Translator: Jenny Carden Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
I am a sculptor and a street artist
and tonight I want to talk about a magical
and mind-blowing new technology
called virtual and augmented reality
and how it can catapult us
from the information age into the knowledge age.
But before I talk about what is so incredible about this technology,
I want to build some context around the discussion.
I want to talk about my favorite four-letter word -- [TIME]
We know where we are on the map --
we are familiar with that,
but very few of us have stepped back
and seen where we are in time.
And knowing that,
can give us clues as to what makes all of us sitting here today
so special and so unlike any other humans
that have come before us.
And knowing what makes us different
can help us see the challenges
that we are going to face
and the advantages that we can wield to create
the world that we want.
The future of our dreams.
I want to start by taking a journey into the past.
This is a street art piece I did
comparing the time dinosaurs and humans have been on Earth.
Each circle equals a million years.
And we have 180 million years of dinosaurs
and three dinosaur ages.
And how long do you think Homo sapiens took?
A quarter of a circle.
As you can see,
we literally just got here.
I have to admit, dinosaurs seemed minimally important in my mind.
I had no idea that Earth was their planet.
So what have we done in this quarter of a circle?
Well, we had a long period of the stone age.
Then, the agricultural age and the industrial age.
And all of you sitting here today ended up
in that teeny tiny red square.
The digital age. The information age.
Now, what comes next is hotly debated.
Will it be [The Virtual Age?]
[The Experiential Age?]
[The Space Age?]
[The Superhuman Age?]
[The Maker Age?]
[The Nuclear Age?]
Well, I believe we are going to look back on this
and call this the knowledge age,
and possibly the wisdom age.
In the last few generations, genius minds
like Buckminster Fuller, Vernor Vinge,
Gordon Moore, of the Moore's Law,
Heidi and Alvin Toffler and Ray Kurzweil
started mapping progress over time
and they noticed patterns
and they realized something quite astounding.
Whether you are talking about inventions
on the periodic table
or computing
or patents, transistors, population
even TED viewership,
we are seeing a trend towards exponential change.
And what this means is --
what happened in the last 10 years has nothing to do
with what can happen in the next 10 years.
So even if you understand this trend towards compound growth,
if we don't find ways to visualize it,
it is going to be hard to change our way of thinking.
So let's go back to the street.
Now, we as humans were able to run
at a speed of 15 miles per hour,
and we weren't able to go faster than that
until finally we rode horses
for 30 miles per hour
and we did that for thousands and thousands of years
and we couldn't go any faster.
Until one day we invented the Model T.
How fast do you think
that we can go today?
17,000 miles per hour
in the Space Shuttle.
This is what it would look like
before we rode horses.
And all of us ended up in what I call the jackpot generation.
Now, let's look at this on a chart.
We ran, we rode horses,
and in a little over just 100 years
we went from cars to exploring outer space.
Now, one of the things we are realizing is
that these trends are not just happening in technology;
it's happening in companies and social structures.
I mean just look at decentralized ideas
like Uber ride sharing and Couchsurfing and Airbnb --
it's causing social and legislative upheaval.
I mean, we have all seen massive companies
like Kodak and Blockbuster struggling to stay relevant.
And look at food --
you've got Coca-Cola selling vitamin water
and McDonalds putting kale on the menu.
So, we have to find ways
for even big things like big political parties
and governmental systems
to transform themselves
so they can change more quickly.
Now, I realized that we as humans
individually might not be mentally prepared for all this change.
So, I went back to the streets
to try to start conversations about the future.
To get people talking about it.
To get people thinking about it.
So, I put up pranks
like organ regeneration flyers
to talk about bioengineering.
I put up fake biometric and retina scanners
on abandon buildings.
I put up strange tech terms hoping people would look them up.
What about artificial intelligence?
I created micro timelines and transformed
fire into the modern microwave.
What about abacuses and calculators?
It's easy to feel nostalgic about the past
because it's so familiar.
But what's going to happen now that things are moving so quickly?
I want to zoom in on a single innovation
that I mentioned at the beginning of the talk.
Virtual reality and augmented reality
will change the way that you see and feel the world.
It's hard to describe it.
But basically, you can take a cellphone
or a tablet or a headset and move around
three dimensional objects on top of space.
And in the case of the latest augmented reality headsets
you can actually pick up virtual items and move them around.
In the case of virtual reality
you can transport yourself to another time and place --
put on a headset and look around
and look around as if you are actually there.
And the craziest part about this technology is very recently
it's gotten so advanced that when you put on a headset
and information is coming into your eyes your brain
and your subconscious is processing that information
and your body cannot tell that it's not real.
So if you are standing on a cliff
your lizard brain won't let you jump.
Now, this is a whole new operating system
just like the Internet and cellphones have been --
and we can hardly imagine our life without those!
Well, this is going to be virtual living
in every aspect of your life.
From virtual banking,
to virtual learning,
virtual travel,
virtual shopping,
virtual communication.
Of course, virtual gaming,
we can't forget that.
