what happened the most important
developments in human development our
first question
Wow since when do we measure the human
development min do we start well our
ancestors Homo sapiens the primitive
forms of Homo sapiens evolved three
hundred thousand years before common age
and modern Homo sapiens cro-magnon men
only forty thousand years forty thousand
years before common age they were
foragers our ancestors of foragers there
they were collecting fruits and plants
hunting animals and maybe we should
start measuring time with that but many
anthropologist will disagree with that
they said there's many more important
things actually it's a farming you see
the dog may have been domesticated
fourteen thousand years before common
age but horse was domesticated only
eight thousand years before common age
we then learn how to keep horse in
Corral's ox was hinge to a plow maybe
six thousand years before common age
which obvious led to agriculture and
farming so our ancestors didn't have to
follow the animals and in hunting
grounds and find a food for himself like
actually produce a food for themselves
which then meant that there were first
settlements this first settlements led
to formations of villages and cities
accumulation of wealth every
documentation wealth there were other
people who said oh you know I don't want
to work in a field
I'd rather plunder honor take hold of
that wealth which led to Wars and
invasions and big empires and empires
were also a very chosen formative
moments in
in human development Ottoman Empire
Mongolian Arab Empire Roman Empire and
they were very very transformational in
a sense that they were uniting customs
trade they brought people together after
all they had a common Empire so it must
be that Wars or maybe with the plants or
maybe farming had something to do with
human development or if it were not for
fighting when there must be a great
ideas a three big thinkers Buddha
Confucius and Socrates lived
approximately the same time some five
six centuries before common age
philosopher Karl yonkers says oh this is
axial age this is the time of awakening
of our species we became aware of who we
are Buddha of course founded one of the
major religions and other religions as
well as hundreds of millions of people
will argue are very very important in
the history of mankind the Christianity
Islam Judaism a very very important so
they must have been as many people who
passionately claim a very important for
human development religion is spread
through spoken but also through a
written word so it must be in writing
has something to do with very important
part of human development first records
come from Asia for time yet they did not
have numbers and they didn't have the
older there was some support to a
numbering system to facilitate exchange
over goods but simple concept like
number of zero was not there for another
four thousand years when today's modern
Arabic counting system that we use
almost universally across the world was
invented historian Ian Morris was very
interested to study looking at his
oceans of facts it's very very hard so
he tried to reduce this to some sort of
quantifiable scale he looked at the four
things the one is
capture if you want a really painstaking
detailed study and he said well energy
capture must be important because this
is how much energy we can collect for
food for transport etc etc so that's one
factor the other factor is complexity of
organizations or so he took the largest
city as a proxy of that war making
capabilities of course size of troops
weapons etc etc and finally information
how do we exchange information how we
process etcetera etcetera so he sort of
added all these things together and of
course he simplifies things and there
are disadvantages in doing this but
there is also some advantages and his
facts are his findings are astonishing
what is astonishing he plots here at the
Social Development Index on your left
hand side and population of people on
planet Earth on right hand side and two
lines are almost identical what is also
very astonishing is that it seems like
human progress was very boring was very
flat we progressed very very slowly but
something happened in mid 18th century I
was that that happened in mid 18th
century is a machine and that's not one
machine but serious of developments
around steam engine and James Watts
invention and clearly that although this
is not a one single moment that there
are also a number of events that
unfolded Industrial Revolution
advantages the metallurgy and mechanical
engineering in chemistry that rapidly
accelerated development engines and
technology advanced suddenly there are
these new technologies that could move
and help us our species Homo sapiens to
do something about this so this age of
the first machine really helped us by
managing a physical power extending our
muscle power and muscle power of animals
around us so that we could generate and
dispose and use mechanical power for any
useful purpose we can move faster we can
lift heavy things etc etc which was also
not always without without without
resistance and what happened to our good
good old friend Horace there was 28
million horses approximately 28 million
horses living in North America at the
end of 19th century today there are only
2 million the horses have been replaced
by tractors another machinery in
agriculture and you know you can imagine
now we are surrounded by some other
kinds of machines and these machines are
for all practical purposes much better
than we are
and we have these machines all around us
so this extension or help to our mental
power is really very important moment it
you know if the physical power is
supported by the first machine age you
can imagine what the second Machine Age
could do for us and this whole has to do
with increasing power in computing that
is famous Moore's law that says that
every year computing ability essentially
doubles more or less which means that
computers computers today are roughly
hundred billion times faster than
computers that were used maybe 40 years
ago so next year they will double they
were there will be 200 billion times
