Scaling up the circular economy

this is Alan hey everyone so welcome Alan

okay I am

delighted and terrified

to be sat here talking to Alan

and as you've heard we've been talking

during the day Alan has seen it and done it much of his

work at Xerox PARC has literally

touched every single one of us you know through

the technology that we have in our pockets and we use in

our homes before the event

Alan shared some of his experience and some of his

thinking in a pre read and the purpose

of that pre read was so that we could really get into the content

with the next 25 minutes so for

those of you who haven't read the pre read you should all

be feeling look extremely guilty at the moment no

don't make them feel bad but just to help the

next few minutes how many people actually did

read this oh well done

okay okay

the rest of you need to stay after class

but

what we're here to talk about with Alan is

what it will really take to scale

up the circular economy and I can quite honestly

say I have no idea where this conversations going

to go it will be a ride Alan has

props anything could happen in the next 25 minutes

please do tweet in questions using the hashtag summit

2019 we will be capturing them and

chucking them to Alan to get us started

ask you the kind of most obvious question in

PARC well I have

to have to start by eeling away

from that for a second but just to get everybody

to take a look I thought

about building a little bringing little fake fire

here because we're actually doing

what human beings did about 150,000

years ago which is gathering around a

campfire listening to stories

and if you think about it our civilization

is actually based on writing and it

was based on science it's based on a whole bunch of

that have almost nothing to do with stories and

have almost nothing to do with the world discourse so

it is very very difficult I think to

do other than make

gestures at immense

complex problems that we

have it's very hard to talk about them without

being able to even play with simulations

of them I feel like you're making them more guilty about

not reading the pre read yeah well

I view this as a commercial not for

reading my piece but I did write it take

the trouble to write it just for this session

but that piece was in

lieu of giving a talk which would give

you the context but not allow for discussion so I

and what I like to do when I teach classes

and university is I write what

I think the student should read and

we use the class to find out what what they're thinking about

know and what they don't know and I'd like to do that here

so I think the

a couple of keys here are

the

there's a lot of method

in the world and a lot of the

way the world is is the result of methods

that are still fairly common sense

thinking in the small everybody

being industrious in the small and

the problem is that the

communication systems of every kind including physical

have clogged

up almost every finite resource

that we have and so

quotation I like you to take away with you was

done by Einstein some years

ago and he said we cannot solve our

problems with the same levels and kinds of

thinking we use to create them this is the number one

thing I'd like you to take away I mean

how does how does that then translate

to what Andrew is saying and this

even we've been talking about today needing

to kind of scale up yeah so when

I hear people saying we we

have to get away from linear that

worries me just because there's

no known linear real linear relationship

in the universe even

the ones that we treat of as linear in science

they're all actually nonlinear they

can all be taken up to a place

where whatever their predictability seemed to

be to our common sense suddenly

goes awry we're much much better

and if you think of these exponential curves

most important thing to think about them is to

take the place where they're getting started and

look at it in our timescales and

realize oh that looks exactly

like it's linear it took Charles

Keeling the name everybody should know

here because he was the first real scientist

who did the first real measurements that gave

us global war warming as a problem

all the way back in the late 50s so

we've actually we've actually had

the

who actually had a warning

from enough data collected

see that the curve that he was measuring in carbon

dioxide build-up was not

either flat

or linear but it was actually an exponential

and so we had adequate warning to start

dealing with the global warming problem as

early as 1963 and there

are many many things that could have been done if

most people's imaginations were

informed by science to be able to understand his results

they weren't they still aren't

today and you can tell because even though people are

talking about global warming they're talking about it in an absolutely

ridiculous way now

is way too late for any kind of market solutions

when there are big countries that can buy carbon credits up

the kazoo forget about it the

climate can be easily toppled

before people run out of money we

have to take Einstein seriously and

reason I'm here I think is

because I was lucky

be a participant in one of these enormous

revolutions the one

brought you personal computing and the internet

I was part of the community

I was a group leader at Xerox PARC I invented

the graphical user interface that

you use I had a lot to do with tablet

