We really need to put the best we have to offer within reach of our children. If we don't do that, we're going to get the generation we deserve. They're going to learn from whatever it is they have around them. And we, as now the elite, parents, librarians, professionals, whatever it is, a bunch of our activities are, in fact, in trying to get the best we have to offer within reach of those around us, or as broadly as we can. I'm going to start and end this talk with a couple things that are carved in stone. One is what's on the Boston Public Library. Carved above their door is, "Free to All." It's kind of an inspiring statement, and I'll go back at the end of this. I'm a librarian, and what I'm trying to do is bring all of the works of knowledge to as many people as want to read it. And the idea of using technology is perfect for us. I think we have the opportunity to one-up the Greeks. It's not easy to one-up the Greeks. But with the industriousness of the Egyptians, they were able to build the Library of Alexandria -- the idea of a copy of every book of all the peoples of the world. The problem was you actually had to go to Alexandria to go to it. On the other hand, if you did, then great things happened. I think we can one-up the Greeks and achieve something. And I'm going to try to argue only one point today: that universal access to all knowledge is within our grasp. So if I'm successful, then you'll actually come away thinking, yeah, we could actually achieve the great vision of everything ever published, everything that was ever meant for distribution, available to anybody in the world that's ever wanted to have access to it. Yes, there's issues about how money should be distributed, and that's still being refigured out. But I'd say there's plenty of money, and there's plenty of demand, so we can actually achieve that. But I'm going to go over the technological, social and sort of where are we as a whole, trying to get to that particular vision. And the way I'm going to try to do this is do it like the Amazon.com website, the books, music, video and just go step -- media type by media type, just go and say, all right, how're we doing on this? So if we start with books, you know, sort of where are we? Well, first you have to, as an engineer, scope the problem. How big is it? If you wanted to put all of the published works online so that anybody could have it available, well, how big a problem is it? Well, we don't really know, but the largest print library in the world is the Library of Congress. It's 26 million volumes, 26 million volumes. It is, by far and away, the largest print library in the world. And a book, if you had a book, is about a megabyte, so -- you know, if you had it in Microsoft Word. So a megabyte, 26 million megabytes is 26 terabytes -- it goes mega-, giga-, tera-. 26 terabytes. 26 terabytes fits in a computer system that's about this big, on spinning Linux drives, and it costs about 60,000 dollars. So for the cost of a house -- or around here, a garage -- you can put, you can have spinning all of the words in the Library of Congress. That's pretty neat. Then the question is, what do you get? You know, is it worth trying to get there? Do you actually want it online? Some of the first things that people do is they make book readers that allow you to search inside the books, and that's kind of fun. And you can download these things, and look around them in new and different ways. And you can get at them remotely, if you happen to have a laptop. There's starting to be some of these sort of page turn-y interfaces that look a whole lot like books in certain ways, and you can search them, make little tabs, and it's kind of cute -- still very book-like -- on your laptop. But I don't know, reading things on a laptop -- whenever I pull up my laptop, it always feels like work. I think that's one of the reasons why the Kindle is so great. I don't have to feel like I'm at work to read a Kindle. It's starting to be a little bit more specified. But I have to say that there's older technologies that I tend to like. I like the physical book. And I think we can go and use our technology to go and digitize things, put them on the Net, and then download, print them and bind them, and end up with books again. And we sort of said, well, how hard is this? And it turns out to not be very hard. We actually went off to make a bookmobile. And a bookmobile -- the size of a van with a satellite dish, a printer, binder and cutter, and kids make their own books. It costs about three dollars to download, print and bind a normal, old book. And they actually come out kind of nice looking. You can actually get really good-looking books for on the order of one penny per page, sort of the parts cost for doing this. So the idea of -- this technology actually may end up putting books back in people's hands again. There are some other bookmobiles running around. This is Eric Eldred making books at Walden Pond -- Thoreau's works. This is just before he got kicked out by the Parks Services, for competing with the bookstore there. In India, they've got another couple bookmobiles running around. And this is the opening day at the Library of Alexandria, the new Library of Alexandria, in Egypt. It was quite popularly attended. And kids starting to make their own books, and a happy kid with the first book that he's ever owned. So the idea of being able to use this technology to end up with paper where I can handle sort of