(Music) Roughly 43,000 years ago, a young cave bear died in the rolling hills on the northwest border of modern day Slovenia.
A thousand years later, a mammoth died in southern Germany.
A few centuries after that, a griffon vulture also died in the same vicinity.
And we know almost nothing about how these animals met their deaths, but these different creatures dispersed across both time and space did share one remarkable fate.
After their deaths, a bone from each of their skeletons was crafted by human hands into a flute.
Think about that for a second.
Imagine you're a caveman, 40,000 years ago.
You've mastered fire.
You've built simple tools for hunting.
You've learned how to craft garments from animal skins to keep yourself warm in the winter.
What would you choose to invent next?
It seems preposterous that you would invent the flute, a tool that created useless vibrations in air molecules.
But that is exactly what our ancestors did.
Now this turns out to be surprisingly common in the history of innovation.
Sometimes people invent things because they want to stay alive or feed their children or conquer the village next door.
But just as often, new ideas come into the world simply because they're fun.
And here's the really strange thing: many of those playful but seemingly frivolous inventions ended up sparking momentous transformations in science, in politics and society.
Take what may be the most important invention of modern times: programmable computers.
Now, the standard story is that computers descend from military technology, since many of the early computers were designed specifically to crack wartime codes or calculate rocket trajectories.
But in fact, the origins of the modern computer are much more playful, even musical, than you might imagine.
The idea behind the flute, of just pushing air through tubes to make a sound, was eventually modified to create the first organ more than 2,000 years ago.
Someone came up with the brilliant idea of triggering sounds by pressing small levers with our fingers, inventing the first musical keyboard.
Now, keyboards evolved from organs to clavichords to harpsichords to the piano, until the middle of the 19th century, when a bunch of inventors finally hit on the idea of using a keyboard to trigger not sounds but letters.
In fact, the very first typewriter was originally called "the writing harpsichord."
Flutes and music led to even more powerful breakthroughs.
About a thousand years ago, at the height of the Islamic Renaissance, three brothers in Baghdad designed a device that was an automated organ.
They called it "the instrument that plays itself."
Now, the instrument was basically a giant music box.
The organ could be trained to play various songs by using instructions encoded by placing pins on a rotating cylinder.
And if you wanted the machine to play a different song, you just swapped a new cylinder in with a different code on it.
This instrument was the first of its kind.
It was programmable.
Now, conceptually, this was a massive leap forward.
The whole idea of hardware and software becomes thinkable for the first time with this invention.
And that incredibly powerful concept didn't come to us as an instrument of war or of conquest, or jasonreeves@example.com.
It came from the strange delight of watching a machine play music.
In fact, the idea of programmable machines was exclusively kept alive by music for about 700 years.
In the 1700s, music-making machines became the playthings of the Parisian elite.
Showmen used the same coded cylinders to control the physical movements of what were called automata, an early kind of robot.
One of the most famous of those robots was, you guessed it, an automated flute player designed by a brilliant French inventor named Jacques de Vaucanson.
And as de Vaucanson was designing his robot musician, he had another idea.
If you could program a machine to make pleasing sounds, why not program it to weave delightful patterns of color out of cloth?
Instead of using the pins of the cylinder to represent musical notes, they would represent threads with different colors.
If you wanted a new pattern for your fabric, you just programmed a new cylinder.
This was the first programmable loom.
Now, the cylinders were too expensive and time-consuming to make, but a half century later, another French inventor named Jacquard hit upon the brilliant idea of using paper-punched cards instead of metal cylinders.
Paper turned out to be much cheaper and more flexible as a way of programming the device.
That punch card system inspired Victorian inventor Charles Babbage to create his analytical engine, the first true programmable computer ever designed.
And punch cards were used by computer programmers as late as the 1970s.
So ask yourself this question: what really made the modern computer possible?
Yes, the military involvement is an important part of the story, but inventing a computer also required other building blocks: music boxes, toy robot flute players, harpsichord keyboards, colorful patterns woven into fabric, and that's just a small part of the story.
