Original subtitles

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I would argue to all of you that

we are in a new turning point of history

for our nation and the world.

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For the first time in all human history

we have the opportunity to bring people together

across the planet in common cause for common good.

We live in an age of interdependence.

But that can be good or bad.

It simply means that we cannot escape each other.

Last year I read a book that described the way

the world works in ways better than I can.

The title of this book is "Nonzero,"

the author is Robert Wright, and if you haven't read it

I urge you to get it, and read it.

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If you look at the progression of human history there's

an experiment involving how broadly can people collaborate,

to what extent can different kinds of people

separated by great distance get together and solve problems,

pursue common interests without succumbing

to the darker side of human nature

that might lead the planet to dissolve into chaos.

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Gosh, you know, you look at all of human history

and you have, you know, a good like, 40,000 years

of just talking face-to-face interaction, and then you get

the first writing, and then, just a few thousand years later,

in the grand scheme of things just a few thousand years,

right, you get the printing press, and then 500 years

you get electronic communication and then, you know,

now it just-- gosh, every day there's probably

five or six new applications that are of some significance.

At least once a year or maybe once every other year

we get a big one, you know, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube,

and it changes the way everybody's connecting.

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You've gotta tell us before we look at this video

what is an internet, would you mind just, you know,

sharing that with us for the-- for the four or five people

that don't know what an internet is would you tell us?

Uh, I don't believe we have the time to go into that.

Okay, so, uh, this internet thing gets its start

from an experiment that was done in 1969

to design something called the Advanced Research Projects

Agency Network.

The internet is defined in different ways

by different people.

For me, as an engineer,

it starts out being a set of standards for communication,

that if you observe those standards,

if you implement those standards, then all kinds

of devices and networks can be made to interwork.

So the internet was literally that, a system for connecting

between networks, uh, supporting inter-net transportation

of information.

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It is now possible, in theory, to communicate

with every human being on the planet.

One way of thinking about the 21st century world

is exactly a world that is ever more connected

through the internet.

But then if you're disconnected, you are more

isolated than ever before.

Thank you, very much, very happy to be here

and present a $100 laptop that we have invented at MIT

and worked jointly with a nonprofit

whose job will be to make these and distribute them

to developing countries around the world

on the basis of one laptop per child,

and...thank you.

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One Laptop Per Child is about eliminating poverty

by providing primary education to the poorest

and most remote kids in the world.

And the way we achieve it is by giving them

connected laptops, each one that they own, they take home,

they use for school, they use it for play,

they use it for everything in their life seamlessly.

It's a window to the rest of the world.

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We're at a cusp in history that has to do with

how you learn.

For the past 200 years we've assumed

that the way you learn is you go to school,

and that somebody teaches you, and it's the first time

that learning can happen without teaching.

That, sort of, cusp happened because of computing,

because of the internet, because of interactivity,

because of a lot of things.

And so you add that to the fact that the world right now

is in a situation where as many 300, 400 million children

around the world aren't getting any education,

they don't go to school, and so you have to leverage

the children, you can't just train more teachers

and build schools, you've got to go back,

and say to yourself, well, can the children be part of this

versus just the objects of teaching.

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The idea is quite simple, let a child learn mathematics

by speaking in mathematics about things

that really matter to him.

So at MIT we've given computers the power to turn motors,

to make sounds, to draw pictures,

and we've found ways of giving children

the power to control the computer.

So that the child can make the computer do anything

that he can describe in a suitable

mathematical language by typing on a keyboard like this.

The initial ideas came in the late 1960s

and early '70s when a man named Seymour Papert

made a very simple observation and that was that children

learn differently when they write computer programs

because the act of writing a computer program

is the closest you can come to thinking about thinking.

What produces involvement, engagement,

what grabs the individual?

Education has very little to do with explanation,

it has to do with engagement, with falling in love

with the material.

Seymour Papert was a student of Piaget's back

in the late '50s, early '60s, and he got a--

this idea in his head that computation's

a thing to think with.

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The simplest way I know of to talk about learning

is you learn through doing.