sounds a little retro, but I think it still has its place. And being from the Silicon Valley, sort of utopian sort of world, we thought, if we can make this technology work in rural Uganda, we might have something. So we actually got some funding from the World Bank to try it out. And we found in about 30 days we could go and take a couple folks from Silicon Valley, fly them to Uganda, buy a car, set up the first Internet connection at the National Library of Uganda, figure out what they wanted, and get a program going making books in rural Uganda. And it actually -- so technologically, it works. What we found out of this is we didn't have the right books. So the books were in the library. We could get it to people, if they're digitized, but we didn't know how to quite get them digitized. Everybody thought the answer is, send things to India and China. And so we've tried that, and I'll go over that in a moment. There are some newer technologies for delivering that have happened that are actually quite exciting as well. One is a print-on-demand machine that looks like a Rube Goldberg machine. We have one of these things now. It's completely cool. It's all conveyor belt, and it makes a book. And it's called the "Espresso Book Machine," and in about 10 minutes, you can press a button and make a book. Something else I'm quite excited about in this particular domain, beyond these sort of kiosk-y things where you can get books on demand, is some of these new little screens that are coming out. And one of my favorites in this is the $100 laptop. And I don't mean to steal any thunder here, but we've gone and used one of these things to be an e-book reader. So here's one of the beta units and you can -- it actually turns out to be a really good-looking e-book reader. And we have a quick hack that we did to try to put one of our books on it, and it turns out that 200 dots per inch means that you can put scanned books on them that look really good. At 200 dots per inch, it's kind of the equivalent of a 300 dot print laser printer. We're in good enough shape. You actually can go and read scanned books quite easily. So the idea of electronic books is starting to come about. But how do you go about doing all this scanning? So we thought, okay, well, let's try out this send books to India thing. And there was a project with, funded by the National Science Foundation -- sent a bunch of scanners, and the American libraries were supposed to send books. Well, they didn't. They didn't want to send their books. So we bought 100,000 books and sent them to India. And then we learned why you don't want to send books to India. The lesson we learned out of this is, scan your own books. If you really care about books, you're going to scan them better, especially if they're valuable books. If they're new books and you can just, you know, butcher them, because you could just buy another one, that's not such a big deal in terms of doing high-quality scanning. But do things that you love. But the Indians have been scanning a lot of their own books -- about 300,000 now -- doing very well. The Chinese did over a million, and the Egyptians are about 30,000. But we sent -- thought, OK, if we're going to need to do this, let's do it in-library. How do we go and do this, and how do we get it down so that it's a cost point that we could afford? And we sort of picked the price point of 10 cents a page. If it's basically the cost of xeroxing to basically digitize, OCR, package it up, make it so that you could download, print and bind it -- the whole shebang -- we would have achieved something. So we started out trying to figure out. How do we get to 10 cents? And we tried these robot things, and they worked pretty well -- sort of these auto-page-turning things. If we can have Mars Rovers, you'd think you could turn pages. But it actually turns out to be pretty hard to turn pages, and the volume isn't there. So anyway -- so we ended up making our own book scanner, and with two digital, high-grade, professional digital cameras, controlled museum lighting, so even if it's a black and white book, you can go and get the proper intonation. So you basically do a beautiful, respectful job. This is not a fax, this is -- the idea is to do a beautiful job as you're going through these libraries. And we've been able to achieve 10 cents a page if we run things in volume. This is what it looks like at the University of Toronto. And actually, it turns out to, you know, pay a living wage. People seem to love it. Yes, it's a little boring, but some people kind of get into the Zen of it. (Laughter) And especially if it's kind of interesting books that you care about, in languages that you can read. We actually have been able to do a pretty good job of this, at getting 10 cents a page. So 10 cents a page, 300 pages in your average book, 30 dollars a book. The Library of Congress, if you did the whole darn thing -- 26 million books -- is about 750 million dollars, right? But a million books, I think, actually would be a pretty good start, and that would cost 30 million dollars. That's not that big a bill. And what we've been able to do is get into libraries. We've now got eight of these scanning centers in three countries, and libraries are up for having their books scanned. The Getty here is moving their books to the UCLA, which is where we have one these scanning centers, and scanning their out-of-copyright books, which is fabulous. So we're starting to get the