Helen Walters: So, Chris, who's up first? Chris Anderson: Well, we have a man who's worried about pandemics pretty much his whole life. He played an absolutely key role, more than 40 years ago, in helping the world get rid of the scourge of smallpox. And in 2006, he came to TED to warn the world of the dire risk of a global pandemic, and what we might do about it. So please welcome here Dr. Larry Brilliant. Larry, so good to see you. Larry Brilliant: Thank you, nice to see you. CA: Larry, in that talk, you showed a video clip that was a simulation of what a pandemic might look like. I would like to play it -- this gave me chills. Larry Brilliant (TED2006): Let me show you a simulation of what a pandemic looks like, so we know what we're talking about. Let's assume, for example, that the first case occurs in South Asia. It initially goes quite slowly, you get two or three discrete locations. Then there will be secondary outbreaks. And the disease will spread from country to country so fast that you won't know what hit you. Within three weeks, it will be everywhere in the world. Now if we had an undo button, and we could go back and isolate it and grab it when it first started, if we could find it early and we had early detection and early response, and we could put each one of those viruses in jail, that's the only way to deal with something like a pandemic. CA: Larry, that phrase you mentioned there, "early detection," "early response," that was a key theme of that talk, you made us all repeat it several times. Is that still the key to preventing a pandemic? LB: Oh, surely. You know, when you have a pandemic, something moving at exponential speed, if you miss the first two weeks, if you're late the first two weeks, it's not the deaths and the illness from the first two weeks you lose, it's the two weeks at the peak. Those are prevented if you act early. Early response is critical, early detection is a condition precedent. CA: And how would you grade the world on its early detection, early response to COVID-19? LB: Of course, you gave me this question earlier, so I've been thinking a lot about it. I think I would go through the countries, and I've actually made a list. I think the island republics of Taiwan, Iceland and certainly New Zealand would get an A. The island republic of the UK and the United States -- which is not an island, no matter how much we may think we are -- would get a failing grade. I'd give a B to South Korea and to Germany. And in between ... So it's a very heterogeneous response, I think. The world as a whole is faltering. We shouldn't be proud of what's happening right now. CA: I mean, we got the detection pretty early, or at least some doctors in China got the detection pretty early. LB: Earlier than the 2002 SARS, which took six months. This took about six weeks. And detection means not only finding it, but knowing what it is. So I would give us a pretty good score on that. The transparency, the communication -- those are other issues. CA: So what was the key mistake that you think the countries you gave an F to made? LB: I think fear, political incompetence, interference, not taking it seriously soon enough -- it's pretty human. I think throughout history, pretty much every pandemic is first viewed with denial and doubt. But those countries that acted quickly, and even those who started slow, like South Korea, they could still make up for it, and they did really well. We've had two months that we've lost. We've given a virus that moves exponentially a two-month head start. That's not a good idea, Chris. CA: No, indeed. I mean, there's so much puzzling information still out there about this virus. What do you think the scientific consensus is going to likely end up being on, like, the two key numbers of its infectiousness and its fatality rate? LB: So I think the kind of equation to keep in mind is that the virus moves dependent on three major issues. One is the R0, the first number of secondary cases that there are when the virus emerges. In this case, people talk about it being 2.2, 2.4. But a really important paper three weeks ago, in the "Emerging Infectious Diseases" journal came out, suggesting that looking back on the Wuhan data, it's really 5.7. So for argument's sake, let's say that the virus is moving at exponential speed and the exponent is somewhere between 2.2 and 5.7. The other two factors that matter are the incubation period or the generation time. The longer that is, the slower the pandemic appears to us. When it's really short, like six days, it moves like lightning. And then the last, and the most important -- and it's often overlooked -- is the density of susceptibles. This is a novel virus, so we want to know how many customers could it potentially have. And as it's novel, that's eight billion of us. The world is facing a virus that looks at all of us like equally susceptible. Doesn't matter our color, our race, or how wealthy we are. CA: I mean, none of the numbers that you've mentioned so far are in themselves different from any other infections in recent years. What is the combination that has made this so deadly? LB: Well, it is exactly the combination of the short incubation period and the high transmissibility. But you know, everybody on this call has known somebody who has the disease. Sadly, many have lost a loved one. This is a terrible disease when it is serious. And I get calls from doctors in emergency rooms and treating people in ICUs all over the world, and they all say the same thing: "How do I choose who is going to live and who is going to die? I have so few tools to deal