>>commentator: Good afternoon everyone, thank you all for coming.
Today we are honored to have Joshua Foer with us.
Josh is a science journalist whose work has appeared in National Geographic, Esquire,
Slate, Outside, The New York Times, and many other publications.
His first book Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
chronicles his journey of going from being a guy with just an average memory to becoming
the 2006 U.S. Memory Champion capable of memorizing a deck of cards in a minute and forty seconds.
Joshua is co-founder of Atlas Obscura an online guide to the world's wonders and curiosities
and is also co-founder of the design competition, Sukkah City.
Please join me in welcoming Joshua.
[applause]
>>Joshua Foer: Thanks.
It's so nice to be here.
I guess given that this is such an intimate setting I think I would like to maybe chat
briefly and then have a kind of conversation with you guys about a theme, a subject, that
is almost like this thread that goes through my book, Moonwalking With Einstein which is
the relationship between knowledge and wisdom, between memory and intelligence.
And I think it's a pertinent subject to talk about at this moment in time here at Google.
In Steven Levy's book In the Plex about the history and culture of Google he has your
CEO, Larry Page, on the record saying that he looks forward to the day when ultimately
his products, Google products, will be channeled straight into your brain, where you will merely
think of a question and the answer will come straight to you.
In fact someday maybe you'll have a Google implant that will connect you directly to
Google services.
Sergey Brin has said that ultimately Google is about making, augmenting your brain with
sort of all of the world's knowledge.
And that my sound kinda like science fiction, but I'm enough of a technological determinist
and I guess have enough faith in Google [chuckles] to believe that that is something that may
ultimately come about.
And I think if you look around at sort of what's going on in the world there are enough
indicators that suggest that this is a future that's not that impossible.
So already you know cochlear implants have been installed in something like over 200,000
human brains; take sound waves, turns them into electrical impulses, channels them into
you; the brain stem allows deaf people to hear.
And you've got a number of sort of research firms all over the world, research groups
I should say, working on developing sort of primitive neuroprosthetics.
I did a story for Esquire a few years back about a guy called Erik Ramsey who when he
was 16 years old was in this absolutely tragic car accident that left him locked in, totally
took away his ability to control any part of his body beyond his eyes.
But cognitively he was totally there and working with a scientist, a neuroscientist in Georgia,
he had a set of electrodes implanted into the part of the pre-motor cortex that controls
sort of movement of the mouth, the tongue, the lips.
And the notion is that at some point they're training him to control the prosthetic voice
using his thoughts.
So that's sort of like one way communication, I think the ultimate vision is some sort of
two way communication where it's not just data coming but data coming into the brain.
And I don't know if it's gonna be Google who does this or I don't know if it's gonna happen
in my lifetime, but if you look at sort of the broad trajectory of where technology is
going in terms of creating an ever more seamless connection, interface, between the minds that
are embodied in our brains and the memories that are embodied in our technology, in our
devices like our Smart Phones, I think it's fair to say that Google has got a nice head
start.
And there was some reporting in The New York Times earlier this year by Nick Bilton who
suggested that you guys are working on a heads up display that he says is gonna be out by
Christmas.
And that the notion is we'll be walking around with sort of all of this information sort
of projected straight on to our retinas which is a much less clumsy and clunky way of tapping
into the collective knowledge of mankind than using my thumbs or even talking to my phone.
And I think this is poised to be like the big story of my lifetime, of the next several
decades is how life is going to change as we really merge in a more seamless way our
internal and our external minds.
And—
I think this is actually an old story; we've been figuring out better and better ways to
externalize our memories and to recall them, activate them with better and better technologies
basically since the first caveman splashed paint on the wall of a cave.
Once upon a time anything that was going to be passed on had to be remembered, there was
nothing to do with a thought except remember it.
There was no alphabet to transcribe thoughts in, no paper to put them down upon, and anything
that was gonna be conveyed first has to be memorized.
And then there was of course this massive technological shift, the invention of writing,
and you had people who were objecting to that; 2500 years ago Socrates was at the very least
ambivalent and maybe even up in arms about this new invention called writing and he said,
"Writing is gonna make people dumb.
People are gonna start taking ideas out of their minds, putting them down on papyrus
and thinking that they're still smart when in fact they're just gonna be like empty vessels.
Information memory stored on a external source, they can't inquire of you, they can't challenge
you, they're static.
Real knowledge has to be sort of deeply embedded in your consciousness."
And Socrates thought the culture was headed down this terrible, treacherous path that
was gonna end no place good.
Fortunately somebody had the good sense to write down Socrates' disdain for the written
word otherwise we wouldn't remember it; thank you very much Plato.
And well I think we would all agree that he was overstating the case, we've had writing
for a couple of millennia, we're more inclined to see its benefits than its pitfalls.
I think there's also something we can recognize in what Socrates was concerned about, some
nugget of wisdom that is especially pertinent today and I think it has to do with the operating
metaphor in how we think about memory, how we talk about memory colloquially.