computers and networking and so forth

and that was part of a community

which was very similar to for instance

the community here in the United States that developed radar

which was the prime technology that

won the war for the Allies rather than

for the enemy I think just sorry but those

are those examples that you're pulling out and Xerox

PARC you would say that is an example of the Einstein quote

in action there's a new level of thinking

that's all yes in all of these so in

this document I picked a simple one like the Empire

State Building which went up in about a year

started starting from demolition and planning

to occupancy now which at the time was

impacted impossible

I think the Chinese are doing it now but

I picked radar I picked

Bletchley Park that's another one

where people were so worried about

the Germans that they finally

said where are the boffins where are

people who actually know something about the physical universe we

need to finally pay attention to

them and they did and they did it in an exemplary fashion on

both sides of the Atlantic that

was a huge factor also in winning

that war I picked

the Manhattan Project just

as an example of something really big that can be done really

quickly can you explain the man what the Manhattan

Project was the atomic bomb project

commend this book which

is in the references of this thing this is a book by the

guy who headed it major-general grows it's

called now it can be told that's a very

matter-of-fact book because the guy was an engineer but

it's not a popular book but

in fact it just matter-of-factly says

well he realized it wasn't

about the scientists knew

as needed and what was needed was fissionable material

and nobody knew how to do it and so at

the end of this thing he had about 700,000 people

he had set up whole new towns including

bringing in doctors and schoolteachers

and he

mobilized a hundred

basically 1% of all of the

money the u.s. spent in the war was spent on

this project to just get it done and they

violated most principles of what

business people think are prudent ways of

doing things but the violations were

the things that allowed them to be successful and

so this so the second

thing I'd like you to take away is yeah

when you have something big to do

besides the fact that it's nonlinear

and you need to do something different you don't

want to abandon rational ways of doing things you

just don't want to let the rational ways of doing things get

in the way of things that seem crazy because

the most important thing to understand is pretty much

everything we do with the physical world today would

be a burnt at the stake offense 500

years ago what changed

was the context Newton was one of the big factors

in changing that context and all

sudden in the new context you could think thoughts that

were literally crazy according

to and so this is the thing to realize that whenever

you think you're thinking reasonably about something

that is really difficult beware

so having heuristics

set up to say how how

are we actually allocating our intellectual

capital here how much of this are

we trying to do with top-down planning

how much of it are we actually trying to do

by getting highly

talented crazy people to try and think up new

things that are not in our top-down ways of doing things how

much problem-solving are we doing versus how

much problem finding are we doing so I just want to jump

in there because I feel like you know you did in your essay

you do lay out a few examples of projects

that you think have demonstrated this just

a level up in thinking and yes but

you also as in one way to think of it is

there are a lot of different Sciences and the

that the different Sciences find is rather specific

to the sciences but the methods in

science are much more uniform across

because they have to do with how do you go looking at four

things how do you judge what

you're doing how

do you get new ideas how do you be open at the

first level so you because otherwise you'd be

dogmatic if you didn't admit every crazy idea in science

but if you're going to have every crazy idea there

you could you have to do what most democracies don't do

which is to go to have a next

level which is the best criticism that anybody has

ever invented science works because it's a two-level

system most government systems don't work because

they try and have something that is like

a religion that has generally agreed on

and you really want to be crazy at one level and

very very sane at the next level and

can I can we come back then to some of those examples because

you know when you're talking about crazy projects

it'd be up for crazy projects employed

great people the truly great people and give them

freedom don't try and organize top-down what are some of

those can you expand on some of those but it's respects it's

again it's one of those things where I wish it

were more simple be

and it's not that there aren't heroes

there are but

the hero's journey is a trope that

misleads most people who

don't fool around with this stuff it's

not really about people in garages so

but however there are heroes and

it's not about small groups but

there are small groups but if you look at

the huge jumps not

just in simple scaling but in

context and science is a good example

itself it works because it is

a community where the community passes

ideas around freely it

