I want to start with a game.
Okay?
And to win this game, all you have to do is see the reality that's in front of you as it really is, all right?
So we have two panels here, of colored dots.
And one of those dots is the same in the two panels.
And you have to tell me which one.
Now, I narrowed it down to the gray one, the green one, and, say, the orange one.
So by a show of hands, we'll start with the easiest one.
Show of hands: how many people think it's the gray one?
Really?
Okay.
How many people think it's the green one?
And how many people think it's the orange one?
Pretty even split.
Let's find out what the reality is.
Here is the orange one.
(Laughter) Here is the green one.
And here is the gray one.
(Laughter) So for all of you who saw that, you're complete realists.
All right?
(Laughter) So this is pretty amazing, isn't it?
Because nearly every living system has evolved the ability to detect light in one way or another.
So for us, seeing color is one of the simplest things the brain does.
And yet, even at this most fundamental level, context is everything.
What I'm going to talk about is not that context is everything, but why context is everything.
Because it's answering that question that tells us not only why we see what we do, but who we are as individuals, and who we are as a society.
But first, we have to ask another question, which is, "What is color for?"
And instead of telling you, I'll just show you.
What you see here is a jungle scene, and you see the surfaces according to the amount of light that those surfaces reflect.
Now, can any of you see the predator that's about to jump out at you?
And if you haven't seen it yet, you're dead, right?
(Laughter) Can anyone see it?
Anyone?
No?
Now let's see the surfaces according to the quality of light that they reflect.
And now you see it.
So, color enables us to see the similarities and differences between surfaces, according to the full spectrum of light that they reflect.
But what you've just done is in many respects mathematically impossible.
Why?
Because, as Berkeley tells us, we have no direct access to our physical world, other than through our senses.
And the light that falls onto our eyes is determined by multiple things in the world, not only the color of objects, but also the color of their illumination, and the color of the space between us and those objects.
You vary any one of those parameters, and you'll change the color of the light that falls onto your eye.
This is a huge problem, because it means that the same image could have an infinite number of possible real-world sources.
Let me show you what I mean.
Imagine that this is the back of your eye, okay?
And these are two projections from the world.
They're identical in every single way.
Identical in shape, size, spectral content.
They are the same, as far as your eye is concerned.
And yet they come from completely different sources.
The one on the right comes from a yellow surface, in shadow, oriented facing the left, viewed through a pinkish medium.
The one on the left comes from an orange surface, under direct light, facing to the right, viewed through sort of a bluish medium.
Completely different meanings, giving rise to the exact same retinal information.
And yet it's only the retinal information that we get.
So how on Earth do we even see?
So if you remember anything in this next 18 minutes, remember this: that the light that falls onto your eye, sensory information, is meaningless, because it could mean literally anything.
And what's true for sensory information is true for information generally.
There's no inherent meaning in information.
It's what we do with that information that matters.
So, how do we see?
Well, we see by learning to see.
The brain evolved the mechanisms for finding patterns, finding relationships in information, and associating those relationships with a behavioral meaning, a significance, by interacting with the world.
We're very aware of this in the form of more cognitive attributes, like language.
I'm going to give you some letter strings, and I want you to read them out for me, if you can.
Audience: "Can you read this?"
"You are not reading this."
"What are you reading?"
Beau Lotto: "What are you reading?"
Half the letters are missing, right?
There's no a priori reason why an "H" has to go between that "W" and "A."
But you put one there.
Why?
Because in the statistics of your past experience, it would have been useful to do so.
So you do so again.
And yet you don't put a letter after that first "T."
Why?
Because it wouldn't have been useful in the past.
So you don't do it again.
So, let me show you how quickly our brains can redefine normality, even at the simplest thing the brain does, which is color.
So if I could have the lights down up here.
I want you to first notice that those two desert scenes are physically the same.
One is simply the flipping of the other.
Now I want you to wilkersonjack@example.org the green and the red.
And I want you to stare at that dot.
Don't look anywhere else.
We're going to look at it for about 30 seconds, which is a bit of a killer in an 18-minute talk.
(Laughter) But I really want you to learn.
