter of making decisions in the here-and-now using our best judgment to find the right path.
If you think that, Plato's not your guy.
But don't give up.
Maybe there's another way that we can use numbers as the basis of our moral framework.
How about this: What if in any situation you could just calculate, look at the choices, measure out which one's better and know what to do?
That sound familiar?
That's a utilitarian moral framework.
John Stuart Mill was a great advocate of this -- nice guy besides -- and only been dead 200 years.
So basis of utilitarianism -- I'm sure you're jfox@example.org.
The three people who voted for Mill before are familiar with this.
But here's the way it works.
What if morals, what if what makes something moral is just a matter of if it maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain?
It does something intrinsic to the act.
It's not like its relation to some abstract form.
It's just a matter of the consequences.
You just look at the consequences and see if, overall, it's for the good or for the worse.
That would be simple.
Then we know what to do.
Let's take an example.
Suppose I go up and I say, "I'm going to take your phone."
Not just because it rang earlier, but I'm going to take it because I made a little calculation.
I thought, that guy looks suspicious.
And what if he's been sending little messages to Bin Laden's hideout -- or whoever took over after Bin Laden -- and he's actually like a terrorist, a sleeper cell.
I'm going to find that out, and when I find that out, I'm going to prevent a huge amount of damage that he could cause.
That has a very high utility to prevent that damage.
And compared to the little pain that it's going to cause -- because it's going to be embarrassing when I'm looking on his phone and seeing that he has a Farmville problem and that whole bit -- that's overwhelmed by the value of looking at the phone.
If you feel that way, that's a utilitarian choice.
But maybe you don't feel that way either.
Maybe you think, it's his phone.
It's wrong to take his phone because he's a person and he has rights and he has dignity, and we can't just interfere with that.
He has autonomy.
It doesn't matter what the calculations are.
There are things that are intrinsically wrong -- like lying is wrong, like torturing innocent children is wrong.
Kant was very good on this point, and he said it a little better than I'll say it.
He said we should use our reason to figure out the rules by which we should guide our conduct, and then it is our duty to follow those rules.
It's not a matter of calculation.
So let's stop.
We're right in the thick of it, this philosophical thicket.
And this goes on for thousands of years, because these are hard questions, and I've only got 15 minutes.
So let's cut to the chase.
How should we be making our decisions?
Is it Plato, is it Aristotle, is it Kant, is it Mill?
What should we be doing?
What's the answer?
What's the formula that we can use in any situation to determine what we should do, whether we should use that guy's data or not?
What's the formula?
There's not a formula.
There's not a simple answer.
Ethics is hard.
Ethics requires thinking.
And that's uncomfortable.
I know; I spent a lot of my career in artificial intelligence, trying to build machines that could do some of this thinking for us, that could give us answers.
But they can't.
You can't just take human thinking and put it into a machine.
We're the ones who have to do it.
Happily, we're not machines, and we can do it.
Not only can we think, we must.
Hannah Arendt said, "The sad truth is that most evil done in this world is not done by people who choose to be evil.
It arises from not thinking."
That's what she called the "banality of evil."
And the response to that is that we demand the exercise of thinking from every sane person.
So let's do that.
Let's think.
In fact, let's start right now.
Every person in this room do this: think of the last time you had a decision to make where you were worried to do the right thing, where you wondered, "What should I be doing?"
Bring that to mind, and now reflect on that and say, "How did I come up that decision?
What did I do?
Did I follow my gut?
Did I have somebody vote on it?
Or did I punt to legal?"
Or now we have a few more choices.
"Did I evaluate what would be the highest pleasure like Mill would?
Or like Kant, did I use reason to figure out what was intrinsically right?"
Think about it.
Really bring it to mind.
This is important.
It is so important we are going to spend 30 seconds of valuable TEDTalk time doing nothing but thinking about this.
Are you ready?
Go.
Stop.
Good work.
What you just did, that's the first step towards taking responsibility for what we should do with all of our power.
Now the next step -- try this.
Go find a friend and explain to them how you made that decision.
Not right now.
Wait till I finish talking.
Do it over lunch.
And don't just find another technologist friend; find somebody different than you.
Find an artist or a writer -- or, heaven forbid, find a philosopher and talk to them.
In fact, find somebody from the humanities.
Why?
Because they think about problems differently than we do as technologists.
Just a few days ago, right across the street from here, there was hundreds of people gathered together.
It was technologists and humanists at that big BiblioTech Conference.
And they gathered together because the technologists wanted to learn what it would be like to think from a humanities perspective.
You have someone from Google talking to someone who does comparative literature.
You're thinking about the relevance of 17th century French theater -- how does that bear upon venture capital?
Well that's interesting.
That's a different way of thinking.
And when you think in that way, you become more sensitive to the human considerations, which are crucial to making ethical decisions.
So imagine that right now you went and you found your musician friend.
And you're telling him what we're talking about, about our whole data revolution and all this -- maybe even hum a few bars of our theme music.
♫ Dum ta da da dum dum ta da da dum ♫ Well, your musician friend will stop you and say, "You know, the theme music for your data revolution, that's an opera, that's Wagner.
It's based on Norse legend.
It's Gods and mythical creatures fighting over magical jewelry."
That's interesting.
Now it's also a beautiful opera, and we're moved by that opera.
We're moved because it's about the battle between good and evil, about right and wrong.
And we care about right and wrong.
We care what happens in that opera.
We care what happens in "Apocalypse Now."
And we certainly care what happens with our technologies.
We have so much power today, it is up to us to figure out what to do, and that's the good news.
We're the ones writing this opera.
This is our movie.
We figure out what will happen with this technology.
We determine how this will all end.
Thank you.
(Applause)