Zeitgeist Day 2013 - Los Angeles CA Federico Pistono
Okay! Let's get this started!
What I'm about to tell you involves the way information is spread.
And it will look like I'm talking about myself, but I'm not.
Unfortunately that's the way ideas are passed through,
from people to people.
So bear in mind that everything I'm about to tell you
came to me from others,
and I want to pass them on to you.
So today I'd like to tell you a story. It's a story of a movement,
a story of an idea actually, a simple yet powerful, unstoppable idea.
And we have to thank some people for this,
among which The Zeitgeist Movement, of course,
the Free and Open Source community, the hackers, the makers,
the industrious inventors who are shaping our future.
[Applause]
First, let me take a step back. 2008:
a group of people begins to challenge the assumption
that labor is a necessary requirement for survival in the 21st century.
They claim that automation and the ability of machines to work
is increasing rapidly, and soon we could replace most jobs,
if not all of them in the economy,
potentially destabilizing the whole system irreversibly.
But, I mean, these are just a fringe minority, a group of extremists.
Just look at yourselves.
[Laughter]
Most people believe this to be just bollocks, nonsense.
But then ... you keep seeing headlines like this:
'U.S. Unemployment: Our Long Economic Nightmare Continues'
and 'Euro Zone Unemployment Rises To Record.'
And then I have what I call the Kodak story, or the Kodak moment,
the once undisputed giant of the photography industry:
90% of the global market in 1976,
145,000 employees in 1984.
2012: Net worth of negative $1 billion dollars when it went bankrupt.
Why? Because they failed to predict the power of exponential trends
when it comes to technology. The same year 2012,
Instagram digital photography company:
13 employees, acquired by Facebook for a billion dollars.
It gets even more ironic,
because Kodak fricking invented digital photography in 1975!
They came out with the first commercially available .01 megapixel digital camera,
but at the time they thought it was a toy, right?
It was like a stamp-size thing. It's like, it's never going to work.
They failed to predict exponential trends.
And exponential trends are going faster and faster.
Foxconn is already beginning to replace its workers with robots.
Many others are doing the same,
and I'm not going to do the whole thing,
because I already gave talks about this. You can check it out on YouTube.
The point is, that a year and a half ago, I decided to quit my job
and dedicate my life, well my time up to now, to writing a book
that I hoped would inspire people to change their mind about this issue,
and bring the idea into the public spotlight.
So how did it go? Well, the book came out on November 5th.
(Remember, remember ...)
[Laughter]
And then I gave talks in some like 20 countries, whatever, I ... some coverage of that:
Brazil, Huffington Post, Forbes Magazine
and then TED Vienna. The video now has more than 200K views.
It's thanks to the amazing Linguistic Team
of the Resource-Based Economy.
The Linguistic Team, they are translating videos in all major languages.
Let's give them a round of applause guys.
[Applause]
So, then the topic started to pick up in the mainstream.
I'll just give you a couple of examples: Paul Krugman,
Nobel Prize in Economics, Op-Ed Columnist for The New York Times.
Here are some of the articles he wrote: 'Robots and Robber Barons' and then
'The Rise of the Robots' just a month later.
And then here: Jeremy Warner, Assistant Editor of The Daily Telegragh,
one of Britain's leading business and economics commentators,
'Our robotic revolution is just beginning to gather steam.'
Next, Cory Doctorow, Co-Editor of 'Boing Boing,'
'Robots are taking your job and mine: deal with it.'
And finally, here's my book 'Robots Will Steal Your Job, but that's OK,'
and here’s two months later, Wired magazine cover
'Robots will take your job, and you'll be glad they did.'
[Laughter]
Now, some have suggested that Wired magazine copied my book and the cover.
You know what? Frankly, I don't know and I don't care, OK?
That's not the point. The point is that you shouldn't get attached to your stuff
because guess what? It's not your stuff.
It's ideas, OK? Once they are out there, they are not yours.
Ideas are spreading, that's what matters.
And why do I think that? Because ideas speak loudly.
They speak louder than myself, louder than any single one of you,
louder than anyone else because you see, and I quote
"Beneath this mask there is more than flesh.
Beneath this mask, there is an idea, and ideas are bulletproof."
[Laughter, applause]
Some of you know I graduated from Singularity University
at the NASA Ames Research Park last summer,
and I studied how exponential technologies can help improve
the lives of a billion people or more in less than a decade.
And I've been asked many times if I spoke with gentlemen such as
Peter Diamandis or Raymond Kurzweil,
and if I exposed the ideas of a Resource-Based Economy to them,
and what was their response, if they changed their mind in some way.
So here's what Peter H. Diamandis, Founder and CEO of The X Prize,
had to say just a few weeks ago.
