(Music) (Music) (Applause) (Applause)
What is love?
Seriously, though, what is it?
What is love?
A verb?
A noun?
A universal truth?
An ideal?
A common thread of all religions?
A cult?
A neurological phenomenon?
There's no shortage of answers.
Some are all-encompassing.
It conquers all.
It's all you need.
It's all there is.
These are all comparisons, though, ways of defining it by contrast, by saying it's more important than all other things, but is it?
Sure, love matters more than your standard turkey sandwich, but does it matter more than shelter?
Or sanity?
Or an exceptional turkey sandwich?
No matter your answer, you're just ranking it, not defining it.
Another challenge to defining love is we often try to do so while falling into it or out of it.
Would you trust someone who just won the lottery to accurately define the concept of currency?
Or, I don't know, ask a guy to define bears while he's fending them off?
Or is romance not like winning the lottery?
Are break ups not like bear attacks?
Bad comparisons?
That's my point.
I'm not thinking right because I'm in love, so ha!
Taking a step back, or taking a cold shower, whatever, love is potentially the most intensely thought about thing in all of human history.
And despite centuries upon centuries of obsession, it still overwhelms us.
Some say it's a feeling, a magical emotion, a feeling for someone like you've never felt before.
But feelings are fluid, not very concrete foundation for a definition.
Sometimes you hate the person you love.
Plus, come on, you've felt feelings like it before, sort of in miniature.
Your relationships with your family shape your relationships with partners.
And your love for your partner may be in its own dynamic relationship, healthy or totally weird, with the love of your parents and siblings.
Love is also a set of behaviors we associate with the feeling: Holding hands, kissing, hugging, public displays of affection, dating, marriage, having kids, or just sex.
But these loving actions can be subjective or culturally relative.
You may love or be someone who can't have kids or doesn't want to, who believes in marriage but also in divorce, who's from a culture where people don't really date the way we think of dating, or who just doesn't want to make out on the bus.
But if love is a thing that we can define, then how can it mean opposite things for so many people?
So, maybe love's just all in your head, a personal mystery winding through your neural pathways and lighting up pleasing, natural rewards in your nervous system.
Perhaps these rewards are addictive.
Perhaps love is a temporary or permanent addiction to a person, just like a person can be addicted to a drug.
I don't mean to be edgy like some pop song.
Evidence shows that chemicals in your brain stimulated by another person can make you develop a habit for that person.
The person comes to satisfy a physiological craving, and you want more.
But then sometimes, slowly or suddenly, you don't.
You've fallen out of love, become unaddicted, for a spell.
What happened?
Does one develop a tolerance or hit a limit?
Why do some lovers stay addicted to each other their entire lives?
Perhaps to create new lives, to proliferate their species?
Maybe love is just human DNA's optimal method for bringing about its own replication.
There are evolutionary arguments regarding every human mating behavior, from how we display ourselves to potential mates, to how we treat each other in relationships, to how we raise kids.
Thus, some argue that the feeling you think you feel in your soul is just biology's way to make you continue our species.
Nature has selected you to have crushes on hotties, just like it makes monkeys have crushes on hot monkeys, and biology marches on.
But is that all love is?
Or, perhaps worse, is it just a construct, some fake concept we all convince each other to try to live up to for a fake sense of purpose?
Maybe it is a construct, but let's be more precise about what a construct is because love is constructed from reality: Our experiences, feelings, brain chemistry, cultural expectations, our lives.
And this edifice can be viewed through countless dimensions: scientific, emotional, historical, spiritual, legal, or just personal.
If no two people are the same, no two people's love is the same either.
So, in every loving relationship, there's a lot to talk about and partners should be open to that, or the relationship probably won't last.
Love is always up for discussion and, sure, under construction.
So, if we can't define it, that's a good sign.
It means we're all still making it.
Wait, I didn't mean, you know what I meant.
In 2012, a team of Japanese and Danish researchers set a world record, transmitting 1 petabit of data— that’s 10,000 hours of high-def video— over a fifty-kilometer cable, in a second.
This wasn’t just any cable.
