headed into war. and so at that point they decided that the plant material in the process should be done in this country. they were traveling all over and had hundreds of thousands of people all over this country sending them back here to fort myers to find a source of plant material that could produce rubber effectively. so could they grow the plant plants are on site and actually do the preliminary research on it. so it's a really exciting project. the laboratory was interesting for many reasons. one of them was at that point in american history there was no con process for chemical patenting. so part of the reason this was so important was that it cost the u.s. government to come

forward with what was called the u.s. patent law which then said that if you had done something with plans and it was a process, it was issued as a patent. >> this weekend american history tv takes a look at the history and literary life of fort myers, florida, including the research of thomas edison. >> next, in a discussion on innovative strategies for an approving administration. kiran dir sethi outlined her 'design for change" program at an event hosted by the chicago council on global affairs. this is about one hour.

[applause] >> thank you so much. it has been amazing. mike and pat have been the most charming host. and i have a great friendship that has betrayed and turned been created. and so thank you so much. so it's an honor to be a sellout. so i would like to share with you my story for the next 20 minutes and i'm hoping you will think him worthy of being a

fellow. and so i'm just going to start. the story of this is not about an educated or social activists want change the world. quite the contrary. everything changed when i became a mother. and so let me introduce you to my son. within a single stroke his cry was to write his essay and he went to school thinking i can grow up thinking i can't. so we like choices everyday. choosing tea over coffee or putting a man onto the moon. her choices define who we become

and it is this where do word that we need to move from her children's vocabulary and for 50 years we tell them they have no choice but to listen and do what we have to tell them. and pathetic, responsible creative citizens. so that day i removed my son was going to was i supposed to do now? the easiest solution would be to change schools but i didn't have a problem with the schools. i had a problem with the storm and this is where my background kicked in. and it starts with asking what it rather than saying what's wrong. otherwise we will end up solving the wrong problems and change doesn't happen and it's a the fact that you are not helpless and that change is possible and you can drive it, otherwise we end up blaming someone for

things we can do and become by standards. so hopefully my child will turn out okay and we can leave everything to chance leaving that we can become empowered young citizens of the world. so my response is designing an education model instead of icann or icann. so for the last 13 years the curriculum spaces have been designed using a simple four step process. you imagine doing and sharing. what i would like to ask you to look at is how empathy ethics engagement are embedded in each of these steps. until we designed all of the equipment and tools in the curriculum to start doing good.

so we got them excited about problem solving and scientific situations as well as recognizing that we have to change by including accidents and engagement. and i would like to show you and i hope i can take all of you to show you how amazing the kids are. but i will show you my children. so the very first story, but this includes the boundaries between school and my red 10th graders, 15-year-olds were designing a new ice cream flavor for the leading blue-chip company. not only a product of value but added value and so lessons in social entrepreneuons in social entrepreneurship ♪ ♪ >> we have proposed this

challenge which is part of this and we are preparing a presentation is part of the ice cream. and we are excited and we didn't know that this could happen in this amount of time. >> [inaudible] >> so we developed this and it looks at the christmas tree. >> that speaks a lot. >> an excellent presentation

because we are including the cost and everything. >> single mocha. ♪ ♪ [inaudible conversations] [cheers] >> we will eventually select him and we would like to continue with news for any social cause of our choice.

♪ ♪ ♪ >> the second story is a snapshot of doing good and how that turns the dose of the school. it's a story of 25 third-grade students, eight and nine year old kids. and they realize that they can raise the money to get their hearing aid that they need and this is their story. ♪

♪ ♪ >> with your hands and legs are inspiring people single mocha. ♪ [inaudible conversations] >> i'm feeling ready. ♪ ♪

>> this program is to help the children ♪ ♪ >> [inaudible] >> we need to take action single micro- ♪ you look at. ♪ >> this is for a good cause.

[inaudible] >> are you ready? >> yes ♪ ♪ [cheers] [applause] ♪ ♪ it does demonstrate that when children do good, they do well and for all of those who tell us what about math and science and english, this is the most recent result that we have gotten. riverside children outperforming

the top 10 studios in math and science and english. so finally the final video is the graduating project. it is an acronym for the time that they will graduate into the world and they need to be able to cleanse her inner self into the office and the second thing is because of the timing. this particular experience happens a month before they exit examinations and that's when everything goes crazy. it's just like when a child is in grade 12 they don't do the light of the day. and so you have to have perspective and life is much larger than the. so we take our children into this community and so this is their story and personal

transformation and personal growth. ♪ ♪ [inaudible] >> the experience to engage ahead hands and hard. >> with completely bungee jump into this experience. >> every other experience has culminated into this. ♪ ♪ ♪

♪ momo. ♪ [inaudible] >> we went to the house and terrel, the one thing that i have gauged for now is respect. ..

♪ >> silence and just reflection. ♪ >> even the meals a taken in silence to understand the slowing down is important. [inaudible] [inaudible] ♪ >> memories back with them to

remind them of always having perspective, never again telling themselves, my god, i'm so tired. i do so much work. >> in the sense that there's something that you have of this world around you. suddenly you're it by reality. [inaudible] >> very important milestone in life. our children will become citizens of this country and of this world. ♪ >> every child will graduate with a certificate.

to give every student to graduate is fashion and compassion. and that's what we have seen. what has taken beyond the school. michael has 370 children. 370 children, just meaningless, has to go beyond. so in an ideal world every society has to take care of his children. but no society would have more marls. to a hundred 50 tv channels. we cannot try to figure the sense of what it the city could design for and nurture tournament. once you nurture.

some 2,007 approached, every child can make the city child friendly. this was something we did with municipalities, police, citizens we have the best design and the best business mines. my god, the city has not benefited from these. how can we all come together and collaborate on making this city child friendly? what i'm going to share with you is three little snapshots. all the other than walking we have services closed down the door. some have it and some don't. have you open up the doors to our children.

the busiest street for traffic and make it a playground for children. the first time i went and said, sir, i need this. no, madam. and said, no, want this. take back streets. i said, no. and the reason why i kept insisting, the fact that it had to be. one day in the month cannot the city's slow down and recognize that our children are important, that they have to be seen and heard and recognize as being creative and protagonist and wonderful. so you know, around our independent state in the 15th of august, it's a public holiday it will be no traffic on the road. it's such a big hit. and they recognize it. it's so wonderful.

now six years down the city now takes this story when they are presented to the world. they have the support. there were telling everybody. ♪ a. [inaudible] >> and it has now gone beyond. ♪

>> the best multiplex and given popcorn. [inaudible conversations] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

>> the first time. this city is giving so much for the children. an initiative which is so unusual. and they are just so caring. ♪ ♪ >> now we had to take the same to the world. so in 2009 we created the world's largest design thinking challenge to take design thinking to everybody and that if the wind says i can and i will. i'm going to just show you a little snapshot when we started in 2009 and where it yesterday.

>> how to read and write. >> this whole thing. >> and i think designs of changed. helped teach all of us. strong, powerful. >> all these children come from the heart. all of them. >> so on august 15th and again , and depended a 2009 we empowered 100,000 of the end of the -- to say i can. simply exploded, the reach of design for change, going from being an idea to traveling around the world. >> i can and you can. together we can. >> and the winner in the war

category is a design based on school competition programs designed to enable children to express their own ideas for a better world. ladies and gentlemen, please welcome. >> we can. >> i said it before obama. >> the best minds. >> it's a simple idea, but it is a constructive idea at the same time. and we can't deal with ideas that are complicated and on travel. so many ideas ourself congratulatory rather than constructive. there's a wonderful constructive gift to the school, the community, the nation and many

other countries around the world. so here is to design for change. >> very interesting participation. and also particularly interesting for me is to see that design is not something that is being talked about in the schools. it actually started sprinkling into the schools without them realizing it. >> it starts with the priority. it starts with that invitation. today, your voice, your imagination, right now matters. >> design for a change would like to give a big hug to the rockefeller foundation for honoring the heroes and telling every adelle. there are a poor child. thank you. [applause] >> so the children changing, to

say in over 35 countries reaching 200,000 schools from reducing the rate of schoolbags to stopping child to of preserving tribal culture. our children are changing in making it did with the power of their idea. so that store heir will share, the numbers in fact, but it is significant in terms of what it did to the community into the child. there's a story of other children change one chancellor forever. a story from a village in india. ♪ ♪ [inaudible]

[inaudible conversations] ♪ >> there will bring the child to school every day.

