>> it is truly evil. [laughter] >> previously the ceo of vitality a company their reinvented medication and packaging and he founded a company called ambient devices. . .

>> i think that that signs up his view of it. he writes about technology and culture. the guardian, the new republic, mit tech review and his work has been included in the science and nature writing. i cannot note that in his biohe also says in the early 1980s he was a founding number of the universally unnoticed group and i want to give you sense up behind the stage banter that we were having. these guys all know each other they say that he and neck have been disagreeing for more than a decade. and he also describes it as a

walking bummer. [laughter] >> there is no pessimism in david's view. anti-is a bit more moderated and then we will hear the doom and gloom area and david, start us off, he is the author of enchanted objects. >> i want to show you an image of my living room. it's a couple of minutes and that will illustrate many of the products that i talked about in the book. ♪ ♪ >> enchanted objects have the same functionality as before except for now they can talk. these are ordinary things and have extraordinary capabilities ♪ >> when we are creating technology for the home am a we want to make something that is

seamless and transparent as opposed to having things draw your attention to it. making it a more ambient experience. >> we will continue to behave as those everyday objects are viewed in the world and we can remain focused on this between two people. and what we are seeing is the proliferation of different devices that are moving out from the cell phone and onto our bodies and into the world. >> in the middle of the living room, there is a coffee table that has google earth. and i just found that having access to this amazing map changes how often we talk about travel and the world and how often we look of places that are mentioned. and it's nice to have this object sitting in the middle of our living space.

the devices can be a lot simpler. it can just be an umbrella that only shows whether it's going to rain. you'll need to tap on an icon or do anything that seems artificial. and so this can be a platform that we personalize and we customize. the key is how do we create this that allows us to move from one experience to the other in a more seamless way. >> some people might think that this would be overwhelming and i think about how we decorate our homes today and we put photographs everywhere and paintings and post it notes and there's a lot of decoration and the doorman in the home. i think that "enchanted objects"

designed in the right way, we want hundreds of them around us. >> what we are going to see is a new renaissance where designers as well as scientists are going to make a really big impact in the type of technology that we see. and the history of computers has mostly been about proficiency. i think one of the things that is changing is that enchanted objects can be about adding motion and magic to the fabric of our everyday lives. >> so i think in the book as we describe the different relationships to technology and how there is a huge wave sweeping, taking technology from this that seems to be monopolizing this back and forth and these things were designed in the age of the interfaces for smart phones where we had microsoft dos. a computer does something back

and then you do something and there is a huge opportunity now that all have a little bit of technology and artificial intelligence that can simplify the relationship to technology as you can see in terms of this and jewelry and all the things that we will have there. so from the examples that i showed that this will impact felt in a positive way, impact transportation in a positive way and housing. the apartments, they had like a big wall, it's like a richer dispenser and so it comes out and there's all these space hogs it had before it can be nested way so you can live downtown in new york or singapore for less

than $1.3 million. this is the cost of square footage today. and i think as we illustrate this in the poster that i broadview, a way to think about what should we make now that technology is affordable enough and small enough for everything. and i made this periodic table and divide it up the things that we could have based on human desire. so i go back to fairy tales and comic books and i think about what our human aspirations that could be satisfied with new technology. i talk about objects for this ignition. about half are real and half of them are prototypes. and this includes human to human

connection like the little cabinet to my six-year-old can talk to, my parents who are in wisconsin, as often as they want to, i don't have to set up a connection, they just open the portal and the other person as they are. or the desire for immortality and these objects that help us understand ourselves and our behaviors and give us a digital self portrait that nudges us towards being healthier versions of ourselves. objects that make travel easy and the last one is objects for personal expression. once the other desires are being satisfied, we can spend more time with personal expression like things that make painting easier or guitar hero or lego

bricks, which makes sculptures or inventing robots easier. and so that is quickly a position technology and that includes this new same that i call enchanted objects. >> david has a number of his posters later. [applause] >> the next up is andrew mcafee. he is at the center for digital business at mit. he was previously a business professor at the berkman center for society. >> thank you all for coming out. this is already a really good day for me because i've been described as the optimist. in our book came out in january

and it is called the "second machine age." i want to talk a little bit about where this comes from. and first i want to underscore david's optimism about the world we are creating with digital technology. and i am concerned with economic prosperity. it's hard to believe that this is the single biggest change became in the late 18th century and has been going on ever since. it's a story about what happens when powerful technology enters human history. we have really good evidence going back hundreds if not thousands of years and it tells us that there's no economic growth and almost no population

growth and no advance in the state of civilization. for honestly thousands of years until the late 18th century and you can grab these things like this. and the story about why that happened is a technology story and the main thing that changed is that we finally have power to let us overcome the limitations and that continues in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with electrical power in the internal combustion engine and it's like nothing else. >> it's a lot of technological progress. and it does spread. what we are witnessing now thanks to innovations like the one david talked about is what we call the second machine age where we are overcoming limitations of our minds and senses thanks to digital technology as we overcome this in the first machine age.

i cannot conclude anything else except this is going to be the best economic news on the planet for sometime to come. so you think, how can you possibly get this and the reason that comes in is as we look at the evidence, it's absolutely true and technological progress is the only free lunch that we believe in. the problem is there is no economic law that says that this has to benefit everybody equally. the progress can easily be biased towards some groups and away from other people. the main people that it is biased against is the fulcrum in the second machine age and the people that want to offer this labor to the economy, they don't have in demand or differentiated skills. they are finding it really hard

to get a job at a wage that is going to be healthy and acceptable for them. so we see that the average american family is no better off today than they were in the late 1990s and is slowly going backward in some measures as well. the middle class in this country and around the world is clearly getting hollowed out. people at the low end are actually doing okay and they work and the physical world. and that includes gardeners and massage therapists. their jobs are the robots cannot do yet. and the technology has already been really good at those and that is explaining the polarization and the hollowing out. and when we look around, we saw astonishing advances in artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles.

and this is becoming problematic in some ways it helps me understand the rise in inequality and plight of the worker. unless we figure out intelligent ways to intervene, those trends are going to continue and i believe they're going to accelerate. so the challenge that i see coming with technology are these economic challenges and i always love nick because he gives me new things to think about. so i find myself reliably

disagreeing with him. >> andrew mcafee hook is "the second machine age." and nicholas carr, his book is "the glass cage." >> since i am the appointed doom and gloom guy, i really feel like i should be up at the pulpit. this is the optimistic take. in the future you won't have a job, but you will have a really cool umbrella. [laughter] and i would like to take a slightly different view and look at a bit of a different question as we look ahead or look at what is going on now and we think about how computers are changing

. and when we rely on machines to perform our jobs, do the talents fluor-ish or do they weather? and that is a very old question that people have been asking for least 2000 years, back to the ancient greeks. it's a question that kind of encapsulates the fundamental ambivalence about labor saving technology. you know, you will save us or it will destroy us. and that is captured in the title of today's session and i was happy to see the word a.m. been there. and i think that the question is is a it more today than it ever has been? whether we are going to florence in this new environment or whether we are going to see the quality of our lives diminish.

including providing evidence about automation through computers and software through the professional jobs. and on the other hand automation itself as the first wave of industrial automation in the 1950s. and they raised productivity. and it's also presented as an emancipator.

and what we found out in reality is something very different than that promise. the business school professor in the late 1950s went out and actually did exhaustive research on what was happening in the industrial or and he went in to their teener 16 different companies including a wide range of industries from companies that made automotive engines to one's that were baking bread on an industrial scale. what he found out in large part is that their skills did not rise up. the jobs are not rise up for it and in fact he went down. they went down throughout all of these sectors. instead of turning the factory worker into these higher skilled people, they turn it into a specialized labor the became a machine operator in the pusher

of buttons and that sums it up in a report that he gave to the government. and the lesson is that it's not true that sophisticated equipment to wires skilled operators. and so i think that that is a lesson that we are learning again on a much broader scale. today as we see computer automation move into all of these professional jobs across the economy, we are often given an optimistic view that says oh, well, as soon as we don't have to do these routine jobs, we will have more strategic jobs or aesthetic jobs or some kind of higher-level skills called in to play. but if you look at the evidence across many different jobs these

days and you see something different. and if you look at how doctors are coming to work when they are doing a diagnosis with the computer and when you look at managers. what you see is not people being raised up and you have a lot of complex different ways to interact with the world to express your skills and thoughts to a more homogenized economy where more and more people are either watching screens or have data into screens and providing backup should it fail. this is not only happening in the professional economy but

it's happening in lots of our individual personal lives. all you have to do is probably look at your own behavior and go out afterwards to do all sorts of everyday tasks. if you want to get to another place and you won't be recommendation for what movie to watch, even when you want to socialize that activity is mediated by companies like facebook. what this does is make us more dependent upon computers and technology and less likely to engage with the world and less likely to engage a greater talent and opens the world to

us. what we see is what we struggle with and this has been going on since the human race first emerged. great tool users and is absolutely essential to our survival including our ability to lead aid for filling satisfying life. but we always have two choices when it comes to this. we tend to use them in a way to engage with the world and take on hard challenges and use our talent and analytical talents, judgment making talent in a way that leads to more for filling work and activity because one thing we know about it is that we actually aren't very happy when everything is made easy for us. and that includes accomplishing hard things or you can go the other way, which is you can use

the technology as a type of barrier between you and the world and all its complexity and this includes very simple tasks and decisions. and so what i would and what is that it we should encourage you to take a different view of technology and what we have come to do is judge these things as purely economic inefficiency including means of production and consumption. and so if we think about them in that way, the demand that even the computer tools are designed to enrich our experience rather than impoverish it, as i think

more and more is being done, we will actually create the future well created human beings rather than well-suited to robots. thank you. [applause] >> i have to say it was a former editor at harvard is this review. only their wood weed research where someone visits 12 to 15 companies to be described as comprehensive. and i just completely disagree. the actual systematic research shows that there is a consistent upgrading of the skills even as it became much more automated and it became the world's best education system because as demanded a more highly skilled set of workers.

>> we are looking at it from two different angles. so what does it mean to the particular jobs or you can look at it as what does it do to the mix of jobs. what you are saying is that the increase in productivity nevertheless created bigger companies with more complex management requirements and we have this whole white collar work force that was built up on top of it. >> the factory workers became more highly skilled. and it's a little bit simplistic. and so the last time when we went on a flight, how many of us were hoping that the pilot had a for filling experience on that flight. >> if it's boring for the pilot, that's good news for us. two let me respond.

there are two different ways to look at it, as i said, you can look at individual jobs or you can assume that we are going to create a richer level of jobs and that richer level of jobs as being either way by computers and there's no sign yet that there will be this big general further increase in jobs and i think we have to look at the reality of the situation come out that says when you introduce more and more sophisticated software, people began to have more homogenized jobs and become more reliant on computers. >> as for the pilot, for 100 years the story of this had been about increasing safety and inefficiency.

when you look at what has happened in recent years, we see that they have manual control for about three minutes into flight. they lose the situational awareness, the skills get rusty and we are seeing this new kind of accident beginning to emerge. automation related accidents where something goes wrong because their skills are rusty it crashes. plaster the faa sent out a notice saying you really have to get pilot to be more engaged in the flight. in practice the skills. so this story is a big story and then what it shows us is that you can take too much responsibility and too much skill away from a person and control away from a person and then you get the opposite effect. if we back up a little and actually respect the skill of pilots and give them more

control and responsibility, it can be even more than today. >> i think that the balance point is the right answer. i think about my morning this morning being aided by three technologies, one is my fixer will play my craft, you could say that that is screen time. but i think just talking about people as a society, creatures of the screen, it is condemning the medium itself. thinking you are a creature of the page. and so i think it's a constructionist game and not the first person shooter mode, i think you can do it for an hour on the weekends. that doesn't seem to be too bad.

i was talking about an inductive top and all of that seems to be -- i didn't have the struggle in terms of cocaine, but also i didn't make the choice to do the tv dinner, like i didn't just get something out of the freezer and say, okay, respect is, everybody. i made the choice to use some tools and so there is a middle ground. and i used this system is easier to get if you have them come to you in the driver is someone who is and on ordinary person and they know exactly where to go and i just left that and billed

my credit card. it was an awesome experience and i think the person who could make some money driving people around, those were three tools. what's wrong with those tools? >> i don't think there's anything wrong with the tools. i have different issues with uber. that includes companies that don't have the worker's best interest in mind. but i think you're absolutely right that as i said we constantly have a choice as the designers of technology. to use these tools and if you look at how most everybody uses gps navigation. and it's extremely valuable in

all sorts of situations where you need to get somewhere really fast and you don't know where you are going. and what we see with that instead of using it words really valuable, i talk about one woman and she is a artist and a designer and a different city and she was looking forward to going to that city and she'd never been there before. and then after the conference was over she realized that every time she left the hotel to go somewhere, she does plunged into the destination with google maps. and she realized that she never developed a sense of place in the area and never really got to lay this out.

