>>Pablos Holman: So, yeah, I'm a hacker, and nothing bad has ever happened to me.
So I'm working on trying to import problems from other places and work on those.
I want to show you a little bit about how hackers think.
This is a buddy of ours named Samy.
Samy served three years for crashing MySpace with a virus he was using to try and pick
up chicks by changing all their pages to say, "Samy is my hero," and automatically adding
them as his friend on MySpace, which got him, like, over a million friends in under 24 hours,
which is pretty cool.
But Samy is allowed to use a computer again.
Anybody here use this maps program?
Samy figured out that the way Google knows about the traffic is that your phones report
what's going on as you're driving around.
And so he started just sending fake data to Google Maps that says, you know, there's a
lot of people out on the roads that I'm about to drive on.
So what Samy does -- [ Laughter ]
-- just for fun, you know.
The reason I'm telling you about Samy and I wish I had time to tell you more about hackers,
is he has a different kind of brain than you do.
His brain is a really important natural resource, and we're using it for all the wrong things;
right?
Clearly.
An example I've used before is if you get a new gadget and show it to your mom or your
grandma, she might ask you, well, what does this do?
And you can explain.
Well, it's like an iPhone.
You stick it on your head, mom.
And she would understand that; right?
But if you give a new gadget to Samy, which actually happens all the time, the question
is different.
The question is what can I make this do?
And he'll take all the screws out, break it into a lot of little pieces and then figure
out what he can build from the rubble; right?
That discovery process is fundamental to invention, it's fundamental to innovation.
That is where every new thing we ever get comes from.
And you can't skip that part, or you don't get anything new.
So what's going on now is humans are running this grand experiment.
We're trying to figure out every day how do we keep more people alive on just one planet.
More people, no additional planets.
And the only thing that we can do is invent our way out of this.
And so we're trying to find ways to scale up invention.
This is a protocol diagram that hackers would use.
It's for a crypto system that's built into your Web browser called SSL.
And that's what encrypts your credit card numbers and passwords.
That is really boring shit.
But what hackers will do is attack every point in this protocol; right?
What happens if I send a date from the future?
What happens if I send two responses instead of one?
What happens if I send a zero instead of a one?
I might get a computer to break.
And if I can get it to break in one way, maybe I can get it to break in some other way, like
a way that makes you my friend on MySpace or Facebook, or gives me your credit card
number or maybe does something more constructive.
This is anopheles stephensi.
She is a female mosquito carrying malaria in Africa, and she kills about a million people
a year.
Half of them are kids under five; right?
And this is a protocol diagram for malaria.
It spends some of its lifetime in humans, some of its life in a mosquito.
It's very complicated.
We don't actually understand everything about how this works, but what I do in my lab where
I work is I hire hackers to attack every point in this protocol, and we try to figure out
how can we intervene?
How can we stop that?
How can we solve a problem that's big?
This is the old fashioned way of going after malaria.
We just spray chemicals that kill everything; right?
You hope some of the good stuff comes back.
This is a real ad from, like, the '40s where we were teaching kids to sing that "DDT is
good for me."
It's not actually good for you.
[ Laughter ] It's still an important part of how we're
going to attack malaria, but we're trying to add tools to the arsenal and figure out
how to deal with that.
So one of our crazy ideas was what if we could find mosquitoes with computers and shoot them
down with laser beams, which sounds like fun.
Pretty much whatever your problem is, we have a solution involving laser beams.
So this is us tracking mosquitoes in real time.
And what we do is use a computer to sample their wing frequency.
We can go to the next video.
And what they do -- this is a mosquito we lit up with an ultraviolet laser, so she's
not coming back.
This is very satisfying stuff because not even PETA comes to save mosquitoes.
Like, you can kill as many as you want.
[ Laughter ] So, you know, people with guns, let's just
give them lasers and let them go after mosquitoes.
It will be fine.
This is kind of before we tuned our lasers and we just totally vaporized the mosquitoes,
which is also rewarding and fun.