♪ [inaudible conversations] ♪ [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

♪ >> amazing. and that's what happened. we have become storytellers. given us the unique responsibility to tell these stories beyond the particular school or community. comic books have actually had a role model, there would be their own model. these wonderful stories being published. basically telling adjuvant, who are you waiting for? you have to find the ghandi in new. the very first time recruiting

designed to it every student to be able to take this particular mine said. optimistic. and to be able to exercise that right, the right that they are not helpless, change is possible and they can drive it. palin this particular book. genetic, cross geography, crossed and a graphics. a mind set that empowers a real human. design is at the core of that thinking. and to celebrate all of these had we make sure that they need each other? every year we have what is called the be the change conference. in india and china and everybody used to take all of the. when the sun than we had to be imagine. and just like we celebrate valentine's day and everyone knows what has to be done to mention will be making the world a better place. this is of netflix.

♪ >> it's about what they care about. yeah. >> i'm still struggling to believe that i can make a difference in this world. that power has been experienced by them and there were 11 years old. al has the jury chased you as a person? >> the joy that i get. >> how are you going to take this up and spread?

>> the program in our community. then each other's -- >> as well as the challenges. >> right now we're facing the challenge of development. were trying raise money for that. >> one thing you learn. >> you can do everything that you want. >> everything a can. >> i did think that the project could bring me so much happiness >> the project is actually made me more custom. ♪ >> celebration. no matter what language is speak and then on that stage the idea is basically we have workshops.

we have conferences. today's of great energy. ♪ >> so of the children are educated but this.

>> some what started with my son has been able to affect children in over 200,000 schools. would just like to leave you with this one caught developing a bathetic response. that does not happen by chance. happens by design. maybe that's why this is about sharing. hopefully that is where the. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you so much. congratulations again. it like to go to the audience for questions. please raise your arm and wait for the mike and make sure your question is a question. maybe i'll kick it off. you have lots of visit this weekend, a charter school, school, meeting with people from the golden apple, could you tell us a little bit about anything you have learned that you think you may be able to implement?

>> i mean, i feel it's ready. there's so much attention. i want to be will the forge more partnerships. the on and check it out of fear. this is possible. i think chicago is really ready for it. i'm excited. already have some wonderful conversations. [inaudible question] >> of the is the not all people welcome change. some people are afraid of change . pepo maybe don't want to see change.

>> de want to do this? that's the concept. so this comes from, the fact that we have to finish the curriculum. we have no time. so is the mindset. the of the mind set is the government. so might be thinking, if only we could start with the what it brought in and what's wrong mentality. that's why i believe that it has to become mandatory. the new incentive framework.

nothing changed. so if you just go back to the human centered approach to believe it is natural that we would respond with positivity and possibilities rather than frustration and being overwhelmed by the magnitude of problem. so human center approach. >> thanks. >> this is just incredible. i really -- and there are lots of words. >> of me as your question. exactly. it's clear why the children are open to this. but how do you convince the teachers that this is -- that

this can work in that this is so important for the kids? can i convince you? there. i don't know. i just -- i am hopeful because of seeing that happen. begin 700 stories of change. this year will reach 10,000 because to go deeper because we get 15 and the stories of change. there is this need. there is this gap. people are feeling it, recognizing that they don't have to be ruthless leaders. and there's an opening to the concept of doing it is important. the spotlight on education was always aware the smartest, strong this. nobody was empathetic or concerned or kind of a jenners.

are not saying you have to be the strongest. if we can spotlight as much of your spelling bee champion, the havoc in story going. and, again, the approach is clearly showing that academically you really do better. this year rick trying to be able to collect more significant data because the researchers doing is with dr. gardner's could well project. we will be tracking the academic scores. once i get that i will probably show a degree that last bit of resistance. >> here in the front room please . >> yours is very interesting. however, in chicago we have someone a problem with their children in public schools. very often a child is not even able to make it to schools

because he or she is shot by some gain. see you have problems with gangs and any of these other places? is there anything you can do? these are in people also. we have a specific problem in our city. i wonder how you would deal with that are make your ideas circumvent that problem. >> actually, they die because of poverty and hunger. equal trouble. we have 300 million children that of the school, roughly the population of the united states. only 18 million graduate college. abcaeighteen million the graduate college, 70 percent and an implacable skills. we are doing something significant in on. we are producing a staggering number of graduates to believe they can't get a job, they can't make a life. you know, whether it's the

perspective of actually being shot or being killed because of the fact of we don't empower them. i magnitude is much bigger. the number is staggering. so i think if anything works in in the it can work anywhere in the world. all the possible solutions to all the possible problems the views of different chunks in different pieces, it's an exciting time. for the last five years, i think, there have been interesting initiatives that have come up specifically for certain pieces of the puzzle. each of these shows significant gain. these initiatives that can be replicated. so this model can be replicated. for certain schools, certainly. it can be something that everybody can do. but whether this particular problem can be solved by -- to we have a solution for this particular problem?

maybe not at the moment. what we do when children get shot. so i think it is a similar problem. >> right here in the front row. >> thank you very much. it was very inspiring to hear what you done. i'm curious about how you started your first class. i mean, you obviously saw what was happening to your own son, but to convince of the parents of your vision, that sometimes can be hard. it's easier to sign on five for six years later when they've seen the results. i'm wondering about that. are your schools will be called private schools or are they subsidized by the government? how are they paid for? >> to answer your first question, i did not have to convince because i don't think people actually bought into the vision. i got 25 students when i started , except for five.

one was my daughter. physically at once did. at think they all came per multiple reasons. the children didn't get into indian school. the other was the top close by for one of two years. so it didn't matter to me. and i was going to start my school. i had 27 believers, nonbelievers. it didn't matter. just because of what we've done we get people who believe in the philosophy, but it didn't matter to me. it didn't matter whether they believed. and needed to be able to share this particular concept and this possibility that this can happen, and it happened with this motley group of people. they are chanting and could not speak a single word. he had come to me from a school that is 75% in english. he sat for six months quiet.

today you write poetry and makes presentations. that stance of the first question. credibility. the second, a private school. we don't get subsidies from the government. the student population is the verse. we have 25 percent of our children will come from below the poverty line. another 40 of to percent who are on financially, and then we have the rest of the people who cannot on the pay but support and sponsor my children who come with zero money. >> yen. front row. >> thank you. you told us this week that we have seen the creativity in your school, the spark, the delight in the children, the imagination which is really quite something. you told us that an wycherley thousand schools in india the

teacher teaches the chip listen and a spot back what they heard, but there is no creativity. we were told that you were one of 20 that were selected to meet with president obama when he was in india. so somebody likes you. ..

i love it, it's fabulous, and it's just that much value in what you're doing. rapid prototyping, if you don't know, it's repeatedly going back not to understand the product, but to understand the user. that's critical. we're not saying, oh, i did this, so wonderful, i love it. that's what we've done in education. we don't learn by textbook, we have pictures now, and they are

colored, you have to love it, and now, kids want to put their body in the text experience, no, now we have smart phones. we are not going back to the user at all, but throwing products at them, you have to retain it, love it, put so much time into it. >> gentleman in the plaid shirt. >> i teach service learning in an alternative school, only service learning, butts heads about standardized testing we have to do. they study with the testing to do at certain times, and that you need time to do it. what are some clues you can give me that i'm always up for something new. >> i think the problem with service learning often -- what schools tend to think is bisque risks, so intangible.