institutional responsibility. The thing we're missing is the 10 cents. If we can get the 10 cents, all the rest of it flows. We've scanned about 200,000 books. Now we're scanning about 15,000 books a month, and it's starting to gear up another factor of two from there. So all in all, that's going very well. And we're starting to move out of the just out-of-copyright into the out-of-print world. So I think of -- we're kind of going from the out-of-copyright, library stuff, and Amazon.com is coming from the in-print world. And I think we'll meet in the middle some place, and have the classic thing that you have, which is a publishing system and a library system working in parallel. And so we're starting up a program to do out-of-print works, but loaning them. Exactly what loaning means, I'm not quite sure. But anyway, loaning out-of-print works from the Boston Public Library, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and a few other libraries that are starting to participate in this program, to try out this model of where does a library stop and where does the bookstore take over. So all in all, it's possible to do this in large scale. We're also going back over microfilm and getting that online. So, we can do 10 cents a page, we're going 15,000 books a month and we've got about 250,000 books online, counting all the other projects that are starting to add in. So what I wanted to argue is, books are within our grasp. The idea of taking on the whole ball of wax is not that big a deal. Yes, it costs tens of millions, low hundreds of millions, but one time shot and we've got basically the history of printed literature online. And then, there's business model issues about how to try to effectively market it and get it to people. But it is within our grasp, technologically and law-wise, at least for the out of print and out of copyright, we suggest, to be able to get the whole darn thing online. Now let's go for audio, and I'm going to go through these. So how much is there? Well, as best we can tell, there are about two to three million disks having been published -- so 78s, long-playing records and CDs -- or at least that's the largest archives of published materials we've been able to sort of point at. It costs about 10 dollars a piece to go and take a disk and put it online, if you're doing things in volume. But we've found that the rights issues are really quite thorny. This is a fairly heavily litigated area, so we've found that there are niches in the music world that aren't served terribly well by the classic commercial publishing system. And we've been starting to make these available by going and offering shelf space on the Net. In the United States, it doesn't cost you to give something away. Right? If you give something to a charity or to the public, you get a pat on the back and a tax donation -- except on the Net, where you can go broke. If you put up a video of your garage band, and it starts getting heavily accessed, you can lose your guitars or your house. This doesn't make any sense. So we've offered unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, forever, for free, to anybody that has something to share that belongs in a library. And we've been getting a lot of takers. One is the rock 'n' rollers. The rock 'n' rollers had a tradition of sharing, as long as nobody made any money. You could -- concert recordings, it's not the commercial recordings, but concert recordings, started by the Grateful Dead. And we get about two or three bands a day signing up. They give permission, and we get about 40 or 50 concerts a day. We have about 40,000 concerts, everything the Grateful Dead ever did, up on the Net, so that people can see it and listen to this material. So audio is possible to put up, but the rights issues are really pretty thorny. We've got a lot of collections now -- a couple hundred thousand items -- and it's growing over time. Moving images: if you think of theatrical releases, there are not that many of them. As best we can tell, there are about 150,000 to 200,000 movies ever that are really meant for a large-scale theatrical distribution. It's just not that many. But half of those were Indian. But anyway, it's doable, but we've only found about a thousand of these things that -- to be out of copyright. So we've digitized those and made those available. But we've found that there's lots of other types of movies that haven't really seen the light of day -- archival films. We've found, also, a lot of political films, a lot of amateur films, all sorts of things that are basically needing a home, a permanent home. So we've been starting to make these available and it's grown to be very popular. We're not quite a YouTube. We tended towards longer-term things and also things that people can reuse and make into new movies, which has just been great fun. Television comes quite a bit larger. We started recording 20 channels of television 24 hours a day. It's sort of the biggest TiVo box you've ever seen. It's about a petabyte, so far, of worldwide television -- Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Iraqi, Al Jazeera, BBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC -- 24 hours a day. We only put one week up, which is mostly for cost reasons, which is the 9/11, sort of from 9/11/2001. For one week, what did the world see? CNN was saying that Palestinians were dancing in the streets. Were they? Let's look at the Palestinian television and find out. How can we