And I'll tell you -- don't look anywhere else -- I'll tell you what's happening in your head.
Your brain is learning, and it's learning that the right side of its visual field is under red illumination; the left side of its visual field is under green illumination.
That's what it's learning.
Okay?
Now, when I tell you, I want you to wilkersonjack@example.org the two desert scenes.
So why don't you do that now?
(Laughter) Can I have the lights up again?
I take it from your response they don't look the same anymore, right?
(Applause) Why?
Because your brain is seeing that same information as if the right one is still under red light, and the left one is still under green light.
That's your new normal.
Okay?
So, what does this mean for context?
It means I can take two identical squares, put them in light and dark surrounds, and the one on the dark surround looks lighter than on the light surround.
What's significant is not simply the light and dark surrounds that matter.
It's what those light and dark surrounds meant for your behavior in the past.
So I'll show you what I mean.
Here we have that exact same illusion.
We have two identical tiles on the left, one in a dark surround, one in a light surround.
And the same thing over on the right.
Now, I'll reveal those two scenes, but I'm not going to change anything within those boxes, except their meaning.
And see what happens to your perception.
Notice that on the left the two tiles look nearly completely opposite: one very white and one very dark, right?
Whereas on the right, the two tiles look nearly the same.
And yet there is still one on a dark surround, and one on a light surround.
Why?
Because if the tile in that shadow were in fact in shadow, and reflecting the same amount of light to your eye as the one outside the shadow, it would have to be more reflective -- just the laws of physics.
So you see it that way.
Whereas on the right, the information is consistent with those two tiles being under the same light.
If they're under the same light reflecting the same amount of light to your eye, then they must be equally reflective.
So you see it that way.
Which means we can bring all this information together to create some incredibly strong illusions.
This is one I made a few years ago.
And you'll notice you see a dark brown tile at the top, and a bright orange tile at the side.
That is your perceptual reality.
The physical reality is that those two tiles are the same.
Here you see four gray tiles on your left, seven gray tiles on the right.
I'm not going to change those tiles at all, but I'm going to reveal the rest of the scene.
And see what happens to your perception.
The four blue tiles on the left are gray.
The seven yellow tiles on the right are also gray.
They are the same.
Okay?
Don't believe me?
Let's watch it again.
What's true for color is also true for complex perceptions of motion.
So, here we have -- let's turn this around -- a diamond.
And what I'm going to do is, I'm going to hold it here, and I'm going to spin it.
And for all of you, you'll see it probably spinning this direction.
Now I want you to keep wilkersonjack@example.org.
Move your eyes around, blink, maybe close one eye.
And suddenly it will flip, and start spinning the opposite direction.
Yes?
Raise your hand if you got that.
Yes?
Keep blinking.
Every time you blink, it will switch.
So I can ask you, which direction is it rotating?
How do you know?
Your brain doesn't know, because both are equally likely.
So depending on where it looks, it flips between the two possibilities.
Are we the only ones that see illusions?
The answer to this question is no.
Even the beautiful bumblebee, with its mere one million brain cells, which is 250 times fewer cells than you have in one retina, sees illusions, does the most complicated things that even our most sophisticated computers can't do.
So in my lab we work on bumblebees, because we can completely control their experience, and see how it alters the architecture of their brain.
We do this in what we call the Bee Matrix.
Here you have the hive.
You can see the queen bee, the large bee in the middle.
Those are her daughters, the eggs.
They go back and forth between this hive and the arena, via this tube.
You'll see one of the bees come out here.
You see how she has a little number on her?
There's another one coming out, she also has a number on her.
Now, they're not born that way, right?
We pull them out, put them in the fridge, and they fall asleep.
Then you can superglue little numbers on them.
(Laughter) And now, in this experiment they get a reward if they go to the blue flowers.
They land on the flower, stick their tongue in there, called a proboscis, and drink sugar water.
She's drinking a glass of water that's about that big to you and I, will do that about three times, then fly.
And sometimes they learn not to go to the blue, but to go where the other bees go.
So they copy each other.
They can count to five.
They can recognize faces.
And here she comes down the ladder.
And she'll come into the hive, find an empty honey pot, and throw up, and that's honey.
