so I run a moonshot Factory in New York
City and today I wanted to share with
you some of these moon shots so the
first one is about humor and democracy
so I grew up in South Asia where it is
normal to pay bribes to politicians or
to government officials to get anything
done but the big problem is you don’t
know how much to pay like should you pay
50 bucks or 100 bucks how what is the
right amount because you don’t want to
overpay and you don’t want to underpaid
so this is in my early teens I was 16 17
then sad as a joke but I made a Yelp for
politicians so basically you can come in
and write your experience about a
certain government official how much
you’ve paid you can write a review how
well they did your job in how much time
so five-star review is you know I paid
him less money and he did the best job
out of all the other officials so
everyone please go and pay him the bribe
so this spread like wildfire but at the
same time as you can guess we got a
seasoned decease notice from the
government and we got shut down which is
why I don’t have any screenshots to show
you right now
but yeah so so I guess moonshots isn’t
about technology sometimes it’s just
about humor and parody from there I
moved to Bombay and my next moonshot
story is about senses and skills so this
is late teens and like every other
teenager I wanted to learn the guitar to
impress some girls but I never managed
to learn because I was so impatient so
years later I made this apparatus
is these transducers that you wear on
your fingers and what they do is they
give you an allusion to your fingers of
pull or push so you feel as if someone’s
holding your hand and like slowly
nudging you forward and backward so now
you can imagine you can pick up a
ukulele pick up a guitar and download a
song onto your hand download a song on
your hand and start playing without
knowing how to play you could also
imagine now picking up a pen and
downloading a language or a script and
then start writing in Arabic for example
without knowing how to write in Arabic
so the way the system works is at first
teaches you so you get better then it
only connects you as you are making any
mistakes and then it will misguide you
so you learn more things so from there I
moved to Singapore and my next story is
about shoes and discovery
so in Singapore where I lived this is
what I saw everywhere people
experiencing the world through this fine
slab of glass and where I grew up I used
to walk barefoot so of course these are
some white man’s legs imagine some brown
legs with my legs so I started working
on super shoes so super shoes are these
silicon based in Souls which tickle your
feet they tickle your feet so there are
three ticklers up there and one
capacitive pad which incense your taps
and there some electronics stuff and all
of this is flexible foldable moldable
and you can put it in any of issue and
any of issue becomes a super shoe so you
could bicycle with that you can walk
with it you could jump with it and the
way it works is an optical interface so
if the left feet tickles take a left
turn if the right feet tickles take a
right turn if nautical stopped and a
false tickle keep keep going so not only
navigation but I added a personality
engine on top of it so now it knows what
kind of food you like music you like
your personal preferences so on so forth
it also knows you look
in reminders tasks calendar all of that
so now you can imagine I’m in Berlin
here for my third time now and I really
want some schnapps and the shoes no I
really love up so they can tickle
me and take me to a really good schnapps
so not only recommendations or reminders
but I think the next thing is which we
don’t do anymore is getting lost we
don’t get lost anymore so the shoes do
is they allow you to wonder wonder and
get lost and then if you want to come
back home you just tap your feet thrice
and the shoes take you back home so the
shoes got acquired by a company which is
manufacturing them right now from
Singapore I moved to Panama and Cambodia
my next story is about waste trash and
education so in Phnom Penh where I lived
I lived close to a landfill a waste
landfill and tons of kids work their
families worked there and kids were
happy they would make toys and play with
them so I shall also making toys so for
example what you see up there a small
box that’s a matchbox ice box that you
put in your pocket and you can take this
and go to a landfill pick up a keyboard
and now the keyboard becomes a piano or
this one where you put it another to ask
you math questions now no kid ever likes
this toy or this one where it tells you
stories and these toys became smaller
and smaller and compact and we had a
whole team of engineers designers
educators who joined us in this NGO we
created open toys and we took it out in
Southeast Asia for the next two years so
again a moonshot but some they are you
make from trash from there I moved to
Tokyo and London and then ended up in