I think it's the operating metaphor that's embedded in the idea of these Google goggles
and in so much else that we're doing with technology right now, which is this notion
that our memories are like a bank; we deposit information into this bank when we encode
it and we pull it back out at some later date.
And that implies a kind of equivalence between an internal memory and an external memory.
Actually if I've got a bank up here and a bank here, the bank that's hardware is a whole
lot less likely to make mistakes, it's a whole lot more durable, it is in almost every way
superior to the wetware that I've got up here.
And I think you find, I found this idea, this metaphor the memory as a bank is really sort
of seeped into a lot of aspects of our life.
Even in school you find now kids saying, "Well why should I learn that piece of information
I can always just Google it?"
And you can find teachers who seem to be agreeing with them, "Yeah why should we teach kids
facts, why should we teach kids content, we wanna make kids into creative thinkers and
to innovative thinkers, into people who can process the world and so why should we waste
our time on content, it's just gonna get forgotten about anyways?"
And I think what we're seeing is a kind of evolution in our notion of what it means to
be erudite.
So for Socrates erudition meant having all of these internally stored memories that were
sort of always there at the forefront of his mind.
And I mean all the way through the late Middle Ages you had people thinking about writing
in very different terms than we do today.
People wrote things down not as we do today to sort of offload them so we don't have to
remember things, people wrote things down to aid their memories, writing was thought
of as an aide memoir.
We had, there's a wonderful quote by Petrarch, he says, "I ate in the morning what I digested
in the afternoon.
What I swallowed as a boy I've ruminated upon as an old man.
These writings were implanted not just in my memory but in my marrow."
There was this notion that to really fully engage with information deeply it had to be
sort of integrated into your soul.
It's a very different sort of notion of reading than we have today.
After Gutenberg, after books become mass produced commodities, erudition evolves from having
all this stuff stored internally to knowing how and where to find information in this
labyrinthine world of external memories, there are now books everywhere.
I'd argue that there is sort of a new kind of, new stage in this evolution of erudition
which is that we no longer have to even know how and where to find stuff we just need to
know the right set of search terms and then Google can take care of the rest.
And what I guess is problematic about this metaphor of memory as a bank is that it's
not really how our memories work.
Our memories are not sequestered in some vault in our brain they're actually always there,
they are always shaping how we perceive the world, how we make decisions in the world,
how we move through the world, our judgment, and there's this kind of continuous feedback
process between our perception and our memory.
Our memories are actually much less like a bank and much more like a lens; a lens that
is constantly filtering the world for us and helping us to make sense of it.
And I think this is something that we all kind of intuitively get.
I mean if I was to sit down next to a Google engineer and look at a website we would see
two very different things; we actually would look at the world differently because of the
memories that we've got floating around in our skulls.
The Google engineer would see all sorts of things that just don't have meaning to me,
that aren't relevant to me, that I don't even understand.
And likewise if we took a walk in a park because I studied evolutionary biology in college
and know a little bit about the life history of trees, there are things that I pay attention
to, things that direct sort of my attention that might not otherwise catch another person's.
And my experience of that walk in the park is going to be qualitatively different from
somebody else's.
And I guess that's what is sort of the notion behind what Petrarch was saying is look, our
memories make us who we are, they're at the root of not just our self identity but our
values, our character, our judgments, our sense of appreciation of the world.
And it's not just about information as sort of a-- well I'll tell you a story which is
that not long ago I was in Shanghai doing an assignment for National Geographic, and
I went through high school not having received even the smallest bit of education about Chinese
history; I didn't know that Kublai Khan was a real person, which in retrospect is kind
of amazing.
And I tried to make the best of this three days that I had in Shanghai and I tried to
go to all the museums and interpret the culture as best I could and make sense of the history.
And what I found was that not just that I didn't know this stuff it was I didn't even
have the ability to learn it; I didn't have the basic facts to fasten other facts to.
And what that suggests is the extent to which our memories, my experience was impoverished
is what it points to, my experience was impoverished.
And it kinda sucked and it made me regret the fact that I didn't know anything about
Chinese history.
And I guess part of what makes me nervous about sort of this direction that technology,
our culture seems to be going in, is that in the process of privileging this kind of
memory that we are devaluing the other kind of memory, the kind of memory that actually
really matters to living a rich life, to living a good life.
And there was this study that I'm sure many of you are aware of in the Journal of Science
last year that suggested that when people know their piece of information is stored
on the Internet in a computer that they invest less of themselves in remembering it and tend
to have a worse memory for that information just because they know that it exists online.
It's not that Google's making us dumb, it's that Google is making us lazy, that's what
that study really suggested.
When we, when I think about this vision of the future that Larry Page is pre-visioning
of a world in which we are constantly plugged in and constantly have the entire collective
knowledge of humanity, the greater human consciousness all sort of immediately accessible, always
there, always on, I think there are gonna be ways in which it's gonna be truly wonderful,
truly glorious having access to all of the world's information is incredible.