But the point is what's going on here is that we've used computers, and we've taken the
advancements that Moore's law gave us.
We compute the value of the life of every individual bug before we shoot it down.
That's unprecedented for humans, right?
We've never had that kind of computation to throw around, and now we do.
And our imaginations are not keeping up.
You have a supercomputer in your pocket and you are using it to play, like, you know,
fart apps or dots or something.
This is not the limit of what we can do with these computers.
We are at the beginning of figuring it out.
I'm not going to go into more detail on this, but the rough idea is we put lasers on fence
posts, around a building, or a village and shoot mosquitoes as they fly towards humans.
Eventually, we realized, oh, we can protect crops, too, with an organic photonic pesticide.
All kinds of possibilities.
But this is again -- we just cheat at invention by using Moore's law to scale others haven't
tried yet.
So this is all taking place in our lab.
This is our machine shop.
The lab is called Intellectual Ventures Lab.
And what we do is we try to take on the biggest problems we can find.
Our business model is a little different because we don't make any products.
We just work on invention.
We can prototype things here.
We basically just bought one of every tool in the world, hired one of every kind of scientist.
This is our warehouse.
Another 8,000 tools that don't fit in the lab.
But I can have them in a couple hours if I need them for a project.
And that's a way of cheating at invention and being faster.
So I'm going to show you a couple quick things that we work on.
This is a cubic mile of oil.
Earlier today you heard that a cubic mile is enough space to hold all the humans on
earth.
That's a huge amount.
Well, a cubic mile of oil is how much energy we used in about the year 2000, right?
This is what we use today, 3 1/2 cubic miles of oil.
That's how much energy we use.
Some of it is coal, but...
If we keep on with what we're doing and we enact all of our brilliant policies for reducing
energy consumption, we only need an additional 1.8 cubic miles by 2035, right?
If we do a really great job and reduce our energy consumption a lot, we only need 1.4.
Pretty good, huh?
We need a lot of energy.
This is how much energy we need by 2050 because we are going to run out of oil and coal.
We got to come up with other ways of getting this.
It is a lot.
More than people ever visualize.
These guys are useful.
You know, that seems like a free way to get energy.
I mean it is modulo the cost of building windmills.
But if you take those guys, windmills, turbines, state-of-the-art turbines and you put them
over the entire -- all the fly-over states, then you get one cubic mile of oil worth of
energy.
And then what happens?
You are going to run out of space and they are going to end up in your backyard, right?
So, you know, we love windmills but you might want to think about what's going to happen
when it's not just in your neighbor's backyard.
So this gets kind of interesting.
It turns out we've got this amazing shit right here.
That can, the size of a Coor's Light has 1.8 million times the energy density of oil, right?
That can is worth 120,000 barrels worth of oil in energy.
If you sat at a gas station and put gas in your Prius and let it run and run until the
bill was $12 million, that's how much energy we have in one can of uranium.
It is pretty good stuff.
We don't know how to use it in a way we're happy with.
This is what happens.
We dig that stuff out of the ground.
We put it through a complicated enrichment program, and we end up with all this nuclear
waste.
Right?
Stockpiles of nuclear waste.
And what's going on is after we enrich that fuel, we get .7% of the energy out.
The other 99.3% is sitting in nuclear waste stockpiles because, well, frankly, the process
is fairly inefficient.
So we invented a new type of nuclear reactor that's powered by nuclear waste.
We take the stuff from the stockpile, we put it in our reactor, and that fuel gets enriched
inside the reactor and burned inside the reactor.
And it is a lot more efficient.
This is neutron bombardment, which I'm sure is rudimentary to everyone in the room, so
I'm going to skip that.
We don't have time.
But, going back to my fake pie chart here, if I burn that fuel in my reactor, I get all
the other energy out, right?
And that's worth doing.
That's worth figuring out.
We don't have a lot of people trying to invent new types of nuclear reactors, and we need
a lot more.
