great preachers of the 21st century and then he preaches and says, oh, he will part the waters. and his view was that god wants you to deliver yourself. and the universe requires that actual people been there. the face of the arc of justice works out because god is on their side. and that really brings us back to criminal justice and other things. as king would say today, our work is not done. he was a glass is half-full guy. just because all black people do not suffer from jim crow doesn't mean that there are plenty of others suffering to require the

integration of coworkers for god or spiritual guidance or those of active human beings who bring justice. so the answer is it repeats itself and every time in every place and just looks different. therefore the obligation of people never ceases. >> we have the ultimate lesson that is playing out in their own time with questions over immigrant rights. when you come down on the wrong side of justice, history does not judge you well. you live with the consequences. birmingham is doing now. i will say that i have been an activist and historian here for 20 years. and i am encouraged in that icy

morning i'll keep all who are open to seeing this story is something that we need to just start talking about. and people who want to know and understand why this happened and why does this keep happening. it can serve the world is a good example and as a starting place for a lot of these conversations that we can have. >> i thank you for being our guests tonight. >> you're watching booktv on c-span2. forty-eight hours of nonfiction authors and books every weekend.

>> now, ian morris looks at the development of civilizations over the past 50,000 years. and uses current measures for human development to explain why the center of advancement move from east to west. this is about an hour and 15 minutes. >> good evening. i'm part of those world affairs council and it is my pleasure to welcome you here in the filming of world affairs today. thank you for joining us for discussing with ian morris how social development besides the fakes of nations. the british-born archaeologist and historian, he looks for broad patterns and overall shapes of history. looking at millennia, not

election cycles, which is more common. winston churchill was reported to have said the farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see. in this case, doctor morris is going to help us look into the future because he begins with the last ice age and compares society east and west. this follows on his 2010 award-winning book and the patterns of history and what they would reveal about the future. and that he examines the intersection of technology and geology in the number of western entrepreneurs that propelled the west rise to power in the 19th century and the development of nuclear weapons computer in the 20th century, but kept it there. in the 21st century, that earlier book argued economic exchanges were called into question, whether the u.s. in

particular would remain so. in the second volume, doctor morris presents a groundbreaking miracle index of social development, comparing societies of different times and places, adapting the united nations approach to development based on four incipal traits including information technology and capacity. we look forward to a fascinating lesson and please join me in welcoming doctor ian miller. thank you for that kind introduction. thank you for coming along on such a beautiful evening. i'm very happy to be here. i'm happy it's a beautiful day today. i managed to pick up a rather

nasty cold. so can y'all hear me okay? on his evening to talk about the new book that we just mentioned, the measure of civilization by the princeton university press a few weeks ago. this book is based on the idea that the past is not a very good guide to the future. so what i'm trying to do is look at how we could identify broad parts of industry and use them to get some kind of sense of what could come across the next 600 years or so. it includes a millennia of a global scale that an that human history will be taking.

this book gratify her six years of work that i have been doing trying to answer what has become the biggest question that we have been asking. back in the 1700s, europeans discovered they had a problem. they were taking over the world. no one could quite explain the turkish empire being affected at any moment. so many european intellectuals were scratching their heads. there were new ideas bounced around. eventually came to the conclusion and that is the obvious explanation.

and the feeling was that if you look back to .5000 years to the ancient greeks, they create unique civilization that is distant from and better than any other civilization of the ancient world. it is more inventive and scientific and all kinds of other great things. it conquered europe and then the idea that is passed down through the ages to we come to the pinnacle of western civilization . it had a very long successful run. in the 20th century, it gets increasingly challenged. these things are explained and particularly the 20th century as east asian economies really began to boom.