But the thing that I hope we will keep in mind is that infinite knowledge is not the
same thing as wisdom and that I hope Google will keep in mind as it develops all of this
technology because over the next couple of decades you guys are gonna have a power to
shape our culture and shape how humans live at a very intimate level in a way that I don't
know that any institution outside of organized religion has ever had before.
And I guess my hope that what will guide you guys is a kind of humanism.
I mean think this trajectory may be inevitable but Google and maybe a few of your competitors
have the power to actually guide us in some ways and to help shape the culture that we're
creating together.
And what would be a shame is if it is the value of technologists, of how do we make
life easier, how to do we make life more efficient, how do we get that extra marginal utility
which doesn't necessarily equate to the good life.
If that's what's driving us, or much worse, the bottom line in maximizing shareholder
profits, I hope that what will guide Google is a sense of humanism, of people asking really
big questions, really old questions that what the good life really means and what are the
values that we want to perpetuate in ourselves and in humanity at large.
And if you guys don't ask those questions, if Google's not asking those questions, if
Apple's not asking those questions, if Facebook's not asking those questions, I fear we're gonna
wake up in 25 years wearing our Google goggles and having our thoughts Tweeted straight into
the ether and we're gonna be like that proverbial lobster that doesn't even realize that it's
boiling itself to death; that we're gonna wake up and we're gonna say, "Is this really
good?
I know my life is more efficient, more productive, I'm more connected, I'm more, my Internet
connection is faster, but am I really living a good life and are my basic human needs in
the biggest possible sense being met?
And is this really the future that we wanted?"
So –
I guess maybe we should have a conversation about that.
I'm curious to hear what you guys think since you all are shaping that future.
Hey man, thanks for [inaudible].
>>male #1: Hi Josh.
>>Joshua Foer: How are ya?
>>male #1: [chuckles] I'm good, how are you.
So I mean I think the way that you're putting this story is really kind of a story of escalating
complexity; computers give us the power to handle more complex interactions every single
day; there's just more stuff that we have to do.
And of course as soon as we get the capability to handle this we also have the capability
to add more of it, right?
So in this world how can we come to a situation where we get the power to deal with complexity
but we don't use that power to add more complexity?
>>Joshua Foer: I don't know if more complexity is necessarily bad, it's the question it's
superficial complexity.
So just to go back to that notion of like the changing notion of how we read.
People use to read a lot less, they read a lot less, a lot deeper, and they really etched
these ideas onto their consciousness in a way that would seem totally alien to us today.
Today you just can't do that, you can't do that and keep up because the world is more
complex; you have to read widely and that means reading superficially.
So there's always gonna be that balance.
The question is we have to be like conscious of when we've swung too far, when the pendulum
has swung too far.
So I don't know maybe this is just something that like is unstoppable and that we're all
kind of destined to be living in the matrix in 250 years because that's just where technology
is gonna take us and we don't have any control over it.
But I think actually we do have some control.
>>male #1: Well but how would we exercise that control, would we exercise that control
by essentially sort of constraining choice?
Is the idea saying, "Well you may think that you want option B more than option A where
option B is a more technologized, less humanized world, but actually we know that you don't?"
>>Joshua Foer: Yeah, maybe.
Yeah because so a lot of what we're, is being sort of created in the world and by Google
is like how do we flip a little pleasure switch in your brain or flip a little switch that
gives you some sort of immediate reward?
I actually get some immediate amount of pleasure every time I check my email that is, I don't
know why that is setting something off in me that is like I wanna constantly check it,
but I suspect in the big picture this is not a good thing that I'm constantly checking
my Smartphone.
And so maybe for the people who are developing Smartphones they should think about that like,
"Okay so how do we create a system in which you're not incentivized to wanna be looking
at this thing every second?"
I don't know how you do that but you need to be asking that question at the very least.
>>male #1: It seems like an odd position for a technological determinist to take though,
saying that.
>>Joshua Foer: Well, so I think this stuff, I think there is still some degree of control
that we have over like the conditions in which this stuff is deployed.
So it may be inevitable that we'll all have these chips plugged in whatever, but I think
there are choices that are gonna be made along the way that will shape the extent to which
that is for good or for ill.
>>male #1: Okay, I'm gonna let other people.
>>Joshua Foer: Alright.
>>male #1: You might wanna, oh.
>>male #2: I find what you say very compelling and very interesting but I always find this
an odd conflict for the following reason: you give the example kids today are saying,
"Why should I learn facts, I can always go Google 'em."
Well I remember being in high school which was a very long time ago and I remember making
the same statement myself and all my friends agreeing, "Why should we memorize this stuff,
it's all in the library?"
And it was sometime during college that I came to the realization that the answer to
that was, "Well if that's true then that library down the block is the most intelligent being
on the planet.
If you don't believe that then you shouldn't be making that statement."
So –-
it's always so easy to look at the current state and say, "Well this is unprecedented,
this hasn't happened before, we need to do something different because we're going in
the wrong direction."