(Laughter) Now remember, she's supposed to be going to the blue flowers, but what are these bees doing in the upper right corner?
It looks like they're going to green flowers.
Now, are they getting it wrong?
And the answer to the question is no.
Those are actually blue flowers.
But those are blue flowers under green light.
So they're using the relationships between the colors to solve the puzzle, which is exactly what we do.
So, illusions are often used, especially in art, in the words of a more contemporary artist, "to demonstrate the fragility of our senses."
Okay, this is complete rubbish.
The senses aren't fragile.
And if they were, we wouldn't be here.
Instead, color tells us something completely different, that the brain didn't actually evolve to see the world the way it is.
We can't.
Instead, the brain evolved to see the world the way it was useful to see in the past.
And how we see is by continually redefining normality.
So, how can we take this incredible capacity of plasticity of the brain and get people to experience their world differently?
Well, one of the ways we do it in my lab and studio is we translate the light into sound, and we enable people to hear their visual world.
And they can navigate the world using their ears.
Here's David on the right, and he's holding a camera.
On the left is what his camera sees.
And you'll see there's a faint line going across that image.
That line is broken up into 32 squares.
In each square, we calculate the average color.
And then we just simply translate that into sound.
And now he's going to turn around, close his eyes, and find a plate on the ground with his eyes closed.
(Continuous sound) (Sound changes momentarily) (Sound changes momentarily) (Sound changes momentarily) (Sound changes momentarily) (Sound changes momentarily) Beau Lotto: He finds it.
Amazing, right?
So not only can we create a prosthetic for the visually impaired, but we can also investigate how people literally make sense of the world.
But we can also do something else.
We can also make music with color.
So, working with kids, they created images, thinking about what might the images you see sound like if we could listen to them.
And then we translated these images.
And this is one of those images.
And this is a six-year-old child composing a piece of music for a 32-piece orchestra.
And this is what it sounds like.
(Electronic representation of orchestral music) So, a six-year-old child.
Okay?
Now, what does all this mean?
What this suggests is that no one is an outside observer of nature, okay?
We're not defined by our central properties, by the bits that make us up.
We're defined by our environment and our interaction with that environment, by our ecology.
And that ecology is necessarily relative, historical and empirical.
So, what I'd like to finish with is this over here.
Because what I've been trying to do is really celebrate uncertainty.
Because I think only through uncertainty is there potential for understanding.
So, if some of you are still feeling a bit too certain, I'd like to do this one.
So, if we have the lights down.
And what we have here -- Can everyone see 25 purple surfaces on your left, and 25, call it yellowish, surfaces on your right?
So now, what I want to do, I'm going to put the middle nine surfaces here under yellow illumination, by simply putting a filter behind them.
Now you can see that changes the light that's coming through there, right?
Because now the light is going through a yellowish filter and then a purplish filter.
I'm going to do the opposite on the left here.
I'm going to put the middle nine under a purplish light.
Now, some of you will have noticed that the consequence is that the light coming through those middle nine on the right, or your left, is exactly the same as the light coming through the middle nine on your right.
Agreed?
Yes?
Okay.
So they are physically the same.
Let's pull the covers off.
Now remember -- you know that the middle nine are exactly the same.
Do they look the same?
No.
The question is, "Is that an illusion?"
And I'll leave you with that.
So, thank you very much.
(Laughter) (Applause)
I am the daughter of a forger, not just any forger ...
When you hear the word "forger," you often understand "mercenary."
You understand "forged currency," "forged pictures."
My father is no such man.
For 30 years of his life, he made false papers -- never for himself, always for other people, and to come to the aid of the persecuted and the oppressed.
Let me introduce him.
Here is my father at age 19.
It all began for him during World War II, when at age 17 he found himself thrust into a forged documents workshop.
He quickly became the false papers expert of the Resistance.
And it's not a banal story -- after the liberation he continued to make false papers until the '70s.
When I was a child I knew nothing about this, of course.
This is me in the middle making faces.
I grew up in the Paris suburbs and I was the youngest of three children.
I had a "normal" dad like everybody else, apart from the fact that he was 30 years older than ...
well, he was basically old enough to be my grandfather.
