Well, I was born with a rare visual condition called achromatopsia, which is total color blindness, so I've never seen color, and I don't know what color looks like, because I come from a grayscale world. To me, the sky is always gray, flowers are always gray, and television is still in black and white. But, since the age of 21, instead of seeing color, I can hear color. In 2003, I started a project with computer scientist Adam Montandon, and the result, with further collaborations with Peter Kese from Slovenia and Matias Lizana from Barcelona, is this electronic eye. It's a color sensor that detects the color frequency in front of me — (Frequency sounds) — and sends this frequency to a chip installed at the back of my head, and I hear the color in front of me through the bone, through bone conduction. (Frequency sounds) So, for example, if I have, like — This is the sound of purple. (Frequency sounds) For example, this is the sound of grass. (Frequency sounds) This is red, like TED. (Frequency sounds) This is the sound of a dirty sock. (Laughter) Which is like yellow, this one. So I've been hearing color all the time for eight years, since 2004, so I find it completely normal now to hear color all the time. At the start, though, I had to memorize the names you give for each color, so I had to memorize the notes, but after some time, all this information became a perception. I didn't have to think about the notes. And after some time, this perception became a feeling. I started to have favorite colors, and I started to dream in colors. So, when I started to dream in color is when I felt that the software and my brain had united, because in my dreams, it was my brain creating electronic sounds. It wasn't the software, so that's when I started to feel like a cyborg. It's when I started to feel that the cybernetic device was no longer a device. It had become a part of my body, an extension of my senses, and after some time, it even became a part of my official image. This is my passport from 2004. You're not allowed to appear on U.K. passports with electronic equipment, but I insisted to the passport office that what they were seeing was actually a new part of my body, an extension of my brain, and they finally accepted me to appear with the passport photo. So, life has changed dramatically since I hear color, because color is almost everywhere, so the biggest change for example is going to an art gallery, I can listen to a Picasso, for example. So it's like I'm going to a concert hall, because I can listen to the paintings. And supermarkets, I find this is very shocking, it's very, very attractive to walk along a supermarket. It's like going to a nightclub. It's full of different melodies. (Laughter) Yeah. Especially the aisle with cleaning products. It's just fabulous. (Laughter) Also, the way I dress has changed. Before, I used to dress in a way that it looked good. Now I dress in a way that it sounds good. (Laughter) (Applause) So today I'm dressed in C major, so it's quite a happy chord. (Laughter) If I had to go to a funeral, though, I would dress in B minor, which would be turquoise, purple and orange. (Laughter) Also, food, the way I look at food has changed, because now I can display the food on a plate, so I can eat my favorite song. (Laughter) So depending on how I display it, I can hear and I can compose music with food. So imagine a restaurant where we can have, like, Lady Gaga salads as starters. (Laughter) I mean, this would get teenagers to eat their vegetables, probably. And also, some Rachmaninov piano concertos as main dishes, and some Bjork or Madonna desserts, that would be a very exciting restaurant where you can actually eat songs. Also, the way I perceive beauty has changed, because when I look at someone, I hear their face, so someone might look very beautiful but sound terrible. (Laughter) And it might happen the opposite, the other way around. So I really enjoy creating, like, sound portraits of people. Instead of drawing someone's face, like drawing the shape, I point at them with the eye and I write down the different notes I hear, and then I create sound portraits. Here's some faces. (Musical chords) Yeah, Nicole Kidman sounds good. (Laughter) Some people, I would never relate, but they sound similar. Prince Charles has some similarities with Nicole Kidman. They have similar sound of eyes. So you relate people that you wouldn't relate, and you can actually also create concerts by looking at the audience faces. So I connect the eye, and then I play the audience's faces. The good thing about this is, if the concert doesn't sound good, it's their fault. It's not my fault, because — (Laughter) And so another thing that happens is that I started having this secondary effect that normal sounds started to become color. I heard a telephone tone, and it felt green because it sounded just like the color green. The BBC beeps, they sound turquoise, and listening to Mozart became a yellow experience, so I started to paint music and paint people's voices, because people's voices have frequencies that I relate to color. And here's some music translated into color. For example, Mozart, "Queen of the Night," looks like this. (Music) Very yellow and very colorful, because there's many different frequencies. (Music) And this is a completely different song. (Music) It's Justin Bieber's "Baby." (Laughter) (Music) It is very pink and very yellow. So, also voices, I can transform speeches into color, for example, these are two very well-known speeches. One of them is Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream," and the other one is Hitler. And