So if you want more learning, you want more doing.

It's really that simple.

What Seymour brought to this was this idea of the children

constructing knowledge, not just receiving knowledge,

having the computer be a wonderful vehicle,

or catalyst, or haven for that kind of construction.

And, uh, then for the next 40 years, uh, at MIT

we were exploring the space and doing pilots.

With One Laptop Per Child, we said, you know what, enough,

we can do pilot, after pilot, after pilot

but now it's time to actually get these ideas into the world.

So One Laptop Per Child is all about how do you take

40 years worth of research around technology and learning

and bring it to scale.

The telecommunications was ready, the computers were ready,

the internet existed quite widely spread,

and the time was right in the beginning of 2005

to build a laptop that was child centric, affordable,

connected, and something that could be read in the sun,

and was very robust, and that is the evolution.

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Well, there've been a couple of waves in human history

of globalization.

This is probably the third or fourth wave of globalization,

and every time, uh, it occurred, people thought

the world was becoming one.

I think this time it may actually be happening.

Uh, the ease of international travel,

the ease of international communications,

and the ease of international commerce,

uh, are much, much greater than they were

20 years ago, 30 years ago.

And so we begin now to think, really, as a global society,

which we didn't before.

♪

Almost everyone comes to the conclusion

that whatever their time is is a critical time

in human history, so I'm not sure that I would buy

an absolute argument.

But I think it's fair to say that we're at a tipping point

in terms of people's access to computer-based information,

to computer-mediated communication.

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With about a quarter of the world's population

online in one form or another, there is something fairly major

happening in, uh, our information society,

if you like.

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There are an estimated 1.8 billion people online.

There are about 740 million in Asia,

250 million in North America, 450 million in Europe,

and the numbers get smaller in other parts of the world.

The interesting thing is that as we get

more and more of the population up on the internet,

the avenues for interaction will become much richer,

and here I am not capable of predicting

what the outcome will be when six billion people

are online, sharing their knowledge with each other,

so I don't see this as being a particularly distinct point

in human history, but I do see this as an evolution,

an unfolding of our ways of communicating

with each other.

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I think this is a critical time in the history of humanity

because for the first time people are

going to be coming together from every corner of the world

and be able to engage in direct conversation with each other.

I think it's really exciting to think about having

amazing new cultural influences and ideas flowing

all around the world from different cultures.

In the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years,

the rest of the world is gonna come online.

The next billion people, the next two billion people

are going to come online, and for the first time

we're going to be hearing directly from people

we have not heard from before.

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If we project any sort of democratic world,

we have to assume that education and learning

to think differently, and that means learning

to learn how to think is going to be an essential contribution,

maybe the essential contribution to that.

The more people are capable of rational, critical thinking,

the better the world will be.

The more they have access to knowledge

about the rest of the world, the better the world will be.

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It's always too tempting to say we're at a critical time,

because then the numbers of critical times

start to accumulate, and you think

you're always at a critical time.

But we're certainly at a point when, I think, a lot of people

think that something has gone amiss.

We're at a fundamental change in the way we communicate,

and it's time to step back and take stock and see

where things have gone right, and where things

maybe haven't gone right.

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Just because we grew up with the internet,

we think that the internet is all grown up.

Which is not true.

The internet is in very early days,

but we've had it long enough to be able to say, you know,

What about the way we now communicate

with each other seems to be enhancing,

and what about the way we now communicate

with each other seems to be taking things away from us

that are nourishing?

Sunshine, our temperature 44 degrees, relative humidity

at 82 percent, wind out of the west-southwest

at five to ten.

Again, it's 44 degrees, high of 52 later today.

Here's what you need to know about the bridges and tunnels.

15 minutes on the inbound Holland tunnel,

about five to ten on the--

The 2nd Avenue subway project is not hazardous to your health,

that's according to an air-quality study.

Using a cell phone while driving in any form

should be banned.

That was the unanimous recommendation today

of the National Transportation Safety Board.

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Every place on the planet is associated

with a latitude and longitude, which also means that, like,

every person has a latitude and longitude assigned to them

at a given moment, every experience,

or every story, or every little, you know,

nugget of information discovered about a place

has a latitude and longitude.