so we are too quick to kind of say, okay, let the computer do it and we lose elemental skills, important skills like navigation and knowing where you are and it turns out that that is actually a very valuable skill to develop. >> would you say that to the calculator? >> the calculator is a very good tool and again it depends when it is introduced. if you give a kid -- >> kids don't have a sense always on us. >> i think the you can bring in now that you have mastered a particular mathematical skills and it's become routine, you can use the calculator to do it for you and that raises you up to the next level and they say you

don't have to learn that skill but the calculator can do it for you. that has the effect of not lifting you up. often going from one level to the next and you have to mastered at a particular level. so they say let's wait until we master a skill it becomes automated. >> you make it very clear that you feel like you're is a effectiveness. in your book you even acknowledge that you have to reorient this education kind of away from an industrial focus on math and reading. and the focus is now so much on science technology and engineering and math. and so we need more focus on personal intellectual skills and so i'm wondering what you think the education system needs to

look like and what can you say we need to be doing differently for what the technology will bring us? >> everyone needs to get up and leave this room and go find out the session where the finish education researcher is talking about this and i'm going to mispronounces last name, but we need to stop teaching people to be so standardized. but concludes the things that we lose with technological progress. it happens all the time everywhere. this was correct, we wouldn't be witnessing this throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century, which is the measurable significant rise that has been measured consistently for a long time. not in any way we can measure or way we can worry about. in a way that we can measure are

we becoming stupider over time even as our world and society has become more tech logically complex. >> in my mind i think that david looks at the world and says, okay, this could be something to make it look better and i think this is true. >> do have a doorbell for when they approached the house? >> i do. do you remember peter and the wolf? and they have a different sound for every character. in our house we have a doorbell that helps to sound who is where and when are they coming home as people are homebound is right in the neighborhood, you hear that it makes a sound for that family member that indicates that they

are homebound and how close they are. and so it's an interface that is embedded and hopefully elegant and not screen-based but audio-based that solves this and the day who is where problem. >> my husband commutes and they love this application called wayz. it lets them know what routes to take. and she was running late, you could see a little picture of her on the map and it's like, okay she's about to park on orchard street. and we should get that and we would always know where we are. and i said, you are getting the ultimate free pass for white, you are offering to tell me where ever you are at all times and i'm declining from that.

and so it's very limited. is there anything that we should leave alone? >> i'm sure there are lots of things. but i look at all of the applications that people have on their screens and i think that this is something that they are intrigued by. in order to hear whatever music you want, sort of a signal and i think about how would you marry that application with a place in someone's life like a cabinet words or or a chair or an object that could put the information in that service in the right place so that the interface wouldn't have to be tabbing over three screens, but instead confined life in music or you open the cabinet and the kid sees the grandmother, to sort of

just trying to find ways that these can become more elegantly embedded in everything and hopefully that will be a more humane way to live. >> talking to you about this, there is a show called 30 feet from stardom, and you hear these songs by starters. you forget that there is a woman's voice that the song would it be the same without it. and it's a backup singer. there's less skill needed by singers now because if you can't hit the note right, autotune can fix it, including human pleasure of learning to do things. so you say that architecture is part of this. can you tell us what we are losing that is intangible and maximum i think that computers are generally valuable for the architecture and construction.

what happens is because it makes it so easy for they happen as in the case with autotune, a lot of us began to use it at the outset of a project. so instead of building models by hand, they go to write to the screen and the computer will build your wall for you and the windows and everything and what is left is this is a center of experimentation that can only come when you're actually visit we using manual skills to stress things out and it turns out that expands the memory and we get more in touch with the physical nature of architecture when we do this. and it's very easy to overlook those types of engaging physically as well as mentally and we began to see these things

as activities that they can do this and let's let the computer do that. and i do think that there is great situations. so we say the computer can do this and we realize that there is reactivity in the sense of a humane scale of things to come when we least start on our own with our own resources being engaged with the world to challenge to bring things like documents together, coming to the right balance and i think we are too quick to say if the computer can do it, then we should be able to do it. >> we want you to be able to ask questions as well. please start. we will try to get as many questions as we can. >> thank you. this is a question beginning for

david about home automation. most of these embedded devices have on the networking stuff, but it's been shown that the home automation can be compromised and used then is it trojan horse within the home network as a platform to attack. and so in the very corrosive security environment that is the internet today with governments flexing their muscles and other players arming themselves and toughening up, isn't the internet kind of a nonstarter? >> the part of security that i'm concerned about is the permanent memory that your facebook and

others have. i'm less concerned about a government or google knowing whether my lights are on or off, but i do think that the security that is prevented by, the security threat prevented by all of the data at the phone is gathering is a much bigger threat and i think as an industry we need policy around lobotomize in our devices and we need a big reset button to be evident so that we can sort of have forgiveness. we can have no memory. we can say, okay, the should no longer remember anything about my whereabouts or my exercise and that should be a more appearance future. >> i think a lot of technology

enthusiasts are excited about it. it allows them to do difficult rings and it challenges their skills. there is the danger that you're losing skills and i'm wondering if there's a way to use technology as we have a sense of achievement that comes learning in this way a task. >> can you think of an example. >> yes, i can. let's go back to airline automation. you can design software back to the pilot at random times and that makes the job a little bit harder and it also keeps the pilot alert. >> you can take off the electrical system at random. [laughter] >> is to make it really hard. >> yes, you could. >> it has been done. [laughter] >> so i think it's not so much, you can see a lot of educational

software making this harder for kids. and the video games actually make things hard. i think that those things can be good models for the types of applications of use in all aspects of our life. including providing room for human analysis, challenging us and i think there's lots of ways that you can design this and i think that that would push us to act more and work more while still getting a lot of benefits from that. >> i would just say in the example of this, what is our goal? is the goal to make that as safe and efficient as possible? or key pilot engaged? i have a really clear preference for the first.

>> the faa says that we should have computers fly more manually. and the way to maybe do this is to get the pilot out of the cockpit. >> look at what happened to sully so when both engines failed, he landed safely on the hudson. >> it's a long time and you look at what happens to the air france white where they handed control back to human pilot, the first thing that the pilot did was yanked back back and put the plane into the stall warning that went off continuously for three minutes. >> if the pilot had been more engaged. >> but they weren't.

>> this is why it is refers to automation error including they make mistakes and they are more likely to make mistakes. can design these systems differently other than say let's just get rid of the pilot because human beings are flawed. we might be flawed, but we should take those laws into account in designing the systems. and so we better make sure. >> there's a reason for that because of the humans in all of their foibles women toys that because it's the safest way amax. >> is the safest way. >> i think it's worth mentioning something that i mentioned at the beginning which is when someone said you and acknowledge that are and then they said we

disagreed more than a decade and you can see it play out right here. >> that, i actually read one of your earlier books which i thought was great. the big switch, you're a lot more optimistic about that. >> i'm a technology enthusiast and i believe in all of the things that you are saying. but i don't think you're saying overall that we are better off without technology, i think you're saying that we definitely are better off with technology and technology has taken a little bit out of each one of us and i think it we see it every day and we depend too much on calculators. and if we are sending texts for not calling each other, the personal contact we are missing and the pilot is a perfect example of this. i would rather fly a plane with

the pilot them without a pilot at this stage and i think that the challenge is that shooters are designed to handle things we program in them and they are not very good at handling exceptions. and that is what happens with the air france pilot which i agree with. the computer did not know how to handle the exception when the plane stalled. my question is other than saying get more engaged, what do we need to do as a society to solve that problem so that we are not solely dependent on machines to the point when exceptions happen we run into problems? >> i think the first thing to do is respect our own talents more than we tend to do right now. realizing that only human beings have common sense and that is what enables us to deal with exceptions in most cases very

fluently were as computers have a great deal of trouble dealing with exceptions and unfortunately we live in a weird world. common sense, skeptical thinking, creativity and ingenuity, all the things that we are good at may not be as efficient as possible because all of those things require us to grapple with hard things and figure things out and we can start with that that we have these unique skills that are crucial for the well-being of society with what i would call a technology centered view of automation refers to figure out what the computer can do and you say, okay, let's give that to those unreliable human beings. move away from that toward what is a human centered design where

you say what are people dead at, how can we design the systems and software to make sure that we capture that skill. and we encourage it to get better and better to counter off our flaws and provide information and i think that that would be a much better approach. and we want to give highest precedence to immediate efficiency and i think that we will short-circuit our own skills and well-being. >> lead let us unpack that. and that includes cd. these are absolutely things that i value and i don't want them reduce to one trivial word like efficiency. >> our first astronauts were all

pilots. they looked at spacecraft, they asked where are the controls and how we fly this thing. so how did the evolution, how does it taste the citizens in regards to today's topic when i. >> i'm not sure, but the astronauts had that reaction and they wouldn't fly without having some control and so nasa retrofitted this to let them -- to give them control through the air to. and so i think it underscores the we have been struggling with this kind of issue and this challenge for a long time. >> i am with nick, there is a trade-off that we struggle with

constantly. we can preserve the status quo in the interest of people who are currently holding today's jobs and we can change the status quo and think about all of the benefits to everybody else that benefits from this. and so i think about the trade-off and i find it an extraordinarily easy trade-off to make. >> one side is looking at what technology has to bring, what conventional wisdom is doing for us, which it also does things to us. and if they were word in your talk is easier. what happens to us and what

happens to our brains and our bodies when more and more we allow technology to substitute for the mental and physical and social efforts that we are used to. and i think that next book is examining the side that we are losing a lot of. it is very important because we have this age of technology and we are not looking at what it is doing to us. >> we have just a few more minutes. >> i don't want our lives to be trivial, i want the interaction with technology itself. this includes learning how to

operate a computer and i just think it is ridiculous because the interface itself is in the eight availability in a lot of things until we can focus on human interaction and solving difficult problems and we won't have the byzantine interfaces like the mercury in her face typing in these characters to tell the machine to do anything. and today we laugh at that and i'm saying let's move this so it's even easier that we get a little bit of interaction and the interaction itself can become embedded and easier.

>> as the late middle aged google executive who now holds the highest record for jump out of a balloon into the earth, breaking this on his own using an amazing amount of technology. >> i think that's fantastic. >> many of us often think what did you do before the internet before google. and shouldn't there be a better way to let it know what we want and so to me it's fascinating. andrew mcafee, and this is nicholas carr, they are now going to cross that into the back room and we will meet them, thank you all for being here.

♪ ♪ ♪ >> were now from the 2014th boston but as the vault with a discussion on how mayors can affect national politics. this is with benjamin barber on how mayors rule the world. [applause] [applause] >> i feel like i am towering over you here.

>> i will do a formal introduction in just a moment. and first we want to thank carol and john who are very active in the community for showing their great support for the boston book festival and the great event as we know it specifically we thank them for their sponsorship. and of course, we all also want to send our very will best wishes out to the boston mayor who was supposed to be on our panel here today and as we all know, he is not feeling well and i am sure that he very much regrets not being here. and i'm sure that we in the send him our best wishes. thank you.

and after our discussion here today, the author, doctor benjamin barber will be signing books next-door, which is just across the hallway and here's how it is going to work trade is going to make a presentation and then we will talk about the book, all of us here on this stage and then you will get a chance to ask a few questions of the members of our panel and if you notice there is a microphone right in the center aisle. since this event is being accorded by the boston book festival and c-span, we are when asked you to go to the microphone asked your question because we want to make sure that we can hear you well as opposed to asking the question from where you are seated and we thank you in advance for that. and now we began.

good afternoon, everyone, welcome to the boston book festival. i am very happy to be here this afternoon and very pleased to be able to be a participating partner at the boston book festival this year. given what we witnessed just this week in ottawa, what we have experienced in boston in terms of terrorism, given guns and drugs and climate change is and other issues and challenges that nations seem unable to solve, mayors are better problem solvers and should be given a try. here to help us discuss the topic our three distinguished massachusetts mayors,. [applause] we have dan rivera of lawrence.