I like to exhibit these paintings in the exhibition halls without labels, and then I ask people, "Which one do you prefer?" And most people change their preference when I tell them that the one on the left is Hitler and the one on the right is Martin Luther King. So I got to a point when I was able to perceive 360 colors, just like human vision. I was able to differentiate all the degrees of the color wheel. But then, I just thought that this human vision wasn't good enough. There's many, many more colors around us that we cannot perceive, but that electronic eyes can perceive. So I decided to continue extending my color senses, and I added infrared and I added ultraviolet to the color-to-sound scale, so now I can hear colors that the human eye cannot perceive. For example, perceiving infrared is good because you can actually detect if there's movement detectors in a room. I can hear if someone points at me with a remote control. And the good thing about perceiving ultraviolet is that you can hear if it's a good day or a bad day to sunbathe, because ultraviolet is a dangerous color, a color that can actually kill us, so I think we should all have this wish to perceive things that we cannot perceive. That's why, two years ago, I created the Cyborg Foundation, which is a foundation that tries to help people become a cyborg, tries to encourage people to extend their senses by using technology as part of the body. We should all think that knowledge comes from our senses, so if we extend our senses, we will consequently extend our knowledge. I think life will be much more exciting when we stop creating applications for mobile phones and we start creating applications for our own body. I think this will be a big, big change that we will see during this century. So I do encourage you all to think about which senses you'd like to extend. I would encourage you to become a cyborg. You won't be alone. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) We all have milestones in life that we remember so vividly. The first one for me was when I was entering kindergarten. My big brother was in school, and by golly, it was my time. And I went trottin' down that hallway. I was so excited, I almost wet myself. And I go to the door, and there was the teacher with a warm welcome, and she took me into the classroom, showed me my little cubbyhole -- we all remember those little cubbyholes, don't we -- and we put our stuff in there. And then she said, "Go over to the circle and play with the kids until class starts." So I went over there and plopped down like I owned the place, and I'm playing, and all of a sudden, the boy next to me, he was wearing a white shirt with blue shorts. I remember it like it was yesterday. Suddenly he stopped playing and he said, "Why are you so short?" And I just kept playing. I didn't think he was talking to me. (Laughter) And in a louder voice, he said, "Hey, why are you so short?" So I looked up and I said, "What are you talking about? Let's just play. We're happy. I've been waiting for this." And so we played, and about a minute later, the girl next to him, in a white shirt and a pink skirt, stood up, put her hands on her hips, and said, "Yeah, why do you look so different?" And I went, "What are you talking about? I don't look different. I'm not short. Again, let's just play." About this time, I looked all around the circle I was in, and all the kids had stopped playing and they were all webblaura@example.org. And I'm thinking -- in today's language, it would be "OMG" or "WTF." (Laughter) What just happened? So all the confidence that I went in with that morning was withering away as the morning went on and the questions kept coming. And at the end of the morning, before I went home, the teacher had us in a circle, and I actually found myself outside of the circle. I couldn't webblaura@example.org. I could not understand what just happened. And over the next few years, I hated to go out in public. I felt every stare, every giggle, every pointed finger, not the finger, but every pointed finger, and I hated it. I would hide behind my parents' legs like nobody could see me. And as a child, you can't understand another child's curiosity, nor an adult's ignorance. It became very apparent to me that the real world was not built for someone of my size, both literally or figuratively. And so I have no anonymity, as you can probably tell, and while you can see my size, we all go through many challenges through our lifetime. And some you can see, like mine. Most you can't. You can't tell if someone's dealing with a mental illness, or they're struggling with their gender identity, they're caring for an aging parent, they're having financial difficulty. You can't see that kind of stuff. So while you can see one of my challenges is my size, seeing does not mean you understand what it's truly to be me on a daily basis, or what I go through. And so I'm here to debunk a myth. I do not believe you can walk in someone else's shoes, and because of that, we must adopt a new way of giving of ourselves. Simply stated, I will never know what it's like to be you and you will never know what it's like to be me. I cannot face your fears or chase your dreams, and you can't do that for me, but we can be supportive of each other. Instead of trying to walk in each other's shoes, we must adopt a new way of giving of ourselves. I learned at an early age that I did have to do some things different than most people, but I also learned there were things I was on equal footing with, and one of those was the classroom. Heh, heh, heh. I was equal. As a matter of fact, I excelled in