faster year after only 400 so something
which is already great moves ever faster
and faster the other thing is this that
everything is connected this Internet of
Things notion we have appliances at home
cameras and whatever you can turn on
your aircon remotely you can collect the
data remotely this is this confluence of
collecting data and processing all this
information creates a very interesting
dynamics as we speak so what about
water this small island in which we live
around 720 square kilometers with almost
6 million people we have both too little
in too much water we and off water
self-sufficient so we have to import 40%
of water from province of Johor in
malaysia and at the same time as we all
know it when it rains it rains cats and
dogs and it gets very very wet so it's
sort of very bizarre we are 10th most
water stressed country on planet earth
and yet at the same time we sometimes
experience having too much water this is
what happened in January 8th in burdock
Singapore this is taken by a colleague
of mine going to work in a bus and off
she goes
there is a bit of a heavy rain and that
heavy rain yeah it's it's a lovely video
and it shows that this happens in this
highly developed very sophisticated
smart cities as also so how can this
possibly happen well it's hard the
rainfall in tropics is very very
difficult this is what we call a
microburst or convective storm when it
rains it rains through this convective
cells and as we all experience here in
Singapore you can walk on one side of
the road and it's perfectly dry and on
the other side of the road it could be
raining cats and dogs so it's highly
that it's highly unevenly distributed
it's very difficult to predict so what
can be done about this I grew up in
which I'm associated has developed in
collaboration with people be here in
Singapore and deployed a system of
rainfall radars this is a very special
x-band radar so technical term but what
makes these radars very very special is
that they can provide information at the
size of one hundred five hundred meters
the size of a football pitch and what is
even better that we can provide is
generating new rainfall forecast every
two minutes so every two minutes you'll
get an
dated rainfall forecast for next six
seven hours and I can tell you whether
this pitch will remain dry or wet and
very accurately so this is good so we
can move because flooding in cities is
very localized phenomena you really know
what what happens at the level of the
street but radar you know fantastic it
sees it senses the rain in the sky a few
thousand meters above the ground so we
have to see what happens on the ground
and what happens on the ground well we
can have measuring devices but we've got
this very interesting approach that we
could use video signals and I would not
expect you to go outside and put your
phone smartphone and take pictures of
falling grain but our city and like any
other modern city has tens of thousands
of CCTV cameras so we are converting
CCTV feeds into very localized rightful
information next time we get into MRT
station look around how many cameras are
there these are all possibly rainfall
meters how does this work this is a
rainfall video taken off my just in
front of my office at NUS so what you
need to do you first need to highlight
the raindrops and of course the longer
the rainfall streak the faster rain drop
moves so it's a bit larger than the
others then what you need to do you need
to subtract the background simply
because people that install security
cameras do not like you to see what
they're looking at so this is perfectly
anonymized and then you use some
computing the key techniques to find out
how far away are these rain streaks and
how large are they and if you add them
all together this is what you end up
with you have a video signal to cameras
at the top and below you have
instantaneous rainfall rate and you can
see if the rate increases the camera
detects this information and when it
stops it accurately protects so this is
this is great we call this the rain
obviously is just the a1 of an
environmental power
air-quality temperature atmospheric
pressure you name it many many factors
can be can be processed particularly now
that we have all this variable devices
smartwatches smart phones that collect
the data and we can process them
we call this opportunistic sensing you
see the cameras are not installed to
measure rainfall the cameras are there
to do something else and we are
processing this to arrive at a different
information information that could bring
more value from a water management
perspective
so is there shifting authority here
because you know camera can now detect
and calculate rainfall intensity that is
sort of sort of scary thought because
these machines are now able to do the
things that once we were supposed to be
so sort of for the four billion years
the life on planet Earth evolve using
principles of national selection but now
we are moving to this age of intelligent
design and what was previously done
exclusively by humans is increasingly
now done by AI clearly there is a are we
going away over the horse I have this
machines around us that are doing so
many things better than we do and this
is Vasily Leontief he's a Russian North
American Nobel Prize winner economist
and he has this you know are we going
the way of the horse twenty eight
million two million is are we is the
same stuff going to happen to us
well I am NOT that person a stick I
don't think we are going to weigh up the
horse because I believe in this stage of
extended intelligence that while you can
design machine to be better than human
in any particular aspect you can have
machine that is much faster than a human
and little if heavier stuff of compute
faster than human
a human with a good machine cannot be
outperformed by machine alone so this
whole notion of artificial intelligence
that we find very exciting a very very
useful actually should be considered
perhaps by a notion of extended
intelligence how do we use these
intelligent designs to help us do our
job better among the other things also
water management thank you