have critical thinking without being able to quote and being able to compare what happened in the past? And television is dreadfully unrecorded and unquotable, except by Jon Stewart, who does a fabulous job. So anyway, television is, I would suggest, within our grasp. So 15 dollars per video hour, and also about 100 dollars to 150 dollars per celluloid hour, we're able to go and get materials online very inexpensively and have them up on the Net. And we've got, now, a lot of these materials. So we've got about 100,000 pieces up there. So books, music, video, software. There's only 50,000 titles of it. Mostly the issues there are legal issues and breaking copy protections. But we've worked through some of those, but we've still got real problems in Washington. Well, we're best known as the World Wide Web. We've been archiving the World Wide Web since 1996. We take a snapshot of every website and all of the pages on it, every two months. And actually, it's really been pioneered by Alexa Internet, which donates this collection to the Internet Archive. And it's been growing along for the last 11 years, and it's a fantastic resource. And we've made a Wayback Machine that you can then go and see old websites kind of the way they were. If you go and search on something -- this is Google.com, the different versions of it that we have, this is what it looks like when it was an alpha release, and this is what it looked nathanstephens@example.com. So anyway, you've got basically an idea of where things came from. Mostly, people want to see their old stuff out of this. If there's one thing that we want to learn from the Library of Alexandria version one, which is probably best known for burning, is, don't just have one copy. So we've started to -- we've made another copy of all of this and we actually put it back in the Library of Alexandria. So this is a picture of the Internet Archive at the Library of Alexandria. And we now have also another copy building up in Amsterdam. So, we should put it in the San Andreas Fault Line in San Francisco, flood zone in Amsterdam and in the Middle East. Right, so anyway ... so we're hedging our bets here. If we go and put it in a couple more places, I think we'll be in good shape. There's a political and social question out of this. Is all of this, as we go digital, is it going to be public or private? There's some large companies that have seen this vision, that are doing large-scale digitization, but they're locking up the public domain. The question is, is that the world that we really want to live in? What's the role of the public versus the private as things go forward? How do we go and have a world where we both have libraries and publishing in the future, just as we basically benefited as we were growing up? So universal access to all knowledge -- I think it can be one of the greatest achievements of humankind, like the man on the moon, or the Gutenberg Bible, or the Library of Alexandria. It could be something that we're remembered for, for millennia, for having achieved. And as I said before, I'll end with something that's carved above the door of the Carnegie Library. Carnegie -- one of the great capitalists of this country -- carved above his legacy, "Free to the People." Thank you very much. I recently had an epiphany. I realized that I could actually play a role in solving one of the biggest problems that faces mankind today, and that is the problem of climate change. It also dawned on me that I had been working for 30 years or more just to get to this point in my life where I could actually make this contribution to a bigger problem. And every experiment that I have done in my lab over the last 30 years and people who work for me did in my lab over the last 30 years has been directed toward doing the really big experiment, this one last big experiment. So who am I? I'm a plant geneticist. I live in a world where there's too much CO2 in the atmosphere because of human activity. But I've come to appreciate the plants as amazing machines that they are, whose job has been, really, to just suck up CO2. And they do it so well, because they've been doing it for over 500 million years. And they're really nathanstephens@example.com. And so ... I also have some urgency I want to tell you about. As a mother, I want to give my two children a better world than I inherited from my parents, it would be nicer to keep it going in the right direction, not the bad direction. But I also ... I've had Parkinson's for the last 15 years, and this gives me a sense of urgency that I want to do this now, while I feel good enough to really be part of this team. And I have an incredible team. We all work together, and this is something we want to do because we have fun. And if you're only going to have five people trying to save the planet, you better like each other, because you're going to be spending a lot of time together. (Laughter) OK, alright. But enough about me. Let's talk about CO2. CO2 is the star of my talk. Now, most of you probably think of CO2 as a pollutant. Or perhaps you think of CO2 as the villain in the novel, you know? It's always the dark side of CO2. But as a plant biologist, I see the other side of CO2, actually. And that CO2 that we see, we see it differently because I think we remember, as plant biologists, something you may have forgotten. And that is that plants actually do this process called photosynthesis. And when they do photosynthesis -- all carbon-based life on