There's a long list of world-changing ideas and technologies that came out of play: public museums, rubber, probability theory, the insurance business and many more.
Necessity isn't always the mother of invention.
The playful state of mind is fundamentally exploratory, seeking out new possibilities in the world around us.
And that seeking is why so many experiences that started with simple delight and amusement eventually led us to profound breakthroughs.
Now, I think this has implications for how we teach kids in school and how we encourage innovation in our workspaces, but thinking about play and delight this way also helps us detect what's coming next.
Think about it: if you were sitting there in 1750 trying to figure out the big changes coming to society in the 19th, the 20th centuries, automated machines, computers, artificial intelligence, a programmable flute entertaining the Parisian elite would have been as powerful a clue as anything else at the time.
It seemed like an amusement at best, not useful in any serious way, but it turned out to be the beginning of a tech revolution that would change the world.
You'll find the future wherever people are having the most fun.
If you wake up one morning with 1,000 times the strength you had the night before, how will you handle delicate day-to-day tasks?
Everything must seem so fragile to you since the scale of your strength has expanded one thousand times.
You'd have to be very careful when you're shaking someone's hand so you don't end up breaking their bones or crushing everyone you hug.
And using a fork to pick up a piece of broccoli from a Styrofoam plate without driving the fork through the plate is going to be as difficult as brain surgery.
Say the day comes and you get the chance to save a damsel in distress falling from a helicopter.
So, you hold out your arms, hoping to catch her.
Seconds later, you will find yourself holding her lifeless body.
What happened?
Well, pressure is force divided by area.
The smaller the area, the bigger the pressure.
This is why we can lift heavy objects without breaking our skin, but a tiny needle can make us bleed with just a little poke.
The pressure that will be exerted on her body can be calculated by force divided by the area on the top of your arms that comes in contact with her.
It doesn't matter if your arms are strong enough to catch her body without breaking your bones.
Her spine is not strong enough to be caught by you without being damaged.
Even if you rip off the nearest door to provide a bigger area to catch her with, you still wouldn't be able to save her anyway.
Remember, it's not the fall that kills her, but the sudden stop at the bottom.
Let's say she's falling from a 32 story building, about 300 feet, and you are 6 feet tall, maybe 10 feet on your tippy-toes, with your arms above your head holding a door, in hopes of distributing the pressure across a larger surface area, but all you're doing is essentially moving the ground up by 10 feet.
So, she's now falling from 290 feet, instead of 300 feet, reaching the speed of 173 feet per second just before impact, not counting air resistance.
It's the equivalent of crashing at 94 miles per hour into a wall with a door in front of it.
The only thing that could save her is flying.
But that power comes with its own host of scientific issues.
If you could fly, what you must do is fly up to her, start flying down at the speed she is falling, hold on to her, then gradually slow down until you come to a complete stop.
This process requires a lot of cushion space between the point she starts falling and the ground.
Every second you waste on changing into your superhero costume and flying up to her height, her head is getting that much closer to the pavement!
If she's falling from a high place, and you can't get to her until she's only a few feet above the ground, there's really nothing you can do other than magically turn the pavement into marshmellow to allow her enough time to slowly come to a stop.
Then, break out the chocolate and graham crackers and you've got s'mores.
Mmmm, delicious!
Now, which superpower physics lesson will you explore next?
Shifting body size and content, super speed, flight, super strength, immortality, and invisibility.
In the summer of 2017, a woman was murdered by her partner in Sofia.
The woman, let's call her "V," was beaten for over 50 minutes before she died.
The morning after, her neighbors told the press that they heard her screams, but they didn't intervene.
You see, in Bulgaria and many other societies, domestic violence is typically seen as a private matter.
Neighbors, however, are quick to react to any other kind of noise.
We wanted to expose and affect the absurdity of this.
So we designed an experiment.
We rented the apartment just below V's for one night.