i can give you a grade you're now 50% more confident or 70% more sthettic. if i can't see -- make it visible, it becomes, you know, sort of something that i can leave away, so i do believe, and i think this is important, make substantial in the work they do and the time they do it in. i would like to, of course, share with you the design thinking book that's come up, and i think that could be useful because it actually puts specific skills to do what you ask them to do rather than leave it as a thinking feeling process. the first step is to be a cartographer and map your words. immediately in that exercise, there's so much skill, all the 21st century skill you teach, eventually, the core curriculum is supposed to align too is happening, clearly, in this particular step. what you do is take that i think tangible spirit of service learning and make it specific, and it's showing fantastic

results so i believe this might be it. >> great. next question. yeah, jerry, please, here in the back row. >> you mentioned, of course, you started the school, mentioned 30,000 school in i india. can you talk more about the scaling mechanisms that you use because i always believe the toughest problem is scaling small protocols up to the scale it has to go to to be really effective. >> right from 2004, i remember people said, my, god, i want to do what you're doing, and i recognized in doing the processes, and so we just got madly into this. i got everything that we did, put it down, the processes they have to become independentble person, that i can take a cross over rep kate it anywhere else i

would do, yet you don't have to do what i do. the whole point of our prototype, processes was this is why it's important. how you do it pretty much, your context, it is important for that particular process, and so we've done that, we've documented just about everything we've done, and this year, we're excited to say with my technology partner over here, we are kind of putting what we call the i can box, which will have everything, using technology just as leverage to be able to get any school that even wants to transform or start new to be able to use the processes. until then, until the technology is used, what we been doing is teacher training. we do teacher training, reaching out to over i think 6,000 teachers by now. they are now in 11 other schools, and so it started small, but today, wii in the right place.

after 13 years of writing it, checking it, refining it, we're ready no to start to at a larger using technology. maybe next year if i'm here again, i'll share with you what we've gone. >> next question, karen jones right here in the second row. >> piggy backing on that thought, how are you working with the universities that are teaching our teachers and how do you get that passion, and you say there's a gap in that teaching, like training the trainers, but eng that would be a critical piece if they are taught along, this is how children learn, what's your thought on that? >> we've had some measure of success at teacher training institutes, so redundant and stuffy at the moment so it happens with very difficult, bureaucracy to get through the states, teacher training is tough. we try to help the teaching

training inagain institutions that do that. there's stir education, they do a lot of work, and we have specifically introduced the design thinking model. i just believe every teacher can go through that, that would be really remarkable change. we did it with some measure with the government in my state. last year, we trained 2500 teachers and two sat lies, trained like 50,000 teachers, but this year, we want to do it as a more continuous process more than the one off. they don't have much effect. we really want to do it consistent. >> karen, did you have a question? karen here in the third row. >> thank you, and congratulations. you start with the children, or is there an unlearning process that takes place with children who are past a certain age? >> starting in pre-kippedder

garten, coming in at two and a half, so pretty much we can mess them up our own way. already >> and your graduates, they would be incredible am ambassadors for you, what are they doing? >> fabulous. 17 graduated last year, my first batch, and just all the other states studied in india, went to the best institutes, and they are topping in each of their colleges, but the one wonderful thing they told me, they got back because we had a little bit of a deeply unfortunate incident, one of my boys passed away when he went to college. the whole batch cam back, rallied around the parents, and the compassion was so viz l. in fact, the parents recognize they were tbhot alone, and i think the big batch was understanding that they were not

leaving my boy. they were going to go along with that journey and keep the memory alive with them. the parents were so moved by the way that they had responded, and i'm telling you, god forbid my son had died and the school, the school would have just had an announcement and assembly. that's it. nobody would have cared, and my son's whole life would have gone, but his life was wonderful, lived fully, and the school responded, the kids just came back, and subsequently, parents had birthdays, childrens ramlieded around, got cakes to the parents. they had a festival. they all came down specifically because the first day would be tough. the parents were stunned, my god, the human faith, we didn't know it was possible. asked me what success is, i think my boys would be fantastic fathers and great husbands, you

know? i think that is is going to be really, really great, and i think that's wonderful. >> woman in the third row, please. >> hi, i come from india, one of the 60 people in the classrooms, so i understand what you're talking about and sending many i son to a school like this in america, so it's nice to hear your story. there's two things that i want to ask you because in india, we have a tendency of hanging on to those like you to just change the world and everything so my first question, how are you going to do something done in riverside to the rest of the incredibly impoverished people all over, like you know, and, actually, i -- the social difference despite just looking at the video, and your school

seems to harbor higher socioeconomic kids even though you have middle and lower class, somebody different because of economic reasons just entered the school. that's one thing. how can we change that across india, and second thing is, we believe we have strength in india, eastern philosophy, the culture, how are you going to integrate and be loud about expanding the values in which the culture goes to the western world? oh, then to come clean. there are too many questions in that, and this is not a platform for me to answer half of them. i'd love to sit with you over a cup of chai, and we'll take it

up. it's a long story, it's a long question. we could take this on afterwards? yes? it's a very india specific question. >> unfortunately, that's all we have the time for, but karen speaks tomorrow on a panel with jeff, and supreme and combating violation and ways to do it around the world. that will be interesting tomorrow evening at the contemporary arts, but thank you for thanking karen for the wonderful presentation. [applause] thank you for supporting this for the seventh year, thank you, pat and mike. we are adjourned. good evening. >> thanks so much. [inaudible conversations]

[applause] >> thank you very much. i, too, am very impressed that such a large number of people are here on a friday night, and i really, really appreciate it. thanks very much for being here. i want to start by introducing you to this up op the screen, a

hawaiian you, and i know that he looks a lot like an ordinary crow you might find around here, but there's significant differences of the his beak is thicker and legs are thicker. the hawaiian islands had several species of crows which probably, at least six species that we know of, and they probably diverged from the crows that we find on the mainland u.s., at least several hundred thousands years ago, so this is, in a lot of ways, a lot like the story of darwin finches where an animal arrive, and issue obviously, we're not sure how it arrive, but in very small numbers, and then specied out to fill niches and survive in different sorts of habitat. the difference is in the case of the hawaiian crows, most of the species died out after the first

humans arrivedded, so whereas they were not inhabited until europeans arrived. in hawaii, the first settlers arrived about 1500 years ago, and already they brought with them species like rats, like the pacific rat, that out competed or potentially just ate up the young and the eggs of these crows so most of the species were already gone by the time europeans arrived. this is the last species that survivedded into modern times, and it's native to the big island, the island of hawaii, and it, too, is under tremendous pressure from has habitat destruction and by the 1980s, the population was so low that the state of hawaii began to take it in captivity to save the species, and this turns out to

be fortunate because the last wild ones were seen in 2002, and the bird is now classified as exticket in the wild. this particular bird you're looking at is named kanoi, born in a breeding facility on the island of maui, and as the saying goes, he's quite the odd duck. he was raised by people. he doesn't seem to self-identify as a bird. [laughter] or at least not as a crow. he does not see himself as a crow. one of the women who cares for him told me that he once fell in love with a spoon bill. because of his, you know, lack of identification with other crows, he refused to mate with any of the birds at the breeding facility so there's now about a hundred birds, maybe a bit more, at the facility, so with 50

females to choose from, he refused to mate with any of them, and he is old now, in his 20s, old for a bird, and so precisely for that reason, his genes are important. he was transferred to the veterinarian hospital of the san diego zoo where he came under the care of a reproductive physiologist. she is hoping that he is going to provide some of his gamets to rush over to hawaii with them and use them to artificially inseminate a crow over there. every spring, when it's mating season, durrant, a serious scientist, ph.d., takes this bird on her lap -- yeah. [laughter] and strokes him in a way that he's supposed to find extremely exciting. [laughter] about a year ago, i was out in