with." It's a terrifying disease, to die alone with a ventilator in your lungs, and it's a disease that affects all of our organs. It's a respiratory disease -- perhaps misleading. Makes you think of a flu. But so many of the patients have blood in their urine from kidney disease, they have gastroenteritis, they certainly have heart failure very often, we know that it affects taste and smell, the olfactory nerves, we know, of course, about the lung. The question I have: is there any organ that it does not affect? And in that sense, it reminds me all too much of smallpox. CA: So we're in a mess. What's the way forward from here? LB: Well, the way forward is still the same. Rapid detection, rapid response. Finding every case, and then figuring out all the contacts. We've got great new technology for contact tracing, we've got amazing scientists working at the speed of light to give us test kits and antivirals and vaccines. We need to slow down, the Buddhists say slow down time so that you can put your heart, your soul, into that space. We need to slow down the speed of this virus, which is why we do social distancing. Just to be clear -- flattening the curve, social distancing, it doesn't change the absolute number of cases, but it changes what could be a Mount Fuji-like peak into a pulse, and then we won't also lose people because of competition for hospital beds, people who have heart attacks, need chemotherapy, difficult births, can get into the hospital, and we can use the scarce resources we have, especially in the developing world, to treat people. So slow down, slow down the speed of the epidemic, and then in the troughs, in between waves, jump on, double down, step on it, and find every case, trace every contact, test every case, and then only quarantine the ones who need to be quarantined, and do that until we have a vaccine. CA: So it sounds like we have to get past the stage of just mitigation, where we're just trying to take a general shutdown, to the point where we can start identifying individual cases again and contact-trace for them and treat them separately. I mean, to do that, that seems like it's going to take a step up of coordination, ambition, organization, investment, that we're not really seeing the signs of yet in some countries. Can we do this, how can we do this? LB: Oh, of course we can do this. I mean, Taiwan did it so beautifully, Iceland did it so beautifully, Germany, all with different strategies, South Korea. It really requires competent governance, a sense of seriousness, and listening to the scientists, not the politicians following the virus. Of course we can do this. Let me remind everybody -- this is not the zombie apocalypse, it's not a mass extinction event. You know, 98, 99 percent of us are going to get out of this alive. We need to deal with it the way we know we can, and we need to be the best version of ourselves. Both sitting at home as well as in science, and certainly in leadership. CA: And might there be even worse pathogens out there in the future? Like, can you picture or describe an even worse combination of those numbers that we should start to get ready for? LB: Well, smallpox had an R0 of 3.5 to 4.5, so that's probably about what I think this COVID will be. But it killed a third of the people. But we had a vaccine. So those are the different sets that you have. But what I'm mostly worried about, and the reason that we made "Contagion" and that was a fictional virus -- I repeat, for those of you watching, that's fiction. We created a virus that killed a lot more than this one did. CA: You're talking about the movie "Contagion" that's been trending on Netflix. And you were an advisor for. LB: Absolutely, that's right. But we made that movie deliberately to show what a real pandemic looked like, but we did choose a pretty awful virus. And the reason we showed it like that, going from a bat to an apple, to a pig, to a cook, to Gwyneth Paltrow, was because that is in nature what we call spillover, as zoonotic diseases, diseases of animals, spill over to human beings. And if I look backwards three decades or forward three decades -- looking backward three decades, Ebola, SARS, Zika, swine flu, bird flu, West Nile, we can begin almost a catechism and listen to all the cacophony of these names. But there were 30 to 50 novel viruses that jumped into human beings. And I'm afraid, looking forward, we are in the age of pandemics, we have to behave like that, we need to practice One Health, we need to understand that we're living in the same world as animals, the environment, and us, and we get rid of this fiction that we are some kind of special species. To the virus, we're not. CA: Mmm. You mentioned vaccines, though. Do you see any accelerated path to a vaccine? LB: I do. I'm actually excited to see that we're doing something that we only get to think of in computer science, which is we're changing what should have always been, or has always been, rather, multiple sequential processes. Do safety testing, then you test for effectiveness, then for efficiency. And then you manufacture. We're doing all three or four of those steps, instead of doing it in sequence, we're doing in parallel. Bill Gates has said he's going to build seven vaccine production lines in the United States, and start preparing for production, not knowing what the end vaccine is going to be. We're simultaneously doing safety tests and efficacy tests. I think the NIH has jumped up. I'm very thrilled to see that. CA: And how does that translate into a likely time line, do you think? A year, 18 months, is that possible? LB: You