the great thing about presenting a TEDx
talk is you get to present your crazy
ideas about how to solve all the world’s
problems and in TEDx tradition I’ll
start with a story
so I was 10 years old at the time of the
Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and it
terrified me because I thought that was
really a chance that we would have a
nuclear war and the world would come to
an end in school we had air raid drills
and siren would go off and you’d have to
crawl under the desk they called the
Duck and Cover you have to know that I
grew up in New York and being the New
York wiseguy that I am even a 10 years
old I said to my teacher look if they
drop even a single bomb on the Empire
State Building
we’ll be vaporized the air raid drills
are useless and my teachers response was
get under the desk kid at that moment I
realized that adults didn’t know what
they were doing
and when I look at the headlines today I
have the same impression the discussion
about the crisis on TV seemed insane to
me nobody had any reasonable way out the
behavior of political leaders is that
once they perceive a threat they make a
threat back and then once they make that
threat back they feel like they’re
obligated to at least be willing to
carry out that threat to preserve their
credibility so it seemed like they were
marching lockstep into disaster nobody
really thought American Russia really
wanted to have a nuclear war we find
this kind of paradox in a lot of
problems in our society
nobody says they want war but again and
again we have Wars
nobody advocates poverty but poverty
endures we have this great democracy but
the Democrats and the Republicans can’t
agree on the best policy any more than
the Yankees and the Red Sox can agree on
who has the best baseball team I’m here
to ask the same question that Rodney
King who was a victim of police
brutality in 1991 famously asked why
can’t we all just get along that’s the
fundamental question and that’s the
title of a new book that I’m writing
with my co-author christopher frey go –
why can’t we dot o-r-g much later I was
a math major at MIT and I learned that
this particular trap had a name it was
called the prisoner’s dilemma the
prisoner’s dilemma is a mathematical
model of the trade-off between
cooperation and competition the dilemma
comes in when you realize that there
were certain situations where if you
just look at your own narrow point of
view you’ll make a decision to compete
but if everybody makes that same
decision everybody loses so what you
have to do is you have to step back from
the situation look at the bigger picture
and then you can decide to cooperate
that’s what happened during the Cuban
Missile Crisis Kennedy and Khrushchev
felt like they had to compete for who
had the stereos threat and what they
risked was the total loss of nuclear war
now in science when we face these
dilemmas we don’t get upset we ask the
question what is the trade-off depend on
and can we influence it in any way and I
also studied evolutionary theory and I
realized that one of the key factors in
the trade-off is the relative scarcity
and abundance of resources and here’s
why if there’s not if you have scarcity
there’s not enough to go around so
people have to fight over what little
there is but the problem is that fight
itself uses up resources so there’s less
for everybody and you get this vicious
circle
okay let’s consider the other side
suppose people decide to cooperate well
two heads are better than one you get
synergy the whole is greater than the
sum of its parts so that creates more
abundance so we have a virtuous cycle so
that’s where we are always on this knife
edge between the vicious cycle and the
virtuous cycle so it’s real simple if we
want the world to be more cooperative we
just end scarcity but that kind of
sounds like a tall order doesn’t it or
it does it my scientific workers and
artificial intelligence and we’ve long
had the dream that if people don’t want
to do work do work for themselves we can
have a robot do it so today you might be
worried that you lose your job to a
robot but tomorrow if that robot is
working for you and what and that means
that you don’t need a job well that
might eliminate a lot of worry there’s
another part of the picture
my co-author Frey is an enthusiast for
3d printers and when he first started
talking to me about 3d printers I
thought ok they print out these cute
little plastic tchotchkes
so what but dances are very very fast in
this and now you can imagine a 3d
printer printing out a car or a house
yesterday we heard a talk about a food
computer a little hydroponic farm in a
box and if we have those then anybody
could make food anywhere in the world so
we could print out the parts for a food
computer but the most amazing thing that
a 3d printer could print out would be a
3d printer so then if you have a 3d
printer and your neighbor doesn’t have
one well no big deal you just print out
one so now we have the ingredients for a
new economy ai is the software 3d
printers are the hardware and that’s
what it’s going to be in the future
so in capitalism Capitol’s owns the
means of production in communism the
government owns the means of production
in what we call maker ISM everybody owns
the means of production and in that way
we can get cutthroat competition out of
the economy okay now we’ve solved the
economy let’s start to think about
government how do we get competition and
power out of government okay well first
we might look around and say do we have
any examples in our society where a
group successfully governs itself
without hierarchies without power we
have competition and I think we do now
my tribe is the scientific community and
if you think about it it’s really a
marvel okay so scientists are smart but
there’s only they’re only a small
percentage of the population they don’t
even spend that much money considering
the magnitude of the problems that
they’re dealing with and yet they
produce breakthroughs that improve our
lives on a regular basis and if you hang
out with science
like I do you know that they don’t
always agree on everything so how do we
do it
and I think the key is scientists
organize themselves for cooperation
rather than competition now there are
10-year battles