people save that this theory that european dominance of the globe basically locks and permanently ancient greece, and this doesn't seem to make any sense in the world that we live in. but we have these intense debate among historians. and there's something quite nasty and personal there. some have noticed these delightful people but they can get a little nasty and this one i think has gotten particularly nasty because sometimes we tend to get confused. there is confusion over what it is that we are trying to explain. what counts haven't you would know whether you're right or

wrong. so it seems to me the best starting point would be to clear this confusion and then because i am the kind of person that i am, it seems to me that the best way to create this was with s sort of numerical tool where we can express quantitatively about the and then we can compare these things and everyone is forced to be on the same page. it clearly doesn't. we have a good way of approaching history. it forces you to be explicit. so they have this part of the world, and i have to admit that

it is not 42.9 or 42.7. you have to have reasons to be able to be explicit and allows other people to engage in things, and if i have it wrong, it makes it a lot easier to show you that. so here are some advantages, particularly an argument like this one where things are kind of messy. so i decided what we need is some kind of a measurement of society in different parts of the world, to see what best explains results that we get. the argument all came down to what i called social development. what i mean by that is where my pet hatreds in the world is people wholike i

can't read myself or do them now about to do this to you. basically because i can. but this is just to include this idea of social development. really the way i am thinking of it, societies have abilities to get things done in the world. and it's a bundle of technological systems, organizational and cultural accomplishments which people reproduce themselves, explain the world around him, extend their power at the expense of other communities and those in their power as well basically it groups the ability to master the physical and intellectual environment. and this is something that we ought to be able to measure and compare their space and time and see how much development

different societies have got. well, the reason i thought this would be a useful thing to do is that the ancient greeks have this wonderful civilization and that explains the distribution in the world it seems that it has been very different and going back a really long time. where is the more recent theory would be the theory and they have seen a lot of different things. other people assume this development and other places. it has been evident in the

assumption is that it is a different shape and also i think a lot of the theories looking to ancient greece. and they assume a long-term market. >> accounts for a lot this. so i write this but, which deals with the narrative of the story line, explaining this in human history. and then all of the details, all

of this stuff, i will stick this up in a website. nobody wants to do boring things it does. we discovered those in book form. so i ended up redoing this and publishing it just a few weeks ago and the measure of civilization from the princeton university press i plan to explain how this works and then say a little bit about what i take tells us about where the world might be going across the next hundred years. okay, in the introduction, the wise words of winston churchill and i agree very strongly. i think he understands social development, we too will back a

long way into the past. that is looking back all the way to the and, about 15,000 years ago. i think you need to start by looking at the history. when you begin to see this in different parts of the world some parts of the world, all over the world -- they are multiplying in a benign climate. the exact way depends on where we live.

there a particular brand of latitudes across the planet. they are the only places on earth where this is hospital one is this western edge of the world. this is the first part of the world where arab culture begins.

this is what i call eastern society the population grows this is something that we can always shift around with the new type of geographical boundaries that appear. toward the end of this, i compare this eastern and western areas and look at the most

important areas, calculated the developments and that is the theoretical framework. and this is a huge problem, how on earth can turn first to review this so in this case, some decided it would be useful to have this index and someone else interested in money in different parts of the world.

so the u.n. ahe human development the only thing they can do is three traits were more or less cover it. they will do the job real wages

indicate that this doesn't cover everything we need by human development. the latest one came out and having been told as always, it is always number one. this is an ene situation.

and sadly, this has to be a big part of our story. and each trait has its own challenges. there are a lot of areas to argue about. we have had this for about the last 16,000 years. we go back to 14,000 bc and then

it ends in the year 2080. maximum development score for the year 2000 a.d., the end of the story, the biggest fights have been over the way things are. and it seems to me that i just had no particular reason for these particular traits, one or the other, even if i did have a reason. there's no good way to do it.

so it is a maximum possibility and it is the highest you can score on any of these four traits. in talking about these sorts of things, so not i'm not going to take you on a death march through this, because you'd really want to kill yourself if you did. the social organization, or picking this because it is the easy one to explain quickly. although there are some serious technical problems. i took another shortcut, another idea. and this idea came from economists, who often will use

the signs within a region is a quick shortcut to give you a sense of the level of that society. there're all sorts of ways but it does seem to work reasonably well. and it is a nice simple way to do things. so what i did was just look at the signs of what we know of and go back in these eastern and western regions. the way this works, like i just, 250 points as the highest possible score can get on this and so the biggest in the history of the world was 250 points. so what we have here are two pairs of columns. the pair on the right is from 2000 a.d. the blue-collar as for the this part of the world and the red

columnist for the western part of world. this is because the biggest city was tokyo according to the source and that is from the year 2000 which has 26.27 million resident it includes 27.69 people new york city had eckstein .7 million. see you divide that, which gives you 156, which is the blue column on the right hand side. so that was nice and easy.