know, Tony Fauci is our guru in this, and he said 12 to 18 months. I think that we will do faster than that in the initial vaccine. But you may have heard that this virus may not give us the long-term immunity -- that something like smallpox would do. So we're trying to make vaccines where we add adjuvants that actually make the vaccine create better immunity than the disease, so that we can confer immunity for many years. That's going to take a little longer. CA: Last question, Larry. Back in 2006, as a winner of the TED Prize, we granted you a wish, and you wished the world would create this pandemic preparedness system that would prevent something like this happening. I feel like we, the world, let you down. If you were to make another wish now, what would it be? LB: Well, I don't think we're let down in terms of speed of detection. I'm actually pretty pleased. When we met in 2006, the average one of these viruses leaping from an animal to a human, it took us six months to find that -- like the first Ebola, for example. We're now finding the first cases in two weeks. I'm not unhappy about that, I'd like to push it down to a single incubation period. It's a bigger issue for me. What I found is that in the Smallpox Eradication Programme people of all colors, all religions, all races, so many countries, came together. And it took working as a global community to conquer a global pandemic. Now, I feel that we have become victims of centrifugal forces. We're in our nationalistic kind of barricades. We will not be able to conquer a pandemic unless we believe we're all in it together. This is not some Age of Aquarius, or Kumbaya statement, this is what a pandemic forces us to realize. We are all in it together, we need a global solution to a global problem. Anything less than that is unthinkable. CA: Larry Brilliant, thank you so very much. LB: Thank you, Chris. Cultural evolution is a dangerous child for any species to let loose on its planet. By the time you realize what's happening, the child is a toddler, up and causing havoc, and it's too late to put it back. We humans are Earth's Pandoran species. We're the ones who let the second replicator out of its box, and we can't push it back in. We're seeing the consequences all around us. Now that, I suggest, is the view that comes out of taking memetics seriously. And it gives us a new way of thinking about not only what's going on on our planet, but what might be going on elsewhere in the cosmos. So first of all, I'd like to say something about memetics and the theory of memes, and secondly, how this might answer questions about who's out there, if indeed anyone is. So, memetics: memetics is founded on the principle of Universal Darwinism. Darwin had this amazing idea. Indeed, some people say it's the best idea anybody ever had. Isn't that a wonderful thought, that there could be such a thing as a best idea anybody ever had? Do you think there could? Audience: No. (Laughter) Susan Blackmore: Someone says no, very loudly, from over there. Well, I say yes, and if there is, I give the prize to Darwin. Why? Because the idea was so simple, and yet it explains all design in the universe. I would say not just biological design, but all of the design that we think of as human design. It's all just the same thing happening. What did Darwin say? I know you know the idea, natural selection, but let me just paraphrase "The Origin of Species," 1859, in a few sentences. What Darwin said was something like this: if you have creatures that vary, and that can't be doubted -- I've been to the Galapagos, and I've measured the size of the beaks and the size of the turtle shells and so on, and so on. And 100 pages later. (Laughter) And if there is a struggle for life, such that nearly all of these creatures die -- and this can't be doubted, I've read Malthus and I've calculated how long it would take for elephants to cover the whole world if they bred unrestricted, and so on and so on. And another 100 pages later. And if the very few that survive pass onto their offspring whatever it was that helped them survive, then those offspring must be better adapted to the circumstances in which all this happened than their parents were. You see the idea? If, if, if, then. He had no concept of the idea of an algorithm, but that's what he described in that book, and this is what we now know as the evolutionary algorithm. The principle is you just need those three things -- variation, selection and heredity. And as Dan Dennett puts it, if you have those, then you must get evolution. Or design out of chaos, without the aid of mind. There's one word I love on that slide. What do you think my favorite word is? Audience: Chaos. SB: Chaos? No. What? Mind? No. Audience: Without. SB: No, not without. (Laughter) You try them all in order: Mmm...? Audience: Must. SB: Must, at must. Must, must. This is what makes it so amazing. You don't need a designer, or a plan, or foresight, or anything else. If there's something that is copied with variation and it's selected, then you must get design appearing out of nowhere. You can't stop it. Must is my favorite word there. Now, what's this to do with memes? Well, the principle here applies to anything that is copied with variation and selection. We're so used to thinking in terms of biology, we think about genes this way. Darwin didn't, of course; he didn't know about genes. He talked mostly about animals and plants, but also about languages evolving and becoming extinct. But the principle of Universal Darwinism is that any information that is varied and selected will produce design. And