the classroom. This was vitally important, I discovered as I grew older and realized I wasn't going to be able to do a physical job. I needed an education. So I went on and got a university degree, but I felt to be one step ahead of everyone for employment, I needed to have an advanced university degree, so I went ahead and got that. Now I'm ready for my interview. Remember your first interview? What am I going to wear? What questions? And don't forget that firm handshake. I was right there with you. So 24 hours before my interview, a friend of mine who I've known all my life called and said, "Michele, the building you're going in has steps." And she knew I couldn't climb steps. So suddenly, my focus changed. In my shoes, I was worried about how am I going to get there? So I went early and found a loading dock and got in and had a great interview. They had no idea what I went through for the day and that's OK. You're probably thinking my greatest challenge that day was the interview, or getting in the building. In reality, my biggest challenge that day was getting through the loading dock without getting run over. I am very vulnerable in certain situations: airports, hallways, parking lots, loading docks. And so I have to be very careful. I have to anticipate and be flexible and move as quickly as I can sometimes. So I got the job, and in my current role I travel quite a bit. And travel is a challenge for all of us these days. And so you probably get to the airport, run through security, get to the gate. Did I get my aisle seat or my window seat? Did I get my upgrade? Me, first of all, I don't run through anything. (Laughter) And I especially don't run through the TSA because I get to experience the personal patdown. I won't comment on that. And then I make my way to the gate, and with my gift of gab that my parents said I was born with, I talk to the gate agent, and then I say, "By the way, my scooter weighs this much, I have a dry cell battery, and I can drive it down to the door of the plane." Also, the day before, I had called the city where I'm traveling to to find out where I could rent a scooter in case mine gets broken on the way. So in my shoes, it's a little bit different. When I get onto the plane, I use my gift of gab to ask the lady to put my bag up, and they graciously do. I try not to eat or drink on a plane because I don't want to have to get up and walk on the plane, but nature has its own schedule, and not long ago, it knocked and I answered. So I walked up to the front of the plane and gabbed with the flight attendant, and said, "Can you watch the door? I can't reach the lock." So I'm in there doing my business, and the door flies open. And there's a gentleman there with a look of horror on his face. I'm sure I had the same look. As I came out, I noticed that he was sitting right across from me, and he's in total, complete embarrassment. So I walk up to him and I quietly go, "Are you going to remember this as much as I am?" (Laughter) And he goes, "I think so." (Laughter) Now, while he's probably not talking about it publicly, I am. (Laughter) But we talked for the rest of the flight, and we got to know each other, our families, sports, work, and when we landed, he said, "Michele, I noticed someone put your bag up. Can I get that for you?" And I said, "Of course, thank you." And we wished each other well, and the most important thing that day was that he was not going to leave with that embarrassment, that experience of embarrassment. He won't forget it, and neither will I, but I think he will remember more our chat and our different perspectives. When you travel internationally, it can be even more challenging in certain ways. A few years ago, I was in Zanzibar, and I come wheeling in, and think about that. Short, white, blond woman in a chair. That doesn't probably happen every day. So I go up, and with my gift of gab, I start to talk to the agent. So friendly, and I ask about their culture and so forth, and I notice there wasn't a jet bridge. So I had to kind of say, "Not only do you have to lift my chair, I could use some help getting up the steps." So we got to spend about an hour together while we waited for the flight, and it was the most magnificent hour. Our perspective changed for both of us that day. And once I got on the flight, he patted me on the back and wished me well, and I thanked him so much. And again, I think he's going to remember that experience more than when I first came in, and there was a bit of hesitation. And as you notice, I get a lot of help. I would not be where I am today if it was not for my family, my friends, my colleagues and the many strangers that help me every single day of my life. And it's important that we all have a support system. Asking for help is a strength, not a weakness. (Applause) We all need help throughout our lifetime, but it is just as important that we are part of other people's support systems. We must adopt that way of giving back. We all obviously have a role to play in our own successes, but think about the role we have to play in other people's successes, just like people do for me every single day. It's vitally important that we help each other, because society is increasingly placing people in silos based on biases and ideologies. And we must look past the surface and be confronted with the truth that none of us are what you can see. There's more to us than that, and we're all dealing with things that you cannot see. So living a life free of judgment allows all of us to share those experiences together and have a totally different perspective, just like the couple of people I mentioned earlier in my stories. So remember, the only shoes you truly can walk in are your own. I cannot walk in yours. I know you can't walk in my size 1s -- (Laughter) but you can try. But we can do something better than that. With compassion, courage and understanding, we can walk side by side and support one another, and think about how society can change if we all do that instead of judging on only what you can see. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Dialogue gives a story color, makes it exciting and moves it forward. Romeo: O, wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied? Juliet: What satisfaction canst thou have tonight? Romeo: The exchange of thy love's faithful vows for mine. Without dialogue: (cricket sounds) So what goes into writing effective dialogue? Well, there are social skills: making friends, solving conflicts, being pleasant and polite. We won't be using any of those today. Instead, we'll be working on -- let's call them "anti-social skills." If you're a writer, you may already have a few of these. The first is eavesdropping. If you're riding a bus and hear an interesting conversation, you could write it all down. Of course, when you write fiction, you're not describing real people, you're making up characters. But sometimes the words you overhear can give you ideas. "I did not," says one person. "I saw you," the other replies. Who might be saying those words? Maybe it's two kids in a class, and the boy thinks the girl pushed him. Maybe it's a couple, but one of them is a vampire, and the woman vampire saw the man flirting with a zombie. Or maybe not. Maybe the characters are a teenager and his mother, and they're supposed to be vegetarians, but the mother saw him eating a burger. So let's say you've decided on some characters. This is anti-social skill number two: start pretending they're real. What are they like? Where are they from? What music do they listen to? Spend some time with them. If you're on a bus, think about what they might be doing if they were there too. Would they talk on the phone, listen to music, draw pictures, sleep? What we say depends on who we are. An older person might speak differently than a younger person. Someone from the south might speak differently than someone from the north. Once you know your characters, you can figure out how they talk. At this stage, it's helpful to use anti-social skill number three: muttering to yourself. When you speak your character's words, you can hear whether they sound natural, and fix them if necessary. Remember, most people are usually pretty informal when they speak. They use simple language and contractions. So, "Do not attempt to lie to me" sounds more natural as "Don't try to lie to me." Also keep it short. People tend to speak in short bursts, not lengthy speeches. And let the dialogue do the work. Ask yourself: do I really need that adverb? For instance, "'Your money or your life,' she said threateningly." Here, "threateningly" is redundant, so you can get rid of it. But if the words and the actions don't match, an adverb can be helpful. "'Your money or your life,' she said lovingly." So, to recap: First, eavesdrop. Next, pretend imaginary people are real. Finally, mutter to yourself, and write it all down. You already have everything you need. This is fictional dialogue, or "How to Hear Voices in Your Head." You've found the hidden switches, evaded the secret traps, and now your expedition finally stands at the heart of the ancient temple inside The Lost City. But as you study the inscriptions in the near total darkness, two of the eight graduate students accompanying you bump into the alter. Suddenly, two whisps of green smoke burst forth and the walls begin to shake. Fleeing for your lives, you come to a room you passed before with five hallways, including the one to the altar and the one leading back outside. The giant sandglass in the center is now flowing, with less than an hour before it empties, and the rumbling tells you that you don't want to be around when that happens. From what you recall of your way here, it would take about 20 minutes to reach the exit at a fast pace. You know this is the last junction before the exit, but your trail markings have been erased, and no one remembers the way. If nine of you split up, there should be just enough time for each group to explore one of the four halls ahead and report back to this room, with everyone then making a run down the correct path. There's just one problem; the inscriptions told of the altar's curse: the spirits of the city's King and Queen possessing intruders and leading them to their doom through deception. Remembering the green smoke, you realize two of the students have been cursed. At any time, one or both of them might lie, though they also might tell the truth. You know for sure that the curse didn't get you, but you don't know which students can't be trusted, and because the possessed students may lie only occasionally, there is no guaranteed way to test them to determine which are cursed. Can you figure out a way to ensure that you all escape? Don't worry about the possessed students attacking or otherwise harming the others. This curse only affects their communication. Pause the video now if you want to figure it out by yourself! Answer in: 3 Answer in: 2 Answer in: 1 The first thing to realize is that since you know you aren't possessed, you can explore one of the halls alone. This leaves eight students for the remaining three paths. Sending groups of four down just two of the paths won't work because if one group came back split two versus two, you'd have to guess who