Transcriber: TED Translators admin Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
(In French) Hello everyone
I'm Rim, I'm part of the Speaker's team
and I'm glad to welcome a very good friend of mine,
he's from Morocco, he is a student at the Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane
and he's going to present you "The next really BIG thing".
Please welcome Hazim Azghari.
(Applause)
Thank you.
I wanna say first that it's really funny for me to be here
because ... not only I look like a pretetious 20-year-old kid
who thinks he knows how to change the world,
but I also... Thanks.
But I also... back home in my university it's finals week and at this time
I'm supposed to be studying for my final exams.
But I thought it was interesting to see what you can learn
if you fly away from home 2,000 km on finals week.
So here I am.
But far from being pretentious,
what I want to do today is just share with you
my little journey or my little travel
or how I changed the way I see innovation
from innovation for the sake of innovation
to understanding what changing the world really meant
It was not really what I thought,
it's more like creative problem solving and a lot of things.
So I wanna today share with you
lessons on what I thought was
the next really big thing and how it'll became
the next really, not really big thing maybe.
So I wanna start by telling you about this
little story of mine and how I also wanted to be
the next big thing a little while ago.
So I took those few big names like Steve Jobs,
Mark Zuckerbeg and Bill Gates and
I place those guys on top of my head
and I wanted to become like them,
they were my role models kind of thing.
But soon enough
after I was participating in this competitions here and there,
convinced that I was going to become the next big something,
I met some interesting people who really questioned my first assumptions
by telling me:
"OK, so why are you doing this?"
And I looked at them with a very surprised face,
like, what a question!
"Why are you doing this?
How is it that you're changing the world for a better place by doing this?
how is it that you [unclear] are changing the world for a better place?"
Good question to ask!
And in those kind of conversations, you know,
when you start looking at that person
and you put down your cup of coffee and start arguing about for one hour,
and the only thing you conclude at the end is that your coffee is too cold to drink?
Well, that was the same for me.
But I really knew deep inside me that I didn't have the answers to that question,
so I went looking for them inside me.
What I found was a really interesting thing.
Those big role models of mine weren't really changing humanity.
And I thought of it why,
but there was something, there was a common thing between all of them.
There was this thing: money and profit. It mattered more than anything else.
And this thing, this very first thing,
was the thing that created problems and that I was my first lesson,
that the profit-driven model is very problematic.
And I want to give you two examples of two companies
that I thought were invited, but
ended up not being as much clean and ethical.
So the first one I'm going to start with is
this very famous drink that everyone likes, Coca-Cola.
If you go to Southern India, people may not like Coca-Cola as much because
Coca-Cola's doing some bad things in Southern India. It's literally
around its facilities, it's sucking up the ground water from the ground,
using it for their processing,
and it's dumping its waste into the remaining water.
So not only they suck up the water like this illustration shows it,
but also the water becomes unusable because they're dumping their waste on it.
Another example is our dearly beloved electronics company
that I'm actually using a remote of here,
that's Apple of course.
So Apple
maybe yeah, I think Apple changed the face of the world, yes,
not necessarily for the better, I think.
So, like any electronics company, Apple has electronic suppliers.
Where, do you ask? China of course.
Foxconn is one of those electronic suppliers
and Foxconn provides electronics for other companies, but Apple is..
I really mentioned Apple for the sake of being the biggest one.
In Foxconn, workers not only work overtime,
they pack them in packs of 20 and they sleep in a bedroom
that usually fits three people only,
and there's aluminium dust everywhere.
And it's really dangerous. But Apple just keeps ignoring every report that
is about hazardous working conditions and whatever.
It slows down innovation, they say.
So on May 12th, 2011, things kept going worse until
aluminium dust lead to an explosion.
4 workers killed, 18 injured.
Ask an Apple executive,
they'll say: "Well our customers, they want new electronics, amazing electronics
delivered to them each year.
What can we do?"
Ask a worker,
he says that Apple never really cared about workers welfare,
it's none of their interest. They only care about two things:
lowering th production costs, maximizing the product quality.
Clearly you see here, money is the deal!