Anyway, he was a photographer and a street educator, and he always taught us to obey the law very strictly.
And, of course, he never talked about his past life when he was a forger.
There was, however, an incident I'm going to tell you about, that perhaps could have led me suspect something.
I was in high school and got a bad grade, a rare event for me, so I decided to hide it from my parents.
In order to do that, I set out to forge their signature.
I started working on my mother's signature, because my father's is absolutely impossible to forge.
So, I got working.
I took some sheets of paper and started practicing, practicing, practicing, until I reached what I thought was a steady hand, and went into action.
Later, while checking my school bag, my mother got hold of my school assignment and immediately saw that the signature was forged.
She yelled at me like she never had before.
I went to hide in my bedroom, under the blankets, and then I waited for my father to come back from work with, one could say, much apprehension.
I heard him come in.
I remained under the blankets.
He entered my room, sat on the corner of the bed, and he was silent, so I pulled the blanket from my head, and when he saw me he started laughing.
He was laughing so hard, he could not stop and he was holding my assignment in his hand.
Then he said, "But really, Sarah, you could have worked harder!
Can't you see it's really too small?"
Indeed, it's rather small.
I was born in Algeria.
There I would hear people say my father was a "moudjahid" and that means "fighter."
Later on, in France, I loved eavesdropping on grownups' conversations, and I would hear all sorts of stories about my father's previous life, especially that he had "done" World War II, that he had "done" the Algerian war.
And in my head I would be thinking that "doing" a war meant being a soldier.
But knowing my father, and how he kept saying that he was a pacifist and non-violent, I found it very hard to picture him with a helmet and gun.
And indeed, I was very far from the mark.
One day, while my father was working on a file for us to obtain French nationality, I happened to see some documents that caught my attention.
These are real!
These are mine, I was born an Argentinean.
But the document I happened to see that would help us build a case for the authorities was a document from the army that thanked my father for his work on behalf of the secret services.
And then, suddenly, I went "wow!"
My father, a secret agent?
It was very James Bond.
I wanted to ask him questions, which he didn't answer.
And later, I told myself that one day I would have to question him.
And then I became a mother and had a son, and finally decided it was time -- that he absolutely had to talk to us.
I had become a mother and he was celebrating his 77th birthday, and suddenly I was very, very afraid.
I feared he'd go and take his silences with him, and take his secrets with him.
I managed to convince him that it was important for us, but possibly also for other people that he shared his story.
He decided to tell it to me and I made a book, from which I'm going to read you some excerpts later.
So, his story.
My father was born in Argentina.
His parents were of Russian descent.
The whole family came to settle in France in the '30s.
His parents were Jewish, Russian and above all, very poor.
So at the age of 14 my father had to work.
And with his only diploma, his primary education certificate, he found himself working at a dyer - dry cleaner.
That's where he discovered something totally magical, and when he talks about it, it's fascinating -- it's the magic of dyeing chemistry.
During that time the war was happening and his mother was killed when he was 15.
This coincided with the time when he threw himself body and soul into chemistry because it was the only consolation for his sadness.
All day he would ask many questions to his boss to learn, to accumulate more and more knowledge, and at night, when no one was looking, he'd put his experience to practice.
He was mostly interested in ink bleaching.
All this to tell you that if my father became a forger, actually, it was almost by accident.
His family was Jewish, so they were hounded.
Finally they were all arrested and taken to the Drancy camp and they managed to get out at the last minute thanks to their Argentinean papers.
Well, they were out, but they were always in danger.
The big "Jew" stamp was still on their papers.
It was my grandfather who decided they needed false documents.
My father had been instilled with such respect for the law that although he was being persecuted, he'd never thought of false papers.
But it was he who went to meet a man from the Resistance.
In those times documents had hard covers, they were filled in by hand, and they stated your job.
In order to survive, he needed to be working.
He asked the man to write "dyer."
Suddenly the man looked very, very interested.
As a "dyer," do you know how to bleach ink marks?
Of course he knew.
And suddenly the man started explaining that actually the whole Resistance had a huge problem: even the top experts could not manage to bleach an ink, called "indelible," the "Waterman" blue ink.