But it's not like this question was new when I was in high school --
>>Joshua Foer: Or when Socrates was in academy.
[chuckles]
[laughter]
>>male #2: Yeah, and somehow we've managed to muddle through which suggests that maybe
we're asking the wrong question here.
>>Joshua Foer: Well first of all I would say, I mean I agree with you this is an old story,
this is only sort of the latest chapter in a conversation that we've been having truly
for millennia although things seem to be accelerating at a rate today --
>>male #2: Um-hum.
>>Joshua Foer: that they weren't maybe when you were in high school.
The thing I would say is look, it's true.
I have all the world's information a thumb click away right now and in a sense I know
that information, there's a sense in which that is all sort of immediately accessible
to me in which if you wanna take this sort of idea of like a self that spills –
>>male #2: Um-hum.
>>Joshua Foer: across the boundaries of my epidermis and this is actually part of me,
okay.
But your library that is the greatest living, smartest organism on the planet actually can't
take two ideas that didn't previously go together and put them together, can't make an insight,
can't have a creative thought --
>>male #2: Right.
>>Joshua Foer: can't invent anything; that still takes a human mind.
And to the extent that we are impoverishing our memories because we're saying, "Well I
can always go look it up in the library, I don't need to fill my mind with stuff, I don't
need to have a furnished brain, a furnished mind," I suspect that there are consequences
to that that are very difficult to calculate.
>>male #2: And again I agree with you a hundred percent and yet I'm concerned that we, in
every generation we look back and say, "Oh the way we knew it when we were growing up
or the way our father's knew it when we were growing up were better, things are falling
apart now."
When you have such a long history of such statements you have to ask, "Are my intuitions
here really right?
Am I approaching this problem the right way?"
>>Joshua Foer: Or, "Am I actually right?"
Maybe actually --
>>male #2: Finally after all these warnings?
>>Joshua Foer: What's that?
>>male #2: Maybe.
[chuckles]
>>Joshua Foer: Maybe life was actually better in some qualitatively meaningful ways for
my father's generation than it is for my generation in terms of --
>>male #2: Could be.
>>Joshua Foer: I think if you're a kid growing up I think there are really like reasonable
arguments to be made that my nephews who are going to grow up absolutely glued to their
computers are maybe not having as good of a childhood as I did.
>>male #2: We had TV before that and comic books before that [laughs] so but I'll leave
it at that.
>>male #3: Hi, thanks for coming.
>>Joshua Foer: Thanks.
>>male #3: I enjoyed your book, by the way, --
>>Joshua Foer: Thank you.
>>male #3: it was really great.
So I would say, I have basically, my response to you is that here's why I think it's not
a big deal.
For me to look up something on my Smartphone, for example, I have a lot of externalized
memories on my Smartphone, it takes a long time for me to look this up.
I mean I could probably do it in like 10 seconds, 20 seconds, but that's huge; an average Google
search is much smaller than one second it's like a few hundred milliseconds, and even
if it's 800 milliseconds that's qualitatively worse for users.
So I would say that the more latency there is before you get your answer, like you have
to overcome that latency and you have to really want to know that information; in essence
it's for information when you kind of accept that latency, it's for information that's
just not that important; if it was important you'd memorize it basically.
And I think this is kind of proven by when we interview people we tend not to ask kind
of little trivia questions that people could look up with Google, but we do ask questions
that are very basic and maybe the people could also look them up with Google, but if they
were interested in the subject they would have memorized it at this point.
And so it's sort of a, I think what's in your, there's no chance of not having a lot of memorization
happen because you'll memorize stuff that you're gonna be interested in and what you're
interested in is growing more complex anyway so it's like that is just crowding up the
space of the brain, everything else goes on to Smartphones and I think we could all live
with that trade off because it's pretty efficient actually.
>>Joshua Foer: Isn't that exactly the case that I'm making though that, I mean so once
we've got the Google goggles that our, I mean I know actually Google goggles is actually
the name of one of your --
>>male #3: It is.
>>Joshua Foer: lab products which is image search --
>>male #3: Yes.
>>Joshua Foer: which I presume is a stalking horse for when that camera's gonna be sort
of in my glasses and I'll immediately --
>>male #3: Maybe, I don't know.
>>Joshua Foer: be able to search whatever I'm looking at and I'll have met you and I'll
actually already know your name and your Facebook profile and --
>>male #3: That's true but that's not that important.
>>Joshua Foer: No but the thing is, the question is as we sort of move towards that future
where all of this information, there is no latency, in fact it'll be calling up stuff
that maybe I don't even need.
How is that going to change the extent to which we invest in bothering to learn information
at all?
>>male #3: Well I would say, first of all I'd say there's always gonna be latency even
if like in, if you're envisioning in 20 years where we're gonna have Google goggles planted
on our face at all times, even then there'll still be latency even if it's only like a
few hundred milliseconds to get answers.
I think it's just inevitable that thinking is always gonna be faster than whatever else,
getting information some way and then thinking about it.