[applause] >> and the honorable [inaudible] of pittsburgh. >> the first to outline this for a few minutes, entitled "if mayors could rule the world", doctor benjamin barber, senior research scholar at the center for philanthropy and civil society at the graduate center in new york. [applause] >> thank you so much and a chance to interact is great as we become fond of where we live in the world today, and that includes tom and others that i've had the pleasure of meeting since earlier this year.

so on this is a particular pleasure and i'm very glad that they are here. and i have a chance to say are you crazy. ..

less than half of those able to vote vote, and those that most need to don't. the result is a skewed political system in which the democracy and democracy of cities which are the preponderant of the 75% of america end up in many cases being ruled from the countryside by a minority with very different interests weather on guns or transportation board health or anything else. there is a skewing of the political system right now in which the guardians of our safety and our welfare and our economy for the last 400 years nation states have become increasingly dysfunctional. it is not just an american problem. the same problems not just in england for china but other parts of the world, you see in the european union the great experiment in transnational sovereignty which in recent years has found it more difficult to attract the

attention engagement of the citizens or nationalists and populist reaction is making it harder for the european common noble european experiment to succeed so nation states are in trouble, dysfunctional and democracy is in trouble because nation states have been the guardians of our democracy for 400 years. what do we do? what can we do? we need to turn out the vote, reform government, we need a more efficacious congress, find ways to bring europe back from the brink. i have a different suggestion. my suggestion is change the subject. stop focusing on obsessing with nation states, washington national government, and start looking at cities. stop talking about president obama and prime minister cameron, the president of the european council, start thinking about people like mayor long,

daniel riviera, bill deblasio, mayor walsh ensnares around the world who even as we see states dysfunctional we see city's continuing as they always have to solve problems pragmatically, realistically and necessarily. twice in the last couple of years the central government of washington closed its borders. the most powerful government in the world closed its doors, number one, how many people noticed? but number 2, imagine for a minute martin walsh has a problem and says are coming next week boston is closed. no police, hospitals, schools, garbage pickup, no metro, no subways, we are closed until we get it right. you can't close cities because cities are the quintessential human communities. date define our identity, where we are born and grow up and have

our children. get educated, where we create and procreate, where we play and pray, where we get older and where we die. cities really are often a fundamental sense, not just another level of government, they are about us and the people we choose are pragmatists, problem solvers and neighbors. a copy is to ask what are we doing? and not something president bush or president obama would be likely to want to do. even the secret service let them do it. imagine the prime minister wander around saying how are doing? is not how it works. but here when we walked in to hamburg with martin walsh or i am with mayor paulino in rome, you walk around and people stop

and say hi and there are not armed guards pushing them away. because mayors our neighbors, citizens of the town, don't forget city and citizen have the same etymology. the word city and the word citizen are locked together in the very meaning of the word. cities are where problems are solved. as a result mayors are different kind of politician, a different political animals and national leaders tend to be. they have to be more pragmatic, sometimes they come in ideologically. i am a progressive democrat. bill deblasio is a progressive democrat but he had to learn he can come in making war on the rich and the developers and think he will get a progressive agenda through. he has to build coalitions, he has to reach out. if you get a business guy like mayor bloomberg he has to reach out to the unions, has to deal with working people, has to deal

with. majors have to build coalitions. they can't give orders. they don't have national executive authority. they have to find ways to get people to work with them to solve problems and that is how government is supposed to work and that is, it does work in cities and is why cities despite the crisis in democracy keep functioning. it is also why cities as a result all through the world as levels of trust with respect to their citizens. you don't find that in any other level of government. the presidency of the united states is about 30% and the supreme court which used to be 65%, 70% now has a twelfth level below the majority, 45%. congress. about 8%. single digit trust. this directly elected democratic body that you and i vote for, one in ten americans trust. that is a disaster for

democracy. it is a disaster for governance but when you come down to city councilors, mayors, the trust level will shoot up again and europe, not just in united states, trusts levels shoots up to 65, 75%, three quarters of citizens say he may not be my guide or the woman i voted for but i trust her because she is my neighbor, she was working to make the city where can she shares our disasters and catastrophes, mayor daniel riviera. because they are neighbors taking on the mantle of government and so we trust them and that trust factor is the central to the success of government and democracy. without trust, no democracy. you don't have to trust a dictator. he is there, he does what he does, you follow war you go to jail but democracy depends on

trust. in our cities that trust level is powerful depressant and allows us to trust our mayors. that leads me to the provocative but by no means polemical title of my book, if mayors ruled the world. why in a world where the global level there is no democratic local governments, either corporate monopolys with private interests, nothing wrong with that they are not legitimate representatives of the people are there for a global terrorist organizations like al qaeda and isis which are belligerent in geos. we don't elect them but they are extremely effective. the only forces out there are monopoly and anarchy at the global level. why not let cities that one by one of them so much and which increasingly in network and associations of cities are working together, why not give

them an opportunity to come together and work together. there are hundreds of city networks you have heard of. most of you have heard of the c 40 climate cities. mayor bloomberg and initiated a couple years ago where cities can work together on climate issues but if you dig deeper, if i say how many of you know what the uclg is, how many have heard of that? is it is a 100-year-old institution in most of the world's cities which nobody has heard of. i call it the most important decision in the world and no one has heard of it. test your high school students, college professors, most of them won't know what it is because the network of inner-city associations, not just the u.s. conference of mayors and mexican conference of mayors, these associations across the globe already encompass a network of associations in which mayors are recognizing when they work

together, when they do it together they get better results, share best practices, share problems, share approaches, borrow each other's commissioners, london and new york and gone back to fourth and transportation and police commissioners. city's working together create an informal governing structure which really works. what i want to suggest is take the powerful, the powerful capacity of mayors and city councilors to work on problem solving, pragmatic and efficient way which the fines which democratic government is supposed to be and take the inner city networks already out there, a matter of these networks but without a keystone, you build an arch but without a keystone, they all fall down. the web of inter city associations needs a keystone to create governance, global governance and i want to propose

that a global parliament of mayors working together would put a keystone in to the arch of intercity associations, allow mayors not to do something they are not doing because they're talking and working together but take it to another level, to actually do some things together, do some things where they say we will do it together and california a couple years ago, the city and state were not happy with the initial levels set by the u.s. government and raised them by 10% above what the u.s. standards were. you know what happened? they didn't make a lot for the united states that the car industry has a decision to make, they sell 17% of automobiles in california, california cities, it has got to be 35 miles per gallon. the car industry makes 17% of their cars with 75 miles a gallon and the others with left or make that their standard. they made that their standard so in effect using the market california cities and the state

leverage the marketplace to make a fundamental changes. there was a new mayor in jersey city which became the largest city in new jersey, he made the market to change gun laws. what if every city in the country which buys weapons and ammunition for the police force got together and said we will only buy ammunition from ben companies that don't sell big magazine assault rifles and don't sell armor piercing bullets whose only job is to kill cops? 17% of the market, i guarantee a lot of gun companies would say that is what you are talking about, will make the switch and the u.s. federal government, they buy another 40% of the arms and ammo so if government uses public pressure in the marketplace, forget the n r a,

anytime you want to make a law the nra, use the market. make it work when mayors work together, city's work together, they can leverage markets in powerful ways that they can't do one by one. a managing global you are doing that. imagine you can make global decisions to get there, not to make a lot but you are leveraging the global marketplace. so the proposal was here that we take the pragmatism, the problem solving, the neighborliness, the trust levels of the cities, 52% of the global population of the couple years ago became have the world's population in the cities and in the developed world here, europe, asia, 75 to 80% of the population and in resources 82% of global gdp comes from cities. don't you believe it the next time you hear a tea party guy in

kentucky saying the indolence minorities of the cities are stealing our taxes. if you want to use that kind of language is the other way around. 65% of u.s. social services go to counties that vote conservative on these issues and the money comes from the cities, from you because over 80% of the resources and tax base for national government is in cities. it is a crime to david cities do so much and of course they don't pay for themselves. they pay for the state and the nation. it is a crime that cities put out 80% of the welfare and tax revenue a gdp and have to beg national government. to do the job they're doing more effectively the national government. they have a right to those revenues, they can't do that one by one but together cities can say to the federal government

don't get money from your treasury. we need to be radical because the problems are being solved or asked on the basis of what political scientists call the unfunded mandate. i want you to do a, b, c and d, and the money, that is your problem but you have to do it but it may be my problem but the money you are not giving me came from me so we will find ways to keep more and create a way of organizing politically that allows that. we sat in brussels and the commissioner of the region in the cities, we have decided to raise the appropriation of

cities this year and the mayor's literally said thank you so much. i was sitting on the podium as a speaker. when you say you are going to raise the appropriation where does it come from. where did they come from? from the regions, primarily from the city's. you offered to give back a little more of what you took and they are supposed to think that is a gift. in cities have the majority of the population, and wealth and gdp, the most devastating complications of climate change or sea rise, 19% are on water and rivers and lakes and oceans and seas, and boston and new orleans, development planning to

try to deal with the reality of ac rise the national political parties refused to even recognize as science. that is not something we as citizens of cities, the great majority of americans who live on water can afford. is not an abstract art, is science, we need to take action and the mayors know it and cities know it so cities are where the action is. cities have the kind of government that works. it is non ideological. it is not nineteenth century property owners versus workers. these old issues of left and right, labor and tories, has so little to do with what mayors and city councilors do in governing. no mayor can say i won't deal with the capitalists. in a knowledge economy whether capitalists? the programmers at that level? in a knowledge economy in a

service economy and knowledge economy those old divisions don't make sense and mayors know it and cities work by consensus in coalition and building a tripod of civil society and business working with the public sector. that is why public-private partnerships are more productive and less problematic that in cities than at the national level and all over the world where i go i found mayors are saying we need to work public or private. and without a flourishing healthy city that provides services infrastructure, health and education, we can do business here. is a two ways to read and the collaborative streets. what i want to suggest is that we are in a world which when you look only at presidents, prime ministers and nation states, the faltering united nations looks

ungovernable, but look at the city or town you live in and see a model that is governedable where democracy is working, citizens are not cynical young people don't vote nationally say my town i believe in where minorities say at least the local town works for me. cities are a place where today hundreds of thousands of undocumented workers and illegal immigrants are found not just here but all over the world. in mexico there are illegal guatemalans. a mayor can't say they are undocumented, i will look the other way. they are here, families, kids, driving cars, in jobs, use the hospitals. what are we going to do. bill deblasio says how about urban identity cards? we will acknowledge them, give them the approved. and right of being a local residents and ask them the obligations and responsibilities registered with the police. let us know where you are. my own prediction is the idea

that the municipal id will be the road to citizenship for all those 12 million in the united states because mayors can't look the other way. they can't pretend. cities, not states, mayors, not presidents and most importantly what i love about cities, you all, the citizen of cities are the fabric of the city's. to empower, the real name of this book was and if mayors rule world but if the citizens of cities ruled of the world through and with their municipal officials. that is an optimistic positive solution which can not only provide a new form of global governance the rekindle the spirit of and trust in democratic institutions. thanks very much. [applause]

>> benjamin barber, thank you very much. a few questions for you and we will discuss all of this with the mayors. you talked about the theory but there is a practical application just ahead because mayors from around the world are about to meet. >> i will take a minute with this because i want to get to the discussion but you capture -- as a capstone for the book. since that time my was invited first to seoul, korea, and mayor bloomberg last year in new york's conlan and the four major mayors of the dutch gee 4 mayors in the netherlands in amsterdam invited me and a group of mayors to amsterdam to discuss and plan a possible parliament, we had that meeting a month ago among the cities represented not by their mayors that

representatives, and mayor walsh in los angeles, athens and singapore, 32 nations and at that meeting six weeks ago the decision was taken to launch the

more cooperation, her head half two lana decision that would depend on the parliament. i'm starting with the notion that would be bottom up to central in, not command-and-control. here is what the world is going to do and give the warders, because mayors don't individually or together give orders but if mayors together come up with a solution for local citizenship, local registration all over the world and every city in the world of cities come up with a solution to climate that involves congestion fees, pedestrian zones, limit on combinations that go beyond anything done, if cities come up with interest the protocol for intelligence

sharing and increasingly cities are recognizing in the face of terrorism going to the national government and the fbi is not what you do, you also got to deal city to city, intelligence services, the new york until squad is deployed in 10 or 15 cities around the world, they send their detectives to talk to the folks and be in touch with police in moscow, police in moscow knew about that they were dangerous. that information, i can't be certain but i am told that information was given to the fbi and a lot of other information, the boston police prior to the marathon did not have valuable in tell about those guys so even in areas like security and intelligence, city cooperation, a city sharing becomes powerful so is it command-and-control? no. but will it do a lot more than the united nations or world bank does? multilateral agreement between nations? yes it will. >> let me bring the mayors in.

this is heady stuff for could be heady stuff. what do you think? do you want your mayoral colleagues from around the world to be able to weigh in and solve, the most vexing problems, the most vexing global problems. want to start? >> thank you for being here today, thank you for that presentation. i came back from a trip to ireland when i was in galway and donegal over to dublin and the concerns of the same ones i am talking about here, growing the economy, creating affordable housing, stabilizing our city, worrying about attacks, terrorism, whatever it might be. we are talking about the same ease is. we talked about the marathon bombing, we are preparing for it, talked about ebola, what is happening and the steps we are

taking and i think there is an opportunity to share best practices. i was asked this morning about the steps new jersey is taking about setting up a quarantine for folks coming in from west africa and new jersey and i was willing to do that in boston, what i want to do is educate this medical facility, educate public health, education and fire department, aged kids the public to understand what the ebola crisis is all about. it is an opportunity for us to have -- to share best practicess. we meet regularly, the massachusetts mayor to talk about different issues and concerns, we had a meeting last week to talk about legislative priorities we want to see, that affects the people in this city, any time the mayor has an opportunity to talk and have a conversation a share best practices is very helpful to the

particular city or cities around world. >> when i think about it, what happened recently, governor patrick talking about the immigrant kids on the border, may bring them to massachusetts so my phone started ringing off the hook. this is not the governor, other people, and we already take -- we are have this obligation and the whispering campaign and really angry at the governor and it wasn't until mayor walsh is the case for us to take the kids. and we have these good people and i think about that power to get through the craziness, at the national level about budgets, that is crazy to us. our budgets don't balance. you can argue, you can't make a

nasty term, the debt ceiling or whenever the ball rolling feeling, that has nothing to do with budgeting, you can't do that so to clear the air by doing something i can easily help with the trust i have at my level to make a move here at the state level of the federal level i would welcome that. it does help us to get to work. >> i have to say i respect my colleagues here. i am the senior mayor on the panel. i have two thirds of mayors here and i am in my fourth term. i can tell you -- [applause] i would not have made four terms little on the single term if not for the help of my fellow mayors. i never met mayor doesn't have a vision. i came in because i wanted to

tackle inequality. one of my first meetings was right after i got sworn in. let's talk about how i am going to tackle inequality as part of my vision. i have got to tackle the $6.5 billion budget deficit, and i can tell you what you can do per the charter. you are the ones who have to articulate your vision for and derive that vision. a lot of cities are surrounded by suburbs are a lot wealthier, if we want to figure out what the best practices to tackle inequality, we have to reach out many miles, sometimes across oceans and get ideas from mayors all over the world. i am hosting the mayor of cleve, germany, the sister city, they are out wealthy countryside area

in germany near amsterdam and in central massachusetts, a small urban area, what are we talking about this week? figuring out how to bring advanced manufacturing, is part of our city's agenda and part of the country's agenda to figures that back and we are talking directly to each other. i am sure obama and angela merkel are talking about these things that they're not communicating to us. we can get on the plane, the phone, skype, we are exchanging real ideas and most recently cleave, germany, was able to bill the whole university regarding advanced manufacturing and figuring out how to utilize skills sets to bring those here. these things happen every day with mayors. >> i will ask for a one word answer from the three mayors. what is the most vexing problem? local problem you deal with? >> tackling the inequality issue.