to trust. But splitting them into one pair and two trios would work every time, and here's why. The possessed students might lie, or they might not, but you know there are only two of them, while the other six will always tell the truth. When each group returns to the hall, all of its members will either give the same report or argue about whether they found the exit. If a trio returns in total agreement, then you know none of them are lying. With the pair, you can't be sure either way, but all you need is reliable evidence about three of the four paths. The fourth you can figure out using the process of elimination. Of course, none of this matters if you're lucky enough to find the exit yourself, but otherwise, putting everything together leaves you with three possibilities. If each group gives a consistent answer, either everyone is telling the truth, or the two possessed students are paired together. In either case, ignore the duo. If there's only one group arguing, both others must be telling the truth, and if there are two conflicts, then the possessed students are in separate groups and you can safely trust the majority in both trios since at least two people in each will be truthful. The temple collapses behind you as greenish vapors escape from two of the students. You're all safe and free from the curse. After that ordeal, you tell your group they all deserve a vacation, and you just happen to have another expedition coming up. I'd like to start with a short story. It's about a little boy whose father was a history buff and who used to take him by the hand to visit the ruins of an ancient metropolis on the outskirts of their camp. They would always stop by to visit these huge winged bulls that used to guard the gates of that ancient metropolis, and the boy used to be scared of these winged bulls, but at the same time they excited him. And the dad used to use those bulls to tell the boy stories about that civilization and their work. Let's fast-forward to the San Francisco Bay Area many decades later, where I started a technology company that brought the world its first 3D laser scanning system. Let me show you how it works. Female Voice: Long range laser scanning by sending out a pulse that's a laser beam of light. The system measures the beam's time of flight, recording the time it takes for the light to hit a surface and make its return. With two mirrors, the scanner calculates the beam's horizontal and vertical angles, giving accurate x, y, and z coordinates. The point is then recorded into a 3D visualization program. All of this happens in seconds. Ben Kacyra: You can see here, these systems are extremely fast. They collect millions of points at a time with very high accuracy and very high resolution. A surveyor with traditional survey tools would be hard-pressed to produce maybe 500 points in a whole day. These babies would be producing something like ten thousand points a second. So, as you can imagine, this was a paradigm shift in the survey and construction as well as in reality capture industry. Approximately ten years ago, my wife and I started a foundation to do good, and right about that time, the magnificent Bamiyan Buddhas, hundred and eighty foot tall in Afghanistan, were blown up by the Taliban. They were gone in an instant. And unfortunately, there was no detailed documentation of these Buddhas. This clearly devastated me, and I couldn't help but wonder about the fate of my old friends, the winged bulls, and the fate of the many, many heritage sites all over the world. Both my wife and I were so touched by this that we decided to expand the mission of our foundation to include digital heritage preservation of world sites. We called the project CyArk, which stands for Cyber Archive. To date, with the help of a global network of partners, we've completed close to fifty projects. Let me show you some of them: Chichen Itza, Rapa Nui -- and what you're seeing here are the cloud of points -- Babylon, Rosslyn Chapel, Pompeii, and our latest project, Mt. Rushmore, which happened to be one of our most challenging projects. As you see here, we had to develop a special rig to bring the scanner up close and personal. The results of our work in the field are used to produce media and deliverables to be used by conservators and researchers. We also produce media for dissemination to the public -- free through the CyArk website. These would be used for education, cultural tourism, etc. What you're looking at in here is a 3D viewer that we developed that would allow the display and manipulation of [the] cloud of points in real time, cutting sections through them and extracting dimensions. This happens to be the cloud of points for Tikal. In here you see a traditional 2D architectural engineering drawing that's used for preservation, and of course we tell the stories through fly-throughs. And here, this is a fly-through the cloud of points of Tikal, and here you see it rendered and photo-textured with the photography that we take of the site. And so this is not a video. This is actual 3D points with two to three millimeter accuracy. And of course the data can be used to develop 3D models that are very accurate and very detailed. And here you're looking at a model that's extracted from the cloud of points for Stirling Castle. It's used for studies, for visualization, as well as for education. And finally, we produce mobile apps that include narrated virtual tools. The more I got involved in the heritage field, the more it became clear to me that we are losing the sites and the stories faster than we can physically preserve them. Of course, earthquakes