this is what Richard Dawkins was on about in his 1976 bestseller, "The Selfish Gene." The information that is copied, he called the replicator. It selfishly copies. Not meaning it kind of sits around inside cells going, "I want to get copied." But that it will get copied if it can, regardless of the consequences. It doesn't care about the consequences because it can't, because it's just information being copied. And he wanted to get away from everybody thinking all the time about genes, and so he said, "Is there another replicator out there on the planet?" Ah, yes, there is. Look around you -- here will do, in this room. All around us, still clumsily drifting about in its primeval soup of culture, is another replicator. Information that we copy from person to person, by imitation, by language, by talking, by telling stories, by wearing clothes, by doing things. This is information copied with variation and selection. This is design process going on. He wanted a name for the new replicator. So, he took the Greek word "mimeme," which means that which is imitated. Remember that, that's the core definition: that which is imitated. And abbreviated it to meme, just because it sounds good and made a good meme, an effective spreading meme. So that's how the idea came about. It's important to stick with that definition. The whole science of memetics is much maligned, much misunderstood, much feared. But a lot of these problems can be avoided by remembering the definition. A meme is not equivalent to an idea. It's not an idea. It's not equivalent to anything else, really. Stick with the definition. It's that which is imitated, or information which is copied from person to person. So, let's see some memes. Well, you sir, you've got those glasses hung around your neck in that particularly fetching way. I wonder whether you invented that idea for yourself, or copied it from someone else? If you copied it from someone else, it's a meme. And what about, oh, I can't see any interesting memes here. All right everyone, who's got some interesting memes for me? Oh, well, your earrings, I don't suppose you invented the idea of earrings. You probably went out and bought them. There are plenty more in the shops. That's something that's passed on from person to person. All the stories that we're telling -- well, of course, TED is a great meme-fest, masses of memes. The way to think about memes, though, is to think, why do they spread? They're selfish information, they will get copied, if they can. But some of them will be copied because they're good, or true, or useful, or beautiful. Some of them will be copied even though they're not. Some, it's quite hard to tell why. There's one particular curious meme which I rather enjoy. And I'm glad to say, as I expected, I found it when I came here, and I'm sure all of you found it, too. You go to your nice, posh, international hotel somewhere, and you come in and you put down your clothes and you go to the bathroom, and what do you see? Audience: Bathroom soap. SB: Pardon? Audience: Soap. SB: Soap, yeah. What else do you see? Audience: (Inaudible) SB: Mmm mmm. Audience: Sink, toilet! SB: Sink, toilet, yes, these are all memes, they're all memes, but they're sort of useful ones, and then there's this one. (Laughter) What is this one doing? (Laughter) This has spread all over the world. It's not surprising that you all found it when you arrived in your bathrooms here. But I took this photograph in a toilet at the back of a tent in the eco-camp in the jungle in Assam. (Laughter) Who folded that thing up there, and why? (Laughter) Some people get carried away. (Laughter) Other people are just lazy and make mistakes. Some hotels exploit the opportunity to put even more memes with a little sticker. (Laughter) What is this all about? I suppose it's there to tell you that somebody's cleaned the place, and it's all lovely. And you know, actually, all it tells you is that another person has potentially spread germs from place to place. (Laughter) So, think of it this way. Imagine a world full of brains and far more memes than can possibly find homes. The memes are all trying to get copied -- trying, in inverted commas -- i.e., that's the shorthand for, if they can get copied, they will. They're using you and me as their propagating, copying machinery, and we are the meme machines. Now, why is this important? Why is this useful, or what does it tell us? It gives us a completely new view of human origins and what it means to be human, all conventional theories of cultural evolution, of the origin of humans, and what makes us so different from other species. All other theories explaining the big brain, and language, and tool use and all these things that make us unique, are based upon genes. Language must have been useful for the genes. Tool use must have enhanced our survival, mating and so on. It always comes back, as Richard Dawkins complained all that long time ago, it always comes back to genes. The point of memetics is to say, "Oh no, it doesn't." There are two replicators now on this planet. From the moment that our ancestors, perhaps two and a half million years ago or so, began imitating, there was a new copying process. Copying with variation and selection. A new replicator was let loose, and it could never be -- right from the start -- it could never be that human beings who let loose this new creature, could just copy the useful, beautiful, true things, and not copy the other things. While their brains were having an advantage from being able to copy -- lighting fires, keeping fires going, new techniques of