because if you go back to 1900, we go that far into the past and we have less evidence. so we scored these points. we are dividing that by 106,000 people.

we are going to talk about this, and so will what we get, we do that, what you get, the one trait of this, including the settlements and the red lines of the eastern world i entered this at the top and you can see this.

ny of you will be familiar with this. what it means is when you have this, each unit you go up the scale, you're measuring this many times so each of the three traits come i have bundled them all together to produce a single and deciding how well i did that for the moment you just have to trust me there's almost nothing

going on here. faced along these lines and red lines, social development spurs and it goes up the vertical access. this is the same date on a scale so that we can see more clearly what is going on in the earlier times. it is very interesting. there's a lot of stuff going on here. we see the similarities of the minds. in the blue line is higher than the eastern line.

but on the other hand, there is a time where the red line is higher than the blue line. that is what we are going to talk about how the west rules. so in the book, it it talks about this. i suggested is basically geography.

i want to stick to the index and to say a few things about other stuff that is interesting about this index. i am sure you figured this out yourself. but moving from the evidence that we are working in, it involves an awful lot of technical steps we should not be asking if it is wrong.

by definition, we are always going to be wrong when we try to do that. the question is is this so long that it is actually misguided and doesn't affect history. still save for the sake of argument i have systematic way under estimated western development by 10% and over estimated the eastern one by 10%. we could collect up by arbitrarily raising the blue line and jumping the red line to see what happens. this is what happens if you do that.

so if we raise this line by 20%, then the western development is always higher than eastern developments since the end of the ice age and the expiration that i came up with is clearly unnecessarily complicated. something that we all have to deal with. but this cannot be right. we can be absolutely certain.

this time we get this it was more developed than 500 bc, which china was more developed. again, that cannot be right. so the numbers cannot be systematically 20% off.

we need to make assumptions and try to see what happens is this is what the future is going to look like. you see here this catches up with the blue western line. and you probably want to make a note of this. the year 2103, that is precise prediction so it is includes

this kind of production. but the most interesting thing is that it is not on the horizontal data where the lines cross. it is the development. now, this i think is an extraordinary hypothesis.

this is an extraordinary kind of thing. one thing that we mentioned is sometimes we are going to get great social classes. that is what lies in store for us in the 20 century. each time we see the same force evolved this includes part of

the population dying, and as the government's collapse, trade routes collapse with them. and then always in the midst of someone, we get climate change. it seems perfectly possible that this is what the 21st century hold. it seems that we have nuclear weapons. and many of you will know in

1986. if we stumble into the kind of collapse that could derail social development the 21st century has a transformation or a disaster that meets the same thing. so to wrap this up, the claims i have made. social developments across this. the measurements are always controversial. that is okay we should expect

the global balance of power to shift during the 21st century. we can probably expect the united states to remain the center of gravity for the next generation probably for the next two generations. perhaps most important, the has read and the 21st century that will turn into the shift of god of power and potential catastrophe. and the thing that worries me a bit about the work that i have been doing is these great shifts around the world in the past have always been this. i'm writing a new book about this at the moment. it is a lot to worry about. but i think that we have good findings. i think it's all going to be

okay. i'm on that happy note, i will leave you. thank you for coming. [applause] [applause] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> thank you. i have one question.

i have a draft of the human population going along with your social development index. and what is your projection of the human population. >> that is a great question. this often comes up as i talk about this stuff. it is such an important issue. and when you have that against development levels, i think there is a sort of feedback process for most of history. it is part of the growing population and partly because of this society and partly because it gives ideas that bounce around and communication is

quicker. it is pushing development forward. and development have one the populations continue rising. and the population will stagnate, things will happen and population surge crashed again. ..