and all the natural phenomena -- floods, tornadoes, etc. -- take their toll. However, what occurred to me was human-caused destruction, which was not only causing a significant portion of the destruction, but actually it was accelerating. This includes arson, urban sprawl, acid rain, not to mention terrorism and wars. It was getting more and more apparent that we're fighting a losing battle. We're losing our sites and the stories, and basically we're losing a piece -- and a significant piece -- of our collective memory. Imagine us as a human race not knowing where we came from. Luckily, in the last two or three decades, digital technologies have been developing that have helped us to develop tools that we've brought to bear in the digital preservation, in our digital preservation war. This includes, for example, the 3D laser scanning systems, ever more powerful personal computers, 3D graphics, high-definition digital photography, not to mention the Internet. Because of this accelerated pace of destruction, it became clear to us that we needed to challenge ourselves and our partners to accelerate our work. And we created a project we call the CyArk 500 Challenge -- and that is to digitally preserve 500 World Heritage Sites in five years. We do have the technology that's scaleable, and our network of global partners has been expanding and can be expanded at a rapid rate, so we're comfortable that this task can be accomplished. However, to me, the 500 is really just the first 500. In order to sustain our work into the future, we use technology centers where we partner with local universities and colleges to take the technology to them, whereby they then can help us with digital preservation of their heritage sites, and at the same time, it gives them the technology to benefit from in the future. Let me close with another short story. Two years ago, we were approached by a partner of ours to digitally preserve an important heritage site, a UNESCO heritage site in Uganda, the Royal Kasubi Tombs. The work was done successfully in the field, and the data was archived and publicly disseminated through the CyArk website. Last March, we received very sad news. The Royal Tombs had been destroyed by suspected arson. A few days later, we received a call: "Is the data available and can it be used for reconstruction?" Our answer, of course, was yes. Let me leave you with a final thought. Our heritage is much more than our collective memory -- it's our collective treasure. We owe it to our children, our grandchildren and the generations we will never meet to keep it safe and to pass it along. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Well, I'm staying here because we wanted to demonstrate to you the power of this technology and so, while I've been speaking, you have been scanned. (Laughter) The two wizards that I have that are behind the curtain will help me bring the results on the screen. (Applause) This is all in 3D and of course you can fly through the cloud of points. You can look at it from on top, from the ceiling. You can look from different vantage points, but I'm going to ask Doug to zoom in on an individual in the crowd, just to show the amount of detail that we can create. So you have been digitally preserved in about four minutes. (Laughter) I'd like to thank the wizards here. We were very lucky to have two of our partners participate in this: the Historic Scotland, and the Glasgow School of Art. I'd like to also thank personally the efforts of David Mitchell, who is the Director of Conservation at Historic Scotland. David. (Applause) And Doug Pritchard, who's the Head of Visualization at the Glasgow School of Art. Let's give them a hand. (Applause) Thank you. How many of you are creatives, designers, engineers, entrepreneurs, artists, or maybe you just have a really big imagination? Show of hands? (Cheers) That's most of you. I have some news for us creatives. Over the course of the next 20 years, more will change around the way we do our work than has happened in the last 2,000. In fact, I think we're at the dawn of a new age in human history. Now, there have been four major historical eras defined by the way we work. The Hunter-Gatherer Age lasted several million years. And then the Agricultural Age lasted several thousand years. The Industrial Age lasted a couple of centuries. And now the Information Age has lasted just a few decades. And now today, we're on the cusp of our next great era as a species. Welcome to the Augmented Age. In this new era, your natural human capabilities are going to be augmented by computational systems that help you think, robotic systems that help you make, and a digital nervous system that connects you to the world far beyond your natural senses. Let's start with cognitive augmentation. How many of you are augmented cyborgs? (Laughter) I would actually argue that we're already augmented. Imagine you're at a party, and somebody asks you a question that you don't know the answer to. If you have one of these, in a few seconds, you can know the answer. But this is just a primitive beginning. Even Siri is just a passive tool. In fact, for the last three-and-a-half million years, the tools that we've had have been completely passive. They do exactly what we tell them and nothing more. Our very first tool only cut where we struck it. The chisel only carves where the artist points it. And even our most advanced tools do nothing without our explicit direction. In fact, to date, and this is something that frustrates me, we've always been limited by this need to manually push our wills into our tools -- like, manual, literally using