It was a souped-up version of fiber optics— the hidden network that links our planet and makes the internet possible.
For decades, long-distance communications between cities and countries were carried by electrical signals, in wires made of copper.
This was slow and inefficient, with metal wires limiting data rates and power lost as wasted heat.
But in the late 20th century, engineers mastered a far superior method of transmission.
Instead of metal, glass can be carefully melted and drawn into flexible fiber strands, hundreds of kilometers long and no thicker than human hair.
And instead of electricity, these strands carry pulses of light, representing digital data.
But how does light travel within glass, rather than just pass through it?
The trick lies in a phenomenon known as total internal reflection.
Since Isaac Newton’s time, lensmakers and scientists have known that light bends when it passes between air and materials like water or glass.
When a ray of light inside glass hits its surface at a steep angle, it refracts, or bends as it exits into air.
But if the ray travels at a shallow angle, it’ll bend so far that it stays trapped, bouncing along inside the glass.
Under the right condition, something normally transparent to light can instead hide it from the world.
Compared to electricity or radio, fiber optic signals barely degrade over great distances— a little power does scatter away, and fibers can’t bend too sharply, otherwise the light leaks out.
Today, a single optical fiber carries many wavelengths of light, each a different channel of data.
And a fiber optic cable contains hundreds of these fiber strands.
Over a million kilometers of cable crisscross our ocean floors to link the continents— that’s enough to wind around the Equator nearly thirty times.
With fiber optics, distance hardly limits data, which has allowed the internet to evolve into a planetary computer.
Increasingly, our mobile work and play rely on legions of overworked computer servers, warehoused in gigantic data centers flung across the world.
This is called cloud computing, and it leads to two big problems: heat waste and bandwidth demand.
The vast majority of internet traffic shuttles around inside data centers, where thousands of servers are connected by traditional electrical cables.
Half of their running power is wasted as heat.
Meanwhile, wireless bandwidth demand steadily marches on, and the gigahertz signals used in our mobile devices are reaching their data delivery limits.
It seems fiber optics has been too good for its own good, fueling overly-ambitious cloud and mobile computing expectations.
But a related technology, integrated photonics, has come to the rescue.
Light can be guided not only in optical fibers, but also in ultrathin silicon wires.
Silicon wires don’t guide light as well as fiber.
But they do enable engineers to shrink all the devices in a hundred kilometer fiber optic network down to tiny photonic chips that plug into servers and convert their electrical signals to optical and back.
These electricity-to-light chips allow for wasteful electrical cables in data centers to be swapped out for power-efficient fiber.
Photonic chips can help break open wireless bandwidth limitations, too.
Researchers are working to replace mobile gigahertz signals with terahertz frequencies, to carry data thousands of times faster.
But these are short-range signals: they get absorbed by moisture in the air, or blocked by tall buildings.
With tiny wireless-to-fiber photonic transmitter chips distributed throughout cities, terahertz signals can be relayed over long-range distances.
They can do so via a stable middleman, optical fiber, and make hyperfast wireless connectivity a reality.
For all of human history, light has gifted us with sight and heat, serving as a steady companion while we explored and settled the physical world.
Now, we’ve saddled light with information and redirected it to run along a fiber optic superhighway— with many different integrated photonic exits— to build an even more expansive, virtual world.
Who doesn't love efficiency?
I do.
Efficiency means more for less.
More miles per gallon, more light per watt, more words per minute.
More for less is the next best thing to something for nothing.
Algorithms, big data, the cloud are giving us more for less.
Are we heading toward a friction-free utopia or toward a nightmare of surveillance?
I don't know.
My interest is in the present.
And I'd like to show you how the past can help us understand the present.
There's nothing that summarizes both the promise and the danger of efficiency like the humble potato.
The potato originated in the Andes and it spread to Europe from the ancient Inca.
The potato is a masterpiece of balanced nutrition.
And it had some very powerful friends.
King Frederick the Great of Prussia was the first enthusiast.
He believed that the potato could help increase the population of healthy Prussians.
And the more healthy Prussians, the more healthy Prussian soldiers.