But I want to say
two things that come back first.
You may say that it is not necessarily
going to happen that if you are a big company,
that you're going to become unethical,
and the second thing you may say is that
one may stay ethical while being a big company
and you not necessarily have to go through those things
and have a bad image, but I want to ask a question.
The really first question:
why do you get in those businesses in the first place?
how are those businesses even changing humanity?
Imagine for just a second, if we were, tomorrow,
full-time, be concerned about solving problems such as poverty.
Imagine if moved the whole smartphone industry tomorrow to start working on
word hunger rather than making the fastest rectangle with round corners.
Imagine if, tomorrow, big companies wanted to start solving word hunger
instead of producing the next Hunger Games movie.
It may give you something in the next five years,
but that come back from that etherial dream, and
let's see the word for what it really is.
This is some interesting statistics:
so 634 apps are downloaded each second
from both android market and App Store combined,
while a child dies
from the disease related to hunger each 12 seconds.
Quick math in there, you have like 7600 applications being downloaded
for each child that dies.
I want to just ask a question:
one doesn't have really to relate to the other or cause the other but
it looks to me like while a child is dying,
people are busy downloading interesting stuff and it looks like
this society thatthese companies are promoting is a society
in which the highest moral act is downloading apps.
Think again: is it really what we want?
Those poor previous role models of mine, Apple, Coca-Cola, will really change humanity.
Worse, they solve existing problems.
And however cliché it sounds to say
that money is the root of all evil,
I think there's some truth to it
when money becomes your only and sole motivation.
So clearly, as I was over with that illusion of becoming the next big thing,
I started looking around: who were the people
that were really solving the real problems?
And I thought, problems like world hunger and poverty,
it only took a government tons of money and tons of modelization
to be able to solve those.
While it may be true that governments may solve issues
such as poverty and hunger,
it is wrong to think that people like you and me
could do something there. There is a place for innovation and simple people,
as like to call them.
So that was my second lesson.
I found out that some people out there
are really trying to solve the existing problems.
And most important problems they may think of are those.
And I want to start with education
'cause it's something which concerns all of us on a really close basis.
So education seems like a big broken building with so many things to fix,
impossible to tackle.
But if you want to take just a quick look around you,
you may find some interest in
problem solvers that you may not recognize at first, but
are doing really great things.
So I found out about Khan Academy, quick raise of hands,
who here knows about Khan Academy?
Well quite a few, okay,
So I want to explain: Khan Academy is a website
that features a collection of videos,
educational videos of maximum ten minutes
which are lectures of either maths,
either math, art history, physics and astronomy, many other things.
And Khan Academy, the way it started, is really interesting. Salman Khan,
the founder of Khan Academy, was a hedge fund analyst
and he used Youtube to as a means to tutor his cousins,
on another place,
by a record in himself like teaching math on a sheet of paper.
So it startes like this,
but the cousins gave him a feedback
that they really liked him on video,
more than on reality.
He asked them why. They said, "well we can pause you
if we have enough of you, we can, like, if we sleep through the video,
then we can watch it again, we can keep it for further reference,
many things that would not usually happen in a classroom.
Even if you're absent in a classroom, you cannot really see the professor again.
So Khan Academy started this way.
Instead of putting more videos on the internet, people looked at them and then
he just moved from being a hedge fund analyst
to working full-time for his nonprofit organization
called The Khan Academy, which today has 400,000 subscribers
and more than 3,600 videos.
Now more important than the numbers,
is what Khan Academy allows us to imagine.
It allows us to imagine a model that we call the flipped classroom model,
in which what used to be
the lecture would be assigned as a homework
and you would watch at home and keep it for further reference,
and what used to be practice and homework would be done in class,
so as the teacher and students can interact,
have time to ask personal questions and see what problems they were really facing.
And that actually improved performance,
I think twelve schools today are trying to use this model back in California
and it's given crazy results for students in 5th grade
who are learning math in a radically different manner.
But still here Khan Academy is a big example maybe on
how something small can go bigger but Khan Academy didn't do much,
it just expanded on a concept we all knew about:
video tutorials. Quite simple but very innovative in a sense.