san diego, and he had, at that point, not yet delivered on this, and she offered to introduce me to him, and he turns out to be a very charismatic sexually confused bird. [laughter] he has very spectacular camming, like a suite, and we could stand in it, and he hopped over to us, and it seemed to me he definitely recognized durrant, seemed embarrassed to see her. [laughter] yeah, that may be projection of course, but he seems to me to be embarrassed, and she brought him snacks. these little mice, hairless newborn mice, known as pinkies. they are pink. he hoped -- hopped over to peck at them. crows are smart birds, as you know, and they imitate human

speech. he has a line, says, i know. it sounds a little bit demented when he says it, but that's what he said over and over, "i know." to me, the bird sort of sums up this very strange and sad situation that we find ourselves in, so here we have this crow, one of the very last survivors of the his species, and people are going to incredible lengths to save the species. they set up a breeding facility, you know, giving what amounts to a hand jobs to crows, and people really do care about animals. about what rachel carson called the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures. at the same time, we're in a process of causing what's. called the sixth extinction, driving more and more species to the brink and more and more

species over the brink. his situation seemed to me to bring together a lot of strands, his knowingness or sort of pseudoknowingness saying, "i know" seemed a reflection almost on his own tragic situation, and i ended up ending the book with his story, and he sort of is an emblem for what i'll talk to you about tonight. what is the sixth extings? the implication is there's five earlier extinctions, and that is exactly the the case. what you're looking at here in this graph is an analysis of the marine fossil records, and it's a little of a complicated graph, but, basically, what you're seeing on the bottom, on your left, is time before the present mored in millions of years, so 600 million years up to 0 up to the present, and where you see the big dips, those are appointments when the number of

marine families, the marine record only, suddenly dropped. if you remember from introductory bio, a family is a group just above a genus. it goes, species, genus, family, and if even one species from a genus survivors, that's a survivor. the losses at these appointments -- points were greater than reflected in these graphs. the five major extinctions, and there's many minor extinctions in the record, but these five are referred to as the big five. they are simply moments when geologically speaking moments, short amounts of time, when the diversity of life on the planet for some reason plummeted to a british pail yentologist who wrote a lot on the subject, have defined mass extinctions as

events that eliminate, quote, a significant portion of the world 's significant amount of time. another, michael benton, use the the tree of life. in a mass extinction, he's written vast swaths of the tree cut short as if attackedded by crazed, ax wielding manman. the first of the extinctions, number one on this chart, took place at the end of what's known as the period, about 440 million years ago, and at that point, life was confined to the oceans, lit living on land. that was devastating for marine life, but not for trees yal life because there was no trees yell life. this is by far the most famous, this killed off the dinosaurs,

and not just the dinosaurs, but a lot of other groups, most mammals, most reptiles, snakes, for example, and also a lot of groups like -- i can't show you a picture of it, but i have this drawing that i like. there's a pretty broad con sen toc now this extinction was cautioned by an asteroid impact. those guys react to the asteroid impact. so to say that we're in a sixth extinction is obviously serious. the reason that we're in a sixth, and some scientists say we're only on the verge ofth, me we can prevent it, and others would say we're pretty deep into it already, is that we're changing the world very, very radically and very, very fast. not unlike an asteroid. in fact, you will hear, and i have heard scientists say this time we, human beings, are the

asteroid. so how are we doing this? how are we changing the world on an asteroid-like scale? there's a lot of ways. i'm going to focus on throe tonight, that's how we're changing the atmosphere, how we're changing the oceans, and how we're changing what darwin called the principles of geographical distribution. start with the atmosphere. every year, we humans add on the order of 10 billion metric tons of carbon die yox ide to the atmosphere, coming from burning fossil fuels. you all know this. i will not belabor it. it's ordinary stuff. we drive our cars. we turn on our lights. there's 7.2 billion people on the planet right now, and it adds up. what we're doing when we burn fossil fuels is that we're taking carbon that was buried under the earth over the course of hundreds of millions of years and transferring it back up into

the atmosphere. we're running geological history backwards at a high speed. we're taking a process that took hundreds of millions of years to run in one direction and run it in the other direction in a matter of centuries. if you were an alien, and you came to visit the earth, yao could easily conclude what we're doing, that the fundamental purpose of modern industrialized society is to effect the transfer as quickly as possible, to see how much carbon we can get out of the ground and put up into the air and how fast we can do it. if the aliens were measuring this process, they would say that we're actually doing quite a good job. we are increasing co0 levels every year. obviously, we, human beings, we are measuring this process. we are doing this, once again, doing it from hawaii, from a place in an observatory at

11,000 feet on a human volcanic mountain. what you're looking at here, i'm sure most have seen this, this is a killing curve. it's showing you atmosphere carbon levels measured continuously for over 50 years now, and what you're seeing on the y axis there, the up and down axis, is co2, and just time on the bottom. the saw tooth pattern is a seasonal component. in the winter when the trees of the northern hemisphere drop their leaves, co2 levels go up, and in the summer when they put up the leaves for photo synthesis, there's more land and vegetation in the northern hemisphere, so when it's northern hemisphere summer, we get lower carbon levels. they take c02 out of the air for photo sin thinks, and levels

fall. they reached a milestone, 400 parts per million, and that is true. they did at the end of last winter briefly, but they since dropped again over the summer. they are now in the rising part of the curve. that's a very recent measurement, 296 parts per million, and this saw tooth keeps continuing in a couple years from now, it will never go beneath 400 parts per million and keeps rising as long as we continue to put c0 # 2 into the atmosphere, went we show no signs at this point of slowing down. if we want to see how long -- how well we do on the process in a longer time scale, we have to go back to ice core records, so what you're looking at here. this is a record of c0 # 2 from a famous ice core drilled on antarctica, and the whole ice sheet is just layers and layers of snow laid down year by year, year by year,ier by year, and

never melted. as you see here, at the left, again, time is going forward from left to right, that is 800,000 years ago. the left land corner. that ice core goes back 800,000 years, and in these ice cores are bubbles that are extracted and amized. these patterns, you see levels on the up and down axis there. the up an down saw tooth things are ice ages. levels low, ice creeps down, down here, places in washington state, and then creeps back up again. there you see when people arrived, arrival 200,000 years ago. this is eight gliecial cycles. you see during that 800,000 years, it was never beef 300

parts per million until recently, and now they are rising to a vertical line, straight up. if we want to go even further back, you know, then the ice runs out, but there are other ways of teasing out ancient atmospheres from the evidence that we have, for example, from the shells of marine creatures that drop to the bottom of the sea, preserved for many millions of years, and these methods are not as exact, but they give a good picture of the past atmosphere. fee we want to find levels that are significantly higher than today's, we have to go back quite a long way, probably around 20 million years ago to a period, and if we keep pouring c02 into the atmosphere like now, we could reach those levels by the middle of this century. if we keep on after that, we could reach levels not seen

since 50 million years ago by the end of this century. what is significant is that c02 has certain properties that make it a greenhouse gas. i'm not going to, you know, giver you the global warming spiel because you know it, once again, but this is just very, very basic geophysics. this property of carbon dioxide that it traps heat near the surface of the earth has been understood since 1850. so this wonderful cop transportation here is called a pee deny t -- petometer, and he designed it to look at different cases, and when he developed carbon dioxide, he saw he found out something very, very important. carbon die dioxide is transparen