>> inequality, education. it is one issue, mr. chairman. inequality, crime, education, they are tied together and you can't let ideology pull them apart and say they are minority people in the education is something over here and something for education, mayors note that because they deal -- kevin johnson at the u.s. conference of mayorss made this issue and he appointed mayor bill deblasio to have a task force look at this around the country and i think it is a problem in every urban area in the country whether it is pittsburgh, lawrence, boston or anywhere of around the country, goes back to what is in the book about what is the chair coming back and what is the addressing? i spent 17 years in the legislature, we have policy driven in the legislature but what happened is that disconnect

between legislatures and cities, that is the real agenda. and what the policy is and what her agenda is when she came into office and if we are not talking about the same agenda we are not giving cities and towns the tools they need to carry that agenda out there is a disconnected. in the city of boston, i did a few pieces of legislation i tried to get through this year and wasn't able to get it. not with you agree with the issue or not, i don't know if anyone is on it but we don't extend in a temporary peace in boston we are not giving that. i have a vision for boston, i am not saying it is on every street corner but it is a vision of the legislature -- i'm not blaming the legislature but we have to be on the same page. the legislature around the country including congress, they don't have a vision -- >> the language is important

too. what people feel in the neighborhood isn't any quality. they feel crime. they feel their kid is not getting education, they don't have a job. it is important to have this conversation in a real way. what i feel first and foremost is the issue of climate and tied to that we failed to chemistry to generations of high school kids and 11% unemployment. all that is tied together but what it manifests itself in is crime. it looks like homelessness and it looks like destitute and feels like the city is in a funk so when i talk about it and i talk about what i need to change, even if you have money in your pocket, you still feel unsafe. we are doing those things talking about it, some cities have a bigger opportunity, to

attack it, talking to it davis. i have the same exact outcome but thinking about that as a policy if i can fix crime i can impact crime, i get dressed and lever suffer round obesity or inequality. >> explained to us how you think the collective power of a world parliament of the mayor is standing behind you and fighting this local problem would help you do that so much so it would triple down to real benefit to the citizens who live in any particular neighborhood where there is some problem with broken windows and stolen cars? >> in massachusetts just over 10% of cities and towns actually have mayors so the majority of towns have city or town manager. there are major differences

between the two. cities and suburbs, how managers get paid a lot more than mayors is number one. number 2, when we sort of look at these different meetings of groups the we have a lot of the city and town managers, to deliver services and often it is people who can afford to live in those communities. when we look at poverty and crime in our municipalities, there are two choices we can have. try to mid nick suburbs, limited resources to try to push out crime or poverty, but we would be pushing that to areas that are not interested in solving those and are becoming more expensive so less people can be there. of cities and towns to not get together and solve or cause the crime, the root cause of poverty, no one else is going to do that so parliament needs to come together because the city and town cannot act alone. there are a lot of issues going

around that very national or global in nature. we have to come together if we're going to solve the root problems that affect all of humanity. if we are talking about moral issues. >> a couple things. what model we have in america, presidents clinton and obama had a vision, they get stuff done. i found just the opposite. i worked with bill clinton. he had a vision when he talked but if you look at what happened in the united states in those years, obama too, the fact is there is a lot of talk at the national level but at the local level of visions get implemented and it starts with what is like going to be for our neighbors but the second thing is you can't do it alone. we talked earlier, let's say bill deblasio bill haas two mayors and these places where we

give urban visas to every resident whether it is legal or illegal. >> in a very short time -- it is a problem. you really need all the major cities in america to say together we will do it. we will take some of these kids coming in from latin america. indy america's cities doing it together. you have to do these things in conjunction. the other point and this comes to your this, a lot of people -- what about suburbs? what about the areas beyond 128 where so much tech force and so forth is in this area? are you just talking about cities? i am not. you are so right. when we talk about cities we have to talk not about the old inner-city is of the 18th and 19th century, we have to think

about the metro regions which incorporate the city, the suburbs, and even the local agriculture. if you think that utopian, just a year ago today i sat in florence, italy, with the mayor of florence, italy and he said to me italy doesn't work anymore. we still organize our own provinces and they have nothing to do -- we have cities, a lot of them. i have a plan, i would like to see elite divided into metro regions and govern that way. he said i have to go, where are you going? i am going to rome? i am becoming prime minister tomorrow. he then went to rome, became prime minister, look it up on google. today italy has a constitutional illusion which in place of traditional problemss no longer represented in the italian senate there are nine metro

regions around genoa, rome, which encompass all of italy. they are now represented and forcing an affect the places, divisions of interest but forcing them to say that is how we have to deal with this. let me give a concrete example. whenever i say cities are great, what about detroit? you know that ploy. everyone has their favorites, mayors should rule the world, mayor for of toronto? is that what you are talking about? crack addict and so forth. i say yes, detour, but not the way was defined 200 years ago because that detroit which in 1950 had 2 million citizens, to they had 680,000 which had all the auto industry, today it has 5% of the auto industry half of whose schools are -- that the troy. did you know that 10 counties

around detroit that make up the detroit metro region, their population went from 3 to 5 million while before it was shrinking. they got three quarters of car companies that left downtown detroit and went to south carolina and mexico and regions are around it. that is the fourth most prosperous new knowledge economy region of the united states. if the joint, the detroit metro region, it would not be bankrupt, it would be one of the more successful cities in america with the problem area that would have resources to deal with it. so the metro region idea, finding ways to incorporate and think about cities in terms of the real population and the economy is they serve which go way beyond the -- lots of people who work in boston and love the boston museum take advantage of boston transportation but don't pay revenues here and are not really part of the city of boston. that has to be changed and again

you can't change it one at a time but in the global parliament of mayors you have the opportunity to say we need and urban revolution that refines cities as metropolitan regions and we can do it together. >> i am a new mayor. she got a lot of expressions from mayor salem as well. the information we talked about being the city center around all the suburbs and it makes sense. a lot of people who live in the suburbs work in our cities so when you look at the stats, the growth of employment and everyone excited about the growth of employment the reality is a lot of people don't actually work in a position created in the city so this approach is important, she taught me about make sure you have a supply chain around you so i said i am talking to regional mayors and managers and they were happy to have the

discussion. no one had talked about the regional transit authority. it worked on its own and even though there was economic development numbers we could pull, in turn helping lawrence, that could help and be in conversations so we started talking about it and going to the meetings and the city had representatives on the regional transportation authority and i pulled mine because it was an attorney anyway. by no intent, the funny thing about being mayor, everyone thinks this is all purposefully. i became the regional transit authority. that was the problem. it was by mistake. i didn't really -- i know nothing about buses. the manager in a suburb, they come to the meeting and get a bust for them, costs $5 when you park in the train station in

lawrence, it helps with the handover. >> just make sure you don't have chris christie working with you. >> this conversation, we have certainly taken an approach in boston, let me go back to the original question about the empowerment idea and halfwit will be accepted. there were two points, one spoke about the power in california of 17% of the auto industry changing the auto industry. the second point was the ratings of congress versus state legislators versus mayors. the fact is if the management gets together and has a conversation it will open the eyes of a lot of people to say they are the most popular people in the region's. what are they talking about and why aren't we part of that conversation and by having that idea, that changes the discussion.

when we talk about regionalization and transportation, governor patrick has put together a transportation plan, really the first time, i spent 17 years in that building. no one at a regional transportation plan. now there's more coordination in cities and towns. and other mass transit. those conversations have to happen and the fact that in boston real quickly, came from cambridge to boston and great victory for boston and a loss from cambridge. there was an announcement after i got elected they will go to somerville. at the end of the day the region didn't win. taxpayers didn't win. it creates opportunities together so that if one industry leaves let's create new industries so we can grow together rather -- coming from

boston, try to use our brainpower to grow new industries. >> in addition to creating opportunities, don't you need to flex your muscles little bit? i can't remember any time in the last 10 or 15 years when i have read a news story that said something to the effect that equity mayors of the ten largest cities in massachusetts or the 15 largest cities in massachusetts got together and want the state government to do x, or they want the national government to do why. you are not flexing your muscle now. >> it is because of politics. individual cities and towns of there, i see a change when it comes to mayors. i have been year two months. i see a change with the meetings we had. the meeting on friday where we

have a lot of mayors show up around the commonwealth we also have the metro mayor's conference in 13 cities, we are part of that. the education funding, the money has been coming in. the mayors have to step up but we have to stay together and understand if we go for this part to get their there might be something in your area you might not get because people will be frustrated. >> mayors have the key elections because we are able to build a machine to rise up and defend our vision. we need to do that among majors. imagine if i want to do education next year, or education and crime you're hearing a lot of noise in the state legislature. i became mayor in 2007. in 2008, 11 similar mayors in similar cities around

massachusetts came together and signed the first-ever compact called the gateway city compact. we look at different things, should we be called the forgotten city? that didn't sound good. the middle city? we decided on gateway cities because we as the gateway to innovation and immigrants. we decided to work together which meant we and our expertise staff like our economic develop and for housing people came together and debate it behind-the-scenes a common agenda. that is what the legislator does but proactively coming from us, we have worked on creating a strong mechanism and because of that we had changing economic development and policy and changes in public safety policy and trying to push for changes in education. we could have never done that unless we had been working for the 6 or 7 solid years as a compact and get a legislator to

adopt the term gateway cities as a term so they could provide funding and policies to help us. without the parliament, what is a bunch of mayors? everyone will call it something different. the parliament is the mechanics in which we come together. so i will tell you this. the n r a, a powerful organization, have you guys heard of mayors against illegal guns? started by mayors of boston in new york. when talking about bringing together funding and changing the national conversation against a very powerful organization whatever your beliefs are it is mayors against illegal guns and you will start hearing the conference as well because these organizations are getting more money, mayors are realizing and buying and growing in membership every year and becoming universally recognized by the press and the public. we don't have anything on a global scale and this is why i am excited about parliament.