our earth is all because of the CO2 that plants and other photosynthetic microbes have dragged in from CO2 that was in the atmosphere. And almost all of the carbon in your body came from air, basically. So you come from air, and it's because of photosynthesis, because what plants do is they use the energy in sunlight, take that CO2 and fix it into sugars. It's a great thing. And the other thing that is really important for what I'm going to tell you today is that plants and other photosynthetic microbes have a great capacity for doing this -- twentyfold or more than the amount of CO2 that we put up because of our human activities. And so, even though we're not doing a great job at cutting our emissions and things, plants have the capacity, as photosynthetic organisms, to help out. So we're hoping that's what they'll do. But there's a catch here. We have to help the plants a little ourselves, because what plants like to do is put most of the CO2 into sugars. And when the end of the growing season comes, the plant dies and decomposes, and then all that work they did to suck out the CO2 from the atmosphere and make carbon-based biomass is now basically going right back up in the atmosphere as CO2. So how can we get plants to redistribute the CO2 they bring in into something that's a little more stable? And so it turns out that plants make this product, and it's called suberin. This is a natural product that is in all plant roots. And suberin is really cool, because as you can see there, I hope, everywhere you see a black dot, that's a carbon. There's hundreds of them in this molecule. And where you see those few red dots, those are oxygens. And oxygen is what microbes like to find so they can decompose a plant. So you can see why this is a perfect carbon storage device. And actually it can stabilize the carbon that gets fixed by the plant into something that's a little bit better for the plant. And so, why now? Why is now a good time to do a biological solution to this problem? It's because over the last 30 or so years -- and I know that's a long time, you're saying, "Why now?" -- but 30 years ago, we began to understand the functions of all the genes that are in an organism in general. And that included humans as well as plants and many other complicated eukaryotes. And so, what did the 1980s begin? What began then is that we now know the function of many of the genes that are in a plant that tell a plant to grow. And that has now converged with the fact that we can do genomics in a faster and cheaper way than we ever did before. And what that tells us is that all life on earth is really related, but plants are more related to each other than other organisms. And that you can take a trait that you know from one plant and put it in another plant, and you can make a prediction that it'll do the same thing. And so that's important as well. Then finally, we have these little genetic tricks that came along, like you heard about this morning -- things like CRISPR, that allows us to do editing and make genes be a little different from the normal state in the plant. OK, so now we have biology on our side. I'm a biologist, so that's why I'm proposing a solution to the climate change problem that really involves the best evolved organism on earth to do it -- plants. So how are we going to do it? Biology comes to the rescue. Here we go. OK. You have to remember three simple things from my talk, OK? We have to get plants to make more suberin than they normally make, because we need them to be a little better than what they are. We have to get them to make more roots, because if we make more roots, we can make more suberin -- now we have more of the cells that suberin likes to accumulate in. And then the third thing is, we want the plants to have deeper roots. And what that does is -- we're asking the plant, actually, "OK, make stable carbon, more than you used to, and then bury it for us in the ground." So they can do that if they make roots that go deep rather than meander around on the surface of the soil. Those are the three traits we want to change: more suberin, more roots, and the last one, deep roots. Then we want to combine all those traits in one plant, and we can do that easily and we will do it, and we are doing it actually, in the model plant, Arabidopsis, which allows us to do these experiments much faster than we can do in another big plant. And when we find that we have plants where traits all add up and we can get more of them, more suberin in those plants, we're going to move it all -- we can and we we will, we're beginning to do this -- move it to crop plants. And I'll tell you why we're picking crop plants to do the work for us when I get to that part of my talk. OK, so I think this is the science behind the whole thing. And so I know we can do the science, I feel pretty confident about that. And the reason is because, just in the last year, we've been able to find single genes that affect each of those three traits. And in several of those cases, two out of the three, we have more than one way to get there. So that tells us we might be able to even combine within a trait and get even more suberin. This shows one result, where we have a plant here on the right that's making more than double the amount of root than the plant on the left, and that's just because of the way we expressed one gene that's normally in the plant in a slightly different way than the plant usually does on its own. Alright, so