hunting, these kinds of things -- inevitably they were also copying putting feathers in their hair, or wearing strange clothes, or painting their faces, or whatever. So, you get an arms race between the genes which are trying to get the humans to have small economical brains and not waste their time copying all this stuff, and the memes themselves, like the sounds that people made and copied -- in other words, what turned out to be language -- competing to get the brains to get bigger and bigger. So, the big brain, on this theory, is driven by the memes. This is why, in "The Meme Machine," I called it memetic drive. As the memes evolve, as they inevitably must, they drive a bigger brain that is better at copying the memes that are doing the driving. This is why we've ended up with such peculiar brains, that we like religion, and music, and art. Language is a parasite that we've adapted to, not something that was there originally for our genes, on this view. And like most parasites, it can begin dangerous, but then it coevolves and adapts, and we end up with a symbiotic relationship with this new parasite. And so, from our perspective, we don't realize that that's how it began. So, this is a view of what humans are. All other species on this planet are gene machines only, they don't imitate at all well, harrisanna@example.com. We alone are gene machines and meme machines as well. The memes took a gene machine and turned it into a meme machine. But that's not all. We have a new kind of memes now. I've been wondering for a long time, since I've been thinking about memes a lot, is there a difference between the memes that we copy -- the words we speak to each other, the gestures we copy, the human things -- and all these technological things around us? I have always, until now, called them all memes, but I do honestly think now we need a new word for technological memes. Let's call them techno-memes or temes. Because the processes are getting different. We began, perhaps 5,000 years ago, with writing. We put the storage of memes out there on a clay tablet, but in order to get true temes and true teme machines, you need to get the variation, the selection and the copying, all done outside of humans. And we're getting there. We're at this extraordinary point where we're nearly there, that there are machines like that. And indeed, in the short time I've already been at TED, I see we're even closer than I thought we were before. So actually, now the temes are forcing our brains to become more like teme machines. Our children are growing up very quickly learning to read, learning to use machinery. We're going to have all kinds of implants, drugs that force us to stay awake all the time. We'll think we're choosing these things, but the temes are making us do it. So, we're at this cusp now of having a third replicator on our planet. Now, what about what else is going on out there in the universe? Is there anyone else out there? People have been asking this question for a long time. We've been asking it here at TED already. In 1961, Frank Drake made his famous equation, but I think he concentrated on the wrong things. It's been very productive, that equation. He wanted to estimate N, the number of communicative civilizations out there in our galaxy, and he included in there the rate of star formation, the rate of planets, but crucially, intelligence. I think that's the wrong way to think about it. Intelligence appears all over the place, in all kinds of guises. Human intelligence is only one kind of a thing. But what's really important is the replicators you have and the levels of replicators, one feeding on the one before. So, I would suggest that we don't think intelligence, we think replicators. And on that basis, I've suggested a different kind of equation. A very simple equation. N, the same thing, the number of communicative civilizations out there [that] we might expect in our galaxy. Just start with the number of planets there are in our galaxy. The fraction of those which get a first replicator. The fraction of those that get the second replicator. The fraction of those that get the third replicator. Because it's only the third replicator that's going to reach out -- sending information, sending probes, getting out there, and communicating with anywhere else. OK, so if we take that equation, why haven't we heard from anybody out there? Because every step is dangerous. Getting a new replicator is dangerous. You can pull through, we have pulled through, but it's dangerous. Take the first step, as soon as life appeared on this earth. We may take the Gaian view. I loved Peter Ward's talk yesterday -- it's not Gaian all the time. Actually, life forms produce things that kill themselves. Well, we did pull through on this planet. But then, a long time later, billions of years later, we got the second replicator, the memes. That was dangerous, all right. Think of the big brain. How many mothers do we have here? You know all about big brains. They are dangerous to give birth to, are agonizing to give birth to. (Laughter) My cat gave birth to four kittens, purring all the time. Ah, mm -- slightly different. (Laughter) But not only is it painful, it kills lots of babies, it kills lots of mothers, and it's very expensive to produce. The genes are forced into producing all this myelin, all the fat to myelinate the brain. Do you know, sitting here, your brain is using about 20 percent of your body's energy output for two percent of your body weight? It's a really expensive organ to run. Why? Because it's producing the memes. Now, it could have killed us off. It