We have hardly any competition in this right now.
We're the only ones and that's not very cool.
Our team is made up of, like, these old guys who we pulled out of retirement that were
interns on the first generation of reactors 50 years ago and then some, like, young guys
who just got their degrees and think it is cool.
There is no one in the middle.
Nobody has been working on this stuff.
We need to work on this stuff.
This stockpile in Kentucky has 700,000 metric tons of depleted uranium.
If we burn that stuff in our reactors, we can power the entire planet, including growth,
for about a thousand years.
And we don't even have to dig up more uranium.
That is wasteful.
So remember these guys?
Anybody here today from that?
No, okay?
Well, see if you can find yourself on this chart.
All right.
[ Laughter ] >>Pablos Holman: So the interesting thing
is these guys, including all of us, you know, look, we all won, okay?
You are the winners.
That's why you're here hanging out with me.
It is exciting.
But since you won, you have a grave responsibility, okay?
As do I. Like I said at the beginning, I don't have any actual problems of my own.
Let's go find some to work on.
[ Laughter ] >>Pablos Holman: So these guys are the top
14% globally, okay, you and me and all the 99% sleeping on the streets in Manhattan.
Top 14, they won, too.
Top 14, that's pretty good if you remember Malcolm Gladwell's chart.
Top 14% in the school, that's the pool you want to hire from.
Not too bad, right?
So what we think is that, you know, we don't need more fart apps for the iPhone.
What we do need is to take on the bigger problems that humans have.
And you guys should be doing that.
This is a big problem that humans have.
We take vaccines.
We put them in a $2 Styrofoam cooler, truck them across the Sahara, and start injecting
kids.
And we get about a 50% failure rate.
A quarter million people a year die this way, right?
So we invented this thing.
It is kind of a super Thermos.
You take that.
You put vaccines in it.
You truck it across the Sahara, and it will keep vaccines cold for months on end with
no external power.
There is no actual way to plug this in.
It doesn't have a power jack.
You guys can come and play with it afterwards if you want.
It just stays cold.
I ship them to Africa and they come back cold.
Just stays cold.
So that's a way of keeping vaccines cold and not having to worry about it.
These things keep vaccines cold for four hours.
And we just inject kids with vaccines gone bad.
That doesn't work.
Last thing I will show you real quickly, this is an antenna.
Pipe organ, right?
Each of those antenna make a different frequency.
So high frequency, little antennas.
Big antennas make low frequencies.
That's what you think of as a big, old analog antenna.
The way we made music was analog until we came up with these guys.
What's that?
That's a pile of computer chips.
And what does it do?
It synthesizes all the sounds you can make with those antenna and more, right?
Computers took over.
All your music is made that way.
So we've been working in an area of science that's kind of new called meta materials.
These are materials don't exist in nature but we can manufacture.
So one of the problems we started attacking is if you have got a satellite dish on the
ground, that's what these domes on boats are, or that dish in a predator drone, it is a
physically steerable dish so that you can aim it at a satellite and talk to it, right?
It's big and heavy and expensive.
If there is an LEO satellite whizzing by, you have a steerable dish in the ground to
talk to it.
So what we did is we invented this new type of antenna.
It is a flat panel.
I will show you.
It looks kind of like that.
But it can electronically steer a beam with no moving parts, right?
I actually brought one -- this is like the commercial product we're working on.
So this thing can steer a beam and aim at a satellite dish.
This is a way of getting gigabyte wireless to everyone on the planet.
Right now every satellite we put up is an LEO satellite.
It has got more communications capacity than the entire network did last year.
But we can't talk to them without these big, heavy, mechanical dishes.
I can duct tape that to the side of a building.
It will find satellites and track them.
That's a way to scale wireless infrastructure beyond what we can imagine the way we do it
now.
So, anyway, I'm running out of time.
I will get out of here.
Thanks so much.
I will be around if folks want to come chat afterwards.