And some of those healthy Prussian soldiers captured a French military pharmacist named Parmentier.
Parmentier, at first, was appalled by the morning, noon and night diet fed to POWs of potatoes, but he came to enjoy it.
He thought they were making him a healthier person.
And so, when he was released, he took it on himself to spread the potato to France.
And he had some powerful friends.
Benjamin Franklin advised him to hold a banquet, at which every dish included potatoes.
And Franklin was a guest of honor.
Even the king and queen of France were persuaded to wear potatoes, potato flowers, pardon me.
(Laughter) The king wore a potato flower in his lapel, and the queen wore a potato flower in her hair.
That was a truly great public relations idea.
But there was a catch.
The potato was too efficient for Europe's good.
In Ireland, it seemed a miracle.
Potatoes flourished, the population grew.
But there was a hidden risk.
Ireland's potatoes were genetically identical.
They were a very efficient breed, called the Lumper.
And the problem with the Lumper was that a blight from South America that affected one potato would affect them all.
Britain's exploitation and callousness played a role, but it was because of this monoculture that a million people died and another two million were forced to emigrate.
A plant that was supposed to end famine created one of the most tragic ones.
The problems of efficiency today are less drastic but more chronic.
They can also prolong the evils that they were intended to solve.
Take the electronic medical records.
It seemed to be the answer to the problem of doctors' handwriting, and it had the benefit of providing much better data for treatments.
In practice, instead, it has meant much more electronic paperwork and physicians are now complaining that they have less, rather than more time to see patients individually.
The obsession with efficiency can actually make us less efficient.
Efficiency also bites back with false positives.
Hospitals have hundreds of devices registering alarms.
Too often, they're crying wolf.
It takes time to rule those out.
And that time results in fatigue, stress and, once more, the neglect of the problems of real patients.
There are also false positives in pattern recognition.
A school bus, viewed from the wrong angle, can resemble a punching bag.
So precious time is required to eliminate misidentification.
False negatives are a problem, too.
Algorithms can learn a lot -- fast.
But they can tell us only about the past.
So many future classics get bad reviews, like "Moby Dick," or are turned down by multiple publishers, like the "Harry Potter" series.
It can be wasteful to try to avoid all waste.
Efficiency is also a trap when the opposition copies it.
Take the late 19th-century French 75-millimeter artillery piece.
It was a masterpiece of lethal design.
This piece could fire a shell every four seconds.
But that wasn't so unusual.
What was really brilliant was that because of the recoil mechanism, it could return to the exact same position without having to be reaimed.
So the effective rate of firing was drastically increased.
Now, this seemed to be a way for France to defeat Germany the next time they fought.
But, predictably, the Germans were working on something very similar.
So when the First World War broke out, the result was the trench warfare that lasted longer than anybody had expected.
A technology that was designed to shorten the war, prolonged it.
The biggest cost of all may be missed opportunities.
The platform economy connecting buyers and sellers can be a great investment, and we have seen that in the last few weeks.
Companies that are still losing hundreds of millions of dollars may be creating billionaires with initial public offerings.
But the really difficult inventions are the physical and chemical ones.
They mean bigger risks.
They may be losing out, because hardware is hard.
It's much harder to scale up a physical or chemical invention than it is a software-based invention.
Think of batteries.
Lithium-ion batteries in portable devices and electric cars are based on a 30-year-old principle.
How many smartphone batteries today will last a full day on a single charge?
Yes, hardware is hard.
It took over 20 years for the patent on the principle of dry photocopying, by Chester Carlson in 1938, to result in the Xerox 914 copier introduced in 1959.
The small, brave company, Haloid in Rochester, NY had to go through what most corporations would never have tolerated.
There was one failure after another, and one of the special problems was fire.
In fact, when the 914 was finally released, it still had a device that was called a scorch eliminator but actually it was a small fire extinguisher built in.
My answer to all these questions is: inspired inefficiency.
Data and measurement are essential, but they're not enough.
Let's leave room for human intuition and human skills.
There are seven facets of inspired inefficiency.