[Question] Median wage is now dropping, adjusted for inflation,
and most economists looking at it find that it's no longer globalization
that's causing the median wage to drop, it's actually technological change.
We could presumably see a lot of people not only out of work,
but the median wage continue to drop.
So the question is "Who's gonna buy the stuff?"
[Diamandis] It's a fascinating question. Let me answer it in two parts.
One, a friend of mine, an SU alumnus,
just wrote a book, which I love. The title is
'Robots Will Steal Your Jobs, but that's OK.'
We're going to be fundamentally changing society,
and the question is, maybe people don't have jobs.
I was joking where I say "I'm sort of a libertarian capitalist at heart,"
but we're heading towards a future of socialism.
And Ray Kurzweil, inventor and futurist, multimillionaire
and Director of Engineering at Google - not exactly a communist.
[Kurzweil] - We'll actually achieve the goals of communism -
to each according to their needs, from each according to their ability -
through this combination of open source information
and with these nanotechnology assemblers..."
He said "We will deliver the goals of communism
from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs
through open source and nanotechnology."
Now, reality check, OK? Come on, let's be realistic.
I am not personally responsible for changing anybody's mind.
I am mostly irrelevant. I'm nobody!
Yet, things are changing. People are talking, and why?
Because of the power of ideas.
I didn't come up with this stuff. I was preceded by a lot of people,
like, I don't know, some guy called Aristotle,
2400 years ago.
And, I was inspired by many extraordinary individuals,
the great men and women that I pay tribute to,
and they were inspired by others as well,
all the way down, like turtles.
As Isaac Newton once said "We stand on the shoulders of giants,"
which is what he was doing when he adapted that saying
from Bernard de Chartres.
As Kirby Ferguson states in his most excellent series 'Everything is a Remix'
"The interdependence of our creativity
has been obscured by powerful cultural ideas.
But technology is now exposing this connectedness,
and the most dramatic results can happen when ideas are combined,"
or as Matt Ridley puts it "When ideas have sex."
[Laughter, wolf-whistle]
By connecting ideas together, creative leaps can be made,
producing some of history’s biggest breakthroughs.
And, ideas don't belong to anyone; they are free.
And we, we are vehicles for these ideas,
or even better, we are wonderful remix machines.
As my friend Jason Silva says ''Ideas are like organisms, they replicate.
They have infectivity and spreading powers. They leap from brain to brain.
they compete for the limited resources of our attention.''
They are what Richard Dawkins calls "The new replicators,
born from the primordial soup of human culture."
And this is what ideas have achieved. They were considered crazy,
our ideas: outrageous! nonsense! just 4 years ago.
And now, Paul Krugman and everyone else talks about them.
They have become a cultural meme, effectively.
Now, where do we go from here?
I think we have very different futures ahead of us,
and depending on the choices we make today, from now on.
Just like with the issue of technological unemployment,
people have a really hard time imagining what tomorrow could be like,
until it happens. And then, it was obvious, everybody knew all along.
[Laughter]
And just like that, we have amazing individuals spreading ideas.
'The First Civilization,' a free book about a Resource-Based Economy
up on the TZM blog,
'Waking Up,' an open source, collaborative movie
about a positive future for humanity.
And this is just with respect to The Zeitgeist Movement.
There are a lot more groups also working towards the same basic goal:
that we need to come together.
[MOVIE STARTS]
(You can take down my light.)
[Narrator] - There's an entire universe of people out there,
countless others spreading ideas of a positive future.
You might call them dreamers, or crazy.
You might say that what they are doing is never going to work,
and that we are doomed to fall to our primal instincts.
Brothers and sisters, comrades and friends,
I am here to tell you differently.
I know that we live an age of daunting problems.
We need the best ideas possible. We need them now,
and we need them to spread fast.
The 'common good' is a meme that was overwhelmed
by the seducive mirage of blind profit and intellectual property.
But it needs to spread again.
If the meme prospers, our laws, our norms,
our society: they all transform.
This is social evolution.
And it’s not up to governments,
it’s not up to corporations,
and it's not up to lawyers.
It is up to us.
WE are the children of a thousand generations of this human race,
and we have come this far not to be subjected to imperialism,
conflict, and deprivation.
We are meant for something great.
I am here to tell you that with the right mind and motivation
we can achieve anything.
We have the technology to feed everyone on earth.
We can escape the prison of working for survival,
and we can find a balance with nature.
We can do all this and much more,
but only if we want to.
♪ ♫ ♪
And now, go and do something amazing!
♪ ♫ ♪
Thank you.
[Applause]
The Zeitgeist Movement thezeitgeistmovement.com