People generally use Foursquare to check into places,

and they're parks and restaurants

and libraries and museums and bars, and when people

check into places, we use that to, you know,

broadcast your location, "Hey, I'm here.

You know, if anyone's around, come and find me."

And then from there, it allows people to, you know,

to figure out like, well, what's next.

Is there something interesting nearby that I should know about?

It's like, let's build things that leverage

all the interesting stuff that's going on with social media,

to help people, you know, put the screens away,

and go out and actually and discover things

that they haven't discovered before.

What's really the heart of how the internet

is going to change everything in the future,

is how things in the real world change because people

are connected, and so, Meetup is a simple idea,

which is, how do people self-organize a local gathering

about anything, anywhere?

♪

I think the most powerful and interesting form

of how community is going to take shape

in the coming years is how people

who have a common interest, common passion, common need,

they have a common diagnosis, whatever it is,

that, now that they can connect and they can connect locally,

more easily, you're gonna have communities emerge,

and there's no such thing, I think, as a real--real,

sustainable community unless people are seeing each other

face to face.

♪

A community, it's interesting.

I try not to let my students

use the word community in class, because it's such

an evocative and descriptive word that it actually allows

people who mean two very different things,

to pretend that they're talking about the same thing.

So, a community, if you look and you know,

find some dictionary definition,

there's about a dozen different definitions

of community, all the way down to, kind of,

Grover's Corners-style little town, U.S.A., where everybody

knows everybody, all the way up to

the community of French speakers.

Very different.

The breakdown of traditional community

happened in the past.

It is indeed the case that a machine with a screen

was partly responsible for eroding community,

but it wasn't a machine with a keyboard, right,

the rise of television, coupled with suburbanization,

and a bunch of other factors, correlates really strongly

with the decay in social capital.

One of the things, I think it falls to our generation to do,

is to figure out how to get that back

in a modern context.

We plainly never go back to white-picket fences

and small-town life, but we have things like Meetup,

we have things like Foursquare, whose existence is predicated

on using these tools to coordinate

real-world meetings, not to replace them.

We know we're missing something in this community.

If we can use these tools to get some of that back,

we will.

I think what we normally think of

as community is more like the feeling of community,

a feeling of being connected, and that's really what we need

in today's world, because we're far beyond the time in which

you could sort of say, "This is a community."

And you could have defined boundaries to it,

and all the people in this location

are a community.

We live in a network society which has fuzzier boundaries,

if you can even talk about boundaries,

so what we need is a feeling of community that would allow us

to feel a sense of connection to people around us.

That community connection has to extend beyond

just connecting you to people like you.

There's really no room for growth of empathy

when you only connect with people like you.

Empathy grows when you connect with somebody totally different

from you, and experience a sense of shared vulnerability

and love for that person.

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Well, there they are, our new electronic media,

or, our new gadgets.

You push a button, the world's yours.

You know how they talk about the world getting smaller?

Well, it's thanks to these that it is.

Everywhere is now our own neighborhood.

But not only is the world getting smaller,

becoming more available and more familiar,

to our minds and to our emotions,

the world is now a global village.

A global village.

With me now is Marshall McLuhan.

These new media powers have made our world

into a single unit.

The world is now like a continually sounding

tribal groan, where everybody gets the message, all the time.

A princess gets married in England,

and boom, boom, boom, go the drums,

we all hear about it.

Why Marshall, do you use the word "tribal"?

Well, I think you'll find everything we observe tonight

about the media, points in the direction

of tribal man and away from individual man.

Involuntarily, we're getting rid of individualism.

We're in the process of making a tribe.

We are no longer so concerned with self-definition,

with finding our own individual way.

We're more concerned with what the group knows,

of feeling as it does, of acting with it,

not apart from it.

The history of civilization in seven words is:

And what the internet does is it allows

many, many more people to pool many more

kinds of resources in a wild variety

of new ways.

Because we can get dynamic information

about the resources you've got access to,

and the resources I've got access to,

we can actually share them better

than we used to be able to.