could have killed us off, and maybe it nearly did, but you see, we don't know. But maybe it nearly did. Has it been tried before? What about all those other species? Louise Leakey talked yesterday about how we're the only one in this branch left. What happened to the others? Could it be that this experiment in imitation, this experiment in a second replicator, is dangerous enough to kill people off? Well, we did pull through, and we adapted. But now, we're hitting, as I've just described, we're hitting the third replicator point. And this is even more dangerous -- well, it's dangerous again. Why? Because the temes are selfish replicators and they don't care about us, or our planet, or anything else. They're just information, why would they? They are using us to suck up the planet's resources to produce more computers, and more of all these amazing things we're hearing about harrisanna@example.com. Don't think, "Oh, we created the Internet for our own benefit." That's how it seems to us. Think, temes spreading because they must. We are the old machines. Now, are we going to pull through? What's going to happen? What does it mean to pull through? Well, there are kind of two ways of pulling through. One that is obviously happening all around us now, is that the temes turn us into teme machines, with these implants, with the drugs, with us merging with the technology. And why would they do that? Because we are self-replicating. We have babies. We make new ones, and so it's convenient to piggyback on us, because we're not yet at the stage on this planet where the other option is viable. Although it's closer, I heard this morning, it's closer than I thought it was. Where the teme machines themselves will replicate themselves. That way, it wouldn't matter if the planet's climate was utterly destabilized, and it was no longer possible for humans to live here. Because those teme machines, they wouldn't need -- they're not squishy, wet, oxygen-breathing, warmth-requiring creatures. They could carry on without us. So, those are the two possibilities. The second, I don't think we're that close. It's coming, but we're not there yet. The first, it's coming too. But the damage that is already being done to the planet is showing us how dangerous the third point is, that third danger point, getting a third replicator. And will we get through this third danger point, like we got through the second and like we got through the first? Maybe we will, maybe we won't. I have no idea. (Applause) Chris Anderson: That was an incredible talk. SB: Thank you. I scared myself. CA: (Laughter) I live and work from Tokyo, Japan. And I specialize in human behavioral research, and applying what we learn to think about the future in different ways, and to design for that future. And you know, to be honest, I've been doing this for seven years, and I haven't got a clue what the future is going to be like. But I've got a pretty good idea how people will behave when they get there. This is my office. It's out there. It's not in the lab, and it's increasingly in places like India, China, Brazil, Africa. We live on a planet -- 6.3 billion people. About three billion people, by the end of this year, will have cellular connectivity. And it'll take about another two years to connect the next billion after that. And I mention this because, if we want to design for that future, we need to figure out what those people are about. And that's, kind of, where I see what my job is and what our team's job is. Our research often starts with a very simple question. So I'll give you an example. What do you carry? If you think of everything in your life that you own, when you walk out that door, what do you consider to take with you? When you're looking around, what do you consider? Of that stuff, what do you carry? And of that stuff, what do you actually use? So this is interesting to us, because the conscious and subconscious decision process implies that the stuff that you do take with you and end up using has some kind of spiritual, emotional or functional value. And to put it really bluntly, you know, people are willing to pay for stuff that has value, right? So I've probably done about five years' research looking at what people carry. I go in people's bags. I look in people's pockets, purses. I go in their homes. And we do this worldwide, and we follow them around town with video cameras. It's kind of like stalking with permission. And we do all this -- and to go back to the original question, what do people carry? And it turns out that people carry a lot of stuff. OK, that's fair enough. But if you ask people what the three most important things that they carry are -- across cultures and across gender and across contexts -- most people will say keys, money and, if they own one, a mobile phone. And I'm not saying this is a good thing, but this is a thing, right? I mean, I couldn't take your phones off you if I wanted to. You'd probably kick me out, or something. OK, it might seem like an obvious thing for someone who works for a mobile phone company to ask. But really, the question is, why? Right? So why are these things so important in our lives? And it turns out, from our research, that it boils down to survival -- survival for us and survival for our loved ones. So, keys provide an access to shelter and warmth -- transport as well, in the U.S. increasingly. Money is useful for buying food, sustenance, among all its other uses. And a mobile phone, it turns out, is a great recovery tool. If you prefer this kind of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, those three