First, take the scenic route, say yes to serendipity.
Wrong turns can be productive.
Once, when I was exploring the east bank of the Mississippi, I took the wrong turn.
I was approaching a toll bridge crossing the great river, and the toll collector said I could not turn back.
So I paid my 50 cents -- that's all it was at the time -- and I was in Muscatine, Iowa.
I had barely heard of Muscatine, but it proved to be a fascinating place.
Muscatine had some of the world's richest mussel beds.
A century ago, a third of the world's buttons were produced in Muscatine, 1.5 billion a year.
The last plants have closed now, but there is still a museum of the pearl button industry that's one of the most unusual in the world.
But buttons were only the beginning.
This is the house in Muscatine where China's future president stayed in 1986, as a member of an agricultural delegation.
It is now the Sino-US Friendship House, and it's a pilgrimage site for Chinese tourists.
How could I have foreseen that?
(Laughter) Second, get up from the couch.
Sometimes it can be more efficient to do things the hard way.
Consider the internet of things.
It's wonderful to be able to control lights, set the thermostat, even vacuum the room without leaving one's seat.
But medical research has shown that actually fidgeting, getting up, walking around is one of the best things you can do for your heart.
It's good for the heart and the waistline.
Third, monetize your mistakes.
Great forms can be created by imaginative development of accidents.
Tad Leski, an architect of the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center, was working on a sketch and some white ink fell on the drawing.
Other people might just have thrown it away, but Leski was inspired to produce a starburst chandelier that was probably the most notable of its kind of the 20th century.
Fourth, sometimes try the hard way.
It can be more efficient to be less fluent.
Psychologists call this desirable difficulty.
Taking detailed notes with a keyboard would seem to be the best way to grasp what a lecturer is saying, to be able to review it verbatim.
However, studies have shown that when we have to abbreviate, when we have to summarize what a speaker is saying, when we're taking notes with a pen or a pencil on paper, we're processing that information.
We're making that our own, and we are learning much more actively than when we were just transcribing what was being said.
Fifth, get security through diversity.
Monoculture can be deadly.
Remember the potato?
It was efficient until it wasn't.
Diversity applies to organizations, too.
Software can tell what has made people in an organization succeed in the past.
And it's useful, sometimes, in screening employees.
But remember, the environment is constantly changing, and software, screening software, has no way to tell, and we have no way to tell, who is going to be useful in the future.
So, we need to supplement whatever the algorithm tells us by an intuition and by looking for people with various backgrounds and various outlooks.
Sixth, achieve safety through redundancy and human skills.
Why did two 737 Max aircraft crash?
We still don't know the full story, but we know how to prevent future tragedies.
We need multiple independent systems.
If one fails, then the others can override it.
We also need skilled operators to come to the rescue and that means constant training.
Seventh, be rationally extravagant.
Thomas Edison was a pioneer of the film industry, as well as of camera technology.
Nobody has done more for efficiency than Thomas Edison.
But his cost cutting broke down.
His manager hired a so-called efficiency engineer, who advised him to save money by using more of the film stock that he'd shot, having fewer retakes.
Well, Edison was a genius, but he didn't understand the new rules of feature films and the fact that failure was becoming the price of success.
On the other hand, some great directors, like Erich Von Stroheim, were the opposite.
They were superb dramatists, and Stroheim was also a memorable actor.
But they couldn't live within their budgets.
So that was not sustainable.
It was Irving Thalberg, a former secretary with intuitive genius, who achieved rational extravagance.
First at Universal, and then at MGM, becoming the ideal of the Hollywood producer.
Summing up, to be truly efficient, we need optimal inefficiency.
The shortest path may be a curve rather than a straight line.
Charles Darwin understood that.
When he encountered a tough problem, he made a circuit of a trail, the sandwalk that he'd built behind his house.
A productive path can be physical, like Darwin's, or a virtual one, or an unforeseen detour from a path we had laid out.
Too much efficiency can weaken itself.
But a bit of inspired inefficiency can strengthen it.
Sometimes, the best way to move forward is to follow a circle.
Thank you.
(Applause)