the visible part of the spectrum, so it doesn't block light, but it's opaque in the infrared part of the spectrum. heat escaping from the earth and otherwise just radiate back to space, some of that is blocked. kindle, again, already in the 1850s, realized that was extremely important that it kept the earth warmer than it would be if we had an atmosphere with no greenhouse gases. so that effect is often called the natural greenhouse effect, and it's critical to life as we know it. if there was no greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, our planet would be frozen with a temperature of 0 degrees. this has been understood for a century and a half now. there's no news here. if you know that it is a heat trapping gas and know we're rapidly raising c023 levels, all things being equal, you'd expect average global temperatures to be going up; right? of course, that's what's happening. so this next slide i'll show you is not a slide, but a video,

made by nasa, and all you need to know to understand it is that as colors get warmer like yellow, orange, temperatures are warmer, and when they are blue, more sort of cold and temperatures are colder. this is a reconstruction of global temperatures of going back to the 1880s done by nasa. yeah, that's dramatic. what does this mean for, you know, living things? well, the icon of what it means

to be, you know, an animal in a warming world has become the polar bear because poe lore bears hunt up the ice which is rapidly disappearing, but one of the points that i make in the book, and it's not really my point. i should say it's a point made by the scientists that i went out with, is that the effects of climate change are likely to be more devastating in the tropics, and there's a couple reasons for this. one of which is that the tropics are remotely lived. if you consider for a moment the example of trees, so canada's royal forest is really the largest, you know, in tact forest left on the planet. it covers almost a billion acres, and in that whole expanse, there's only about 20 species of trees that you can find. now, here we are in a cloud

forest in the andes in peru. you're looking down a ridge from the very high andes from about 12,000 feet. some scientists here, a scientist named miles who works at wake forest university, has laid out these tree plots along this ridge at different elevations. each of these plots is about two and a half acres, exactly two and a half acres, and in the plots, you get up to a hundred species of trees in just two and a half acres, so five times as many species as you get in a billion acres up in the canadian royal forest. that shows you there's just a whole lot more species living in the tropics. what they've done in these plots is they have tagged and measured and id'ed species every tree with a diameter of over four inches. this sort of leads to another

reason why tropical species have a lot more to lose, as it were, a lot to lose with climate change as certainly as many to lose as arctic species, and that is tropical species tend to inhabit very narrow language, very, very specific climatic conditions. as we were hiking down this ridge that i showed you before, miles said to me, you know, look at -- find a leaf, find a leaf with an interesting shape as we go down this trail, and watch it as we go down, and you're only going to see that this leaf, for a couple hundred meters because that is a whole range of this tree. that is the only place you're going to find that tree. they are very well adapted to very, very specific conditions. the whole point of the experiment, the whole point of laying out tree pods, laying out

the trees and tags them is to see what happens to the trees the andes warm, as they are warming quickly. to track the climatic conditions they are used to, they would have to move up the mountains by several meters per year. now, obviously, trees do not move or get up and move, but they do, you know, put out seeds, and the seeds survive as high r and higher elevations. what they found, this has been running for a decade now, and the early results suggest that some species, a few species are moving fast enough to track the climate, but only a few. most are not. a lot are not moving at all. they are just sitting there. these tree communities, which have tended to be stable over time in the tropics because the climate has tended to be stable, are going to break apart; right? we're going to have different trees moving at different rates. what's going to happen to the

creatures that are also adapted to living in the communities? well, that's difficult question to answer. you know, the insects, the birds, the mammals because it's hard to tag, for example, an insect. trees have the advantage, easy to study these, they stay in one place all the time. as miles pointed out to me, up fortunately, we're going to find the answer. we're going to find out what happens to the species because we're running this huge experiment. another question that arises in terms of what's going to happen to the tropics when you think about it as all these organisms move up slope or towards the poles is what's going to happen in the tropical lowlandses; right? they are the warmer places on earth. they tends to have a lot of species there, but as everything is on the move, what moves into the tropical lowlands? are they going to empty out? once again, we don't have an answer to that at this point.

unfortunately, we're going to find out. so global warming is not the only effect of pouring c02 # # into the air, but there's a significant effect, and, perhaps, some argue even more significant effect, and that is what it does to the oceans. here are just a couple key facts about this. the oceans have absorbed about a third of the c02 emitted since the start of the industrial revolution. that amounts to about 150 billion metric tons every hour. they absorb another met trick ton, and the net result the is acidity of the oceans increased by 30%. the details of this phenomena, which is become known, i'm sure you heard the term, is ocean acidification, are complicated, and i'm not going into the nitty-gritty of the chemistry, but all you need to know is that if you dissolve c02 in water,

you get an acid. it's a weak carbonic acid, and, you know, you had a coke this afternoon, you were drinking it, but it's an acid. if you add enough of this to the ocean, you change their chemistry, and that affects a lot of properties of the water. potentially, but one of the key things it does is that it makes it harder or at least more energetically demanding for organisms that build shells or external skeletons out of the mineral carbonate. it does not exist in the water as a solid. organisms assemble it like you assemble ingredients to make a cake, and we're making it more and more difficult for them to do that. lots and lots of climate organisms do this. they calcify. these are these tiny little marine organisms, you can't see them with the neighborhood eye. this is under magnification, and

they are so plentiful they turn waters milky white of color. common shellfish is california fieres, clams, and muscles. sea urge gins are, and that's what you see on the great barrier reef, and coral are california fieres, and what happens when you make life harder for all of these different kinds of organisms? well, once again, there's a lot of work being done to try to answer that question. it's, obviously, a very important question because some of the organisms are very bottom of the food chain, marine food chain, and one of the big concerns is what is going to happen to coral reefs; right? coral reefs support these incredibly vibrant diverse

ecosystem that everyone's been on a thriving reef knows. so this is another place i went in the course of reporting the book. this is an island, on the great barrier reef now, looking down on it, that green spot is the island, which is just really peaks above the reef that vowndz surrounds it. researchers were trying to look at what is going to happen to corals, you know, as we continue to pour c02 into the water, and corals turn out to be docile research subjects. you can break the reef, glue it, and if it has what it needs, it sits there quietly going on, doing whatever corals do. in this case, they are bubbling, and there's corals in the tanks, bubbling in different levels of carbon die oxize to imnate

futures. in their studies, and i should say there's many, many of these studies going on all around the world, suggest that if we keep on our current emissions taskings by around the middle of the century, reef building corals will not keep up or able to assemble this carbonate at the rate needed to keep reefs going. they will just sort of effectively stop growing, and there's a lot of forces always working to break reefs down. there's a lot of creatures that deal with the reef and storms and just erosion and wave actions. reefs really need to be always growing in a sense just to be staying even. this is a quote from some british marine biologists who wrote a whole book about the future of coral reefs. it's likely that reefs will be the first major ecosystem in the modern era to be ecologically

extinct. so another way that we are changing the planet, and this is the last one i'll talk to you about tonight is by moving species all around the world. you're all familiar with species that arrived, and this one has been making a lot of news lately. this is the asian carp. it's not one species but several species which the name suggests, coming from asia. they tend to be extremely filter feeders, going through everything, it's not good for native fish, and there's a lot of fear these guys are going to the great lakes, and, in fact, just last month, congress asked for a study, some -- of the congress people from around the great lakes asked the army corp. of engineers to do a study of what it would take to try to keep these carps from getting into the great lakes, and the army corp. of engineers released

its plan for how they could maybe keep the carp out of the lakes and the price tag that accompanied that plan was $18 billion. this is another species from asia. this guy's the emerald ash bore. he does what his name suggests, boring into ash trees, usually the results are fatal for the trees. if you live in the northeast, as i do, you see these signs saying please do not move firewood. that is to prevent the spread of this bug. a lot of the trees in the forest of the north eastern u.s. and mid western u.s. are ash trees so he's a worrisome relatively recent arrival. not all invaders, are from asia. this guy's from eastern europe. he's a zebra muscle. also he has a nasty habit, as you can see, of sticking to every available surface and

