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June 12 - June 22, 2022
“A game designer would never put it in a game because people hate that.” Instead Sheldon has implemented an “experience points” game-based design. Students begin the semester as a level zero avatar (equivalent to an F), and strive toward a level 12 (an A). This means that anything you do in the class produces forward motion, and students always know exactly where they stand—two conditions that serve to motivate.
And you do. Why? Because games take testing, the most ludicrous, painful part of school, and make it fun.”
As this technology develops, games will be able to record massive amounts of data about every aspect of each student’s development—a far superior metric for progress than the one-size-fits-all testing method we currently favor.
In short, educating girls is the greatest poverty-reduction strategy around.
Africa has 1.3 percent of the world’s health workers caring for 25 percent of the global disease burden.
Also, by digitizing hand movements and placing a digital layer between the surgeon and the robotic instruments, you can take out jitter, make motions more precise, and even transmit the surgical incisions over a long distance, allowing an expert in Los Angeles to conduct surgery in Algiers during their free time without spending twenty hours on airplanes.”
P4 stands for “predictive, personalized, preventative, and participatory,”
The free flow of information has become so important to all of us that in 2011 the United Nations declared “access to the Internet” a fundamental human right.
modern information and communication technologies are the greatest tools for self-empowerment we’ve ever seen.”
Imagine building censorship systems that are as detailed and fine-tuned to the information needs of their users as the behavioral advertising we encounter every day. The only difference between the two is that one system learns everything about us to show us more relevant advertisements, while the other learns everything about us to ban us from accessing relevant pages.
So while ICT is clearly the greatest tool for self-empowerment we’ve yet seen, it’s still only a tool, and, like all tools, is fundamentally neutral.
There are four major motivators that drive innovation. The first, and weakest of the bunch, is curiosity: the desire to find out why, to open the black box, to see around the next bend. Curiosity is a powerful jones. It fuels much of science, but it’s nothing compared to fear, our next motivator. Extraordinary fear enables extraordinary risk-taking. John F. Kennedy’s Apollo program was executed at significant peril and tremendous expense in response to the early Soviet space successes. (You can ballpark the ratio of fear to curiosity as a driver for human innovation: it’s the ratio of the
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“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
“[D]on’t think outside the box. Go box shopping. Keep trying on one after another until you find the one that catalyzes your thinking. A good box is like a lane marker on the highway. It’s a constraint that liberates.”
The point is that incentive prizes have a three-hundred-year track record of driving progress and accelerating change.
I’ve always believed (to paraphrase computer scientist Alan Kay) that the best way to predict the future is to create it yourself, and in my five decades of experience, there is no better way to do just that than with incentive prizes.
The point here, of course, is that Clarke was right. Demonstrating great ideas involves a considerable amount of risk. There will always be naysayers. People will resist breakthrough ideas until the moment they’re accepted as the new norm.
“Revolutionary ideas come from nonsense. If an idea is truly a breakthrough, then the day before it was discovered, it must have been considered crazy or nonsense or both—otherwise it wouldn’t be a breakthrough.”
Fearlessness is like a muscle: the more we use it, the stronger it becomes.
Many have built their careers buttressing the status quo, reinforcing what they’ve already accomplished, and resisting the radical thinking that can topple their legacy—not exactly the attitude you want when trying to drive innovation forward.
Henry Ford agreed: “None of our men are ‘experts.’ We have most unfortunately found it necessary to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an expert because no one ever considers himself expert if he really knows his job . . . Thinking always ahead, thinking always of trying to do more, brings a state of mind in which nothing is impossible.” So if you’re going after grand challenges, experts may not be your best coconspirators.
Reputation is a quality built through consistent performance and serial successes. One big failure can topple decades of effort.
people can practice stretching their imaginations, taking bigger risks, and learning to see failure as a building block of innovation rather than its anathema.
When we enlarge the variety and reach of technology, we increase options, not just for ourselves and not for others living, but for all generations to come.”
The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself.
The Abundance Pyramid outlines the increasing levels of needs enabled by technology. This is loosely based on Maslow’s (pyramid) hierarchy of needs.
Improved sanitation facilities are used by less than two thirds of the world population; 1.2 billion people still practice open defecation.
For every one person killed by nuclear power generation, 4,000 die because of coal.
Despite these trends, wind energy remains a relatively small fraction of worldwide electricity supply. The total wind power capacity installed by the end of 2009 would, in an average year, meet roughly 1.8 percent of worldwide
No other renewable scales like solar. It has nearly 850 times the potential of ocean thermal, its nearest competitor.
Specifically, as the childhood mortality rate decreases, so too does the number of children born to each woman.
Each hype cycle drills down into the five key phases of a technology’s life cycle. Early in the life cycle of a new technology there is an overestimation of the technology’s potential, which leads to the peak of inflated expectations, followed by a dismissal of its abilities and the trough of disillusionment, and ultimately by the technology’s true fulfillment and its plateau of productivity.
Gartner Hype Curve
The first problem is that banning anything tends to create a black market and a criminal workforce dedicated to exploiting that market.
Our problem is not that we don’t have enough stuff—it’s that we don’t have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.