And my father immediately replied that he knew exactly how to bleach it.
Now, of course, the man was very impressed with this young man of 17 who could immediately give him the formula, so he recruited him.
And actually, without knowing it, my father had invented something we can find in every schoolchild's pencil case: the so-called "correction pen."
(Applause) But it was only the beginning.
That's my father.
As soon as he got to the lab, even though he was the youngest, he immediately saw that there was a problem with the making of forged documents.
All the movements wilkersonjack@example.org.
But demand was ever-growing and it was difficult to tamper with existing documents.
He told himself it was necessary to make them from scratch.
He started a press.
He started photoengraving.
He started making rubber stamps.
He started inventing all kind of things -- with some materials he invented a centrifuge using a bicycle wheel.
Anyway, he had to do all this because he was completely obsessed with output.
He had made a simple calculation: In one hour he could make 30 forged documents.
If he slept one hour, 30 people would die.
This sense of responsibility for other people's lives when he was just 17 -- and also his guilt for being a survivor, since he had escaped the camp when his friends had not -- stayed with him all his life.
And this is maybe what explains why, for 30 years, he continued to make false papers at the expense of all kinds of sacrifices.
I'd like to talk about those sacrifices, because there were many.
There were obviously financial sacrifices because he always refused to be paid.
To him, being paid would have meant being a mercenary.
If he had accepted payment, he wouldn't be able to say "yes" or "no" depending on what he deemed a just or unjust cause.
So he was a photographer by day, and a forger by night for 30 years.
He was broke all of the time.
Then there were the emotional sacrifices: How can one live with a woman while having so many secrets?
How can one explain what one does at night in the lab, every single night?
Of course, there was another kind of sacrifice involving his family that I understood much later.
One day my father introduced me to my sister.
He also explained to me that I had a brother, too, and the first time I saw them I must have been three or four, and they were 30 years older than me.
They are both in their sixties now.
In order to write the book, I asked my sister questions.
I wanted to know who my father was, who was the father she had known.
She explained that the father that she'd had would tell them he'd come and pick them up on Sunday to go for a walk.
They would get all dressed up and wait for him, but he would almost never come.
He'd say, "I'll call."
He wouldn't call.
And then he would not come.
Then one day he totally disappeared.
Time passed, and they thought he had surely forgotten them, at first.
Then as time passed, at the end of almost two years, they thought, "Well, perhaps our father has died."
And then I understood that asking my father so many questions was stirring up a whole past he probably didn't feel like talking about because it was painful.
And while my half brother and sister thought they'd been abandoned, orphaned, my father was making false papers.
And if he did not tell them, it was of course to protect them.
After the liberation he made false papers to allow the survivors of concentration camps to immigrate to Palestine before the creation of Israel.
And then, as he was a staunch anti-colonialist, he made false papers for Algerians during the Algerian war.
After the Algerian war, at the heart of the international resistance movements, his name circulated and the whole world came knocking at his door.
In Africa there were countries fighting for their independence: Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Angola.
And then my father connected with Nelson Mandela's anti-apartheid party.
He made false papers for persecuted black South Africans.
There was also Latin America.
My father helped those who resisted dictatorships in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and then it was the turn of Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay, Chile and Mexico.
Then there was the Vietnam War.
My father made false papers for the American deserters who did not wish to take up arms against the Vietnamese.
Europe was not spared either.
My father made false papers for the dissidents against Franco in Spain, Salazar in Portugal, against the colonels' dictatorship in Greece, and even in France.
There, just once, it happened in May of 1968.
My father watched, benevolently, of course, the demonstrations of the month of May, but his heart was elsewhere, and so was his time because he had over 15 countries to serve.
Once, though, he agreed to make false papers for someone you might recognize.
(Laughter) He was much younger in those days, and my father agreed to make false papers to enable him to come back and speak at a meeting.
He told me that those false papers were the most media-relevant and the least useful he'd had to make in all his life.
But, he agreed to do it, even though Daniel Cohn-Bendit's life was not in danger, just because it was a good opportunity to mock the authorities, and to show them that there's nothing more porous than borders -- and that ideas have no borders.