eating everything in the water column. all of these species were transported by people from somewhere very far away, and when they got to new places, they didn't have any enemies so they just proliferated. they did really, really well. moving species around the world is something we do every day. often purposely, we have plants in our yard, for example that are nonnative species, and people have pets that are nonnative species, but even more often we do is accidently. it's been estimated that every day in the water of the super tankers, we move around 10,000 species. this is, one again, strikes us as ordinary. this is just the way things are. when you think about it, it's really say something that's very, very new. unusual. without a lot of help of land species, the land can't cross an ocean, obviously, or a marine

species similarly can't cross a continue continent. this is running geological history backwards at a very high speed, so around 250 million years ago, all of the world's land masses were sort of clumped together in the giant super continent that's been called pangea, and then, you know, owning to the effects of plate tee tonics, they broke up, drifted apart, and form the world as we know it today, and by bringing together by transporting all the species, bringing together evolutionary lineages that have been separately living for tens of millions of years, we are effectively bringing these continents back together again, and biologists termed this the new pangea. we are creating a new pangea, and not all of the species we bring together, obviously, have

disastrous consequences. in fact, a vast majority do not survive in a new place, and then there are many that survive, but co-exist, you know, relatively peacefully with what's already there, but if you are moving so many species, thousands and thousands of species around the planet every day, even a tiny portion of them have a disastrous effect, those disasterrous effects are going to, you know, start adding up. this is the golden frog. used to be considered a lucky symbol in panama. technically it's a toad, but we'll call it a frog. it's poisennous, and that's why it stands out from the forest floor. it used to be printed on lottery tickets in panama. around, i guess around, yeah,

ten years now, maybe more, maybe 15, the frogs in panama just started to disappear. people eventually figure out that they were disappearing to a disease that's known by the shorthand vd, has a longer latin name hard to pronounce, but it is a fungus. it's caused by a fungus. it appeared in a lot of different parts of the world, and so in central america, emerged in australia, in europe, more or less at the same time. that is a clear indication it was moved around by people. no one knows exactly how, but one of the theories is it was moved around on a frog called the african claw frog, and what's interesting about the african clawed frog is it was used in the 50s as a pregnancy test. if you inject the frog with a

urine of a pregnant woman, that frog lays agos within a few hours. obstetricians kept tanks of these frogs in the offices, and a lot of them, i don't know, people don't know -- people got tiered of them, whatever, they let them go, and now they are a naturalized populations of the african clawed frogs in different parts of the world, and african clawed frogs carry this fungus, but they are not affected by it. that's one theory of how we might have transported this disease around the world. it's not clear if that's a correct theory, but it's one theory. anyway, as i was saying, people realize this is what was killing the frogs in central america or one of the things, certainly, that was killing frogs in central america, and in this particular case, they could literally watch this move. the fungus moved east, killing the frogs, moving in an easterly direction. some scientists in 2006, american scientists, tried to

get out in front of the disease and try to save a population of the golden frogs. just before it got to the area in central panama that they live in, they -- biologists scoopedded some out of the rain forest to preserve a remanent population, and at that point, they had nowhere to put the frogs. the frogs quite literally ended up living in a hotel. [laughter] yeah. they rushed to build the center, and this is one of the few places that you can still see the golden frogs. they are now classified as exticket in the wild. this is where i begin, i worked my way from the end of the book to the beginning, and i begin with the story of the golden frog and the wonderful story of the -- what's called the frog

hotel, and in some ways, you can say this is a heartening story, and it shows that people really are concerned about other species, to use the phrase of the problem with sharing our earth with other creatures. throughout the book, i spent a lot of time of people who devoted their entire lives to this problem. a lot of them, scientists, you know, like barbara durrant who i mentioned, but a lot are ordinary people, for instance, when i went down to the conservation center, there were a lot of volunteers from the state who were down there to help, and when they a took the frogs out of the rain forest and put them in the hotel, they needed people to collect food for them to go out literally into the field and collect bugs for them, and people from all over the world volunteered. they got themselves over to panama, and they volunteered their time and basically their

resources. even people who, you know, are not part directly of efforts like this, you know, give lots of money to groups like the world wildlife fund, defenders of wildlife, national wildlife federation, groups that do really great work. i would like to be able to end on that sort of upbeat note, and to say, you know, what's going to make the difference here, we just need to get even more people involved in efforts like that. that, unfortunately, wouldn't really be true to the book, so one of the central points of the book, and i -- my talk tonight, is that caring is not really the issue. it doesn't really matter, you know, how we feel about this. it doesn't matter how much we're concerned about it. what matters is that we are changing the world. that's what makes us comparable to app asteroid.

unless and until we confront that, that we are the world changing force, then i'm afraid we're just not really confronting the problem. thanks very much. [applause] folks, we have 15 minute for question, want to get through as many people as we can. keep it brief in the form of a question, and if you'd like to ask something, come to the two microphones on either side of the stage. >> in your talk of extinction, you left out one species that is sitting here tonight. [laughter] i wonder if you can say anything about that? >> well, people do seem to be very concerned about the state of people, and i understand

that. as i say in the book, some of my best friends are people. [laughter] i very -- i want to say that i very consciously and pointedly, you know, if you read the book, avoid talking about that, but i guess there's two ways to look at it. the first is if you had to pick, you know, an organism that seems to do really, really well living with people, it would be people; right? we seem to be really quite good at, you know, basically taking over the resources and niches, the habitats of other organisms and living therement we live on every continent, every habitat. we are, you know, we are really adaptable and very clever creatures. if i bet on a species to sort of survive, i think i would bet on humans. but the other answer to that is that one of the lessons was

record, and it's really another -- you know, one of the reasons why i do look -- spend time in the book of what can we learn from the past mass extingses is that past success is no guarantee of future success. the dinosaurs were an incredibly successful group of animals, dominated the planet for tens of millions of years, way, way longer than any of our relatives, even the most distant relatives have been around. you know, when the rules change and we are changing the rules, we are doing that right now, you don't know where things are going to end. those are two somewhat cop tray digit ri answers, but that's sort of the best i can do. >> how serious a problem do you think the threat of foreign jeeps from the gmo crop to other

plants, bt genes and round up resistance? >> well, i don't -- i don't know -- i mean, the short answer to that is i don't know. the longer issue is that there's a couple different issues sort of involved there, and, you know, one of the big stories that's come out of just in recent weeks, for example, is that a lot of the gmo, you know, crops in the midwest that have been modified so they can be -- withstand heavy duty herbicides. the herbicides, it's not the crops doing the damage, but others kill off the milk weed in the midwest, and that's led to many scientists believe to have really dramatic plunge in the number of mop ark butterflies, so, you know, there's all sorts of issues that radiate out that are not necessarily having to do

with the genetic makeup of the crob, but why are we modifying the crops? what are we pouring, what chemicals do we use that then have effects on different species that depend on the plan plants, you know, we call weeds that are try -- that they need them to survive. there's a lot of issues in there, and i am not an education pert enough to unpack all of them. >> you rat out the issue of people caring, right, and you said people don't care enough, which i agree with, and what do you think is causing this situation of the climate change, destruction of species, ect.? seems to me that question of human -- there is tremendous sentiments to stop the destruction to interact in entire different way, but it's limited in controlledded and

squashed by a system that operates in an opposite way driven by competitiveness and everything else. i wonder -- i think there's potential for people to live in an entirely different way in relationship to nature to be caretakers of the planet, but it's restrained and controlled, and i wonder, what do you think the solution is to this? >> well, one of the -- another point, which i didn't get into in tonight's talk, but that i do get into today in the book is, you know, the question of when did we begin this project? we, you know, when people look back at, for example, we at north america, you know, we used to have a lot of fantastic creatures that are not here anymore, and have not been here for many of thousands of years. it's not just a recent phenomena. there's a pretty, once again, there's a lot of evidence that is very early people to reach