objects are very good at supporting the lowest rungs in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Yes, they do a whole bunch of other stuff, but they're very harrisanna@example.com. And in particular, it's the mobile phone's ability to allow people to transcend space and time. And what I mean by that is, you know, you can transcend space by simply making a voice call, right? And you can transcend time by sending a message at your convenience, and someone else can pick it up at their convenience. And this is fairly universally appreciated, it turns out, which is why we have three billion plus people who have been connected. And they value that connectivity. But actually, you can do this kind of stuff with PCs. And you can do them with phone kiosks. And the mobile phone, in addition, is both personal -- and so it also gives you a degree of privacy -- and it's convenient. You don't need to ask permission from anyone, you can just go ahead and do it, right? However, for these things to help us survive, it depends on them being carried. But -- and it's a pretty big but -- we forget. We're human, that's what we do. It's one of our features. I think, quite a nice feature. So we forget, but we're also adaptable, and we adapt to situations around us pretty well. And so we have these strategies to remember, and one of them was mentioned yesterday. And it's, quite simply, the point of reflection. And that's that moment when you're walking out of a space, and you turn around, and quite often you tap your pockets. Even women who keep stuff in their bags tap their pockets. And you turn around, and you look back into the space, and some people talk aloud. And pretty much everyone does it at some point. OK, the next thing is -- most of you, if you have a stable home life, and what I mean is that you don't travel all the time, and always in hotels, but most people have what we call a center of gravity. And a center of gravity is where you keep these objects. And these things don't stay in the center of gravity, but over time, they gravitate there. It's where you expect to find stuff. And in fact, when you're turning around, and you're looking inside the house, and you're looking for this stuff, this is where you look first, right? OK, so when we did this research, we found the absolutely, 100 percent, guaranteed way to never forget anything ever, ever again. And that is, quite simply, to have nothing to remember. (Laughter) OK, now, that sounds like something you get on a Chinese fortune cookie, right? But is, in fact, about the art of delegation. And from a design perspective, it's about understanding what you can delegate to technology and what you can delegate to other people. And it turns out, delegation -- if you want it to be -- can be the solution for pretty much everything, apart from things like bodily functions, going to the toilet. You can't ask someone to do that on your behalf. And apart from things like entertainment, you wouldn't pay for someone to go to the cinema for you and have fun on your behalf, or, at least, not yet. Maybe sometime in the future, we will. So, let me give you an example of delegation in practice, right. So this is -- probably the thing I'm most passionate about is the research that we've been doing on illiteracy and how people who are illiterate communicate. So, the U.N. estimated -- this is 2004 figures -- that there are almost 800 million people who can't read and write, worldwide. So, we've been conducting a lot of research. And one of the things we were looking at is -- if you can't read and write, if you want to communicate over distances, you need to be able to identify the person that you want to communicate with. It could be a phone number, it could be an e-mail address, it could be a postal address. Simple question: if you can't read and write, how do you manage your contact information? And the fact is that millions of people do it. Just from a design perspective, we didn't really understand how they did it, and so that's just one small example of the kind of research that we were doing. And it turns out that illiterate people are masters of delegation. So they delegate that part of the task process to other people, the stuff that they can't do themselves. Let me give you another example of delegation. This one's a little bit more sophisticated, and this is from a study that we did in Uganda about how people who are sharing devices, use those devices. Sente is a word in Uganda that means money. It has a second meaning, which is to send money as airtime. OK? And it works like this. So let's say, June, you're in a village, rural village. I'm in Kampala and I'm the wage earner. I'm sending money back, and it works like this. So, in your village, there's one person in the village with a phone, and that's the phone kiosk operator. And it's quite likely that they'd have a quite simple mobile phone as a phone kiosk. So what I do is, I buy a prepaid card like this. And instead of using that money to top up my own phone, I call up the local village operator. And I read out that number to them, and they use it to top up their phone. So, they're topping up the value from Kampala, and it's now being topped up in the village. You take a 10 or 20 percent commission, and then you -- the kiosk operator takes 10 or 20 percent commission, and passes the rest over to you in cash. OK, there's two things I like about this. So the first is, it turns anyone who has access to a mobile phone -- anyone who has a mobile phone -- essentially into an ATM machine. It brings rudimentary banking services to places where there's