Boston where I was a scientist at MIT at
the MIT Media Lab and my next story is
about elasticity and gadgets so one day
when I was packing my you know my back
to go to my lab I realized that I carry
all these different devices you know I
carry a
up top MacBook I mean iPad iPhone and
they all do the same thing you know they
all do all more the same thing but why
am i carrying five different devices
what if you could make them elastic so
what if you could take your iPhone and
stretch it and it becomes iPad like a
rubber band and you stretch it even
further and becomes the MacBook and it
stretched the MacBook and becomes an
iMac so I made a elastic screen so this
is a very preliminary demo where it
shows how you interact with the screen
and it’s a 2.5 g displace it’s not just
two-dimensional it’s 2.5 dimensional so
as an example say you’re looking at
Google Maps so you can brought in to see
the soil and water layer you can pull up
to see the air layer you can stitch the
elastic screen and see them side-by-side
you can also use it as a shape memory so
it has it understands shapes so you can
pull out a mountain and at the mountain
stays as it is so you can imagine if you
are playing with excel your bar charts
now come up and down you can pull from
the screen and push into the screen or
in this case you can also use it as a
normal discreet second draw a river and
then compress expand and change the
shape of the river and if you wanted it
really wanted you could also pull up the
entire screen up like pull up the whole
screen and see the layers underneath so
this was my time in Boston and after
Boston I quit my PhD and I moved to
Seattle where my team was a moonshot
secretive team working in Seattle these
are some photos from our lab and three
years later our team launched the Amazon
Alexa echo look so that was an
interesting experience taking a moonshot
ish idea I won’t call it a moonshot but
taking something out and shipping it to
millions of people and then I got bored
so I left and I took a sabbatical went
and then I moved to New York City this
is my office in New York City and Soho
and I can share with you two projects
that I’m working on right now one of
them is an idea of bacteria and time so
it comes back to the question what is
time and we think of time as quantity
it’s 250 it’s 3 3 3 o clock it’s fire
clock but that’s just a most simplistic
representation of time but conceptually
time as I understand it is a gradient
between life and death so what if we can
now experience time through something
that’s living like a bacteria so I
started making a wristwatch and if this
is a wristwatch which runs on bacteria
so there are no hands there are no
digits but under the glass there is a
colony of millions of bacteria whose DNA
is programmed to change color with time
so as time passes your watch changes
color and the watch is programmed the
bacteria’s programmed to live for
exactly 24 hours so it dies after 24
hours so that’s how you experience a day
and at the end of the day evolve opens
up on the right hand side and let the
dead bacteria into the air as ashes as
you’re emitting them and a left wall
opens up which takes new bacteria in and
the cycle starts again
so you’re experiencing time now not as a
quantity but life and death ok let’s
make it a bit less serious so the other
thing I’m working on right now is dogs
and sweat so I love dogs but I’ve always
wanted to emotionally connect with dogs
and it’s difficult to talk to dogs so we
are right now working on this new
project I set a prototype stage so we
realized that when dogs have extreme
emotions they let out a tiny amount of
sweat in their palms and sweat as you
know it’s the line which is salt which
is conductive so we are able to measure
in micro volts the amount of saline
sweat that the dogs have and that helps
us with machine learning to model the
emotions of the dog so now we are able
to soon we’ll be able to talk with the
dog
so maybe next year and TEDx Berlin I can
be joined on stage with my dog and we
can give a talk together but coming back
to the title of my talk like when the
moon shoots back and the reason I did
this is because I really believe that
moon shots are not about technology are
not necessarily about technology they
can even be about eyes they can even be
about something simple they don’t need
technology case in point this is my
first project I ever did in my life I
was smoking cigarettes and my professor
caught me and he told me to pick up all
the dirty secret butts so I came back
next week and I put a plant seed in the
butt of a cigarette so now when he
smoked a cigarette on you through the
but you’re actually planting a tree this
is cigarette this is plants growing from
four packs of cigarettes so moonshots
don’t need technology so let me end it
with this one word of advice moon shots
are hard
self-doubt isn’t clever so create a ton
of work before you dead forever thank you