our hands, even with computers. But I'm more like Scotty in "Star Trek." (Laughter) I want to have a conversation with a computer. I want to say, "Computer, let's design a car," and the computer shows me a car. And I say, "No, more fast-looking, and less German," and bang, the computer shows me an option. (Laughter) That conversation might be a little ways off, probably less than many of us think, but right now, we're working on it. Tools are making this leap from being passive to being generative. Generative design tools use a computer and algorithms to synthesize geometry to come up with new designs all by themselves. All it needs are your goals and your constraints. I'll give you an example. In the case of this aerial drone chassis, all you would need to do is tell it something like, it has four propellers, you want it to be as lightweight as possible, and you need it to be aerodynamically efficient. Then what the computer does is it explores the entire solution space: every single possibility that solves and meets your criteria -- millions of them. It takes big computers to do this. But it comes back to us with designs that we, by ourselves, never could've imagined. And the computer's coming up with this stuff all by itself -- no one ever drew anything, and it started completely from scratch. And by the way, it's no accident that the drone body looks just like the pelvis of a flying squirrel. (Laughter) It's because the algorithms are designed to work the same way evolution does. What's exciting is we're starting to see this technology out in the real world. We've been working with Airbus for a couple of years on this concept plane for the future. It's a ways out still. But just recently we used a generative-design AI to come up with this. This is a 3D-printed cabin partition that's been designed by a computer. It's stronger than the original yet half the weight, and it will be flying in the Airbus A320 later this year. So computers can now generate; they can come up with their own solutions to our well-defined problems. But they're not intuitive. They still have to start from scratch every single time, and that's because they never learn. Unlike Maggie. (Laughter) Maggie's actually smarter than our most advanced design tools. What do I mean by that? If her owner picks up that leash, Maggie knows with a fair degree of certainty it's time to go for a walk. And how did she learn? Well, every time the owner picked up the leash, they went for a walk. And Maggie did three things: she had to pay attention, she had to remember what happened and she had to retain and create a pattern in her mind. Interestingly, that's exactly what computer scientists have been trying to get AIs to do for the last 60 or so years. Back in 1952, they built this computer that could play Tic-Tac-Toe. Big deal. Then 45 years later, in 1997, Deep Blue beats webblaura@example.org. 2011, Watson beats these two humans at Jeopardy, which is much harder for a computer to play than chess is. In fact, rather than working from predefined recipes, Watson had to use reasoning to overcome his human opponents. And then a couple of weeks ago, DeepMind's AlphaGo beats the world's best human at Go, which is the most difficult game that we have. In fact, in Go, there are more possible moves than there are atoms in the universe. So in order to win, what AlphaGo had to do was develop intuition. And in fact, at some points, AlphaGo's programmers didn't understand why AlphaGo was doing what it was doing. And things are moving really fast. I mean, consider -- in the space of a human lifetime, computers have gone from a child's game to what's recognized as the pinnacle of strategic thought. What's basically happening is computers are going from being like Spock to being a lot more like Kirk. (Laughter) Right? From pure logic to intuition. Would you cross this bridge? Most of you are saying, "Oh, hell no!" (Laughter) And you arrived at that decision in a split second. You just sort of knew that bridge was unsafe. And that's exactly the kind of intuition that our deep-learning systems are starting to develop right now. Very soon, you'll literally be able to show something you've made, you've designed, to a computer, and it will look at it and say, "Sorry, homie, that'll never work. You have to try again." Or you could ask it if people are going to like your next song, or your next flavor of ice cream. Or, much more importantly, you could work with a computer to solve a problem that we've never faced before. For instance, climate change. We're not doing a very good job on our own, we could certainly use all the help we can get. That's what I'm talking about, technology amplifying our cognitive abilities so we can imagine and design things that were simply out of our reach as plain old un-augmented humans. So what about making all of this crazy new stuff that we're going to invent and design? I think the era of human augmentation is as much about the physical world as it is about the virtual, intellectual realm. How will technology augment us? In the physical world, robotic systems. OK, there's certainly a fear that robots are going to take jobs away from humans, and that is true in certain sectors. But I'm much more interested in this idea that humans and robots working together are going to augment each other, and start to inhabit a new space. This is our applied research lab in San Francisco, where one of our areas of focus is advanced robotics, specifically, human-robot collaboration. And this is Bishop, one of our robots. As an experiment, we set it up to help a person working in construction doing repetitive