Sometimes you sleep through a class,
maybe one hour, two hours, three hours, four hours,
but you just sleep!
And you go back home and you just see a video tutorial,
maybe two or three and
you pretty much get the whole thing.
And you wonder, why teachers can't be as effective,
as straightforward and sometimes
just as funny?
Good question to ask but
I want to talk now about other problems. Education may seem easy.
What about poverty, world hunger,
human trafficking, other problems.
It may not be one person that may be able to tackle those problems but maybe
not two, not three, not four,
maybe sixteen.
And here I talk about Matternet which is a project started by a group
of 16 students who thought about transportation,
being a most important thing
that leads human development.
So there's a big deal in the world that actually one billion people
are getting disconnected from the main road network
in Africa and Asia due to
conditions like, natural conditions like flood, heavy rain, etc.
Those people can no more get their food,
no more get their medecine etc.
So what do these guys thought about is this:
this is like a quad copter, something this big, and it flies from point A to point B
and it can transport something from three to five kilograms.
And this actually enabled them to do something about hunger and poverty
in medicine and health.
So what they did,
for example imagine a person
was to walk 20 km to the hospital but there's no road,
so the person gives a call to the hospital, the hospital sends off
the medicine by this thing,
and problem solved!
But what they hope to do is this:
it's to create an open roadless network where people would transfer
packages all over the world, freely.
And this leads you to think
small problems, people solve them, lead them to bigger issues.
So when I learned about this, the first thing I started to do is
to bug my friends. We're talking about
problems like poverty, hunger, this is for governements.
For us it's wiser to learn Android programming,
mobile web programming,
to make the next big app that makes shopping easier.
The next big social networks for pet owners or whatever.
Problems that clearly don't exist
But after seeing all of this, you ask yourself a natural question,
which problem do I solve? Some problems you know about,
some problems you don't know about.
Some problems you think you're qualified for, but quite not really.
Some problems that really bug you, some problems that are personal,
some problems that are difficult to deal with
And you ask yourself, ok, which problem do I solve?
And I think it really takes up to two things:
one thing is to start from the problem that exists; and however silly it may sound,
this is a problem that does not exist,
but it led to Coca-Cola.
And not only all you have is water in India, you no more have water in India.
you have only Coca-Cola.
Starting from a problem that exists is not something easy.
You should start from either a personal problem,
a problem that you see, a problem that you can grasp the consequences of,
that you can feel and see.
And that takes time!
The second thing to take is that you should start from a problem
that it is easy to solve. And that means starting small and grow big.
But not necessarily knowing where you're going.
You cannot really start tomorrow to say,
I want to start a social movement tomorrow, I want to start a revolution.
I want to start other things.
Sometimes it just takes you to solve a small llittle problem.
Salman Khan go back, started by tutoring his cousin.
He used Youtube as a means to solve a problem,
ended up solving education and improving it.
Those people who started by transporting their package A from package B....
a package from place A to point B
started by doing a university project all summer.
And now they're doing something really toward hunger and poverty.
So think again: you really to start small and not necessarily
know where you're going, but as soon as you solve the first problem,
you can see where you're going and hopefully the problem will lead
to something bigger and then you can take the lead to solving the next problem.
and I want to conclude by using a quote from a dear person of mine...
I actually don't know him, he's the developper of Gmail.
Some of you may think, what is Google doing in this presentation?
Actually, I'm kind of misusing the quote.
So the guy is saying, the developer of Gmail, Paul Buchheit,
"Live in the future, build what's missing."
This is the way to innovation.
But I want to say, if our future looks like flying cars,
touch screens all over the place and everything,
there's nothing wrong with that. But I think we may have to make sure
that this future doesn't have people starving,
doesn't have people being exploited,
doesn't have people dying from cold,
while other people are enjoying the touchscreens all over,
and flying in some cars.
So if you want to help for the future
and build what's missing, I think you should build what's missing
for a future that has no more poverty, no more exploitation,
no more human traffic, no more slavery and no more world hunger.
And for me, that will be the next really big thing.
Thank you.
(Applause)