All my childhood, while my friends' dads would tell them Grimm's fairy tales, my father would tell me stories about very unassuming heroes with unshakeable utopias who managed to make miracles.
And those heroes did not need an army behind them.
Anyhow, nobody would have followed them, except for a handful [of] men and women of conviction and courage.
I understood much later that actually it was his own story my father would tell me to get me to sleep.
I asked him whether, considering the sacrifices he had to make, he ever had any regrets.
He said no.
He told me that he would have been unable to witness or submit to injustice without doing anything.
He was persuaded, and he's still convinced that another world is possible -- a world where no one would ever need a forger.
He's still dreaming about it.
My father is here in the room today.
His name is Adolfo Kaminsky and I'm going to ask him to stand up.
(Applause) Thank you.
Almost 30 years ago, my country was facing the need to rebuild everything from scratch.
After years of Soviet occupation, Estonia regained its independence, but we were left with nothing.
No infrastructure, no administration, no legal code.
Organizational chaos.
Out of necessity, the state leaders back then had to make some daring choices.
The ones that our country could afford.
There was a lot of experimentation and uncertainty but also a bit of luck involved, particularly in the fact that we could count on a number of brilliant visionaries, cryptographers and engineers.
I was just a kid back then.
Today, we are called the most digital society on earth.
I'm from Estonia, and we've been declaring taxes online since 2001.
We have been using digital identity and signature since 2002.
We've been voting online since 2005.
And for today, pretty much the whole range of the public services that you can imagine: education, police, justice, starting a company, applying for benefits, looking at your health record or challenging a parking ticket -- that's everything that is done online.
In fact, it's much easier to tell you what are the three things we cannot yet do online.
We have to show up to pick up our ID documents, get married or divorced, or sell real estate.
That's pretty much it.
So, that's why don't freak out when I tell you that every year I can't wait to start doing my tax declaration.
(Laughter) Because all I have to do is sit on my couch with a mobile phone, swipe a few pages with prefilled data on income and deductions and hit submit.
After three minutes, I'm looking at the tax return amount.
It actually feels like a quite rewarding experience.
No tax advisors, no collecting receipts, no doing the math.
And have I mentioned that I have not visited a state office for almost seven years?
Indeed, one of the features of the modern life that has no reason to exist anymore, considering technological possibilities of today, is the labyrinth of bureaucracy.
We've almost got rid of it completely in Estonia, in an effort coordinated by the government that has also digitized itself.
For instance, cabinet of ministers' work in e-Cabinet is absolutely paperless.
The central idea behind this development is transformation of the state role and digitalization of trust.
Think about it.
In most countries, people don't trust their governments.
And the governments don't trust them back.
And all the complicated paper-based formal procedures are supposed to solve that problem.
Except that they don't.
They just make life more complicated.
I believe Estonian experience is showing that technology can be the remedy for getting the trust back, while creating an efficient, user-centric service delivery system that actively responds to citizens' needs.
We did not do it by digitizing bureaucracy as it is.
But by rather agreeing on a few strong, common principles, redesigning rules and procedures, getting rid of unnecessary data collection and task duplication, and becoming open and transparent.
Let me give you a glimpse into some of the key e-Estonia design principles today.
First, it is essential to guarantee privacy and confidentiality of data and information.
This is achieved through a strong digital identity that is issued by the state and compatible with everything.
In fact, every Estonian has one.
The identity is doubled with a strong digital signature that is accepted, used and legally binding both in Estonia and the European Union.
When the system can properly and securely identify who is using it, after logging in, it will provide access to the personal data of the citizen and all the public services within one tool, and allow to authorize anything by signing digitally.
A second principle, and one of the most transformative, is called "Once only."
It means that the state cannot ask for the same data more than once, nor can store it in more than one place.
For instance, if you've already provided your birth or marital certificate to the population registry, this is the only place where this data is going to be held.
And no other institution will be ever asking for it again.
Once only is a very powerful rule, as it defines the whole structure of the data collection in a country, what information is collected and who is responsible for maintaining it, making sure we avoid centralization of data, duplication of data, and guarantee that it's actually up to date.