that's just one example I wanted to show you. And now I want to tell you that, you know, we still have a lot of challenges, actually, when we get to this problem, because it takes ... We have to get the farmers to actually buy the seeds, or at least the seed company to buy seeds that farmers are going to want to have. And so when we do the experiments, we can't actually take a loss in yield, because while we are doing these experiments, say, beginning about 10 years from now, the earth's population will be even more than it is right now. And it's rapidly growing still. So by the end of the century, we have 11 billion people, we have wasted ecosystems that aren't really going to be able to handle all the load they have to take from agriculture. And then we also have this competition for land. And so we figure, to do this carbon sequestration experiment actually requires a fair amount of land. We can't take it away from food, because we have to feed the people that are also going to be on the earth until we get past this big crisis. And the climate change is actually causing loss of yield all over the earth. So why would farmers want to buy seeds if it's going to impact yield? So we're not going to let it impact yield, we're going to always have checks and balances that says go or no go on that experiment. And then the second thing is, when a plant actually makes more carbon and buries it in the soil like that, almost all the soils on earth are actually depleted of carbon because of the load from agriculture, trying to feed eight billion people, which is what lives on the earth right now. And so, that is also a problem as well. Plants that are making more carbon, those soils become enriched in carbon. And carbon-enriched soils actually hold nitrogen and they hold sulphur and they hold phosphate -- all the minerals that are required for plants to grow and have a good yield. And they also retain water in the soil as well. So the suberin will break up into little particles and give the whole soil a new texture. And as we've shown that we can get more carbon in that soil, the soil will get darker. And so we will be able to measure all that, and hopefully, this is going to help us solve the problem. So, OK. So we have the challenges of a lot of land that we need to use, we have to get farmers to buy it, and that's going to be the hard thing for us, I think, because we're not really salesmen, we're people who like to Google a person rather than meet them, you know what I mean? (Laughter) That's what scientists are mostly like. But we know now that, you know, no one can really deny -- the climate is changing, everyone knows that. And it's here and it's bad and it's serious, and we need to do something about it. But I feel pretty optimistic that we can do this. So I'm here today as a character witness for plants. And I want to tell you that plants are going to do it for us, all we have to do is give them a little help, and they will go and get a gold medal for humanity. Thank you very much. (Applause) (Cheers) Thank you. (Applause) I finally got it out. Chris Anderson: Wow. Joanne, you're so extraordinary. Just to be sure we heard this right: you believe that within the next 10 years you may be able to offer the world seed variants for the major crops, like -- what? -- wheat, corn, maybe rice, that can offer farmers just as much yield, sequester three times, four times, more carbon than they currently do? Even more than that? Joanne Chory: We don't know that number, really. But they will do more. CA: And at the same time, make the soil that those farmers have more fertile? JC: Yes, right. CA: So that is astonishing. And the genius of doing that and a solution that can scale where there's already scale. JC: Yes, thank you for saying that. CA: No, no, you said it, you said it. But it almost seems too good to be true. Your Audacious Project is that we scale up the research in your lab and pave the way to start some of these pilots and make this incredible vision possible. JC: That's right, yes, thank you. CA: Joanne Chory, thank you so much. Godspeed. (Applause) JC: Thank you. Today's computers are so amazing that we fail to notice how terrible they really are. I'd like to talk to you today about this problem, and how we can fix it with neuroscience. First, I'd like to take you back to a frosty night in Harlem in 2011 that had a profound impact on me. I was sitting in a dive bar outside of Columbia University, where I studied computer science and neuroscience, and I was having this great conversation with a fellow student about the power of holograms to one day replace computers. And just as we were getting to the best part of the conversation, of course, his phone lights up. And he pulls it towards himself, and he looks down and he starts typing. And then he forces his eyeballs back up to mine and he goes, "Keep going. I'm with you." But of course his eyes were glazed over, and the moment was dead. Meanwhile across the bar, I noticed another student holding his phone, this time towards a group. He was swiping through pictures on Instagram, and these kids were laughing hysterically. And that dichotomy between how crappy I was feeling and how happy they were feeling about the same technology, really got me thinking. And the more I thought of it, the more I realized it was clearly not the digital information that was the bad guy here, it was simply the display position that was separating me from my friend and that was