north america did in a lot of these fantastic creatures, and the mammoths and giant sloths here, and if you had a slow reproductive rate, you did not survive early contact, even with a very small number of people using very simple weapons, and so, you know, people are this unique creature who can innovate in ways that are much, much faster than other creatures can adapt to, and i'm sorry to say, sad to say that seems to be something we've been doing for a long time, and it's now rampedded up incredibly with our discovery of how to use fossil fuels with the fafght there's 7 billion of us on the planet, and i don't want to say there's not a way that we could be doing things a lot, lot better because there is, but the question of whether with 7 # billion people on the planet, we use a lot of

the resources that other organisms usedded to use african-american question of how we sustain ourselves and also all these other creatures is a question that i want to say i have just yet to see someone provide a good answer for, and i'm sorry to say that i can't provide a good answer for it to be tonight. >> thanks for a wonderful talk own your wonderful work. i hope you don't mind a personal question. you've taken a close look at climate change, and its biodiversity loss, grim subjects. you're a parent, like all of us who are parents, you have a deep stake in the future. how do you keep from dispair? [laughter] >> well, i don't -- i mean, i think that, you know, there's -- again, i could answer that in a lot of ways, and probably the most honest ways is that we all, everyone compartmentalizes;

right? people do -- people work in emergency rooms and work with -- suffering in various ways and go home, play with their kids, and so, you know, we all have the ability to, you know, sot of see certain, you know, dark truths about life in general, and also to put them aside and lead our daily lives. maybe that's the problem with all of us, but that certainly is true of me too, and i think that this material is, you know, incredibly sobering, but it's not necessarily any more sobering than what we know, you know, about humanity for a long, long time. there's been many, many dark episodes in the life of our species, and we've sort of kept going. you know, my grandparents were refugees from nazi germany, for example, and they kept going, so how's that? [laughter] that's -- [laughter]

[applause] >> thank you for a wonderful talk. i heard it -- i think you were giving a talk on npr and said by the end of the century, a lot of our large mammals that have been extinct, a very, very scary thought, and when you think about it, it's strange a bit, but i came here to say if you look around the room, i'm pretty sure everyone in here has been to high school, finished high school, been to college maybe, had a good education, and how are we going to fix our planet if we can't fix our old species, and we have so many of the world's population sitting in poverty and want and need and famine and war and how are we going to help our poor planet if we have children having to walk miles and miles to get space in

the water or great food from the ground to eat. what do you think -- my question would be, how are we going to move forward? how are we going to do that? what do you think? >> well, you know, i think that these are the questions of our century, and, you know, beyond because there are tremendous issues, obviously, of global equity, you know, this is one of the real -- at -- one of the issues of the heart of the, you know, trying to mitigate climate change, you know, are those of us in this country and those in the developing world who created the problem to a large extent is going to be born by a lot of people who did pretty lit little to contribute to it and what's the fair and equitable way to deal with that, and, believe me, i do not believe we'll deal with it fairly or ecosystem --

ecosystem quitly, but how people are living in poverty and at the same time try to preserve those many other species that are not using all resources; right? lifting people out of them processes poverty is a question, sorry to say i can't keep answering it, but i can't answer, and i do think it is the question that will, you know, occupy us or should occupy us for the rest of the century, and it will hinge on us more and more, i think, both the inequity of the global system and, you know, what we're going to other species, i don't think that the situation is just going to, you know, continue on as it is right now. >> okay, two more questions. sure. >> thank you for the article a couple years ago. can we anticipate -- not the

right word -- sudden extinction that may help to tell the climate story in the way that weather events have begun to help? >> that's an interesting question, and i don't know the answer to that, and it's like be careful what you wish for, that's for sure, but i don't know the answer. it's a good question, and i just don't know the answer. >> thank you for the presentation, so i had a couple question, one of them, during the presentation, you were saying that science, like different scientists thought about how deep we were in the situation. what do you think about that? do you think we've taken a step too far in that it's irreversible? >> well, you know, how many species have we already driven

extinct and how many are on the vrnlg right now, you say, this is a pretty serious situation, but it's not the death of the dinosaurs or death of 7 a% of -- 75% of all species on the planet, but when you look at, you know, realistic scenarios, like the rest of the century, how much c02 we pour into the water, things like that, and how much global population increases and how many resources people are going to use. now, we don't know whether those scenarios are going to come to pass, then you say, well, that's taking us into pretty dangerous territory, and if you project out and out and out, and, again, the longer out we go, you know, the more and more uncertain our projections become; right? people who have, you know, looked at, you know, for example, things like measuring the rate at which creatures go from the categories of

vulnerable and threatened to near exticket, extinct in the wild say this rate, the rate at which these things happenings you know, suggests that we are in a very major extinction event. people look at ways to calculate that, and as i said at the top, have come up with different answers, and i, honestly, can't tell you where we are in that process. it's one of the things where, you know, many millions of years, whatever is looking a the fossil records, will know, but it will be very difficult for us to know while we're doing it. >> we actually have to man knewly make a change, but earlier on you said that some leading factors towards the sixth extinction were 7 billion people on the planet use lights, driving, and such. do you think it's -- do you

think us man -- man ewely making a change would not be affected by all the lights and cars and such? >> what i say by that is just our good intentions are not enough. we have to confront. you know, it doesn't -- even at the point where it something's on the verge of extinction and preserve a remanent population, that's a noble thing to do, and i really admire people spending their lives doing that, but we really need to confront, you know, the root causes, as it were, of what's going on. as i hope i indicated, they are really big, and there are many. they are not just one, not even just climate change, unfortunately. there is a host of ways in which we are changing the planet on a geological scale, so much so that you probably heard discussions of geologists saying that we should rename the time

we live in. we officially live in the holistein, time since the last ice age, that we have to rename this after people because people have replaced the great forces of the geology, of the past. these are really, really big things, and they are not -- it's not a matter of, you know, spending more time, helping animals or even donating more money. toes are all good things to do, and i really do recommend them, but it's a matter of trying to sort of get our minds around, you know, all of these really, really big waves, in what we're doing that seems ordinary is really just changing the planet on a permanent basis. thank you. thanks a lot. [applause]

>> ladies and gentlemen, if you want a book signed, line upright here in front of the stage. [inaudible conversations]

>> on the next washington journal, looking at the disclosure stai.s of candidates of how much money they are raising for this year's elections. key political correspondent for the national journal hot line. the chairman of the federal election commission, lee goodman, will join us to discuss how its agency has been affected by the recent supreme court decision on campaign contributions. >> there's an old saying that victory is a hundred fathers and feat, and i would not be surprised in information is poured into you in regards of all the recent activity. >> we're just talking about the

fact that the interrogation last week of the senate committee asking questions about the use of the carrier aircraft, the aircraft and markings painted out, and, well, we figure that somebody over there told them about, you know, that thing on wednesday morning, and that that's where they spring it or goldwater springs it, and spring in such a way it looks like they are cover, and you were wrong and i was wrong in saying there wasn't. >> historic audio to overthrow castro saturday at 6 p.m. eastern on c-span radio and washington, d.c. on 9 o.1fm, online at c-span.org, and on xm radio channel 120. >> in our final invention, james answered the threat of run away artificial intention intelligence.