beginning to break down and transform into entirely new things. i think demography is going to be one. it's easy to spend out lots of science fiction source of what you think you're going to happen but my sense of it is the transformation will begin to break some of the old constraints. we've already begun with the green revolution. but which is going to go dramatically further. i think we're also going to go dramatically further with the

break in the link between sex and reproduction. increasingly sexes something people do for fun rather than have babies. that's going to go way, way for the. fewer pressures have more babies because this is already what's happening. also i think we're going to see the generation, insofar as we see generating more and more humans we're going to do it in an entirely new kinds of ways. cloning is one obvious way to do this. a shift of human mental activity to noncarbon platforms, shifting onto computers. i think it's another thing to some extent i think that's likely to happen in the 21st century. a great question because it gets into all these other things that are going on. but i'll stop there. >> in looking at your premises,

i wonder whether, if this is a bit from left field, but i wonder whether you took into account isolated societies such as the tibetans which had developed very comprehensive structure based upon internal dynamics of the human condition rather than the externalities? did not enter into your thinking at all or was this primarily on the material plane that you are concerned about social about? >> another great question. what you're talking about as a very different source of development, in for what i was doing, my work was driven by the core question, why was a particular group of society around most came to dominate the world in the last couple hundred years. as i saw it this was driven by social development in this as i defined it.

so partly i wasn't looking at that, partly because i think it doesn't directly address the question as i was trying to answer it here but also because that thing would be very, very difficult. you're aware, i don't even know where you would begin, how you would begin to measure something like that. so what i was doing, anything i couldn't measure, couldn't be part of the index. but that cuts to the heart of winone of what i think is a potential big challenge to an index, doing this sort of thing. i would say those are the three way -- three main things. one would be to build on the question you ask and to say, well, measuring stuff about society, this is just the wrong way to think about everything. this is completely misleading. the whole effort is a waste of time. it's a valid criticism.

second wave in challenges to to say yes, measuring how much the way to go. but the idea of developing, social development i'm working, it's the wrong thing to look at. i should be looking at something else entirely. for objection, not three. third objection, measurement is great, social department fine, but the trade should use is wrong. in the last what i think is measurement great, development great, but you did it wrong. i'm an idiot, i've bungled the research, i got all wrong. so thinkers for me you can attack us. and i have difficult for objections are correct. but i'm willing to pretend to listen to somebody who objects. [laughter] >> thank you. to what extent does your index

measure gaps in development when you look at the north-south? and i'm thinking, for example, if you look at the social development measures that you used if you used population size, let's say you chose -- very different in terms of, jenna, social economic composition, et cetera and the issues that they face from tokyo. so i'm just curious as to how you use this index to look at, to answer every similar question that comes up in the north-sou north-south? >> yes. that's a fascinating thing to get into. like i said i was comparing eastern and western developmen developments. but there is absolutely no reason not to do this in any part of the world you're interested in. and so i've actually just lately been studying around the index point of it.

i'm comparing the develop within america's with the old world, in some ways very similar but on different time structures. in some ways quite different but very interesting. the north-south comparison, africa is a really interesting case because the very beginning of my index, said he projected it back another 40, 50,000 years, further, say 60 or 70,000 years, africa would have the highest level in the world. him and then, of course, they start spreading out of africa moving to the other parts of the world. the driving force behind that shaped the world. so africa takes a lead early on social development. but then as humans, and also because human development after

the first you get much more biological diversity than anywhere else in the world. all the dna studies have now confirmed this. it makes perfect sense because humans have been there longer. so you might expect africa to retain the lead and develop an over the long run. but what happens is people spread out of africa into these regions across the old world, particularly southwest asia. when the ice age ends, these regions outside africa are the only places where all these domestic coal plants and animals have evolved for people to domesticate. so to get domestication first having a set of africa. it does happen independently but it takes a lot longer because it's harder to do. so africans domesticate into farmers can eventually into government. but it happened later. geography changes its meaning.