binding those kids together. See, they were connected around something, just like our ancestors who evolved their social cognitions telling stories around the campfire. And that's exactly what tools should do, I think. They should extend our bodies. And I think computers today are doing quite the opposite. Whether you're sending an email to your wife or you're composing a symphony or just consoling a friend, you're doing it in pretty much the same way. You're hunched over these rectangles, fumbling with buttons and menus and more rectangles. And I think this is the wrong way, I think we can start using a much more natural machine. We should use machines that bring our work back into the world. We should use machines that use the principles of neuroscience to extend our senses versus going against them. Now it just so happens that I have such a machine here. It's called the Meta 2. Let's try it out. Now in front of me right now, I can see the audience, and I can see my very hands. And in three, two, one, we're going to see an immersive hologram appear, a very realistic hologram appear in front of me, of our very glasses I'm wearing on my head right now. And of course this could be anything that we're shopping for or learning from, and I can use my hands to very nicely kind of move it around with fine control. And I think Iron Man would be proud. We're going to come back to this in just a bit. (Applause) Now if you're anything like me, your mind is already reeling with the possibilities of what we can do with this kind of technology, so let's look at a few. My mom is an architect, so naturally the first thing I imagined was laying out a building in 3D space instead of having to use these 2D floor plans. She's actually touching graphics right now and selecting an interior decor. This was all shot through a GoPro through our very glasses. And this next use case is very personal to me, it's Professor Adam Gazzaley's glass brain project, courtesy of UCSF. As a neuroscience student, I would always fantasize about the ability to learn and memorize these complex brain structures with an actual machine, where I could touch and play with the various brain structures. Now what you're seeing is called augmented reality, but to me, it's part of a much more important story -- a story of how we can begin to extend our bodies with digital devices, instead of the other way around. Now ... in the next few years, humanity's going to go through a shift, I think. We're going to start putting an entire layer of digital information on the real world. Just imagine for a moment what this could mean for storytellers, for painters, for brain surgeons, for interior decorators and maybe for all of us here today. And what I think we need to do as a community, is really try and make an effort to imagine how we can create this new reality in a way that extends the human experience, instead of gamifying our reality or cluttering it with digital information. And that's what I'm very passionate about. Now, I want to tell you a little secret. In about five years -- this is not the smallest device -- in about five years, these are all going to look like strips of glass on our eyes that project holograms. And just like we don't care so much about which phone we buy in terms of the hardware -- we buy it for the operating system -- as a neuroscientist, I always dreamt of building the iOS of the mind, if you will. And it's very, very important that we get this right, because we might be living inside of these things for at least as long as we've lived with the Windows graphical user interface. And I don't know about you, but living inside of Windows scares me. (Laughter) To isolate the single most intuitive interface out of infinity, we use neuroscience to drive our design guidelines, instead of letting a bunch of designers fight it out in the boardroom. And the principle we all revolve around is what's called the "Neural Path of Least Resistance." At every turn, we're connecting the iOS of the brain with our brain on, for the first time, our brain's terms. In other words, we're trying to create a zero learning-curve computer. We're building a system that you've always known how to use. Here are the first three design guidelines that we employ in this brand-new form of user experience. First and foremost, you are the operating system. Traditional file systems are complex and abstract, and they take your brain extra steps to decode them. We're going against the Neural Path of Least Resistance. Meanwhile, in augmented reality, you can of course place your holographic TED panel over here, and your holographic email on the other side of the desk, and your spatial memory evolved just fine to go ahead and retrieve them. You could put your holographic Tesla that you're shopping for -- or whatever model my legal team told me to put in right before the show. (Laughter) Perfect. And your brain knows exactly how to get it back. The second interface guideline we call "touch to see." What do babies do when they see something that grabs their interest? They try and reach out and touch it. And that's exactly how the natural machine should work as well. Turns out the visual system gets a fundamental boost from a sense we call proprioception -- that's the sense of our body parts in space. So by touching our work directly, we're not only going to control it better, we're also going to understand it much more deeply. Hence, touch to see. But it's not enough to