And also for stuff that you're interested in and you want to think about it and that
involves memorization as a byproduct even if you're not even set out to memorize it.
So I think it's gonna happen anyway, that is you will memorize lots of things throughout
your life.
>>Joshua Foer: Yeah except people don't seem to be doing that.
I mean --
>>male #3: I think it happens, I mean I think it does happen like you --
>>Joshua Foer: You look at like, maybe this is another issue altogether, but you look
at these statistics of kids coming out of high school in America who don't know jack
squat, 20 percent of American high school students can't tell you who America fought
in World War II.
>>male #3: Yeah but, okay but they're probably not interested in it.
Let me give you an example that you just earlier in this when you were talking you kind of
mentioned, "Oh there was an article, there's an article in The New York Times," and you
mentioned the person who wrote it.
>>Joshua Foer: Um-hum.
>>male #3: You memorized that, that is all in your memory 'cause it's really interesting
to you as a writer who wrote one piece for The New York Times.
Now I heard it, it's not interesting, I mean it is interesting but I didn't take the time
to memorize that name.
>>Joshua Foer: So I guess one response to that is are you going to be interested in
learning information when it is so immediately, shallowly available to you?
So for example, I'm walking through a park --
>>male #3: Um-hum.
>>Joshua Foer: and if I want to, I take that extra moment to learn what kind of, to identify
what kind of tree this is, that kind of depth of engagement of taking that extra moment
to try and figure it out and look at the leaves and see if I can tell what the shape is and
can I make sense of this, that extra engagement is what makes it memorable, that depth of
processing.
But if I can just walk up to it, take a picture of it, and I have the answer sent right to
my brain, right to my retina, then I'm not engaging with it very deeply.
I'm engaging with it superficially and it's not gonna be memorable.
>>male #3: Yeah but I --
>>Joshua Foer: We're creating a culture in which everything is kind of, you're just skimming
over the surface of the world because it's all coming at you and you're getting the pleasure
of knowing that answer without actually investing any of yourself in learning it, then are we
actually going to truly have real memories or are we just gonna have this kind of superstructure
of external memories?
>>male #3: Yeah, well I think it's all based on interests and if you're interested the
memorization will happen.
But I'll let other people talk now.
Thank you.
>>Joshua Foer: Thanks.
>>male #4: Hi, couple of quick points: thank goodness for the bell shaped curve because
you'll always have some of one and some of the other.
If you think you have the world knowledge at your fingertips you're sadly deluded.
I have done research using Google where I've had to go to page 27 to get the correct result
because the noise drowned out the signal.
If you don't have the ability to think critically like that you're just going to delude yourself
and that may be a danger and one that I am particularly concerned about.
I've raised a son who's now employed full time about almost a year which is quite an
achievement for a college grad these days.
And I was always asking him, "Okay now that you've figured it out tell me what it means."
Well the poor rascal ended up studying philosophy and it's all my fault.
[laughter]
>>Joshua Foer: But he still got a job.
>>male #4: [chuckles] He did indeed, he did indeed and what your learn in philosophy is
how to size up an argument quickly, size up a bunch of information quickly and that is
something Google can't do and I doubt Google --
>>Joshua Foer: Isn't that your mission?
I mean isn't your mission, isn't the Google mission to get, if the piece of information
I actually want is on page 27 and that is Google saying, "We're actually not doing a
good enough job and our goal is to get it to number one?"
>>male #4: Right on the money.
But the way we do it it's a popularity contest and people have freedom of opinion, but I
don't think people have freedom of truth and that's where we fail.
And what it takes to survive in an information rich society is the ability to distinguish
signal from noise.
Socrates was right, you can have an information dystopia and we have had it in history, it's
called scholasticism where the written word superseded observables.
Okay?
The danger lies in the lack of critical thinking to where it's truly becomes if it's on the
Internet it must be true.
And we have to work to prevent that and I think that's what you're trying to say if
I understand you correctly.
>>Joshua Foer: I think it's a piece of it.
>>male #4: Yeah, a good piece of it.
Anyway I could go on forever but I better not.
>>Joshua Foer: Thank you.
>>male #4: Thank you.
>>male #5: Hi, thanks for coming.
I have a quick comment.
I mean a lot of what you're saying here is it's really interesting, there's a lot of
tricky questions, it all kinda sounds like a bummer too.
[chuckles]
One thing that occurred to me when the first questioner was up here talking about the restriction
of choice in order to I guess guide people towards a more enriched life, it sounds like
there's an analogy with nutrition and physical health and that what we're kind of talking
about is the information and experience equivalent of junk food.
That in agriculture and in food production in general we've found ways to feed a lot
more people, in the meantime we've also created a diabetes and obesity epidemic in this country.
And I think a lot of what you're saying is kinda that same thing like when food or information
is so readily available that people may not be making conscious healthy decisions.
And I think to some degree we are seeing the pendulum swing back a little bit more like
people are choosing to pay more for organic food even though there's plenty of cheap food
available on the shelves, you can always feed yourself with junk food.