tasks -- tasks like cutting out holes for outlets or light switches in drywall. (Laughter) So, Bishop's human partner can tell what to do in plain English and with simple gestures, kind of like talking to a dog, and then Bishop executes on those instructions with perfect precision. We're using the human for what the human is good at: awareness, perception and decision making. And we're using the robot for what it's good at: precision and repetitiveness. Here's another cool project that Bishop worked on. The goal of this project, which we called the HIVE, was to prototype the experience of humans, computers and robots all working together to solve a highly complex design problem. The humans acted as labor. They cruised around the construction site, they manipulated the bamboo -- which, by the way, because it's a non-isomorphic material, is super hard for robots to deal with. But then the robots did this fiber winding, which was almost impossible for a human to do. And then we had an AI that was controlling everything. It was telling the humans what to do, telling the robots what to do and keeping track of thousands of individual components. What's interesting is, building this pavilion was simply not possible without human, robot and AI augmenting each other. OK, I'll share one more project. This one's a little bit crazy. We're working with Amsterdam-based artist Joris Laarman and his team at MX3D to generatively design and robotically print the world's first autonomously manufactured bridge. So, Joris and an AI are designing this thing right now, as we speak, in Amsterdam. And when they're done, we're going to hit "Go," and robots will start 3D printing in stainless steel, and then they're going to keep printing, without human intervention, until the bridge is finished. So, as computers are going to augment our ability to imagine and design new stuff, robotic systems are going to help us build and make things that we've never been able to make before. But what about our ability to sense and control these things? What about a nervous system for the things that we make? Our nervous system, the human nervous system, tells us everything that's going on around us. But the nervous system of the things we make is webblaura@example.org. For instance, a car doesn't tell the city's public works department that it just hit a pothole at the corner of Broadway and Morrison. A building doesn't tell its designers whether or not the people inside like being there, and the toy manufacturer doesn't know if a toy is actually being played with -- how and where and whether or not it's any fun. Look, I'm sure that the designers imagined this lifestyle for Barbie when they designed her. (Laughter) But what if it turns out that Barbie's actually really lonely? (Laughter) If the designers had known what was really happening in the real world with their designs -- the road, the building, Barbie -- they could've used that knowledge to create an experience that was better for the user. What's missing is a nervous system connecting us to all of the things that we design, make and use. What if all of you had that kind of information flowing to you from the things you create in the real world? With all of the stuff we make, we spend a tremendous amount of money and energy -- in fact, last year, about two trillion dollars -- convincing people to buy the things we've made. But if you had this connection to the things that you design and create after they're out in the real world, after they've been sold or launched or whatever, we could actually change that, and go from making people want our stuff, to just making stuff that people want in the first place. The good news is, we're working on digital nervous systems that connect us to the things we design. We're working on one project with a couple of guys down in Los Angeles called the Bandito Brothers and their team. And one of the things these guys do is build insane cars that do absolutely insane things. These guys are crazy -- (Laughter) in the best way. And what we're doing with them is taking a traditional race-car chassis and giving it a nervous system. So we instrumented it with dozens of sensors, put a world-class driver behind the wheel, took it out to the desert and drove the hell out of it for a week. And the car's nervous system captured everything that was happening to the car. We captured four billion data points; all of the forces that it was subjected to. And then we did something crazy. We took all of that data, and plugged it into a generative-design AI we call "Dreamcatcher." So what do get when you give a design tool a nervous system, and you ask it to build you the ultimate car chassis? You get this. This is something that a human could never have designed. Except a human did design this, but it was a human that was augmented by a generative-design AI, a digital nervous system and robots that can actually fabricate something like this. So if this is the future, the Augmented Age, and we're going to be augmented cognitively, physically and perceptually, what will that look like? What is this wonderland going to be like? I think we're going to see a world where we're moving from things that are fabricated to things that are farmed. Where we're moving from things that are constructed to that which is grown. We're going to move from being isolated to being connected. And we'll move away from extraction to embrace aggregation. I also think we'll shift from craving obedience from our things to valuing autonomy. Thanks to our augmented capabilities, our world is going to change dramatically. We're going to have a world with more