geography allowed people in south east asia to build a more complex society. as they do so, they then start sending around the coast of africa come back into africa. so it's like somebody built a wall around africa 1000 b.c. sort of basically lacking, what would it be, about three or 4000 years behind the western area because it gets a later start because of plants and animals. what eventually, it will take and the same path but it can't do that because you got this much more developed societies to start colonizing africa, pushing back and africa. eventually taking over africa. something the indexes are really useful term -- tool for looking at some of these. what are the things we need to explain care about world history, but yeah, i think some of things you are suggesting

could be really interesting exercise to. >> thank you, professor barbara interesting topic i wanted to pressure on your definitions of east and west, what they might mean in the coming century. you'll have to forgive me, this is the first time on exposed to your work but i'm a have a definition on producing look at stars with geography. been exercise developed an are able to do your for any tears over larger geographical area, expansion of the cultural political factors associate with the early society. in the context of globalization, and as societies increasingly able to do these things over a larger scale, there seems to be some conversion in political, social, practice. in 2103 when these past west, what would that really mean? is it something we should care about? >> yes.

yes, as i was running the but it increasingly struck me, my book, the one called why the west rules for now come increasing struck me towards the end of the book that was not what the book was about at all. to the depressing feeling when you're an author is your written an entire book about something else. it seems happened to me quite a lot. if i understand the implications behind your question, who what i, the conclusion i came to was the whole thing about east and west, it's just not going to matter very much by 2103 if anything like this graph turns out to be the way the world is going. the big story as i said, like i said, geography determines social development or where you live in the world determines basically how your societies going to develop. at the same time high society develops determines what the

geography means. the meaning of geography constantly changes. the speed at which it changes has been accelerated throughout history. in this sense of globalization goes all the way back to humanities spread out over the plate. societies get bigger and bigger and more and more complex, longer and longer distance context. the process of this is expedient to buy the 21st century, in our own day, early 20 day, early 21st century we've reached a point where now in some sense you can see the geography has become to some of its means. i just flew out of from california a few days ago. i had to sit in a 10 to provide hours. i took the redeye, just too short to get a good night's sleep. i arriving new york city, i feel like this. to me it felt like geography has not lost much of its being so far. of course if it's been 100 years ago, if this up in 1913 and to

offer some in the chance to jet from severu services continued e hours they would have jumped at the. they would have geography already lost a lot. in certain things that can be done out on the digital platform, space really has lost all its many. my guess is one of the big things in the 21st and will be continuing collapse of space. that would be one of the huge transformations of just everything. so that if the world goes to 5000 points, i think physical space as we can see it come i suspect will no longer mean anything at all. this event, one since there's a big lesson, one of the glass and you can draw out of this development index. at the same kind -- time, what it suggests is everything it's been happening in the past 15,000 years is about to be swept away by the change in the world. the changes that we're seeing in

one sense are just more examples of the kinds of processes that go back 15,000 years but in another sense they are utterly different from anything the world has seen before. so where that because i don't know by think that's exactly where your question takes us. >> thanks for being here. i'm from the world affairs council. i'm sure you as most of the people in the room are really unaware of jared diamond's work, which really gives a brilliant narrative of much of what your stats are trying to show. and i'm sure that what you're trying to do is he able to quantitative, et cetera. my only question was, your first diagram looked fight is to me that i was sitting back and less my eyesight is measuring wrong, looks like a east and west lines were perfectly attuned to events in history. but then you said they didn't match up to your criteria, and so he changed them.

and back on you said you up or down to 20%. i just wondered how you did that or should you have done that in trying to make an exact quantitative thing if it matched history. >> yes, yes. i am also a great fan of jared diamond work. historians think geography is trying to force history, as far back as history goes. two in a thousand years ago, his big claim was geography throws the book at history. historians are the last i'm blessed your 60 years have generally been very skeptical about this, kind of backed away from it. the huge achievement was that it put geography back in the driver seat and showed us also the vibrance importance of taking along the of history but if you're going to understand it you cannot do it just by looking at essential to you must go back thousands of years.

that are ways in which my arguments do differ from his. we disagree. but i think it's been the most important scholar in recent years and putting this back in the driver's seat. by finishing second part of your question about what happened if we move this quarter i was doing that to give you a sense of what i would say is -- i don't think that the 10% lines are closer to the truth than what i should you do this is to show you if i were 10% off in everything i did, the basic pattern would still be correct. i would need to be 20% off in all of my estimates, and i can be confident and not 20% off because if i were we would have -- i would like to think what i showed you are absolutely right on every single detail. and in my wilder moments i'm convinced they are.