no banking infrastructure. And even if they could have access to the banking infrastructure, they wouldn't necessarily be considered viable customers, because they're not wealthy enough to have bank accounts. There's a second thing I like about this. And that is that despite all the resources at my disposal, and despite all our kind of apparent sophistication, I know I could never have designed something as elegant and as totally in tune with the local conditions as this. OK? And, yes, there are things like Grameen Bank and micro-lending. But the difference between this and that is, there's no central authority trying to control this. This is just street-up innovation. So, it turns out the street is a never-ending source of inspiration for us. And OK, if you break one of these things here, you return it to the carrier. They'll give you a new one. They'll probably give you three new ones, right? I mean, that's buy three, get one free. That kind of thing. If you go on the streets of India and China, you see this kind of stuff. And this is where they take the stuff that breaks, and they fix it, and they put it back into circulation. This is from a workbench in Jilin City, in China, and you can see people taking down a phone and putting it back together. They reverse-engineer manuals. This is a kind of hacker's manual, and it's written in Chinese and English. They also write them in Hindi. You can subscribe to these. There are training institutes where they're churning out people for fixing these things as well. But what I like about this is, it boils down to someone on the street with a small, flat surface, a screwdriver, a toothbrush for cleaning the contact heads -- because they often get dust on the contact heads -- and knowledge. And it's all about the social network of the knowledge, floating around. And I like this because it challenges the way that we design stuff, and build stuff, and potentially distribute stuff. It challenges the norms. OK, for me the street just raises so many different questions. Like, this is Viagra that I bought from a backstreet sex shop in China. And China is a country where you get a lot of fakes. And I know what you're asking -- did I test it? I'm not going to answer that, OK. But I look at something like this, and I consider the implications of trust and confidence in the purchase process. And we look at this and we think, well, how does that apply, for example, for the design of -- the lessons from this -- apply to the design of online services, future services in these markets? This is a pair of underpants from -- (Laughter) -- from Tibet. And I look at something like this, and honestly, you know, why would someone design underpants with a pocket, right? And I look at something like this and it makes me question, if we were to take all the functionality in things like this, and redistribute them around the body in some kind of personal area network, how would we prioritize where to put stuff? And yes, this is quite trivial, but actually the lessons from this can apply to that kind of personal area networks. And what you see here is a couple of phone numbers written above the shack in rural Uganda. This doesn't have house numbers. This has phone numbers. So what does it mean when people's identity is mobile? When those extra three billion people's identity is mobile, it isn't fixed? Your notion of identity is out-of-date already, OK, for those extra three billion people. This is how it's shifting. And then I go to this picture here, which is the one that I started with. And this is from Delhi. It's from a study we did into illiteracy, and it's a guy in a teashop. You can see the chai being poured in the background. And he's a, you know, incredibly poor teashop worker, on the lowest rungs in the society. And he, somehow, has the appreciation of the values of Livestrong. And it's not necessarily the same values, but some kind of values of Livestrong, to actually go out and purchase them, and actually display them. For me, this kind of personifies this connected world, where everything is intertwined, and the dots are -- it's all about the dots joining together. OK, the title of this presentation is "Connections and Consequences," and it's really a kind of summary of five years of trying to figure out what it's going to be like when everyone on the planet has the ability to transcend space and time in a personal and convenient manner, right? When everyone's connected. And there are four things. So, the first thing is the immediacy of ideas, the speed at which ideas go around. And I know TED is about big ideas, but actually, the benchmark for a big idea is changing. If you want a big idea, you need to embrace everyone on the planet, that's the first thing. The second thing is the immediacy of objects. And what I mean by that is, as these become smaller, as the functionality that you can access through this becomes greater -- things like banking, identity -- these things quite simply move very quickly around the world. And so the speed of the adoption of things is just going to become that much more rapid, in a way that we just totally cannot conceive, when you get it to 6.3 billion and the growth in the world's population. The next thing is that, however we design this stuff -- carefully design this stuff -- the street will take it, and will figure out ways to innovate, as long as it meets base needs -- the ability to transcend space and time, for example. And it will innovate in ways that we cannot anticipate. In ways that, despite our resources, they can do it better than us. That's my feeling. And if