Um, but --
>>Joshua Foer: Yeah, I think that's a really wonderful analogy that I hadn't --
>>male #5: Yeah.
>>Joshua Foer: really thought of and may borrow from you.
>>male #5: [chuckles]
[laughter]
And instructive in a lot of ways because I think you're actually just starting to see
sort of some of that pendulum swinging back the other way in relation to our engagement
with the Web and with ubiquitous Smartphones and stuff.
I mean --
>>male #5: Right, I mean I think the flip side of that is we're also, we're kind of,
we're feeding a lot more people than we ever have and we're also educating more people
than we ever have.
I mean you're talking, you mentioned something about high school students not being able
to recall --
>>Joshua Foer: Um-hum.
>>male #5: facts when they graduate.
There's also I think, I don't have any numbers on this, more high school students are graduating
with the knowledge of calculus --
>>Joshua Foer: Um-hum.
>>male #5: than ever did before.
So maybe we're shifting more toward skills rather than facts and like we're talking about
creative synthesis.
I think you're right though without a sort of a basis of knowledge that there's nothing
to synthesis and that your brain has to have something to work in order to be able to generate
those --
>>Joshua Foer: Yeah, well I --
>>male #5: experiences.
>>Joshua Foer: so I think you're right.
In everything we do there are costs and benefits and the question is how do we think about
them in relation to each other?
And with respect to nutrition like people started having a big conversation --
>>male #5: Right.
>>Joshua Foer: like a really epically big conversation that involved scientists, involved
the government, involved farmers, involved consumers, McDonald's, K-Mart --
>>male #5: And this really only seemed to happen like after we discovered that we have
big problems.
>>Joshua Foer: Right.
>>male #5: So we may be sort of on the way up of the pendulum swing right now with this
information problem and we may have to go pretty far before, as you mentioned like some
people start to say, "Well maybe this isn't right, maybe this isn't what we want."
And I think it's a small number of people still who are swinging back in the realm of
nutrition.
I mean you have shows like The Biggest Loser on TV, but people are becoming aware of this
but it's still not, I mean a lot of people are still eating really crappy food all the
time, everyday.
>>Joshua Foer: So my question is how does Google like embed this kind, maybe it is,
embed this kind of big think questioning into how you guys direct your resources and think
about shaping the culture in which we live.
>>male #5: Yeah, I think that's a big question for us.
I mean how do we continue to use technology to make our lives better rather than just
easier --
>>Joshua Foer: Right.
>>male #5: or more [unintelligible].
>>Joshua Foer: Right, what is better?
>>male #5: Yeah.
>>Joshua Foer: So, thanks.
>>male #5: Yeah.
>>male #2: You should probably take him first --
>>Joshua Foer: Yeah.
>>male #2: 'cause I just came back up.
Go ahead.
>>male #6: Thank you for coming.
I haven't read your book yet although I've read one of the articles based on your book.
I think you're sort of posing a false dichotomy here.
And you discussed that people know a lot of things very shallowly whereas previously you
would read one or two books and think about them very deeply for a long time.
And yet you still see people nowadays devoting their entire lives to a single subject, a
single train of thought sometimes and kids right out of college, kids right out of high
school do this.
I don't know that it is so much a matter of we are being trained to think about things
shallowly, to remember things shallowly because this information is so much at our fingertips
as it is we know that we can develop the richer context in a shorter time.
You talked about your trip to Shanghai was it?
>>Joshua Foer: Um-hum.
>>male #6: That basically you came in with no preparation and you spent three days going
to the museums and came away with nothing 'cause you had no context to attach it to.
Whereas in 25 years from now with your Google implant you could spend the plane ride over
developing the sort of knowledge base that 20 years ago would have taken you three months
and 14 trips to the library to develop.
>>Joshua Foer: Um-hum.
>>male #6: And yeah that context may not be as fully textured as the one you would have
had 20 years ago, but if you retain the interest in the subject --
>>Joshua Foer: Um-hum.
>>male #6: I think you can develop the richer context faster.
>>Joshua Foer: Um-hum.
>>male #6: And you can see this with if you've ever met a six year old who's just developed
an interest in dinosaurs.
Within one month they can rattle off 50 to 100 species and they'll know the physical
characteristics of these things.
And if they retain the interest within three months they'll know the names of the paleontologist
who dug them up and like the techniques and where they were discovered.
It's more a matter of if you have the interest the tools are becoming more available for
you to develop the context –
>>Joshua Foer: Um-hum.
>>male #6: but it relies on you having the interest.
>>Joshua Foer: Yeah.
So I really love that and I think maybe the way to pose the question is like how do we
use these tools to develop that kind of depth?
I'm sure that, I'm very confident that the same technology we're talking about can be
used to make people have richer experiences, deeper experiences, have like fuller mental
lives.
And the question is how do we design what we're creating so that it does that and --
>>male #6: Not an easy problem.
No.
>>Joshua Foer: Not an easy problem, but one I hope you guys will think about.