And at 10pm, Maksim, the artist in our group, sat on the drum set we had assembled in the living room and started beating it.
Ten seconds.
Thirty seconds.
Fifty seconds.
A minute.
A light came on in the hallway.
One minute and 20 seconds.
A man was standing at the door, hesitant to press the bell.
One minute and 52 seconds.
The doorbell rang, a ring that could have saved a life.
"Beat." is our project exploring the ominous silence surrounding domestic violence.
We filmed the experiment, and it became instantly viral.
Our campaign amplified the voices of survivors who shared similar stories online.
It equipped neighbors with specific advice, and many committed to taking action.
In a country where every other week, the ground quietly embraces the body of a woman murdered by a partner or a relative, we were loud, and we were heard.
I am an activist, passionate about human rights innovation.
I lead a global organization for socially engaged creative solutions.
In my work, I think about how to make people care and act.
I am here to tell you that creative actions can save the world, creative actions and play.
I know it is weird to talk about play and human rights in the same sentence, but here is why it's important.
More and more, we fear that we can't win this.
Campaigns feel dull, messages drown, people break.
Numerous studies, including a recent one published by Columbia University, show that burnout and depression are widespread amongst activists.
Years ago, I myself was burned out.
In a world of endless ways forward, I felt at my final stop.
So what melts fear or dullness or gloom?
Play.
From this very stage, psychiatrist and play researcher Dr. Stuart Brown said that nothing lights up the brain like play, and that the opposite of play is not work, it's depression.
So to pull out of my own burnout, I decided to turn my activism into what I call today "play-tivism."
(Laughter) When we play, others want to join.
Today, my playground is filled with artists, techies and scientists.
We fuse disciplines in radical collaboration.
Together, we seek new ways to empower activism.
Our outcomes are not meant to be playful, but our process is.
To us, play is an act of resistance.
For example, "Beat.," the project I talked about earlier, is a concept developed by a drummer and a software engineer who didn't know each other two days before they pitched the idea.
"Beat." is the first winner in our lab series where we pair artists and technologists to work on human rights issues.
Other winning concepts include a pop-up bakery that teaches about fake news through beautiful but horrible-tasting cupcakes -- (Laughter) or a board game that puts you in the shoes of a dictator so you get to really grasp the range of tools and tactics of oppression.
We did our first lab just to test the idea, to see where it cracks and if we can make it better.
Today, we are so in love with the format that we put it all online for anyone to implement.
I cannot overstate the value of experimentation in activism.
We can only win if we are not afraid to lose.
When we play, we learn.
A recent study published by Stanford University about the science of what makes people care reconfirms what we have been hearing for years: opinions are changed not from more information but through empathy-inducing experiences.
So learning from science and art, we saw that we can talk about global armed conflict through light bulbs, or address racial inequality in the US through postcards, or tackle the lack of even one single monument of a woman in Sofia by flooding the city with them, and, with all these works, to trigger dialogue, understanding and direct action.
Sometimes, when I talk about taking risks and trying and failing in the context of human rights, I meet raised eyebrows, eyebrows that say, "How irresponsible," or, "How insensitive."
People often mistake play for negligence.
It is not.
Play doesn't just grow our armies stronger or spark better ideas.
In times of painful injustice, play brings the levity we need to be able to breathe.
When we play, we live.
I grew up in a time when all play was forbidden.
My family's lives were crushed by a communist dictatorship.
For my aunt, my grandfather, my father, we always held two funerals: one for their bodies, but, years before that, one for their dreams.
Some of my biggest dreams are nightmares.
I have a nightmare that one day all the past will be forgotten and new clothes will be dripping the blood of past mistakes.
I have a nightmare that one day the lighthouses of our humanity will crumble, corroded by acid waves of hate.
But way more than that, I have hope.
In our fights for justice and freedom, I hope that we play, and that we see the joy and beauty of us playing together.
That's how we win.
Thank you.
(Applause)