>> i am a milken's surge with all things being mobile, that concerns me we get far afield and i spread my wings as well, and i feel like a good positive view, and came to one of the meetings and they have this bucket of money in the legislature so everybody tells them to talk to the governor about this and all of a sudden i didn't know that thing existed, there wasn't a headline but it was a headline in my town or city. >> it is going to be now. >> the mayors rattled and a little bit and you see that on education reform, not fully funding education formula fors. >> at the same time local mayors

in massachusetts can tackle climate change because parliament could. we are affected by that. >> i am thrilled about the gun thing, that is genius. there are no politics on my level. >> a great massachusetts guy said all politics is local. not any more. we live in an interdependent world, talking about transportation or immigration or any quality or jobs or climate or terrorism, talking about cross border global problems, mayors are the problem solvers that they have to understand it is an interdependent world and local politics won't do it. global politics of mayors will give an opportunity to take these issues on in ways that will make your job easier. nobody will go to global parliament. you come up at your citizens they spend the money to go to london or wherever you went, if you go home and it is apparent you are solving problems more

effectively by working with others that will be welcome but the world is interdependent and the notion of local politics just being local simply isn't true anymore. >> there was an article in the new yorker this summer about newark packing the schools and one of the guys said the rock star may hear booker, one of the guys did some research around the impact and said we found you could be a rock star, you could be a mayor, but you can't be both. the idea that i worry because like the gun issue, is important, we could leverage our gun buying power to shut down. >> no one is going to go to the polls and vote me out of office because they did that. >> 80% of carbon emissions come from cities. >> the mayor of visiting the was a rock star before he became --

>> one more question before we open up to the audience and if you would like to ask a question please come to the microphone in the center aisle. here is my question to the mayors and professor barber. how independent do cities need to be from their governing authorities from there in the u.s. and their states and national government and are we talking about professor barber, weaning city's office of state and national government dependence? >> i would like to win national government of of dependence on the cities because that is where they get their wealth, their tax revenue and try to maintain jurisdiction the city's need more jurisdictional authority, more autonomy, cities need more of their own resources in town to do the things they need to do and when they worked together

they can get that. message to cory booker, the mayor of the united states has ever in the history of the united states become president of the united states and i believe there's a reason for that and it is not the mayors are not affected. is presidents are not effective. mayors as problem solvers have a problem when they go up the ladder. >> quick answer to my question. you need a relationship. there are three branches of government you need a relationship. is important for that. the relationship is frayed. we need to focus the country back and be in this together. >> do you agree? >> i worry about the national identity thing. we have a national identity. i don't know how we could ever -- novel mccall their mayors of their congressman, your congressman -- being effective, that is true. >> you have to work together. obama and appointed an ebola czar. we are the ebola czar.

we need to have that autonomy but also get the resources. >> we only have time for a couple quick questions. i am sorry i took up so much time. go-ahead. >> i heard the word climate come up several times and i really appreciate dr. barber, your inspiration on this. i disagree with this lightly because i believe mayors in boston can help solve climate crisis issues. the mitigation work, i will ask you to think outside the box and did three things, convene a massachusetts major conference on climate change specifically, in light out of the box thinkers to work on it from 5-year-olds to 95-year-olds across the board. i will ask you to work on wicked cheap solar up on everything from buildings to public transportation and i am going to

ask you to entertain the idea of having massachusetts be the first the cities in massachusetts, follow our friends in north hampton to be the first cities to divest from fossil fuel companies and this could be amazing leadership. >> let me jump on the question of getting the mayors together, that is one of the agenda items but the state could together some policies and acting on them and a lot of cities and towns have the ability of boston, boston, chief of environments, reducing the cabin emissions, and all the important issues, the state has a plant at one point and not where it needs to be. and the cities and their own. there is an opportunity, one

mayor can make a difference. when it comes to the climate one mayor can start it but we need to have a bye in of all of them. statewide, it is an open door opportunity, they are like-minded in many ways, they don't care democrat or republicans, doesn't matter. >> i work on these issues. i also know what i do in pittsburgh, the next mayor made change, the administration, i like the idea of what the mayor is talking about. >> we don't have time for that. i will take one more question if it is quick. >> the question for everybody, i am interested in hearing mayor walsh's answer because i go to

the high school you graduated from. >> right down the street. >> so if the cities of florence and pittsburgh and boston had unlimited coffers and assuming revenue was the only problem, one policy to help american schools become competitive on the global scale that you could all agree on? >> early childhood literacy. >> i would agree to is that. >> technology. if we had the money, these are important, we also have to have the technology. a couple weeks ago, in my mother's school, a small rural village on the company's side, there are 30 kids in the school every kid in school had an ipad. i went to the school down the road, seven schools, all the kids had ipads, we are sharing

technology, we have to provide our young people the best opportunity for success. we need your re-education no question but we have to provide the best technology for the innovation coming up. we need young people to be prepared to go out into the world. this isn't about the boston economy or the united states economy but a worldwide economy and young people have to be prepared for that. >> on that note we say thank you to all our panelists for their time today. [applause] >> boston mayor martin walsh, daniel riviera, lisa wong and the author of if mayors ruled the world, dr. benjamin barber. thank you all for being here today, thank you for attending. ♪

>> coverage from the sixth annual boston book festival continues. ..

>> and vikram as a fiction writer who stumbled into nonfiction. sitting right next to him i have howard gardner who is a professor of cognition and education at the harvard graduate school of education and the author of "the app generation." and then i have judith donath, who is the founder of the social miss machine group. i'm going to invite the audience to participate as soon as i can. and we will begin by sure presentations at each of the authors and after that i will ask if you rest in. so we are going to begin with

judith, please. >> hello. what i wanted to do will start by telling you some beautiful organisms that look like something you might see in the crib in ca. but they are actually visualizations and the artist based them upon different features of spam, how long it is, the words that are used, to determine the colors and how they grow. and in the online world where everything you see is virtual synthesized between ute and goodness, to be rather arbitrary. and i like watching people and i like to go to people and watchfire cafés. we extrapolate from what we see and a close that they wear, and

the way they walk, an online it can be even more exciting. and they are talking and arguing and playing games. they're offering sympathy and support to each other. and it has been an unprecedented social space an unprecedented more so than the social space. so you can't just go up and start speaking to them the weight you can online. and it's also the inverse of the physical world where every time you look at a person there's nobody and there's nothing to observe. and there are things that are so plentiful face-to-face. in 1991 i spent a summer living in japan. and i really enjoyed it.

i was fascinated and also very lonely. i was in i.t. at the time and what i would do and i would run the true command, which would show you a list of who was online. and mostly because of the time distance they were sleeping. so at the end of the day i would get to see the start of their day and everyone getting around. and what i really wanted to was to say how can i make that into a real window where i can actually be what people were doing online. when i came back, i decided to make that window and then we have this community and the first problem that i realized was the social space and the spam that was so arbitrary. just to say where is everybody

and people have to be somewhere. if i put them all in alphabetical order, it's kind of like a memorial and not the effect that i wanted and who is online now, who is active, and this would be at one of the afternoons in which it was lively. it's sort of a beginning, it's nothing like looking at people's faces, but it is the beginning for how we could make this as we do something much more visual and sensory. when i was with my students we did all kinds of different experiments with this. and this is a portrait of and it

shows over time what are the things that they talk about. and it can be beautiful, this happens to be a record with my ex-husband. it started off beautiful, but one of the things that was interesting when we gave this to people to try and to use as it shows the words and what were the words used with the greatest frequency. and we thought people would use it as a narrative. and so people would put them up on their post and we thought, okay, it didn't seem very private and we get a sense of the and so much of our lives online, you don't have that

equivalent of that and it's a way of creating that snapshot. so this is another example and this is a piece that was visualized on twitter. today they are getting news and gossip and jokes and often it is hard to get a sense of this year and the idea was to say for each person one side shows the words that they typically use overtime in the other side are the words that they are using right now. so in a way this is another take on that window. i can imagine wanting to come into an office where we have this sort of snapshot and have this sort of window that i could look into of the world of people that i care about and i want to

know what they're talking about. so this is how to make this world more visual and interesting and to start feeling like you could actually start doing this online. and one of the things that we came to realize about the online world is that it wasn't necessarily the people happily chatting in cafés, there was a tremendous amount of what goes on online that is arguing, harassment, some of it started in the early days. and the first one i remember seeing where it was a very nice place for people that love cats. until another one decided to invade it. they would come in and pretend

to be cat lovers and we would be greatly horrified on this conversational space because it's kind of like how somewhat it may have been speaking in baby talk. and so some of these examples here, there's a constant stream of stories and some are a little bit funny and some are horrible. and some who follow upon families who lost a child and there is a really huge problem of bad behavior online.

so in a world like this it's very easy to come and and behave really badly. so the real challenge is finding those to make interfaces that also help people to behave in a prosocial way. some of these make sense, is this someone who has been a part of this conversation or is it someone who comes in at the last minute as part of a group was trying to discredit someone else's writing. and this is a piece that was done by a former student of mine who is a professor now and this is a representation of face-to-face conversation showing how long everyone has talked and who is interrupting whom. part of this was to get people to be able to develop more of this around how to behave.

and it could be a very vicious argument but not actually trying to show what is bad. and so people have to learn this on their own. so as we go on a lot of the customs that we have, do we call out this behavior and what is the way we can design a world where we can both see what is most interesting about people and have this sense of amazing community and help to shape the community for the kind of space that we wanted to be. i'm going to end on a different note and also my colleague said that 1.0 was made to help physicists with web 2.0, which

is made to help people share pictures of cute cats. but the reason that that is important is that while i am a designer, things like this technologies that help us, things like you cats are also the type knowledge he that share support and help us develop for social activism and also people who are activists on the negative side. so part of it is what is it about the technologies that we use that helps them make this more social and cooperative. >> thank you, judith. >> thank you and good afternoon, everybody. we have the habit in our society

we have the greatest generation and the boomers and the mullen kneels. this happens to be the first generation since we began to do this which things of itself technologically, the internet, with the web, they spoke, when you talk to kids how they describe themselves, katie davis is the author of this and we became interested in whether young people are significantly different from their predecessors. and so when we began to think in terms of technology, there are people that see technology that are rather utopian and i gather that there was some dystopian discussions and we are social

scientists and we decided upon less and collect data more. so we carried out with teachers who have been teaching kids for at least 20 years and we have focus groups from religious leaders to camps psychoanalysts, over 20 years time and we have done surveys of young people and we have examined 500 works of art and we have tried to put it all together is social sciences do as we come up with a convincing description and there's one thing i was surprised by in the interviews and that's how many people told us that young people today are risk-averse and this is something that we did not expect, i'm not going if it's due to the digital media, that

we don't know, but it's interesting that came up over and over again from people that watch kids for a long time. and they say having kids always been risk-averse and i grew up in the 60s no one accuses us of being risk-averse. and so i came to summarize this in the title and as you know what apps bar. but it could be worth stepping back to talk about how we think about things. there are quick and efficient ways to get things done including what to do when you get there and so on. one thing that could be less evident is twitter and amazon and all you have to do is see the symbols and you know who is sponsoring it. that turned out to be important. and so saying this in

relationship is that it's good that it enables you to do things so that you become dependent upon them but i think each will talk about it in their own way. we are creating these old charts and will talk about what most kids do most of the time, to take this out and activated in one way or the other. and so in the book we examine three kids, each because their sense of identity, the capacity for this and their imagination, in each case he found encouraging things and some discouraging things. in the case of identity kids can explore all kinds of identity and all kinds of avatars and play all kinds of roles and that was pretty much true when social

media came in and to put pressures on kids to brand themselves perhaps before they should look perfect, to feel that other people look more perfect than they do. once you brand yourself come you can't change without looking authentic. so that is a less positive aspect of being a member of this generation. and so when it comes to intimacy, kids are more connected than they ever have been before, they have hundreds or even thousands of friends. and a lot of those relationships are transactional and we wonder to what extent you can have a more transformational connection as we get to know ourselves and other people much better. the kids are much more tolerant

and this is something that we found out in lots of ways, not to say that there isn't a lien taking place, but this is by far the most generous generation in terms of recognizing and dealing with people who don't have the same sexual orientation and so on. the results were the most interesting when it came to orientation. sometimes i ask if you think the imagination has become greater or less and whatever people say, i figure you are wrong. [laughter] and in fact it depends upon the media. we looked at hundreds of works of art from kids in 1990 and 2010, sort of a pre-digital revolution very much in the middle of it. and in general the graphic works

were much more interesting and the design was more interesting in the use of media was more interesting when it came to literature, the stories were matter-of-fact and third person, one thing right after the other, less fantasy in flashback and so on. we don't know the reason but the fact that the imaginations is to matter depending on what the medium is and it is a nice surprise. we talked about this enablement versus dependency. and to give you a feeling this is an application called google buddy which helps you draw. and you can choose the implement, the color and so on and if you do it in an apt enabling way, and i can't even

understand how it works, but it's kind of cute and shiny and it enables the child may be to do something that he or she couldn't do before. and it can also make you very dependent because what you can do is choose exactly what color and shape and form you want and simply pick the background, you pick this and you have the sun and the butterflies and so forth and so on. and it made may look nice, but it has a lot more to do with you. and so that includes many examples of what one could give for the dependence versus enablement. so the tip as parents and teachers and mentors, towards being more enabled unless dependent, what can you do to

move towards enablement? as adults we can model this and you can imagine transcendence and you can teach this so kids can make it or revise them. and that includes the people that design apps can promote enablement or promote dependency. so talk about the more dystopian side and i want to magnify this in this quotation that is very frequently given as some of you may know. and it's civilization with a number of operations that one can perform without thinking about them. we hear about this it sounds really good.

i realize i didn't want someone else deciding which operation is important and which ones aren't. and so all the decisions are made for you and we coined the term super apps. you have to go to the right preschool, elementary school, take the right test, go to the right college and summer internships, maybe you can do teach to america for your and that is what we call where we download all the decisions. and so what is an example of this. i use the steve jobs because he probably -- he probably has more to do with our digital world more than anything else and he was certainly right and yet he never let any kind of technology

tell him what to do. he was a translator and i think you good role model for all of us. on terms of just personal relations but his ability to transcend the current technology. thank you. [applause] >> okay, so i'm a fiction writer and i write novels and short stories. a few years ago i hit a low in my fiction writing. and i didn't quite know what might characters were going to do next. so i wrote about the culture of this programming. and i did little bit of programming for small to medium-sized businesses and i didn't have any form of training, i just picked it up as

many people do. so i found a good way would be to enter this would be the computer programmers talk a lot about beauty. and this might not be immediately apparent to civilians in the industry. and so the reason is you don't really write code for the machines but all the other programmers in the years following who will come to your code to understand that they can debug it so they can fix and add features to it. so talking about a fairly long timeline. there is processing the transactions and were talking 20 or 30 years. so within a community of programmers there is a great space on clarity and famously in

the early '80s, there was the literacy programming and what he argued is that we start to think of ourselves as writing for other programs and programmers. and so it sort of has a narrative sense about what it is trying to do. and so this can get enormously large. there was a distribution of the open-source system which comprised a lot of code. understanding something that large, the architecture itself needs to be intent.

