Name: Pablos Holman - Zeitgeist Americas 2013
Uploaded: 2016-07-07T06:44:38.000Z
Duration: 16 min 52 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

>>Pablos Holman: So, yeah, I'm a hacker, and nothing bad has ever happened to me. So I'm

working on trying to import problems from other places and work on those.

I want to show you a little bit about how hackers think.

This is a buddy of ours named Samy. Samy served three years for crashing MySpace with a virus

he was using to try and pick up chicks by changing all their pages to say, "Samy is

my hero," and automatically adding them as his friend on MySpace, which got him, like,

over a million friends in under 24 hours, which is pretty cool.

But Samy is allowed to use a computer again. Anybody here use this maps program?

Samy figured out that the way Google knows about the traffic is that your phones report

what's going on as you're driving around. And so he started just sending fake data to

Google Maps that says, you know, there's a lot of people out on the roads that I'm about

[ Laughter ] -- just for fun, you know. The reason I'm

telling you about Samy and I wish I had time to tell you more about hackers, is he has

a different kind of brain than you do. His brain is a really important natural resource,

and we're using it for all the wrong things; right? Clearly.

An example I've used before is if you get a new gadget and show it to your mom or your

grandma, she might ask you, well, what does this do? And you can explain. Well, it's like

an iPhone. You stick it on your head, mom. And she would understand that; right?

But if you give a new gadget to Samy, which actually happens all the time, the question

is different. The question is what can I make this do? And he'll take all the screws out,

break it into a lot of little pieces and then figure out what he can build from the rubble;

right? That discovery process is fundamental to invention,

it's fundamental to innovation. That is where every new thing we ever get comes from. And

you can't skip that part, or you don't get anything new.

So what's going on now is humans are running this grand experiment. We're trying to figure

out every day how do we keep more people alive on just one planet. More people, no additional

planets. And the only thing that we can do is invent

our way out of this. And so we're trying to find ways to scale up invention.

This is a protocol diagram that hackers would use. It's for a crypto system that's built

into your Web browser called SSL. And that's what encrypts your credit card numbers and

passwords. That is really boring shit. But what hackers will do is attack every point

in this protocol; right? What happens if I send a date from the future? What happens

if I send two responses instead of one? What happens if I send a zero instead of a one?

I might get a computer to break. And if I can get it to break in one way, maybe I can

get it to break in some other way, like a way that makes you my friend on MySpace or

Facebook, or gives me your credit card number or maybe does something more constructive.

This is anopheles stephensi. She is a female mosquito carrying malaria in Africa, and she

kills about a million people a year. Half of them are kids under five; right?

And this is a protocol diagram for malaria. It spends some of its lifetime in humans,

some of its life in a mosquito. It's very complicated. We don't actually understand

everything about how this works, but what I do in my lab where I work is I hire hackers

to attack every point in this protocol, and we try to figure out how can we intervene?

How can we stop that? How can we solve a problem that's big?

This is the old fashioned way of going after malaria. We just spray chemicals that kill

everything; right? You hope some of the good stuff comes back.

This is a real ad from, like, the '40s where we were teaching kids to sing that "DDT is

good for me." It's not actually good for you. [ Laughter ]

It's still an important part of how we're going to attack malaria, but we're trying

to add tools to the arsenal and figure out how to deal with that.

So one of our crazy ideas was what if we could find mosquitoes with computers and shoot them

down with laser beams, which sounds like fun. Pretty much whatever your problem is, we have

a solution involving laser beams. So this is us tracking mosquitoes in real

time. And what we do is use a computer to sample their wing frequency.

We can go to the next video. And what they do -- this is a mosquito we

lit up with an ultraviolet laser, so she's not coming back. This is very satisfying stuff

because not even PETA comes to save mosquitoes. Like, you can kill as many as you want.

[ Laughter ] So, you know, people with guns, let's just

give them lasers and let them go after mosquitoes. It will be fine.

This is kind of before we tuned our lasers and we just totally vaporized the mosquitoes,

which is also rewarding and fun. But the point is what's going on here is that

we've used computers, and we've taken the advancements that Moore's law gave us. We

compute the value of the life of every individual bug before we shoot it down. That's unprecedented

for humans, right? We've never had that kind of computation to throw around, and now we

do. And our imaginations are not keeping up. You

have a supercomputer in your pocket and you are using it to play, like, you know, fart

apps or dots or something. This is not the limit of what we can do with these computers.

We are at the beginning of figuring it out. I'm not going to go into more detail on this,

but the rough idea is we put lasers on fence posts, around a building, or a village and

shoot mosquitoes as they fly towards humans. Eventually, we realized, oh, we can protect

crops, too, with an organic photonic pesticide. All kinds of possibilities.

But this is again -- we just cheat at invention by using Moore's law to scale others haven't

tried yet. So this is all taking place in our lab. This

is our machine shop. The lab is called Intellectual Ventures Lab. And what we do is we try to

take on the biggest problems we can find. Our business model is a little different because

we don't make any products. We just work on invention.

We can prototype things here. We basically just bought one of every tool in the world,

hired one of every kind of scientist. This is our warehouse. Another 8,000 tools that

don't fit in the lab. But I can have them in a couple hours if I need them for a project.

And that's a way of cheating at invention and being faster.

So I'm going to show you a couple quick things that we work on. This is a cubic mile of oil.

Earlier today you heard that a cubic mile is enough space to hold all the humans on

earth. That's a huge amount. Well, a cubic mile of oil is how much energy we used in

about the year 2000, right? This is what we use today, 3 1/2 cubic miles of oil. That's

how much energy we use. Some of it is coal, but...

If we keep on with what we're doing and we enact all of our brilliant policies for reducing

energy consumption, we only need an additional 1.8 cubic miles by 2035, right?

If we do a really great job and reduce our energy consumption a lot, we only need 1.4.

Pretty good, huh? We need a lot of energy. We need a lot of energy. This is how much

energy we need by 2050 because we are going to run out of oil and coal. We got to come

up with other ways of getting this. It is a lot. More than people ever visualize.

These guys are useful. You know, that seems like a free way to get energy. I mean it is

modulo the cost of building windmills. But if you take those guys, windmills, turbines,

state-of-the-art turbines and you put them over the entire -- all the fly-over states,

then you get one cubic mile of oil worth of energy. And then what happens? You are going

to run out of space and they are going to end up in your backyard, right? So, you know,

we love windmills but you might want to think about what's going to happen when it's not

just in your neighbor's backyard. So this gets kind of interesting. It turns

out we've got this amazing shit right here. That can, the size of a Coor's Light has 1.8

million times the energy density of oil, right? That can is worth 120,000 barrels worth of