>>male #6: Okay.
>>Joshua Foer: Yeah.
>>male #2: Alright I asked earlier about are we asking the wrong question and I found it
fascinating 'cause the very next person came up and asked a number of questions and as
you two talked you fell into exactly the trap you warned about earlier, which was that you
talked about memory, human memory, as if it were just like the external memory, it's just
this data bank.
You were talking about a series of facts; do kids come out of high school knowing --
>>Joshua Foer: Um-hum.
>>male #2: a bunch of facts, which completely misses the point.
Facts are irrelevant, that's not what we really learn.
There are the classic studies I think it was by Simon on expert chess players.
>>Joshua Foer: Um-hum.
>>male #2: Expert chess players have memorized thousands upon thousands of games.
They can look at a board position and memorize it within seconds, but only if it's an actual
board position that makes sense.
If you give them a board position with just pieces randomly [ inaudible ] around that
they're no better than somebody who's never seen a game of chess before.
What we learn, I mean the reason that we learn, that we are able to retain facts is because
we learn certain ways of thinking --
>>Joshua Foer: Right.
>>male #2: within which the facts fit.
If you know about evolutionary biology and you look at trees it's not the fact that you
know the names of the trees, anyone can memorize a list of names of trees; that gives them
no understanding of how the trees fit together into the ecosystem, how they evolved, what's
important, what's not.
It doesn't seem to me that anything that you're saying about the easy availability of facts
has anything whatsoever to do with our ability and need to develop understandings.
It may tempt us to think that we can be experts if we simply have access to a bunch of facts,
it's not true, it never was true.
The other final thing that's interesting there's been a lot study on this about what it takes
to become an expert.
>>Joshua Foer: Yes.
>>male #2: What expertise really takes.
>>Joshua Foer: Have you read my book Moonwalking With Einstein available in the back?
[laughter]
>>male #2: Okay.
>>Joshua Foer: [chuckles] [inaudible]
>>male #2: And one interesting thing about it is it takes about 10 years.
>>Joshua Foer: Right.
>>male #2: And it's always taken about 10 years and nothing we've done has changed that.
>>Joshua Foer: Right.
>>male #2: So why are we so worried?
What is it that you, if you look at it in those terms, is there something about, even
assume the technology trends goin' the direction you're going is there something in there that
would lead you to believe that people will not become experts?
>>Joshua Foer: Yeah, so this is, I think this is actually the essence of it which is that,
so with chess, right?
>>male #2: Um-hum.
>>Joshua Foer: It's not that people become chess experts from memorizing lots and lots
–
>>male #2: Um-hum.
>>Joshua Foer: of games, it's that, the causality works in the other direction.
It's that --
>>male #2: Correct.
>>Joshua Foer: by having played lots of games, having been invested in the sport of chess
for a long time –
>>male #2: Um-hum.
>>Joshua Foer: they develop terrific memories for chess because they have this deeper way
of thinking --
>>male #2: Um-hum.
>>Joshua Foer: more context, they see dynamics, they see structure, they see all sorts of
--
>>male #2: Um-hum.
>>Joshua Foer: all sorts of things that I don't see when I look at a chess game.
And this is true of experts in every possible discipline that's ever been studied.
Something about achieving expertise brings with it a terrific memory for the details
of that field.
The question is when the details are easy to come by, when they are, we don't have to,
when they're just sort of fed to us does that kind of superficial knowledge make us somehow
less likely to invest in the kind of way that it would take to be a real expert.
So if you're a chess player and you've got the answers constantly being funneled into
your heads up display you're never gonna become a good chess player.
>>male #2: That's right and if your interest was in chess you will quickly discover that
that's the wrong way to go about it.
>>Joshua Foer: Right.
>>male #2: What's new here?
I mean people have been experts on baseball statistics for generations; they memorize
huge numbers of baseball statistics, a completely useless bit of mental --
[laughter]
stuff by any kind of outside measure.
I mean if you're into that kind of thing, you're into that kind of thing.
So what?
I mean that stuff has always been there for anyone to look up.
>>Joshua Foer: That's true.
>>male #2: Has it made baseball any more or less inter, well it's been more interesting,
actually it's made it more interesting, the statistics draw a lot of people into the game.
How has it made it less interesting?
How has it made people less interested in playing the game, in watching the game?
>>Joshua Foer: So that's trivia, when we're talking about --
>>male #2: Maybe to you, maybe to me [laughs] no but some people --
>>Joshua Foer: If we take that metaphor of chess --
>>male #2: Um-hum.
>>Joshua Foer: which I think is a useful metaphor that we can apply more broadly to sort of
all areas in which people develop hard earned expertise and a sort of a deeper way of thinking
about the world, a deeper way of seeing.
Truly an expert chess player looks at a board differently, I mean activates different regions
of the brain than I do when they look at the board.
It's, the question is --
if the answers are always there and immediately accessible how is that going to affect knowledge
in the bigger picture in all sorts of disciplines?