there’s battles for funding scientists
have big egos it’s all true okay but to
me that’s a sideshow that’s not science
what that is is the business and
politics of having jobs in science and
it’s like not surprisingly it’s like the
business and politics of having jobs
anywhere okay but when all the
bureaucrats are out of the room what a
scientists do they make theories they
make hypotheses they do analysis they do
simulation and those are ideas we could
bring into government right now our
government is mostly about who gets to
make a decision and what it should be
about is what’s the best decision for
everybody so FRA and I are working on a
new proposal for government that we call
reason aa cracy and I’ll just give you a
little flavor of it okay so in America
we hold the idea of voting to be sacred
you know but like in the scientific
community we don’t have any voting in
fact we don’t really even have many of
the trappings that business and
government tell us is necessary to get
things done okay
there’s no president of science there’s
no CEO of science there’s no there’s no
stockholders no political parties and
very little voted so suppose instead we
chose people at random representatives
at random like jury duty we right now we
ask juries to make life-and-death
decisions okay but that would get money
out of the selection and but of course
we’d have to couple that with some
education to make sure the
representatives knew what they were
doing and I think the number one thing
in the curricula
should be learning how to cooperate
teach the modern conflict resolution and
consensus building methods and we don’t
have to do it all just by people talking
in a meeting we can have online tools
they didn’t think of 200 years ago when
they made the constitution we could have
crowdsourcing for brainstorming we could
have online tools that helped us keep
track of the dependencies among ideas
what’s pro and what’s con and we can do
what if scenarios just like a
spreadsheet and fry and I are working on
some such tools in our research work so
I’m a starry-eyed idealist and people
say to me oh you scientists you think
everything’s a technical problem but you
couldn’t solve things like cooperation
and competition which are timeless
social problems but I think science can
I think that science can help remove
pressures like scarcity that make people
act out of fear and fear is what
prevents us from building the culture of
empathy and compassion that we need so
when frightened little ten-year-old
Henry poked his head out from under the
desk during the Cuban Missile Crisis his
fourth-grade teacher couldn’t have
taught him all this we didn’t have AI or
3d printers the book that popularized
the prisoner’s dilemma wasn’t even
published until the 1980s I don’t want
there ever to be another air raid drill
in a fourth-grade classroom
I want fourth graders to learn about the
fundamentals of computation the
mathematics of cooperation so Rodney why
can’t we all just get along
it’s because society doesn’t understand
the truth about the trade-off between
cooperation and competition yes thank
you
[Applause]
talk is you get to present your crazy
ideas about how to solve all the world’s
problems and in TEDx tradition I’ll
start with a story
so I was 10 years old at the time of the
Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and it
terrified me because I thought that was
really a chance that we would have a
nuclear war and the world would come to
an end in school we had air raid drills
and siren would go off and you’d have to
crawl under the desk they called the
Duck and Cover you have to know that I
grew up in New York and being the New
York wiseguy that I am even a 10 years
old I said to my teacher look if they
drop even a single bomb on the Empire
State Building
we’ll be vaporized the air raid drills
are useless and my teachers response was
get under the desk kid at that moment I
realized that adults didn’t know what
they were doing
and when I look at the headlines today I
have the same impression the discussion
about the crisis on TV seemed insane to
me nobody had any reasonable way out the
behavior of political leaders is that
once they perceive a threat they make a
threat back and then once they make that
threat back they feel like they’re
obligated to at least be willing to
carry out that threat to preserve their
credibility so it seemed like they were
marching lockstep into disaster nobody
really thought American Russia really
wanted to have a nuclear war we find
this kind of paradox in a lot of
problems in our society
nobody says they want war but again and
again we have Wars
nobody advocates poverty but poverty
endures we have this great democracy but
the Democrats and the Republicans can’t
agree on the best policy any more than
the Yankees and the Red Sox can agree on
who has the best baseball team I’m here
to ask the same question that Rodney
King who was a victim of police
brutality in 1991 famously asked why
can’t we all just get along that’s the
fundamental question and that’s the
title of a new book that I’m writing
with my co-author christopher frey go –
why can’t we dot o-r-g much later I was
a math major at MIT and I learned that
this particular trap had a name it was
called the prisoner’s dilemma the
prisoner’s dilemma is a mathematical
model of the trade-off between
cooperation and competition the dilemma
comes in when you realize that there
were certain situations where if you
just look at your own narrow point of
view you’ll make a decision to compete
but if everybody makes that same
decision everybody loses so what you
have to do is you have to step back from
the situation look at the bigger picture
and then you can decide to cooperate
that’s what happened during the Cuban
Missile Crisis Kennedy and Khrushchev
felt like they had to compete for who
had the stereos threat and what they
risked was the total loss of nuclear war
now in science when we face these
dilemmas we don’t get upset we ask the
question what is the trade-off depend on
and can we influence it in any way and I
also studied evolutionary theory and I
realized that one of the key factors in
the trade-off is the relative scarcity
and abundance of resources and here’s
why if there’s not if you have scarcity