and so without all that you end up with what is technically known as a big ball of mud. that is a code word that nobody really understands how it works because it has hundreds of programmers working on it and it transcends human understanding in this might sound incredible and it makes frequent errors in pink personnel, there are a lot of affectations would they pay someone wrong. it comprises 7 million lines of code that were written in 1967, i think that it is lots of documentation for it long ago. and nobody really understands how it works and this keeps on rolling out. so this sort of focus on beauty has led to a situation in which a lot of programmers are playing

things like this with a successful venture capitalist and programmer. and that includes hackers and artists are part of this and if you go to the website which is a blog system that someone might use on the bottom of which the page they say in light lettering the code. so that is a very unequivocal statement that somehow this language amounts to doing this in the nature of literature. so i always found this provocative and interesting and that is where i started to get into it. and as i was thinking about what constitutes it, it occurs to me that i had this in my own

backyard. it's a language in which the syntax tightly constrained by system of rules. and so the man wrote about this and that means eight chapters. but it's not a grammar and the in the traditional sense to you and i might understand it. and so what i learned english from showed me this and expected me to memorize those as models. and that is very short, it's about 300 words long, and any current programmer would recognize as is the order rules

and the way that works is when you want it to work, you take a workgroup and you pop it into the grammar and it sets off certain rules and each one change is that a certain fashion. and then at the other end you end up with cognition. and so the grammar itself has an interesting trigger in the west. and so it is essentially a complex algorithm that operates and produces words and sentences. what it did is stabilize it.

and so there has been trends in the sense that in the second millennium people started using a lot of words because it became very fashionable. so if you put them in a time machine back to dozen 2000 years, maybe we could make sense of it. and we know how much language can change and this gets discovered in the 18th century and they bring it to the west, first in germany and elsewhere in the gets translated and understood and then has an incredibly powerful effect on the shape of modern linguistics. and so this was in fact part of

this. and [inaudible] i know a programmer and friend has talked a lot about this and in 1967 programmers in the 40s and 50s start chugging away from this to try to create artificial form of languages to tell them what to do and they look at linguistics. so they are transforming these ideas and this is the form that they had used as the means of defining and generating and so

that means that there are will weird links and the way that it lives in today. and we have a huge body of poetry that gets developed and it's called literature. and so there was a lot of this because it came from linguistics that are created and what makes poetry beautiful and what is it about it that makes it beautiful. and other people process and thought that style was more important. and so there's something about

the economy of the language that makes it beautiful. and those things contributed to what makes something beautiful as to what it doesn't say. and so let us just review one little thing that someone uses as an example. and there is a speaker as a woman who is saying to him that the little dog has been killed and is wondering the village. and what this says is that this is beautiful because and what

they are really trying to do is keep this away from the river where she meets her lover. so that is what is makes it interesting and beautiful. and that is an invitation. and so we are very fond about this and we have a strange mixture of this and we have to make it work. >> thank you and my favorite is

when line 2238, when they switch into this and they say you are not expected to understand this. in other words it is so difficult and even others couldn't get out. so does it matter is and there is a deal and so the

misunderstanding or the lack of misunderstanding can happen on federal levels area and the moment that this ambiguity happens, the context makes it happen. and so we are operating within a certain operating system and 40 years down the line, and there has been some fairly horrible incidents in which people have been killed.

including not understanding what the and the stock market goes down and nobody has any idea why because there are all these algorithms with these companies and they are doing things that we can't understand. >> when you think of the movements with intentional programming, which is the idea that you can make computer programming sufficiently better that we could communicate these devices. >> we have been going since 1950. any moment now there's going to be a language that the ordinary person can use and i think at

least i don't see it happening within my lifetime. concisely because it's really interesting that even the semantics keep it going. with what the language actually means is forever drenched in ambiguity. so i guess you can look at this on a lot of systems and then handed over to people. and it could be very difficult. >> used untrained use some negatively resonant words are fun. we talked about vicious arguments, harassment come out much of this focused on the nature of identity and deception. how real are the identities and how seriously should we take what they claim that they want

and who they claim to be. and so giving a brief description of what it is, tell us how seriously should make those claims in the community. >> it is a fairly confusing online argument at this time. and first of all there's a lot of treatment going on in the gaming community and there's others we find people that are really trying to undermine the game but they have taken this to the level of a death threat and it's a very good situation. getting back to this particular

piece, it's easy to create imaginative identities. because one of the things of that in this world, first of all there's a lot of physicals. and there's only so much you can do before this happens. an online there are very few things when someone decides that they are going after it poorly. one of the things that they can do, you can say we can ban this person from the conversation and it's very easy to take in your name and come back in your name. and it can be very slippery. the part of the issue is how much is it going to spill over into the physical world.

and it's a concealed carry state they are and they said we can't tell people that they can have guns and so we have to let the guns and an at least it wasn't just an online identity but a physical world. >> until a big piece is to say that identities online are really a history. if you don't insist on having this history, you could have a history and have some sense of how this person has behaved in the past and that's how you start creating a social structure. >> a few months ago they created some simple things like twitter and facebook could do to make

identities more accountable and persistent. so it happens online and then created to harass mainly women in this case. and we have been fairly resistant to creating more robust networks. why the networks are resistant to better design and what you think that might look like? >> i think that the design is one that if you look on twitter, there's a lot of great phrases, there's astroturf thing and there's grassroots things and it's very simple to create any

of your account, you just need an e-mail address. as a lot of it is they want to make it easy for people to come and and make it easy for them to have certain identities and on the other hand they don't make it easy enough for the viewers to get a sense of the history of the person or of what they have said who follows them. and so it's hard to become part of the network and to have people that are interested in this. so we can talk about this and the history of how that community is, you still have the ability to say to people that have a long-term reputation. not necessarily building rules,

but giving people the opportunity to say who can i trust? >> how did your own research, which you are most famous for, the concept of how the intelligence might be nonoverlapping. and does the generation encourage particular intelligence? do certain people do better in this generation than others? that's a good question and i don't have an answer to that. so i'm not going to filibuster, but i will say in general that digital media is very firmly to the ideas.

and so there so many ways to present this in the digital media is very active. they can use it and so on and may be the mit robotics can develop more intelligence. to the extent that this is very lockstep, i'm wondering if i could comment more about us. but i have to opposite reactions to the discussion and i think i found a way to reconcile it. my usual reaction was that the whole part of works of art was due to multiple interchurch interpretation and you can't translate them. and then i went to the definition of beauty and this is

memorable. and so we have to talk about why this decision is more important than others. so works of art should be accessible for people without having to have a technical language. it's actually a good example and most people hated it. >> it was something that they could do and we just couldn't see the beauty in it. >> there are various kinds of

beauty and this is where artists and hackers become just about the same thing with what they would have called this within the art or craft of making something work. also it is the revelation of the truth it becomes beautiful and gives pleasure. so you can create this in a functional sense by looking at it. and you are exactly right you

have probably seen it and looking at bats just innumerable meanings of this. and i've come to the conclusion that it's not the same thing. but certainly among the programmers is interesting to me >> it is probably antithetical to people who ask for programs to avoid a considerable and it has become transactional. and finally we would worry about elegance later. which is why some websites blow up because you have this because

nobody has ever fixed anything. >> we have time for questions from the audience. >> acceptable questions are much more polite and interesting. >> okay. >> my question is about the user interface and the devices evolved from the computer screens not just smart phones but also and google glass and apple and how do you expect this to change as we go into smaller devices and have different interfaces.

>> when you're dealing with this pacific task, it's not completely gray, the significance is what is going to go on with these devices and the fact that they never leave you and you can have smaller and smaller things, but they are always with you. so we become much more connecting you to the network, it tells everybody else where you are and so for the types of uses that you have what it stops being so much of a device that you use for a piece of information but it becomes things that turn us all into humans for we are always connected to a network with some element of software and where information is always at your tips. it's a transformative use and

this includes how it changes in the social world. it's hard for us to remember when there something you wanted to know what you didn't know it. and you have to go around and asked people where something was. and it was a social experience and right now the world is everywhere where you go and you have humanity's knowledge and you never have to ask another human being that question again. and so i think it's the transformation more than the design that is the key. >> another question, please and

skills and technologies are substituting for the kind of thinking and physical action and may be social action that we used to do. that and he then introduced this effect, basically saying that iqs have been rising steadily and that this is evidence that technology is not dissipating our mental skills and it has been wrong demonstrated and i think there is a good explanation that those are the iq tests the need to be

successful in schools. my reaction to this question reminds me of an experience which had a deep effect on me and i talk about it in the book. and i find it very important. for five years ago i was talking with a man that said doctor gartner, i don't know why anyone would need to go to school anymore when the answer to all questions are in this little device and i said yes, the answer to all questions except the important ones. and i was just angry serious but i'm not sure that he understands what i meant.

and that is where you can't always have the ability to look it up. and this is kind of tag off as well, looking at the social aspect, sort of going from this more technology dependent. so for whoever wants to answer it is are we becoming more technologically dependent society from the social round.

>> i was thinking what would also be an interface question and what's interesting is that it's not that we are using this instrument but that it is also shaping us. and that includes what we call competing aesthetics that there is a data structure of an algorithm and essentially in all of these controls they have been to the top so that when you switch from one to the other you can actually handle this as well. so in some sense that is now embedded inside of it, because that is how you can use the interaction with the world and perhaps with yourself. so living there, i think there is an increasing sense of

ourselves so that all of these if you take a walk across by people they there, it's all about maximizing for activity. what app can use, can you hack this as you can actually sleep less and work more. this notion that we have collections for statistics is becoming not just interfacing the components of the machine itself. >> this is where we are consuming this solvent. it looks about the color of origin taste disgusting. but that is a good idea because it maximizes our efficient the. and they certainly could do less of shopping eating and socializing.

>> when i talk about the transcendent one of the things i'm talking about is putting technology aside and especially digital technology and i think it's important for everyone to be able to do that. i was shocked to realize that many have gotten lost. and i can tell you that you get lost and found again. and so what you do is understand the people are completely helpless because they are dependent upon technology. including whatever the contemporary digital formats. so i think the teaching and good parenting is to have a limited amount of time and i would've said the same thing about this 500 years ago.

>> this includes the knowledge of things, it was all going to hack and the world was going to end. >> hello, my name is ray daniel and my question is about we look at this and the mostly people that can be physically disconnected and yet socially immersed at the same time. so i'm wondering if you see this is something we have created is a trend and if you have any thoughts as to whether this is a good or bad thing. >> what about the identity altogether? and that includes those that create a space where young people could be wrong. and yet at the same time it

removes accountability and responsibility. >> it has been called the cesspool of the internet were a lot of behavior comes from and it's also where a lot of imaginative ideas come from. and so i think that the ability to socialize and have a full identity without ever leaving your basement is fairly new and we haven't had the ability to connect to thousands and millions of other people without being present. so there's elements of it that are certainly quite novel and you can argue and they had written about this, this literature, the protagonist and

it was this work. .. i think it is easy for you to imagine what is wrong with living that way and what i would like to highlight is the good side. there's a tremendous amount of precedent. when you meet someone now the first thing you know is they raised the gender, their age, everything you know about them. one of the promises of the online world is it is safe, all you know about a person is what

that have to say and what they are thinking. there's a lot of balance to it. it has some very bad sides but it also has the promise of a type of world that we couldn't have without that separation. >> mites in the front is signaling time i am afraid. warm hand for my panelists here. [applause] >> there will be a book signing but i don't know where because i thought we were going to be in the boston public library. where will the books be signed? outside their. they will take your questions and the charming and informative out there. thank you. ♪