The techies got there first, as so often happens, right.

Linus Torvalds pops up in 1991, says he wants

to build an operating system.

Linus was the first person to realize he could use

the entire world as his talent pool,

and that, the opportunity to, in an instant,

reach into that and get hold of the collective imagination,

the collective wisdom, the collective knowledge,

that kind of weaving together of things, is moving

from, you know, we can build an encyclopedia,

we can build an operating system,

right, the famous, the famously virtual examples,

it's moving into the real world.

♪

The interweaving of mobile phones

and the internet, the fact that they're no longer

separate networks, but they're really now,

genuinely tied together means that we have,

for the first time in human history,

the majority of adults on the planet

are part of a single, connected grid.

There's a generation of people who simply think,

"We can accomplish things our elders didn't,

because we have tools and networks and agreements

among ourselves to act and behave in a different way."

Because of things like Facebook and Twitter,

and even the software that came before them,

there's millions of people, hundreds of millions of people,

that are trained to use this type of software now.

So, all the stars kind of align,

and allow you to do things that we just--

we've never been able to do before.

♪

A large part of what is emerging out of the Arab Spring,

is a new generation who has grown up

with the technology and the possibilities

that the technology creates in a world

that is radically different from their parents'.

What is clear is that what's really driving

these revolutions is not technology,

what's driving these revolutions is the desire of millions

of people for change.

What's facilitating it is the ease of the technology

and the speed of the technology.

What a Facebook page does is, at one glance, you realize,

"Oh, my god, there's 70,000 people, or,

700,000 people who feel the same way I do.

So, maybe together, we can do something."

That's again, why it is a turning point

in human history.

This generation starts from connections,

starts from the assumption that you are

inextricably connected to others,

and that changes the way we think

about what is possible.

♪

The ability of the human race to innovate,

to surprise each other with things that are both

unexpected and practical, things that can change the world

for the better, is going to be increased,

because we can get more ideas from more people,

crossing more wires in more ways.

We've got bigger problems, but we've also got

a bigger network of potential solvers

of those problems, and I'm hopeful

that we can use that network to get those people

tuned into each other, and thinking

on all of our behalves.

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Yeah.

Okay, Bari.

Okay.

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If this were 1845, you would be making a movie

about the telegraph, and you would be so excited

about this.

First of all, the signals on the telegraph go as fast

as the speed of light in a wire.

Now, do you know how much faster that is

than a horse running, or a train going?

You'd be saying, "Whoa, we won't have wars anymore,

because people can communicate instantaneously

with each other."

Now, we all know that, subsequently, there were

major World Wars that have happened,

and all kinds of other, terrible things,

despite the fact that we have increasing amounts

of communication and connectivity.

So, there is no guarantee, that just because

you can communicate, that you will agree,

and the consequence of that is sometimes tension,

disagreement, and conflict.

Technology does not solve all problems.

In fact, it creates some, the internet is now an avenue

for harm as well as good.

Disappointing as that is, it's also a manifestation

of human nature.

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♪ It's a lonely, it's a lonely, it's a lonely ♪

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Connectedness does risk erasing difference,

in that the very exchange of ideas and flow of cultures

can...overwhelm cultural differences

that have taken millennia to develop and again,

that are the diversity that makes the world

so interesting.

There's a trend toward homogeneity in societies.

And as you go around the world,

cities are beginning to look like each other.

You're finding the same stores and the same restaurants

and the same products.

And people are doing more of the same kinds of things.

Wherever you go in the world,

the world is becoming more similar.

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It's not very popular to question why

we're holding onto these things,

but we have to question it.

Because sometimes, you do that in a very paternalistic way

where you say, "Well, that culture

is something we shouldn't disturb, because their identity

is so strong and the fact that

they're poor, and they're not learning,

and they don't have medicine, it's better to leave it alone."

The world is changing.

The numbers of languages are reducing,

and there will be a time where we will be one race

speaking one language.

Maybe that'll take 1,000 years,

maybe it'll take 5,000 years,

maybe it'll take 500 years.