This distributed approach also avoids the problem of the single point of failure.
But since the data cannot be replicated, or collected more than once, it means that the design has to keep in mind secure and robust access to that information at all times, so the public institution can offer a service.
This is exactly the role of the data exchange platform called the X-Road that has been in use since 2001.
Just like a highway, it connects public sector databases and registries, local municipalities and businesses, organizing a real-time, secure and regulated data exchange, saving an auditable trace after each move.
Here's a screenshot of a live feed showing all the requests performed on the X-Road and all the services that it actually facilitates.
And this is the real picture of all the connections between public and private sector databases.
As you can see, there is no central database whatsoever.
Confidentiality and privacy are definitely very important.
But in the digital world, reliability and integrity of information is just critical for operations.
For instance, if someone changes your medical health record, let's say allergies, without you or your doctor knowing, treatment could be deadly.
That's why in a digital society, a system like an Estonian one, when there's almost no paper originals, there's almost only digital originals, integrity of data, data exchange rules, software components and log files is paramount.
We use a form of blockchain that we invented back in 2007, way before blockchain even became a thing, to check and guarantee the integrity of data in real time.
Blockchain is our auditor and a promise that no access to the data or data manipulation remains unrecorded.
Data ownership is another key principle in the design of the system.
Aren't you worried by the fact that governments, tech companies and other businesses around the world claim data they've collected about you is theirs, generally refuse to give access to that information, and often fail to prove how it was used or shared with third parties?
I don't know, for me it seems like a quite disturbing situation.
The Estonian system is based on the principle that an individual is the owner of the data collected about him, thus has an absolute right to know what information is collected and who has been accessing it.
Every time a policeman, a doctor or any state officer is accessing personal information of the citizens online, first they only get to access it after logging in to the information they're authorized to see to do their job.
And secondly, every time they're making requests, this is saved in a log file.
This detailed log file is part of the state public services and allows real transparency, making sure no privacy violation will remain unnoticed to the citizen.
Now, of course, this is only a simplified summary of all the design principles that e-Estonia is built on.
And now, government is building up to get ready for use of artificial intelligence and building a whole new generation of public services -- proactive services that would activate seamlessly based on different life situations that people might be in, such as childbirth, unemployment or starting a business.
Now, of course, running a digital society with no paper backup can be an issue, right?
Even though we trust our systems to be solid, but one can never be too cautious as we experienced back in 2007, when the first cyberincident happened, and it literally blocked part of our networks, making access to the services impossible for hours.
We survived.
But this event put cybersecurity at the very top of agenda, both in terms of strengthening the platform and backing it up.
So how do you back up a country-wide system in a small state where everything is super close?
Well for instance, you can export a copy of the data outside the country territory to an extraterritorial space of an embassy.
Today, we have those data embassies that are holding the most critical digital assets of Estonia, guaranteeing continuity of operations, protection of our data, and most importantly, our sovereignty.
Even in case of a physical attack on our territory.
Some of you might be thinking by now: Where are the downsides?
Well, going all digital is administratively, and let's be honest, financially more efficient.
Interfacing primarily with computer systems might create an impression that the human factor, elected politicians and participating in democratic processes is somehow less important.
And there are also some people who feel threatened by pervasive technology that might make their skills obsolete.
So all in all, unfortunately, running a country on a digital platform has not saved us from political power struggles and polarization in the society, as we have seen in the last elections.
Well, until there are humans involved.
One last question.
If everything is location-independent and I can access all of the services from anywhere in the world, why cannot others tap into some of these services, even if they don't reside within Estonian borders?
Five years ago, we launched a governmental start-up called e-Residency program that for today joins tens of thousands of people.
These are businessmen and women from 136 different countries, who establish their businesses digitally, who do their banking online, and who run their companies virtually over e-Estonia platform, within European Union legal framework, using an e-identity card similar to mine and all of that from anywhere in the world.
The Estonian system is location-independent and user-centric.
It prioritizes inclusiveness, openness and reliability.
It puts security and transparency at its center.
And the data into the hands of the rightful owner, the person they refer to.
Don't take my word for it.
Try it.
Thank you.
(Applause)