>> up next hour final program from the 2014 boston book festival. daniel dennett and stanislas dehaene look at the brain and human consciousness. >> bonjour. isis he some people -- is not going to be in fringe. good afternoon. it is my pleasure it to be present at the boston book

festival. the intellectual feast every october. i am officially happy to note the expanded collaboration between the french consulate in boston, the french control center and boston book festival, in partnership we have four remarkable french authors. one is an author and historian. a chemist who brought a revolution to our approach to cooking pan stanislas dehaene, world-renowned cognitive neuroscience and psychologist. there were a series of passionate discussions on their works over the course of this morning and this afternoon's event of friend of mine on

cognitive thinking with daniel dennett and stanislas dehaene, and debra baker -- deborah becker who authored a series on the brain agreed to moderate this discussion for us. to briefly introduce daniel dennett he started with mathematics and cognitive science, sure noon to neuroscience and experimental psychology. leaving the laboratory in france's national institute for health and medical research, he is a professor at one of france's most prestigious institutions, the college of france. the difference in how the brain goes the thought, more than two

decades of work on perception, the human perception of consciousness and the mind and ability to understand its own existence. using scientific tools his team of researchers have tried to turn an age-old philosophical conundrum into an experimental question. the book has already received books from book list and praise from the washington post and scientific american mind. we would like to introduce the director debbie quarter ended coordinators' and volunteers for all their art work organizing the this sensational event and finally i would say that we look forward to using our brain to consciously explore the many options this weekend at the boston book festival. so thank you to our speakers and your attention and thank you

very much. [applause] >> can everyone here me ok, welcome, so good to see so many of you today at that tale end of the book festival. we have got big topic, questions people have been asking for hundreds of years, researchers have been trying to figure out. what is human consciousness, how we measure it, how do we know we are thinking about thinking, all kinds of interesting questions and we have two of the world's leading researchers to talk about it. macaulay's a agree with each other. this is not going to be a debate. they are going to each present their book for 15 minutes and after that we will chat a little bit and opened up for questions from you so i am going to start

by having stanislas dehaene give you a presentation about his book. it is fascinating. it is about consciousness and measuring consciousness. has come up with the latest ways neuroscience can measure human consciousness and he is going to tell you about that first. >> thank you very much. thank you for being here on a beautiful saturday afternoon. thanks to the consulate and a boston book festival. the topic is a huge one, is science legitimate to the problem of consciousness or is this a bridge too far? is consciousness beyond the reach of science? when you are among narrow scientists my fellow colleagues often say consciousness is the holy grail, something you do after retirement may be but not when you are my age and they

have objections to there being a science of consciousness. the question of neuroscience is limited to objective events, subjective experience should escape, scientific investigation. we don't have intuition, not just due to philosophers, it is not just allegiance system's legal systems that make us feel something very different. it is very basic in tuition we all have, our mind is special, it flies away as was in the last cave 18,000 years ago when a person is dreaming the minds slides away which has been painted so many times and represented in so many cultures. the mind is special and it is hard to see how it can be part of the body.

we blame society to some extent, because i am french of the like to defend descartes. i submit descartes was one of the pioneers of the science of the brain and mind into few read descartes as i did you will see that he was trying to explain a lot about the brain, respiration, waking, sleeping, reception of light, retention of memory and stellar movements, following these from the disposition of its audience. as naturally as the movements of a clock from the disposition of a counterweight. so descartes' tried to explain wakefulness and sleet in terms of the machine, but he couldn't see how this machine could do flexible speech production,

flexible behavior, the type of things that we will seek, to the higher levels of consciousness but i think we are now beginning to address these issues. what is new since descartes? for one thing one of the key ingredients to the science of consciousness that i'm trying to expose in this book consciousness and the brain is the notion of experimental paradigms. we are able to play with consciousness in the lab and, as this cannot all be used to make pictures disappear from your consciousness after they appear so consciousness can be on and off and we can measure the consequences of the brain. i would like to try little demonstration for you. i hope this will work. i am switching to the one we are using. even last week and it will come

in a second. you will see what you have to link up, here it comes and i will flash a digit very briefly. then there will be a delay and there will be a matter is and this is the exact disposition we use in the lab so if there's a long delay within the digit and the letters i hope you concede the digit very quickly, very clearly, it is brief but it is here. i hope you can all see it. how we make the delay shorter and shorter, at some point it will be so short the phenomena of masking will appear in the hope it is the case now of the i swear to you i didn't cheat. did it is still present. is appearing in peoria retina, what is called the subliminal image. don't assume the, you are being subjected to subliminal images. that is how we can play with it.

sometimes the digital appear in your consciousness, some of these aig decided that most of you don't. just a second. just need to go back to this. here we go. here are the two other ingredients we use, one is focusing on very simple things, we call conscious access, the ability to proceed on an image, we're constantly bombarded by images of around us, plenty of stimuli the only one of the matter given moment gets into our consciousness. this is the simple meaning of consciousness. we may start with something simple and later on built up to a bigger problem of self consciousness. that was the essentially the bigger deal. let's start with perception of

consciousness. the third most important ingredient is quantifying perception. i can actual wheat -- you can see the digital nazi it, if you see it you can click the pattern, if you don't you can click the lot of fat and so the very same stimuli is a function of subjective experience which is something rather new for experimental psychology, the ideas that subjective perception counts not because it gives us access to the mind, you cannot talk about how your mind works, you can introspect about your experience and this is the defining feature of experience we correlate with brain activity so we thought about subjective experience. with all these ingredients all we have to do and it is a big one, we can measure brain activity and you all know it has been a revolution in neuroscience, we can measure brain activity thanks to functional magnetic resonance imaging, we can measure it

through electroencephalograms, when we think, we cannot show you the electrodes in some patients, the electrodes are in the brain for clinical purposes, we can use these recordings to ask about consciousness and finally we can use these recordings in my little nephew on the left to ask whether he is conscious or not and a big clinical problem, can he use the recording to ask whether patients were recovering from a coma. that is very much what we are doing in the lab, correlating conscious or unconscious reports with brain activity. the first thing we found, in one slide, love of data, away to show it but unconscious processing is expansive. the digit you didn't see not

only governed your retina but your visual cortex, it got deep into your cortex. was process of way to me now. it was in responses for a few seconds even though you didn't see it. subliminal processing is extremely extensive. in this light we show the responses to the amygdala, a structure deep in the brain which is responsive to fear and if they flash you a word that as the content of fear, the amygdala will activate quickly subconsciously even if you are not aware there was any at all. there was a lot of subliminal processing in the blame, 95%, we don't know, but a lot. the flip side is something special happens in those conscious times. again, summarizing, in my lab and many other labs in the world, what we found is the

conscious trials are singled out by cognition. something that comes relatively late, 1-third of the second after the picture was on screen. if it is conscious, the brain will switch to global state of brain activity where the same information is being represented in multiple regions of the cortex and if it is a picture or phone or word there is the signature of consciousness in this global edition. you see the area of single neurons, we see that in the higher levels of the cortex they will switch on specifically when there is conscious experience and not when the subject says i couldn't see the picture or the digit. in the book i am reviewing the data and also trying to connect with an explanation for these

signatures of consciousness that we see in the lab now. the explanation takes the form of a framework and workspace i thought of this and i tried to figure the flavor of the idea. the idea is broadcasting of information. there is a lot of unconscious processing in the brain, there are many specialized systems for processing faces, words, fear, and specialized systems. the claim is that consciousness is a second system which has evolve to share this information. the modules don't speak so much to each other. it is a special system that has evolved to share the information and the claim is simple. what we subject the experience of consciousness is the global variability of information, i am delighted to speak -- a huge influence of this work. he will tell us about this in a

moment. this is the sort of merrill substrate, some piece of information makes it into a system of neurons that concerti information in the brain. and this is the reportability. there is surely an evolved network of neurons. and special neurons with long distance connections crisscrossing the prospect. is not a localized system but a distributed system where many others speak to each other. such a system evolves and it is present in the brain of all primates and in humans is a special evolution rather neurons are larger, to the propagation

of information. they have a giant dendrites below them to see messages and they spread and defused the message. thanks to the system we can ask what does it bring? what computation does it bring? what is consciousness good for? this is a tough question in science, we pressure them to this day but there are times when they claim consciousness is worth nothing, a different phenomena and like the whistle on the steam machine. is not doing anything. i don't think so. i think it is an evolve the system that has a different function. it cannot be on line. to control their fine gestures. to contact the information into a few symbols you can remember

for a long time and for this information across a series of stages, so we have evidence from the lab that if you are asked to do a series of steps, the sort of mental calculation that requires many steps then you cannot do this unconsciously. you have to be conscious of the information. there are limits to unconscious processing. when you need to hold onto the information and cut the information from multiple systems you require consciousness. in particular when you monitor your own behavior, you look back at what you did in the past, it detects your own error, these tasks have patterns that you click the wrong button. you know that you were wrong and

tried to stop it. you handed the clicking and when you do this you move the total system which generates hugely negative potential on the top of the head. very easy to measure and it is called technically the air hole related negativity that nontechnical people call the oh shit effect which is what it is. you try to capture behavior you know what is wrong. secondary system and we have shown in the lab that it requires consciousness. if you are not conscious of the digit you don't know you made an error. this is the sort of thing consciousness is good for. i would like to close, i would like to close by saying in the lab we are very concerned by the tactical implications in understanding consciousness and i would like to understand when consciousness starts and when it is lost in patients with

legions. we begin to be able to fly this knowledge to infants, we can recall -- we can look at whether the signatures we found in human adults are already present, we find to some extent they are already present and the recognition stage when we flash of face to babies like we flashed the digit earlier but babies prefer faces to digits, we flash a face and do we see the same processing? we have these very late ignition responses in babies which suggest that when the face was long enough they could see it. different from what we have in human adults. one property that is different is the slowness of that. it is three times lower in babies compared to a human adult

which i find very interesting, presumably babies have consciousness but require more time to become conscious of a specific property of the external world. it speaks well of our experience of babies to be genetically slow but conscious reaction to the external world. much more difficult question to end with is consciousness in the clinic. the literal life-and-death matter. can we decide whether some patients still have consciousness. it is difficult clinically from interaction, discussing with the patient to decide whether he is conscious or not but thanks to brain imaging you can go inside and do you see this signature in brain activity itself for a person being conscious and the classical work, he was able to show one patient seemed

vegetative, clinically non conscious, and asked for instance visiting the apartment, was able for 30 seconds to avoid the state of brain activity which corresponded to the exact same pattern of what normal person doing mental imagery of the same kind so the suggestion was consciousness and similar patients using this as a code. you ask them up question was your father named joseph, if you want to say yes imagine playing tennis and by reading the brain activity, and imagining they were able to see the patient, the answer was correct and this particular patient, and understand language and generate

an intention, i should press that there are a few patients of this kind, absolutely crucial to understand, it is a practical consequence, this is the latest fresh from the lab but it is in the book. we are able to use e e.g. to derive measures of consciousness by measuring the amount of long distance communication in the brain. and in a vegetative state and non conscious from those in terminally conscious of the subject. the growing science monitoring the clinic in a successful manner.

and different questions, i look forward to hearing them, philosophical aspect of this growing science of consciousness. [applause] >> now i think we will hear more about the philosophical end of things from daniel dennett. >> i have to say something about stanislas dehaene's book. when i published a book about consciousness 24 years ago, i have a theory that is very sketchy and over the years watching from the side lines, which parts of it held up, and stan has gone way beyond the sketch that i had and collaborated things that are very congenial to me and i think it is the best book unconsciousness i read in the

last 20 years, it is full of detail, clearly, only ridden with very well thought out explanations and every point in it. just the material on every page is bringing me up to date which is what i wanted to do so i could return to the consciousness for a more or less up-to-date so i am delighted to be here with stan and nicely for me. my book is called in tuition, and tools for thinking, a former student of mine, you can't do much carpentry, and not much thinking with your bare brain. that is the motto of my work these days. i am looking at the tools for

thinking that we all add to our basic born with equipment, native bare brains we are born with and the role that that place in enhancing our capacity to understand and the book is a collection of tools. and showing how they evolve and sits in the brain. here is a chicken and egg puzzle. the tools evolve that make us smarter or did we evolve to become smart enough to make tools? like most evolutionary chicken and egg puzzles the answer is yes. it goes both ways. in fact stan was just talking about the neural anatomical differences between us and our

closest relatives, chimpanzees. we had these into collecting neurons which are quite special. what drove their evolution in our brains? i would say what drove that was the advent of human culture and language, which gave the brain a flood of new opportunities and new problems so i see a coevolution between cultural evolution and genetic evolution explaining the tremendous difference between our minds and the minds of any other animal. yes, i am pushing the human exceptionalism button and i am pushing it deliberately and i am not saying that we are outside the realm of science. i am going to give a sketch of a scientific accounts of how our

minds are exceptional and why. some of you know about the flynn effect. iq has gone up dramatically in the last century. why? flynn thinks it has to do with human culture and i think he is right. the thing is words are tools and once you have got words and know how to use them you have increased your competence in many ways. there are lots of kinds of tools, what are they made of? they are not made of wood and steel, they are informational systems, structures, habits, routines whether it is long division or alphabetizing the lift, there are many, each of you are equipped with literally hundreds and hundreds of culturally born thinking tools that enhance your capacity to

think and i will add a few to them, to your kit today and what i call intuition pumps are rather elaborate pools, thought experiments that extend your imagination but also many in tuition pumps which cloud your imagination and i am very critical of those but i want to give you a few good examples. i will start with the simple tool called the surely alarm. i watch you in the future every time you see the word surely in a text i want a little bill to ring. that little bell alerts you to the fact that the author misused the word surely and this is very often, not always, very often the weakest point in the argument. why? the author is telling you something that you are supposed to accept but it doesn't go

without saying. if it did, he wouldn't have said it. it has got to be said but the author doesn't want to bother arguing for it so he nudges and says surely. that is a very good place to drive a wedge. it doesn't always work but if you just get in the habit of having that little bell rings when you hear the word surely you will discover a lot of weaknesses in a lot of arguments not just in philosophy or science but politics. we should have a little practice with the surely alarm. suppose you have a cup of coffee and you are going to put milk in it and you want to keep the coffee warm as long as possible so surely you should wait and put the milk in as late as possible, right? i didn't hear any being. surely you should -- all right.