>>male #2: I will only suggest that in your answer that well, chess, that the baseball
statistics is just trivia: any field in which simply having the recorded answers is sufficient
is just trivia so why worry about it?
>>Joshua Foer: That's, no don't think that's right.
I don't think that's right I think to go back to our walk through the park --
>>male #2: But that's not sufficient.
You understand things at a deeper level than someone who simply knows the names of all
the trees.
>>Joshua Foer: So one of the Google goggles apps, I don't know if it's been developed
or in development will take a picture of a leaf and tell you what kind of tree it is.
>>male #2: Yeah, and --
>>Joshua Foer: So that is trivia --
>>male #2: Yeah.
>>Joshua Foer: but understanding why --
>>male #2: [inaudible]
>>Joshua Foer: this leaf is --
>>male #2: Say again and what I'm suggesting to you is if having such a perfect app which
tells you everything about a leaf --
>>Joshua Foer: Um-hum.
>>male #2: just from taking a picture of it defines everything there is about the field,
then the field is trivia --
>>Joshua Foer: Actually --
>>male #2: and who cares?
>>Joshua Foer: the question will people who have all this --
>>male #2: Hasn't stopped --
>>Joshua Foer: stuff constantly channeled into them, are they gonna bother?
Are they gonna be like content to just get that extra little kick that –
>>male #2: Um-hum.
>>Joshua Foer: they get from knowing that piece of information and moving on?
>>male #2: Do you see any evidence that they are?
>>Joshua Foer: I do, yeah
>>male #2: Oh.
>>Joshua Foer: Yeah I do.
I see it in my own life in how I browse the Internet, in how I like hopscotch around and
in how I read.
I mean I see it in my own, I don't know, do people not see that in their own lives this
sort of sense of, "I'm not really engaging as deeply as I used to or that could be?"
I see --
>>male #2: I can answer for myself.
>>Joshua Foer: I see it in personal interactions with people that I'm tempted to constantly
be picking up my phone and looking at it which is a form of like ADD, I mean it's like I'm
not paying attention, my mind is elsewhere, I'm doing something else and not engaging
in the way that will make my life richer, make my life better.
I don't know.
Yeah, thank you though.
>>male #7: Hi, thanks for coming to speak to us today, really enjoyed the topic and
I appreciate the dilemma that you're bringing up of super intelligence versus wisdom and
I just sort of belated thoughts: one is on the analogy of like the library being the
most intelligent being if that those were the same idea.
So I think the idea of, the challenge that you're bringing to us is valuable and we should
be thinking about it, but at the same time maybe it's not proper that Google should be
the place that sort of solves it, we're trying to be the world's best librarian in a sense
and what you're saying is that that's not sufficient and I agree.
I'm sure many of my colleagues agree, but it's more of a cultural question: how do we
make wisdom out of intelligence?
And I thought, I personally grew up in a sort of religious Jewish day school and we always
were arguing about stories, ethics, morals [clears throat] we read books over 2,000,
3,000 years old and I think that's what the distinction that you're bringing up is like
stories versus facts.
So I have my particular way of coming to that and I'm sure everyone had their own and I
guess the thought to me is, is there a way of having this general discussion a valid
question without a particular way of coming to stories?
I have my own particular background is there a way of having a common way of doing that
to the whole culture?
>>Joshua Foer: See I think that is your responsibility.
I think Google has become much more than just a librarian and is becoming more and more
intimately involved in what it means to think and to, I mean when you talk about the goggles,
by the way, [chuckles] maybe that's a myth, maybe the goggles aren't even coming.
But in any case --
>>male #7: It could.
>>Joshua Foer: if we're talking about a company, a technology that is mediating our direct
experience of reality on a moment by moment basis that's like we're in the realm of like
the spiritual here in terms of what kind of power that technology can wield upon us.
And I think it is Google, whoever creates this whether it's Apple or you guys or both
of you guys or you create it and they copy you --
that's incredible power and it brings with it incredible –
>>male #7: Um-hum.
>>Joshua Foer: responsibility.
>>male #7: I agree with that.
I didn't mean it as a way of shrugging off or we shouldn't have to worry about that,
I meant more it's a bigger question, it shouldn't be relegated to one company.
In a sense those goggles would be the ultimate reference librarian but that is to point out
to your issue that that's not the same as knowledge.
We should be coming up with a culture as appreciation that that's merely one side of a coin or multifaceted
object that as a measure of humility we shouldn't be thinking, "Oh we can come up with a way
to solve that problem."
Any one company I don't think should have that expectation.
We can become the best, fulfill our company's mission making information universally accessible,
that's different than trying to push wisdom onto everyone in the world and I think it
should remain that way.
>>Joshua Foer: I'm not sure that they're so separable.
That's I guess my response.
>>male #7: Okay, thanks.
>>Joshua Foer: Thanks.
A couple more minutes.
Does anyone have any other questions?
Okay.
Maybe we'll call it a day then.
[applause]
Thank you.