there’s not enough to go around so
people have to fight over what little
there is but the problem is that fight
itself uses up resources so there’s less
for everybody and you get this vicious
circle
okay let’s consider the other side
suppose people decide to cooperate well
two heads are better than one you get
synergy the whole is greater than the
sum of its parts so that creates more
abundance so we have a virtuous cycle so
that’s where we are always on this knife
edge between the vicious cycle and the
virtuous cycle so it’s real simple if we
want the world to be more cooperative we
just end scarcity but that kind of
sounds like a tall order doesn’t it or
it does it my scientific workers and
artificial intelligence and we’ve long
had the dream that if people don’t want
to do work do work for themselves we can
have a robot do it so today you might be
worried that you lose your job to a
robot but tomorrow if that robot is
working for you and what and that means
that you don’t need a job well that
might eliminate a lot of worry there’s
another part of the picture
my co-author Frey is an enthusiast for
3d printers and when he first started
talking to me about 3d printers I
thought ok they print out these cute
little plastic tchotchkes
so what but dances are very very fast in
this and now you can imagine a 3d
printer printing out a car or a house
yesterday we heard a talk about a food
computer a little hydroponic farm in a
box and if we have those then anybody
could make food anywhere in the world so
we could print out the parts for a food
computer but the most amazing thing that
a 3d printer could print out would be a
3d printer so then if you have a 3d
printer and your neighbor doesn’t have
one well no big deal you just print out
one so now we have the ingredients for a
new economy ai is the software 3d
printers are the hardware and that’s
what it’s going to be in the future
so in capitalism Capitol’s owns the
means of production in communism the
government owns the means of production
in what we call maker ISM everybody owns
the means of production and in that way
we can get cutthroat competition out of
the economy okay now we’ve solved the
economy let’s start to think about
government how do we get competition and
power out of government okay well first
we might look around and say do we have
any examples in our society where a
group successfully governs itself
without hierarchies without power we
have competition and I think we do now
my tribe is the scientific community and
if you think about it it’s really a
marvel okay so scientists are smart but
there’s only they’re only a small
percentage of the population they don’t
even spend that much money considering
the magnitude of the problems that
they’re dealing with and yet they
produce breakthroughs that improve our
lives on a regular basis and if you hang
out with science
like I do you know that they don’t
always agree on everything so how do we
do it
and I think the key is scientists
organize themselves for cooperation
rather than competition now there are
10-year battles
there’s battles for funding scientists
have big egos it’s all true okay but to
me that’s a sideshow that’s not science
what that is is the business and
politics of having jobs in science and
it’s like not surprisingly it’s like the
business and politics of having jobs
anywhere okay but when all the
bureaucrats are out of the room what a
scientists do they make theories they
make hypotheses they do analysis they do
simulation and those are ideas we could
bring into government right now our
government is mostly about who gets to
make a decision and what it should be
about is what’s the best decision for
everybody so FRA and I are working on a
new proposal for government that we call
reason aa cracy and I’ll just give you a
little flavor of it okay so in America
we hold the idea of voting to be sacred
you know but like in the scientific
community we don’t have any voting in
fact we don’t really even have many of
the trappings that business and
government tell us is necessary to get
things done okay
there’s no president of science there’s
no CEO of science there’s no there’s no
stockholders no political parties and
very little voted so suppose instead we
chose people at random representatives
at random like jury duty we right now we
ask juries to make life-and-death
decisions okay but that would get money
out of the selection and but of course
we’d have to couple that with some
education to make sure the
representatives knew what they were
doing and I think the number one thing
in the curricula
should be learning how to cooperate
teach the modern conflict resolution and
consensus building methods and we don’t
have to do it all just by people talking
in a meeting we can have online tools
they didn’t think of 200 years ago when
they made the constitution we could have
crowdsourcing for brainstorming we could
have online tools that helped us keep
track of the dependencies among ideas
what’s pro and what’s con and we can do
what if scenarios just like a
spreadsheet and fry and I are working on
some such tools in our research work so
I’m a starry-eyed idealist and people
say to me oh you scientists you think
everything’s a technical problem but you
couldn’t solve things like cooperation
and competition which are timeless
social problems but I think science can
I think that science can help remove
pressures like scarcity that make people
act out of fear and fear is what
prevents us from building the culture of
empathy and compassion that we need so
when frightened little ten-year-old
Henry poked his head out from under the
desk during the Cuban Missile Crisis his
fourth-grade teacher couldn’t have
taught him all this we didn’t have AI or
3d printers the book that popularized
the prisoner’s dilemma wasn’t even
published until the 1980s I don’t want
there ever to be another air raid drill
in a fourth-grade classroom
I want fourth graders to learn about the
fundamentals of computation the
mathematics of cooperation so Rodney why
can’t we all just get along
it’s because society doesn’t understand
the truth about the trade-off between
cooperation and competition yes thank
you
[Applause]
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