experience things ourselves. We're inherently these social primates. And this leads me to our third guideline, the holographic campfire from our first story. Our mirror-neuron subsystem suggests that we can connect with each other and with our work much better if we can see each other's faces and hands in 3D. So if you look at the video behind me, you can see two Meta users playing around with the same hologram, making eye contact, connected around this thing, instead of being distracted by external devices. Let's go ahead and try this again with neuroscience in mind. So again, our favorite interface, the iOS of the mind. I'm going to now take a step further and go ahead and grab this pair of glasses and leave it right here by the desk. I'm now with you, I'm in the moment, we're connecting. My spatial memory kicks in, and I can go ahead and grab it and bring it right back here, reminding me that I am the operating system. And now my proprioception is working, and I can go ahead and explode these glasses into a thousand parts and touch the very sensor that is currently scanning my hand. But it's not enough to see things alone, so in a second, my co-founder Ray is going to make a 3D call -- Ray? (Ringing) Hey Ray, how's it going? Guys, I can see this guy in front me in full 3D. And he is photo-realistic. (Applause) Thank you. My mirror-neuron subsystem suggests that this is going to replace phones in not too long. Ray, how's it going? Ray: Great. We're live today. (Applause) MG: Ray, give the crowd a gift of the holographic brain we saw from the video earlier. Guys, this is not only going to change phones, it's also going to change the way we collaborate. Thank you so much. Thanks, Ray. Ray: You're welcome. (Applause) MG: So folks, this is the message that I discovered in that bar in 2011: The future of computers is not locked inside one of these screens. It's right here, inside of us. (Applause) So if there's one idea that I could leave you with here today, it's that the natural machine is not some figment of the future, it's right here in 2016. Which is why all hundred of us at Meta, including the administrative staff, the executives, the designers, the engineers -- before TED2017, we're all going to be throwing away our external monitors and replacing them with a truly and profoundly more natural machine. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you, appreciate it. Thanks, guys. Chris Anderson: So help me out on one thing, because there've been a few augmented reality demos shown over the last year or so out there. And there's sometimes a debate among technologists about, are we really seeing the real thing on-screen? There's this issue of field of view, that somehow the technology is showing a broader view than you would actually see wearing the glasses. Were we seeing the real deal there? MG: Absolutely the real deal. Not only that, we took extra measures to shoot it with a GoPro through the actual lens in the various videos that you've seen here. We want to try to simulate the experience for the world that we're actually seeing through the glasses, and not cut any corners. CA: Thank you so much for showing us that. MG: Thanks so much, I appreciate that. On our planet, we have two polar regions: the Arctic, whose name comes from the Greek Arktikos, of the North, and the Antarctic from Antarktikos, opposite of the North. But there's an easier way to remember them if you just remember what surrounds them. The Arctic, situated in the Northern hemisphere of our planet, is an ocean entirely surrounded by land. On the other side of the world, the Antarctic is a continent entirely surrounded by ocean. So, the Arctic has polar bears but no penguins, and the Antarctic has penguins but no polar bears. Let's talk about the Arctic first. The Arctic region consists of a vast, ice-covered ocean surrounded by treeless permafrost. The area can be defined as the region between the Arctic Circle and the North Pole. If you were to stand at the North Pole, everywhere you looked, in all directions, would be south. But standing at the North Pole is difficult to do for very long because it's in the middle of an ocean, covered by constantly shifting, frozen sea ice. If you were to fall into the water at the North Pole, you'd fall into water that's 13,980 feet deep. Above the water, average winter temperatures can be as low as -40 degrees Celsius, and the coldest recorded temperature is approximately -68 degrees Celsius. Despite these incredibly harsh conditions, humans have populated areas in the Arctic for thousands of years. Life in the Arctic includes organisms living in the ice, zooplankton and phytoplankton, fish and marine mammals, birds, land animals, plants, and human societies. Okay, what about Antarctica? Antarctica is Earth's southernmost continent, and it contains the geographic South Pole. It's the fifth largest continent on the planet at nearly twice the size of Australia. Almost 98% of Anarctica is covered by ice at least one mile in thickness. Conditions in Antarctica are some of the most extreme in the entire world. On average, it's the coldest, windiest, driest continent and has the highest average elevation of all the continents. You might think that it snows all the time at the Poles, but Antarctica is so dry, it's considered a desert with annual precipitation of only 200 millimeters along the coast and far less inland. The temperature in Antarctica has reached -89 degrees Celsius. Because it's so