when it comes to the middle east, if the choice is between stability of government or democracy, surely democracy, thank you. what have i just done? i have just downloaded an apps to your nicktop. i get letters from people saying how do i turn the sure the alarm off? the point is no, you leave it there with a host of others. it is the useful friend. it will get in the way rarely but you'd be surprised how often it works. here is one of my favorite slides. on the left we see a termite castle conlan australian termite castle. on the right goudy's great church in barcelona. very similar structures, both

inside and out. very similar, they are both artifacts made by living organisms. they are profoundly different when you think of the research and development, the design and construction, the one on the left was designed by termites. one on the right by goudy. i got a little ahead of myself. can we go back to the previous slide? thank you. the termites are clueless. there is no boss termite, no architect termite, there is the queen termites but she is not in charge. these are thousands, hundreds of thousands of clueless little operators doing their thing and don't even know what they are doing or why. got the on the other hand is that paradigmatic, charismatic

boss, he has blueprints and manifestoes and he has it all worked out in advance. it is a very different sort of top-down design and construction compared with the termite colony. we understand very well angel -- king -- nature's way of doing termite type building. how do you get from termite pipe design and construction to goudy tight design and construction? that is a tall order particularly because your brain is more like a termite colony than you might at first think. you have billions of neurons, each clueless. they don't know baroque from rococo. they don't know barcelona from cleveland, and yet you put enough of them together and you

get a dowdy mind full of comprehension and understanding and vision, seeing ahead, planning ahead, the trick is to see how can you organize all those neurons to make the goudy type mind? that is one of the reasons people say this is just beyond science to discover. i beg to differ. i think we are making great progress on it and the answer is it is in the organization of all those neurons. stan and his colleagues in paris have i guess hundreds of experiments which shed light on how the architecture of the human mind is organized in the human brain but we have a long way to go and i would submit stan and his colleagues are working on the bear brain. i have hardly touched on the

full infested brain although they rely on it all the time because when you ask a subject to perform a test or what to do you are depending on the fact that both you and the subjects have language and can comprehend. basically when stan sets up the subject to press the button if you see this and press this button if you say that, creating a little apps in the brain which is going to give him evidence about what is going on inside. now here is the question. how did a gaudy light comprehension rise out of this organization of clueless bits? the answer is culture which relies on cultural evolution which is not genetic evolution but a separate evolutionary process. i want to illustrate the remarkable feature of what i

call competence without comprehension. you have all seen the documentarys of the gazelles running away from the cheetahs or lions and throwing these ridiculous high leaps, and people wonder what is this for? is very energetic, they are wasting time, it is not helping them get away from the printer. what are they doing? it is pretty well worked out. it is costly signaling. the gazelle is saying, look at me, i control these ridiculous expenses, athletic leaps, you still can't catch me. my cousin can't do this and the lions believe him. so there is the evidence that animals are seldom predated. the ones that strong enough, fast enough to do that expensive

activity, they get predated. i have given you the rationale of this. it is the signaling system, a communications system between two different species but here is the important point, they don't have to understand that. they can be as clueless as a termite. they don't know why they're spotting. pages have the urge to stop on the lie and if they can if the lion attacks and the lion doesn't have to understand why it isn't attracted, it just doesn't seem very attractive as a prey item. go out to the ones that are spotting. neither the sender nor the receiver has to understand the message for the message to get through. that is a stunning weird facts but it is an important factor because the same thing is true

in our brains. your optic nerve doesn't have to understand what is out there in the world that is sending information to the visual cortex. the different parts of your brain and different collections of neurons can be quite termite like. and still carry information. in the case of spotting, what shapes this behavior, what designs this behavior is genetic evolution. over the centuries, over the millennia, this communicative behavior has evolve and stabilize and by the rationale that i mentioned. the same thing has to happen in the brain, and intracranial evolution.

there aren't. they are quite clueless but there are evolutionary system this, cause i evolutionary systems in the brain which can shape coalitions of neurons to communicate, discriminate, evaluate, and generate decisions and none of the individuals have to understand at all and yet comprehension is the result. thinking tools, we are the only species that has thinking tools and the beautiful thing about them is in effect they evolve to elsewhere. none of you had to invent long division, art or language or of arithmetic or alphabetizing lists or calculus or any of the other tools you may have in your kit. there is no other species that can share knowledge like that please you didn't get it from

your grandfather or your great grandfather or your great-grandmother. you got it from people you never met because it is transmitted by the culture. analogies are very good thinking tools. how my doing for time? i will tell you about them. there is a big argument in consciousness work about whether conscious states have some intrinsic property which the fis science by the end of time and i have the analogy with the following amusing scenario. a lot of american tourists go to europe, they want to buy something in euros, how much is that in real money? meaning dollars. they say in the fact i don't know how you folks get by with

euros. they don't have any intrinsic value. dollars have intrinsic value, you can just feel that. i know what a dollar is worth. it is intrinsic. and yes indeed, you can translate euro value in to dollar value but europes have no actual intrinsic economic value. only dollars have that. we can all see that that is a mistake, right? i think many philosophers and not just philosophers, some neurosciences make this a mistake about consciousness. they say you're giving us all these functional features of the events in the brain, but where is the intrinsic quality of the conscious -- they are making the same mistake which is just more clouded, you might say, harder to see.

the idea -- that a property is intrinsic. do i have time for one more quick thought experiment? i don't think i do so i will stop there. >> thank you. [applause] >> maybe you can bring it up when we are standing. i want to mention we will open up for questions and there are microphones in the room if you want to ask a question and afterward they will be signing copies of their books and you can talk with them after word in gordon chapel. what i am wondering if you can both briefly address this is what do you think your research and your measurements say about the notion of the cumin skull in consciousness? stanislas dehaene. >> that is very interesting. i am a member of the academy

organizing a meeting about the mind and soul and i could find scientists for the first two. >> is the notion of those sold -- >> organizing a meeting which was the brain and the human person which was very interesting because that is what we can deal with, the various aspects of the cumin person, the feeling, the subject to the, the pain, the social aspects. we had a nice session on the social brain which is an issue that is advancing quite a bit so all these aspects are being taken apart basically. i don't think this leaves a lot of room for the soul. >> i was asked this question some years ago by a very good italian science journalist and philosopher. the next day in korea in iman

was an article about it and the headline was wonderful. it has become a talisman for me, it said -- yes, we have a soul but it is made of lots of tiny robots. that is what i said. there is a structure in the human mind which distinguishes it from other animal minds in that grounds the competences and attitudes and inclinations that make us moral people and make us worthy of love and capable of being held responsible. that is the role that the soul has been given. that role is filled. it is just not filled with a different kind of thing. it is filled with apps that you download to your neck top.

>> when you are measuring consciousness and someone has a very different perception, if you will, than most of us do. if i look at that sign behind essentially it's as boston book festival of have interviewed people who have significant differences in thinking and they might think it says the cia is looking for them. how do you measure different types of consciousness or thinking if you will, what does research tell us about mental health issues? >> it is a difficult question. there are differences within high level brain organization, your mentioning a hallucination, it is very true they are being

discovered in patients including interestingly this high level of consciousness so we did several experiments to show the results showed unconscious processing was very preserved, they have no level of unconscious processing but the process of conscious access was very different, and capacity of assumptions. just a fact that there are more facts of this kind suggesting there are pathologies, and the level of integration of the workspace. what we do is as a society is another matter. reason is the traditional answer. hope that the science we have, and cannot presume what they

will be. i see there may be new drugs and especially new brain computer interfaces that may add to our circuit to be able to present these anomalies. >> i think it is a question of which citizens are competent, and the freedom of motion to be allowed to be in the state. we learned a lot about those competences and pathologies of competence which we morley have to take into consideration, and some people are able to govern themselves in the way we wanted to govern themselves, so we could permit them freedom of movement and freedom of choice in other ways. we have to do something with

those, there are risks to others and themselves. a matter of the state of the art of what we can do, and 9 invasive technologies which can make a significant difference. we can identify shortcomings, problem areas in people and in affect create eyeglasses for the mind to some regard. and raise them to the level for the standards for citizenship. of lot of people, more about neuroscience, and no one will be held responsible because you understand how everybody's green works and there won't be any room for responsibility, very

misguided idea. what will prevent that is if you like political and held responsible, and get all the benefits of being in free society and as long as we keep benefits for freedom high we don't have to worry about creeping explication as i call it, it is not going to happen. people will be held responsible and would be willing to do what it takes to maintain the integrity and autonomy, and that integrity. >> you and i share in genuine -- they are not going to go away, and free will is just property of the network, and the state

had mattered and filtered according to a darwinian principles that you described. it is okay to describe the machine as living very well, just what we think usually but something non determined that is determined by the machine, and on the brain. do you agree with that? >> the structure of the machine, you brought up goudy. what about the structure of the machine that makes his machine create the way it does and others not create that way, and to make someone more artistic and be able to create -- >> i very much doubt there is a routine way of generating supercreativity in the near

future, that there is some fairly interesting theoretical reasons why really groundbreaking creativity is always going to be a few steps ahead of anybody's methods, not going to be any algorithm for creativity. although many things that used to be creative can be routine, that is something we have learned. pioneers are still going to have to be rare individuals who, one way or the other, and it may of course be because they have been subjected to horrendous experiences in their life. we don't want to foster that, but then again, the people who

have been through those trials are often very creative. >> what do you think about that? >> i don't think we have a science of supercreativity but we begin to have a science of how the brain changes with education and i wanted to react to you were saying, going beyond the brain, how for instance education to reading is changing the brain in a way that expands and makes it more flexible, make better use of the resources, the idea there is, of redundancy in the bear brain if i might take an expression and by education to diversify what it is doing with another half of the brain to do completion, just doing object and cellular conversion we are doing something else with it, something slightly different and in this way we have more flexibility in the available

routines. i see mathematics very much in this way. mathematically trained person has a lot more options to look at the world, to generate pictures of the data he or she gets. and we begin to have a science of thought. we can see bitterly the difference between an embittered brian gay leverett bring, between a mathematically trained person or not. the topic of my previous book actually. reading and the brain is very much about that. >> what about the role of emotion and what we know about the motion and, affects consciousness? you had mentioned one word is flashed, it may create fear like the word rape and what happens to various areas of the brain, how you measure it, how does the motion affects consciousness? many of us can remember something that was dramatic or fearful and they may forget that happens your we had a cloudy memory of the details of exactly what happened because it seems

as if the mind almost compensate for that and let us not remember or not be conscious of some of the details. what do we know about what is going on in terms of consciousness and how we can tell what is going on? >> let me jump in because i will change your question a little bit. the big difference between a human brain and the animal brain and any of the computers we built so far is in the human brain, all control is ultimately by emotion. it is by the modulation and competition and negotiation between different affective states and merrill modulator floods. there is no boss in there, no top that is prioritizing. what does the prioritizing, what

lets you concentrates on one thing or distracts you, what thrills you or depresses you, this is what determines what you think about next, not any other sort of master program so it means the motion, the idea of the emotionalist computer brain is bad science fiction. >> what about the idea of a conscious computer? >> yes, but it is going to have to be one where the control structure is different from the control structure of the computers today. >> this a minute. >> i want to agree about the conscious computer. the emotion, no longer treated in terms of science as a simple system. it has been discovered that every single emotion is an evolve system, a specific computation so emotion is computation.

each of these modulations systems are there to add precise value to the learning attention and additional error processing. and contrary to what sigmund freud said, the art of processing external stimuli such as the enhancing of consciousness, we found these emotional words break into consciousness with a lower fashion. they don't need as much exposure in order to become visible because they are helped by the emotions systems. >> open it up for questions. question? >> question, fascinating topic, i was intrigued by the example you gave of a patient who was asked to answer a question, to think of playing tennis, if the answer was yes or no. they very intrigued by that. my question is are we saying

science, we are at a stage where we can read people's thoughts and minds? did i understand that correctly? the second part of the question, how far we if we are able to do that to go the other way where we put thoughts in people's minds like the matrix? something like that? >> these are wonderful questions. we believe there is an identity where every thought and pattern of the brain we should be able to go both ways. it begins to work. fascinating new experiments decoding mental states, we were able to decode which number people i think king of by just looking at the pattern of activity in one specific brain area which makes sense in the parietal cortex. other people can decode by waking the person what she was

dreaming about. you can use the pattern of brain activity just before she was awakened to guess better than chance when she was dreaming about. it is the state of the science. should we be worried about this? it is about chance, the scientific demonstration can do better than shan's. not that you can read every thought and this is not all the case at the moment. furthermore the system requires the help of the person who is being scanned, she must lay still, participate, try to amplify the signals. it will be extremely easy to turn it to nothing if the person was not willing to collaborate. i don't think we have to worry about the negative uses of a possibility but it is real and in theory every thought is a state of the brain. >> i wonder whether you would