so the question now is have to ask, you are never going to be right doing this to the only sensible question is how wrong is this? isn't so terribly wrong that the basic identifier is not true or is it just the kind of wrong supplied every i do in life? you get a little wrong and you sort of model through. i do stand by my numbers. the alternative i showed you was just to show how much margin of error we think we can have. >> i'm a big fan of muddling through. my first question is, why, maybe in the book, but today you explained the city side and you said you took it to the baseline the year 2000. it would strike me would make more sense to go at a time when culture or society's looked at next globalization.

that lead would extend by secont related question. you predict the future, but 1000 years ago, more or less today they certainly don't. so tomorrow you have overlapping or homogenizing societies, the more i have to ask ourselves, can you really predict? i have to throw in a third question. norway is number one as you said. where would norway fit in on there? i think norway would turn out pretty badly. >> yes, gosh, okay. i'm terrible at -- remind me -- >> [inaudible] >> yes. >> homogenize and globalization. >> they norway. yes, thank you. one of anything she can do with an index like this is you can set it up in all kinds of different ways. so somebody wanted to take the

data i gathered and say exactly what you said in your first question. it was more interesting to say, set the baseline in the year one. back in times of the roman empire. the a lot of questions which i think that would be a very useful thing to do. or so you could set the baseline back even further still. i've talked about i go back far enough in history, africas the highest level of social development. that becomes almost impossible to see if you set the baseline in your 2000 a.d. if we set the baseline back 10,000 b.c., then that would make it very difficult to look at anything in recent history. the numbers explode. look at what's happening earlier on. allotment be too. it would also change the balance between the traits, all kind of interesting was. there are other things you can do, like the grass i should you.

calculating the scores on the portraits, then tackling the logarithm of that one score. you can do it a different way, which is by calculating the logarithm of each and then selling the locks together which gives you an index wich is wildly more sensitive to changes in early history. it shows you something more effectively and other things less effectively. and i guess i said that is the bomb went of all this stuff. all the lies, damn lies and statistics. there's no neutral way to present this. i chose that because i thought that showed most clearly of all the ways i could display the numbers what has happened in the last few hundred years and the extent to which they both continue. but yes, you can set it up in many different ways which can sure all kinds of different things. i think, the second what about

mixing cultures. yes, again, i think i would agree pretty much with what you're saying. this is one of the things you see operate over the long run of history. you go from many, many thousands of largely central cultures, of course people to get together in the i.c.e. agent come together in large groups. that basically, except for these occasional festivals the world would consist of -- [inaudible] but you would move around a lot. the seemingly would change but the face of wooden. later on you get the farm societies with the scenery doesn't change. villages of thousands of people. but as the societies get bigger and more complex, people traveling further and further, so that, already by 2000 b.c. your 2000 b.c. you're getting a few objects traveling all the way to the shores of the atlantic to the choice of the

pacific. by about 200 a.d. the gini suggests there are at least a few people -- dna suggests people traveling from china to the mediterranean. then this goes up and down that basically a long story is more and more integration. which as you say this affects very much what we should be looking at and think about and nation. i think one consequence of the acceleration of mobile connections in the 21st century is going to be this is the disappearance of these east and west as useful analytic tools but if you go back 10,000 years, east and west are not very useful tools. and her own age, the age of farming and then fossil fuels, they become very important tools. in the distant future i think what's going they will cease to be analytic tools. norway, yes, norway is this incredibly dope country. everybody in the world wants to

live there. but as you said it wouldn't come out of the very tough social development. because the social development is looking at things whether different from human develop an index. on the social develop an index one of the big things in the is the billy of communities to impose their will on the world around them. which you may prefer the reasons i that's not the sort of thing we should be looking at. if you want to answer the question i was starting with about why the dish vision of power and wealth came to be what it is, this is what we need to be looking at. so the core of the western region at the moment is locked very strong in the united states. the core has shifted around for a long time. he was in northwest for a while and now very firmly in north america. north annex course highest highest i think within the western world of all the world traits i look at. norway, western europe is