City and today I wanted to share with
you some of these moon shots so the
first one is about humor and democracy
so I grew up in South Asia where it is
normal to pay bribes to politicians or
to government officials to get anything
done but the big problem is you don’t
know how much to pay like should you pay
50 bucks or 100 bucks how what is the
right amount because you don’t want to
overpay and you don’t want to underpaid
so this is in my early teens I was 16 17
then sad as a joke but I made a Yelp for
politicians so basically you can come in
and write your experience about a
certain government official how much
you’ve paid you can write a review how
well they did your job in how much time
so five-star review is you know I paid
him less money and he did the best job
out of all the other officials so
everyone please go and pay him the bribe
so this spread like wildfire but at the
same time as you can guess we got a
seasoned decease notice from the
government and we got shut down which is
why I don’t have any screenshots to show
you right now
but yeah so so I guess moonshots isn’t
about technology sometimes it’s just
about humor and parody from there I
moved to Bombay and my next moonshot
story is about senses and skills so this
is late teens and like every other
teenager I wanted to learn the guitar to
impress some girls but I never managed
to learn because I was so impatient so
years later I made this apparatus
is these transducers that you wear on
your fingers and what they do is they
give you an allusion to your fingers of
pull or push so you feel as if someone’s
holding your hand and like slowly
nudging you forward and backward so now
you can imagine you can pick up a
ukulele pick up a guitar and download a
song onto your hand download a song on
your hand and start playing without
knowing how to play you could also
imagine now picking up a pen and
downloading a language or a script and
then start writing in Arabic for example
without knowing how to write in Arabic
so the way the system works is at first
teaches you so you get better then it
only connects you as you are making any
mistakes and then it will misguide you
so you learn more things so from there I
moved to Singapore and my next story is
about shoes and discovery
so in Singapore where I lived this is
what I saw everywhere people
experiencing the world through this fine
slab of glass and where I grew up I used
to walk barefoot so of course these are
some white man’s legs imagine some brown
legs with my legs so I started working
on super shoes so super shoes are these
silicon based in Souls which tickle your
feet they tickle your feet so there are
three ticklers up there and one
capacitive pad which incense your taps
and there some electronics stuff and all
of this is flexible foldable moldable
and you can put it in any of issue and
any of issue becomes a super shoe so you
could bicycle with that you can walk
with it you could jump with it and the
way it works is an optical interface so
if the left feet tickles take a left
turn if the right feet tickles take a
right turn if nautical stopped and a
false tickle keep keep going so not only
navigation but I added a personality
engine on top of it so now it knows what
kind of food you like music you like
your personal preferences so on so forth
it also knows you look
in reminders tasks calendar all of that
so now you can imagine I’m in Berlin
here for my third time now and I really
want some schnapps and the shoes no I
really love up so they can tickle
me and take me to a really good schnapps
so not only recommendations or reminders
but I think the next thing is which we
don’t do anymore is getting lost we
don’t get lost anymore so the shoes do
is they allow you to wonder wonder and
get lost and then if you want to come
back home you just tap your feet thrice
and the shoes take you back home so the
shoes got acquired by a company which is
manufacturing them right now from
Singapore I moved to Panama and Cambodia
my next story is about waste trash and
education so in Phnom Penh where I lived
I lived close to a landfill a waste
landfill and tons of kids work their
families worked there and kids were
happy they would make toys and play with
them so I shall also making toys so for
example what you see up there a small
box that’s a matchbox ice box that you
put in your pocket and you can take this
and go to a landfill pick up a keyboard
and now the keyboard becomes a piano or
this one where you put it another to ask
you math questions now no kid ever likes
this toy or this one where it tells you
stories and these toys became smaller
and smaller and compact and we had a
whole team of engineers designers
educators who joined us in this NGO we
created open toys and we took it out in
Southeast Asia for the next two years so
again a moonshot but some they are you
make from trash from there I moved to
Tokyo and London and then ended up in
Boston where I was a scientist at MIT at