I don't know what it's gonna take.

But that's where we're headed.

♪

The story of human history has been the extinction

of indigenous traditions.

The capacity to preserve the elements of the tradition

is richer than it's been.

There's no need for any language

that exists now to recede from human memory

ever again.

We can capture them digitally.

But, there is the fact that time and again

when indigenous people have been faced with...

the modern world, they find parts of it attractive.

The story of humanity is the story

of cultural traditions disappearing

by human choice,

by people abandoning those traditions.

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I no longer can speak for One Laptop per Child,

I can only speak for myself.

Our goal was to give every child

an opportunity to learn.

And we had a means to that goal,

which was a connected laptop that every child

would have running great software for learning.

So, we built a laptop, and we started getting

it out into the world.

We're not there yet.

It's gonna take time, and it's gonna take time

for the teachers to become comfortable with this,

and it's gonna take time for the curricular goals

to evolve so that they make room for this,

and even though there are deficiencies,

the vector's pointed in the right direction.

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What is a friend?

What is a friend?

What is a friend?

Where do you come up with these questions?

What is a friend?

Well...

you know, a friend is--

Used to be somebody you knew really well.

A friend on Facebook or a friend in reality?

It is funny that I feel like

I have made friends virtually with people

I've never met.

Well, a friend is, first of all, very rare.

What we used to call a friend

is now what we would call a really good friend,

somebody you actually kind of know.

Aristotle was the first, I'm an academic,

so, I'm required to take really simple questions

and answer them on absurdly grandiose historical canvas,

but Aristotle, he's one of the only

philosophers ever to take on the concept of friendship

as a salient human characteristic.

And in his telling, someone that you had

such a deep association with that you shared their life

and they shared yours without other gain,

without also being in business together,

without also being romantically attached.

It goes from that to a friend is someone

who I click the button on Facebook that says,

"Will you friend this person?"

In that process, the word "friend"

has become damaged because it now stretches

to cover really all kinds of connection.

♪

Does the number of casual friends, right,

on the long tail of sort of Facebook connectivity,

does that actually reduce the number

and depth of our closest friends?

I remember growing up with a multi-party

telephone line and no television.

I'm not nostalgic, necessarily, for any of that,

and the reason is that I feel that I am

far more connected with a larger group of people

now than I ever could've been in the past.

Hello.

Hello.

The tools that are available to me

to maintain friendships, to maintain family relationships

are infinitely more varied and richer

than anything I had available in the pre-internet age.

Hello, Isaac.

That's Michael.

Oh, he could see?

Yeah, that's what he sees when he looks at his screen.

Hi, Michael.

I don't pine for the past at all.

I'm very happy to watch this internet

evolve and become an even better tool for me

to stay connected with the rest of the population.

You know, sometimes when I kinda think

I have my iPhone with me, then realize I don't,

you know, and I need to check my e-mail,

I wanna check my e-mail, the moment when I realize

I don't have it, there's like a thing

in my gut, like, this feeling of loss, you know?

You're like emotionally attached to the device itself.

♪

I think it's gonna get a lot worse.

I think you're gonna see mainstream uses of people

just on their phones all the time.

And the things that they're disappearing to

aren't things that make their real world experience

any better, they're distractions.

As these technologies pile up,

there's a way in which you can see a future

in which things are even more radically different.

I think there's a certain way in which these connections

are becoming easier to make, and it'll be even easier

in the future.

As these connections become more automatic,

then, you know, what happens to our sense

of real connection?

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Currently, 68 percent of the world's population

cannot get online.

That's about five billion people.

In 2011, a special repertoire

for the Human Rights Council of the United Nations

released a report.

In it, he detailed that access to the internet

is a vital part of any society,

and every state should make it a priority

to ensure all their people are connected

to the internet.

My vision and my dream is to ensure every person

has access to the internet as a basic human right.

♪

Many people think that the internet is the bits,

wires and protocols that make it work.

It's your wireless router in your living room.

It's your cell phone in your pocket.

But that's not what the internet is to me.

The internet is this digital civilization

that lives on top of our brick and mortar civilization

that we live in.