I mean, it's going to totally revolutionize
entire industries like construction
and it's already causing breakthroughs
in mental and physical rehabilitation.
So, let's tackle the challenges
and the advantages of this new age.
Starting with the advantages;
very expensive experiences
and very expensive things
become very inexpensive,
replicable, sharable.
And also location no longer matters.
We've always wanted as humans to transcend time and space.
Well, virtual reality lets us do that.
You can literally have great experiences
anywhere, anytime, with your friends and family
no matter who you are or where you are in the world.
So if you are a young girl in Kansas and you want to take a field trip
to open an Egyptian tomb in the past,
for the very first time, you can.
Want to see how beautiful Earth looks like from the moon
but you are not a billionaire living in the future?
Want to eat dinner with friends and family
but they are three thousand miles away?
Want to recombine molecules but you don't have a fancy lab?
Virtual reality will let us learn, feel,
remember and process new ideas
in a more experiential and deeper way.
Humans were hard wired to learn by doing
and virtual reality lets us do that.
Your mind and your body will feel like it was real --
and it will be real.
It is going to be a "new real".
We started out with data in the world.
A bunch of facts and figures
and we organized that data
into useful information and we put that into stories
and books and the Internet.
Well now, virtual reality can transform
that information into knowledge.
[Knowledge = Information gained through experience]
So, Edgar Dale stated that after two weeks
the human brain remembers
10 percent of what it reads,
20 percent of what it hears,
and 90 percent of what it does or simulates.
So, instead of cracking open the textbook
and having to read complicated theories
about physics and construction,
we all become foreman.
Our learning is going to be faster and deeper.
And the everyday person with augmented reality
can now fix their fridge, or their car,
pulling in the exact information needed
at the exact moment in time.
Now does anybody know the difference between knowledge and wisdom?
Compassion.
And one of the most surprising and unexpected things
we're learning about this new medium of virtual reality
is when people put on the headset
and they become another gender
in another country, in another place,
they immediately feel compassion.
So much so that the entire industry has nicknamed the virtual reality
as the empathy machine.
And it's already being used in the United Nations
to successfully change votes on the refugee crisis
and create conversations about laws
about solitary confinement and police training.
I believe that if we can spread compassion
we can see the wisdom age in our lifetime.
I was so blown over by this technology
that I started to incorporate it
into my street art and my prints.
This is a headset based art on top of art.
This is a postcard that becomes Harry Potter.
And my most recent work
takes the sounds made by the viewer
and creates animations.
In 2013, I began to create a sculptural
timeline of all these VR headsets,
starting 60 years ago and running all the way to today.
I was fascinated by the passionate quest of all these companies
to bring this technology to us.
And look what happened when I put it on a chart.
This is that same acceleration curve
that is so scary and exciting and prophetic
and this right here is the greatest challenge of our age.
Change.
The ability to love and enjoy change.
We have to admit that it's happening,
otherwise we are not going to be able
to leverage its unique abilities.
And lets start by saying that
change is not necessarily scary and bad.
Change can be good.
And in our accelerating world,
good things can happen more quickly.
You can use a fire to burn a house or cook a meal.
You can use a pen to write a declaration of war
or to write a love poem.
It's not the tools but how we use them
that define where we are striving as humans.
We've come from a world where only a few elite had access
to hand written books that were locked away,
to a world where we can take out
our second brain and read a book
or write down an idea
and it can spread all over the world
in a matter of days, or hours or seconds.
That has never been possible
in any other generation before.
The other thing that we need to focus on as a challenge
is the ability to become more fluid, less rigid.
I mean I will admit, it's so hard for me
to change my opinion about something
that I have already decided upon.
But we're going to have to rethink
solutions to problems that we thought we already solved.
And nobody knows the mindset of this acrobatic reinvention
better than the hardware engineers that are working so passionately
to bring this revolution to us.
The Toffler's stated that the time
between the original idea and mass adoption is now momentary.
The typewriter was invented in 1714
but it was 150 years before
the first model became available.
Virtual realty took a third of that time.
In part thanks to 3D printing a single headset
like this one from HTC Vive
went from prototype to being sold in stores
in a matter of years.
This is what it takes to succeed in a changing world.
The ability to scrap our ideas, change our minds
and to be curious rather than fearful of the unknown.
And who knows,
we might have to rethink schools.
I mean, how to we even teach critical thinking.
We might have to study teenagers to become
less fearful of change.
How do we make our governments,
and our universities and ourselves
more responsive and nimble?
I hope that in this process of stepping back in time,
we can see that most generations
were the same as past generations
on the order of thousands of years.
People were born into the same world that they died in.
Not anymore.
We are experiencing a new way of life.
You might even say a new way of being human.
I hope that I have made you
truly curious about your rare position in history
and given you the context
to see why this is the most exciting time in history to be alive.
We have the rare opportunity
to see the world change, in our lifetime.
And now that we're connected,
everyday people, we can get together
and change the world, in our lifetime.
I dare us to dream big.
Thank you.
(Applause)