obviously scores very highly on the development. not as high as north america. the index is an interesting way to think about some of these debates about where your future is likely to lead. because in 1900 western europe arguably was the core of the west and it had the highest development schools. 100 years on it's a. i think the index is possibly my, why the balance of power has shifted so much within the u.s. >> thank you for the question. >> i'm chris from the university. i found it interesting that you specify the point of the future in 2103, but i wanted to get your opinion have you elaborate on what you think the future is beyond that, hundreds of years or a thousand years.

>> i think if for the sake of argument, everything i've said is correct, which is was a good assumption to have, by the time we get to the your 2103, we are looking at a planet absolutely unlike anything we can imagine. the next, if that's what happens, the next 100 years is going to see much more change than the previous 100,000 years. in some ways the last 100 years that you already see more change. particularly what it means to be a human. if we could take somebody in the 1900, or better the year 1800, transport them your to this room, they would be astonished by what they saw in this room. first of all the liquor and they say there's so many old people in your. look at them. then it would look at you and they would say, i do not only old, the healthy. they are older people with teeth. what is going on here? old people who are nnot death.

their choice or not plaguing them with arthritis over time. when i see old, i mean over 40. to any earlier age in the world, the way we live now is absolutely unimaginable. it's harry potter rover now living in. thanks to the intervention was made in medicine, public health, hygiene and diet, the human body now typically we today globally, not just rich country, globally we are four inches taller, we live 30 years longer and we're 50% happier than people have ever been before in history. we are much more than 50% healthier. we do magical things to ourselves. someone in this room making magic at this moment, if you have a pacemaker. this is something, you future body with technology. we have, a guy bring in the last 11 games, a sprinter with no legs ran in 11 games. he then went and shot his

girlfriend, so kind of spoils the story slightly. [laughter] this is magic. these things can happen. and, of course, we've only begun to scratch the surface you. these changes are going to go much, much further than what we've already seen. it easy to start throwing of predictions because a lot of people have done. i love reading these, the science, technology futurists but we have no way of knowing whether these productions we right or not. my guess would be, the big thing you will see is the fusion of human and machine. i would suspect this is going to be true. the question is how far is that going to go? will go the way some of the technologists suggest we get to the point were basically humans and machines are fused completely and there's this global consciousness out there on the platform and sloppy

humans, we will be acronyms. whether it will go that far or that direction, who knows? this is going to be the big change. because that my guess would be they're trying to answer question what would look like in a couple hundred, three, four, 500 years, i suspect that it's going to look, it's going to look something that we cannot begin to imagine. this would be like if we had been neanderthals, tracking our knuckles on the ground. they didn't. the neanderthals were very smart. they may be able to talk, kind of, but questions like the one you just asked me, would have been meaningless to the nano. we're pretty confident about that. because our world would just be totally unimaginable to the neanderthal. in less of course we blow it all

to pieces. then we get one in which is imaginable that i would prefer not so much. >> i'm from george washington university. i just wanted to ask you briefly about one of the four categories of energy capture. i didn't have an idea how you calculate that or what it is. >> when i give longer talks about my book, energy capture is the trait of focus on the most. i didn't the cd because it's a bit more complicated. all of these traits have the own problems. the energy capture, i think you'll like the things that because that's the most important of these traits. in a sense some of my friends suggested to me i'm being unduly fussy and detail oriented in

having for traits. i need one basic. energy capture drives everything off. the other pitch about how people use energy. the capture is the big thing. but hat i did for the energy capture i looked again at the social opposition, look at what is the highest level of energy capture on record, and the year 2000 a.d. it was the united states. the average american in terms of 220,000 killer calories per day, which is a staggering amount of energy if that were to the unique about 2000 killer calories. you will maintain your weight and be healthy. modern americans on average consume, i think it's 4368, or maybe 3000 -- 3004 and 68 which is a lot, which is why all of us have some issues with this. actually what we do, the calories we eat are rel