♪

For the first time, it is theoretically possible

to communicate with every human being on Earth

and to allow them to communicate with each other

and to connect them to the people

and to the knowledge that they need

to make something of their own lives.

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There are a lot of things that happen as a result

of having the internet

that are basically just silly, right?

Kittens on treadmills on YouTube, right?

It amuses you for lunch hour.

But it's not exactly the stuff that civic revolutions

are made of.

And then when you look back in history

at the printing press, you see that the stuff

we take for granted now took decades,

in some cases, centuries to actually come into being.

The printing press gets set up.

The first thing we get, erotic novels.

Somebody's like, "Hey, I know."

The scientific journals took another 150 years

to get going.

When you look at things like Ushahidi,

the crisis mapping service that sort of takes

what a whole population knows about a crisis

and turns it into a map you can see and work with.

Or you look at PatientsLikeMe

which is trying to transform medicine

by making the patients much more active participants.

You see that we have a chance here

to take these tools and their incredible flexibility

and their distracting amounts of freedom

to create bits of self-amusement

and not much more, or we have the opportunity

to really figure out ways that we can use

these tools to make society better off.

People think the internet is just a tool for communication.

It's how we get in touch with one another.

It does that, but it does so much more.

And it has impacts in basically

every facet of life.

The internet is a tool for innovation.

All of the world's knowledge is catalogued,

categorized one Google search away,

and education.

You can now go online and go to Harvard

and watch Harvard lectures, MIT lectures.

With Telehealth and Telemedicine,

villagers can talk to doctors via Skype.

♪

In disaster relief, we're seeing how communications

is reinventing how lives are saved.

We've watched how, in the Middle East,

the internet gave people a voice

that they never had before.

And not only were the people in the Middle East

rallying for change, the rest of the world

rallied with them.

♪

People's ability to communicate shouldn't

be limited by imagined cultural boundaries.

Every person that we connect to the internet

becomes a co-creator in our future.

They get to be part of what happens next

on planet Earth.

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For me, one of the most exciting things

about the internet is this ability

to recognize the humanness of people,

the reality of people and other cultures

and other languages.

So, I think we've really barely scratched the surface

of what is possible through collaboration.

If you think about it, doing an encyclopedia

is one of the easiest things.

I see collaboration,

especially computer mediated collaboration,

as an extremely enabling tool

for the population of the world,

and I hope what it'll do is uncover voices and ideas

that might be invisible otherwise.

When we or are grandchildren look back and see

what we made of the internet when we were the first people

to shape its place in society,

the question they're gonna ask is

did they use it to change the world

for the better?

The greatest hope of this technology

is that human beings would be connected

to each other globally in ways that allowed us

to realize our common humanity.

That's the vision that really imagines

that we could erase so much conflict

that comes from seeing ourselves one way

and others another way.

♪

Anything that enriches our knowledge of the range

of human traditions, I think enriches

our understanding of ourselves.

The broader our database of human experience,

the more clear we can be

on kinda what are the universals

of being human?

How broad is the menu

from which we can choose?

And to what extent maybe has the menu shrunk

by virtue of modern technology?

What have we lost?

We know what we've gained with e-mail

and telephones and whatever else

is characteristic of modernization,

but what have we lost?

We've left behind a way of life.

I don't know that that's good or bad,

but it is.

The way we live is different.

And as the information revolution continues,

we may find that it has very fundamentally

changed the nature of global society

and what it is to be human.

Throughout all of history, we have moved from isolation

to interdependence to cooperation.

That's what's goin' on here now.

People all over the world are trying to figure out

how to hold on to their religious, their ethnic,

their racial, their tribal characteristics

that make them proud and give them identity

without having to denigrate, dehumanize somebody

who's different.

I believe the great mission of the 21st century world

is to build up the positive forces

of interdependence and beat back the negative ones,

to move from mere interdependence

to a global community.

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And there's whole worlds of civilizations there

that we don't really hear from all that often.

Should we wait for that ringing to stop?

It's my phone.

That's brilliant.

Sorry.

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