he spoke about his book in annapolis, maryland. this is 50 minutes. [applause] >> hi, i'm james, and i want to thank mary and jenice for inviting me and i thank c-span for being here. i think this is such a great bookstore. it's good to remember when books were only sold in bookstores, and this one's a miracle because it manages, to me, capture the wild and mysterious bookstore of when i was a kid. just a little bit spooky. [laughter] very rich, and fascinating, obviously, it's a great meeting place for people. i want to thank them for inviting me, and i've written a book about artificial intelligence, but my job is

document and film producer, made film you see on national geographic channel on pbs. here are some. some are available on netflix. it's through documentary that i became interested in artificial intelligence, and that's what i'm here to talk to you about tonight, artificial intelligence, what it is, and why i think ai researchers and ai makers think it's developed in the wrong way. i hope to give you things to think about because i believe this conversation is thee most important conversation of our time. let's begin with this. what is artificial intelligence? it's the theory of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence. this throws the idea of ai backed humans because by and large human intelligence know much about human intelligence

and human intelligence with ai is both the study, summit of study and the tool in when we try to penetrate what intelligence is. this is what makes ai fascinating to me. it's the most inward looking of any of the sciences, involves psychology, neurosign, medicine, statistics, and a lot more on top of programming and computer science. it makes us ponder what it is we're looking for when we hope to mirror human cognition in machines. what do humans do? what are you? what is intelligence? there are a lot of definitions of intelligence in the ai research, ai research business. i'll cite one. it says intelligence is the ability to achieve goals in a variety of novel environments and to learn, and there's a lot packed into the definition.

intelligence is goal oriented, so if the intelligence is not doing something, it's not displaying intelligence. intelligence should be mobile and probably comes with a body, but if you can't move around and adapt, you're intelligence may be poor quality. there's no way to test it. to move around, you need some sort of body, and you have to learn from experience. this is a real important one for ai. most come with all abilities they'll ever have, not humans. we learn new languages, sports, craft, ect., and other animals with learn, but nothing on the scale of humans because of our intelligence. i've been interested in ai for decades, but i was bitten by the bug, and i was working for the learning channel back when it was the learning channel, and i'm -- i was making a film about artificial intelligence, and i got to interview the man who was my hero at the time, and ray, as

you know, is a pioneer of speech recognition technology, machines that read books to the blind, and many other inventions. he's been called the thomas eddyson of our time and coined the term "singularity," and recoined the term that has been around for a while. he's in charge of google, project that reverses things near the brain, and most ai researchers think reverse engineering the brain is the fastest way to create artificial general intelligence which is human level intelligence in a machine, reverse engineering the brain. that might be something to look into. it's fascinating. i will not go into it in much depth. i got to interview another hero of mine, back then, rodney brooks. rodney brooks is the foremost robottist of our time, and the company he founded makes irobot. he sold it. he's moved on. this is the general purpose robot called factor.

it is designed to learn, to be able to do things in your home or in factoryies and imagine them working on farmings, and right now, but he also -- irobot makes the roomba that vacuum your floor and battle robots that carry guns. there's a debate going on right now, a debate whether or not they should be aton mouse, whether or not they make the kill decision without humans. that goes into drones too. i'll get into that later. ironically, i'm going to sudan in ten days, taking two irobot robots. they are going to help us -- >> uh-oh. >> yeah. they are called first looks. they are small. we will go in a pyramid that's not been explored and there's a lot of rock fall so all the pass cammings we cannot get through to. they will be excavated eventually while there, but the first thing to do is put robots in to get a sense of where --

what's the fastest way to the burial chamber, what does the layout look like? obviously, you know, don't let the title of the book mislead you, i like robots. i like ai. they were both optimistic about the time that's coming when we'll share the map et with machines that are smarter than we are. the nonfiction books about the singularity predict ai will helps solve every medical problem facing us like the overall general problem of mortality. after these, i interviewed arthur c. clark. he wrote the book that the film was about. before he was a science fiction legend, he had a background in mathematics and physic, and then we went on to win every award in

science fiction, and he was not optimistic of sharing the planet with smarter than human machines. he says intijt machines will win out and dominate it. to pair phase, we humans fear the future not because we're the fastest or the strongest creature, but because we're the most intelligent. when we share the planet with creatures smarter than ourselves, they'll steer the future. that idea infecked me. this is back in 1990. i started interviews ai makers and robotists shortly after that to work out this idea, and i decided to write a book. when i spoke with artificial intelligence programmers, i posed the question, and sure enough, everyone agreed with the premise that in a hundred years, most of the decisions affecting our lives will be made by

machines. i asked follow-up questions. does that transligs to be frndly? a handover or takeover? will we change ourselves to become machines with brain modifications which was the singularity or create machines smarter than ourselves, and will those machines replace us? what i learnedded is that we proceed on the course i'm currently following, and i want to explain why, we'll create machines not benign or harmless, but develop their own drive like resource acquisition and self-protection. they'll start out being our tools but quickly become their tools if we continue to exist at all. my book is called our final invention, artificial intelligence, the end of the human era. we have to develop a science for understanding smarter than human intelligence before it's created, before we create it. this threw me into a world of people always driven to create

smart machines. scientists working at high levels in ai wanted to create these machines since they were teenagers and children. they run with their goal their whole lives. it's involved in the lives of people who are just as determined to stop the wrecklessness development of advanced ai. the two years i spent writing the book were among the most intensely enjoyable, but the most harrowing. i looked for -- i got more than i bargained for. i went looking for a fish and found a whale. i found more bad news than i was really prepared to find. let's jump in. how do we get from smart phones in our pockets to superintelligent machines that threaten our exist ens. i have to ask you a question. a show of hands, do you think scientists can make a machine smart as a human? okay. so if not, then the problem is either too hard in an

engineering sense or it is something baht the human brain that defines engineering. who thinks the department of human intelligence is too hard? this is a legitimate problem. it could be too hard. i mean, forever. over the next century. so the problem's either too hard or there's something that's imagine call or mysterious about the human brain that can want be copied. who is on that side? okay. less than 15% of the ai officials say it's too hard, and none think there's anything imagine call about the brain that engineering won't crack. being ai specialists, they are going to think that. i did a wider poll of experts and nonexperts an combined them in a couple graphs. my conclusion is with them, there's nothing magical or up

fathomable about the human brain, and this creates human level intelligence and then beyond. in that case, if you follow that path, we just -- you were not aware, but split up into tribes right there -- [laughter] but if you follow that -- if you follow we can crack the problem and it's a matter of time, ten years or a hundred years, if intelligence is a problem that can be solved, how long does it take? calculating technology progress, reckons 2029, that's when he thinks we mirror all the nuances, like emotional nuances of the human brain in a mere. the mean date, according to ai makers is about 2045, which is within many of our lifetimes. the very outside date from specialists to nonspecialists was 2200. the new yorker magazine, a psychologist, neuroscientist, he was kind enough to review our

final analysis in the new yorker, and said this about how long it takes, he said a century from now, nobody will care how long it took. what they'll care about is what happened next. it's likely the machines will be smart enough before the end of the century, he said. what's important, he says, it's not when superintelligence shows up, but what happens next. in other words, will we will ready? will we have prepared ourselves? even ray, supremely optimistic and created a bran called the singularity, believes the machine intelligence will surpass our ability to understand it. how exactly, my question was, how exactly will that happen? how will machines get smart enough? there's a pretty simple theory put out in 1965 and a couple chapters about an unknown genius who was -- worked at the park as a code breaker, and they were

good friends, but what's coming up is what he said about this, flawed with a lot of words so i'll give you time to read it. i'm going to give you 20 seconds to read it. [laughter] i like it, but i like to put it another way. we created machines better than we are at tasks like navigation, and a lot of other things. probably within the next decade or two, we'll create machines better at ai research than we are. at that point, they can improve their own capabilities quickly. ..the capabilities very quickly and rhino software

exists that it deserves experiments and make suggestions and hypotheses for further experimentation. software that judges the quality of software. so software systems improves itself and it is within reach there are good attempt of you doing it right now if we of the theory of evolution and algorithms, there's a lot that we can do to improve the. end this is another thing. that is general intelligence that is 10 or 20 years away. and when that is self improving, it will be able to rapidly improve the intelligence and then we will share