the MIT Media Lab and my next story is
about elasticity and gadgets so one day
when I was packing my you know my back
to go to my lab I realized that I carry
all these different devices you know I
carry a
up top MacBook I mean iPad iPhone and
they all do the same thing you know they
all do all more the same thing but why
am i carrying five different devices
what if you could make them elastic so
what if you could take your iPhone and
stretch it and it becomes iPad like a
rubber band and you stretch it even
further and becomes the MacBook and it
stretched the MacBook and becomes an
iMac so I made a elastic screen so this
is a very preliminary demo where it
shows how you interact with the screen
and it’s a 2.5 g displace it’s not just
two-dimensional it’s 2.5 dimensional so
as an example say you’re looking at
Google Maps so you can brought in to see
the soil and water layer you can pull up
to see the air layer you can stitch the
elastic screen and see them side-by-side
you can also use it as a shape memory so
it has it understands shapes so you can
pull out a mountain and at the mountain
stays as it is so you can imagine if you
are playing with excel your bar charts
now come up and down you can pull from
the screen and push into the screen or
in this case you can also use it as a
normal discreet second draw a river and
then compress expand and change the
shape of the river and if you wanted it
really wanted you could also pull up the
entire screen up like pull up the whole
screen and see the layers underneath so
this was my time in Boston and after
Boston I quit my PhD and I moved to
Seattle where my team was a moonshot
secretive team working in Seattle these
are some photos from our lab and three
years later our team launched the Amazon
Alexa echo look so that was an
interesting experience taking a moonshot
ish idea I won’t call it a moonshot but
taking something out and shipping it to
millions of people and then I got bored
so I left and I took a sabbatical went
and then I moved to New York City this
is my office in New York City and Soho
and I can share with you two projects
that I’m working on right now one of
them is an idea of bacteria and time so
it comes back to the question what is
time and we think of time as quantity
it’s 250 it’s 3 3 3 o clock it’s fire
clock but that’s just a most simplistic
representation of time but conceptually
time as I understand it is a gradient
between life and death so what if we can
now experience time through something
that’s living like a bacteria so I
started making a wristwatch and if this
is a wristwatch which runs on bacteria
so there are no hands there are no
digits but under the glass there is a
colony of millions of bacteria whose DNA
is programmed to change color with time
so as time passes your watch changes
color and the watch is programmed the
bacteria’s programmed to live for
exactly 24 hours so it dies after 24
hours so that’s how you experience a day
and at the end of the day evolve opens
up on the right hand side and let the
dead bacteria into the air as ashes as
you’re emitting them and a left wall
opens up which takes new bacteria in and
the cycle starts again
so you’re experiencing time now not as a
quantity but life and death ok let’s
make it a bit less serious so the other
thing I’m working on right now is dogs
and sweat so I love dogs but I’ve always
wanted to emotionally connect with dogs
and it’s difficult to talk to dogs so we
are right now working on this new
project I set a prototype stage so we
realized that when dogs have extreme
emotions they let out a tiny amount of
sweat in their palms and sweat as you
know it’s the line which is salt which
is conductive so we are able to measure
in micro volts the amount of saline
sweat that the dogs have and that helps
us with machine learning to model the
emotions of the dog so now we are able
to soon we’ll be able to talk with the
dog
so maybe next year and TEDx Berlin I can
be joined on stage with my dog and we
can give a talk together but coming back
to the title of my talk like when the
moon shoots back and the reason I did
this is because I really believe that
moon shots are not about technology are
not necessarily about technology they
can even be about eyes they can even be
about something simple they don’t need
technology case in point this is my
first project I ever did in my life I
was smoking cigarettes and my professor
caught me and he told me to pick up all
the dirty secret butts so I came back
next week and I put a plant seed in the
butt of a cigarette so now when he
smoked a cigarette on you through the
but you’re actually planting a tree this
is cigarette this is plants growing from
four packs of cigarettes so moonshots
don’t need technology so let me end it
with this one word of advice moon shots
are hard
self-doubt isn’t clever so create a ton
of work before you dead forever thank you
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