doesn't know who's going to do the next good

thing and it relies

on the community to help keep

things that are used for new things

to be vetted rather

carefully so you have this mixture

things which is really hard it doesn't wrap into a

religion and it doesn't wrap into the way most companies

are organized so it's

very difficult it frightens most

c-level executives and

a frighten the executives of Xerox I

can tell you when they came out to Palo Alto

see how we were doing what we were doing they thought we

were out of control we

weren't out of control any more than the internet is out of control

the internet has has grown to 50 billion

nodes now without any central control

but it has control it's a different

kind of control in order to get

the internet we had to abandon

the kind of thinking that went into switched telephone

systems and hub control

networks and all of those things you had to abandon go

to something more like a biological model and

that looked out of control to most people

who had wetted their

life to a particular way of doing things so

the number one thing here is when somebody talks about scaling

it's it's not the

number it's when does

the scaling become different

and when are you going to notice

that the scaling has become different that's

the big deal and that is what you need heuristics for when

you're trying to take something that works in the small

and trying to employ it in the large

for instance almost any particular

effort in saving the planet

from pollution or global warming

all of these things really has to be done

that all of these systems are actually rather tied

to each other and we

don't know what all of those systems are the

climate simulations that have been done have

all been in the direction of measurement

following behind the simulations but

in almost every case the actual

global warming that's been going on has been been worse

than the simulations predicted that means that the

simulations aren't capturing some gotchas

that could be really terrifying in another

20 years to go from really terrifying

gotchas to may be

some communities that give you hope today if

there are any and you know in

our preparation I'm just like you're saying this in the context of

you being from the UK with

what's going on here and me being from the US with

what's going on here yeah okay in the US

you mentioned the Genelia labs

Camellia and that is a current

yes Jamelia is a current lab

it's funded in part by the Hughes

foundation they did a very

good thing one of the spark

plugs is a guy one of my favorite guy I used to

molecular biologist and my misspent youth in

one of my heroes was Sydney Brenner just

died recently a Nobel Prize winner from South

Africa but he was fundamental

to DNA here in Cambridge and

he was one of the spark plugs to get

hings started in many places in the world and Genelia labs

near Washington DC is one of them yeah

it's it's a pretty impressive and can you just maybe

just thinking about some of those characteristics what

is it what is it about Genelia labs that you like well I think that

I wrote down 19

of them in the in this document I

think the number the number

one thing is as

the immensity of

the difficulties

starts impinging on us

we have to go away from

funders trying to pick goals it's

natural it's their money they're responsible

but all the good funders in history let

people who are going to do the work pick the goals

what the funders did was to put

together a vision which

is not the same as a goal and it's not the same as a mission

a vision is a picture of a future state

of things which is would

be really nice if we had so for instance

the one that I worked under the sentence

was the destiny of computers are

to become enter an interactive

intellectual amplifiers for

all humans on earth pervasively

networked worldwide the guy

who set up this funding and the community that did it would

not peel it down to a hard

goal he said no no we'll get everybody who

thinks they can do something against this vision will

fund them and if we're

if we got given what we're funding and the

level of aspiration we

have if we get 30% success we'll

change the world qualitatively

the result of that funding did

have about maybe

40% success but it's almost every

technology that you use today in computing and

the return on the

investment just from Xerox PARC so Zarek's Park

is maybe I don't know 120 million dollars

the return on investment from Xerox PARC

has been about 40 trillion dollars so

this flabbergast business people think they're in business

to make money but they aren't they're just trying to make a few bucks

safely way you make money is

take advantage of the deep knowledge we have about the

universe and what can actually be done

with it by people who are not trying

to do too much planning ahead of time uncertain

enacts you talk about funding and that being

that kind of unrestrictive miss you know having the vision to aim

for and having less restrictions tied to money yeah

like there was a sympathy the other McArthur

foundation in the u.s.

foundation yeah confusing this

is the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and I now

that I live over here I think of the one

in the US as the other but

what they do is

pick I don't know 20

people 30 people a year that they think

show promise and they give them a five-year

no-strings-attached grant of

$625,000 period they

don't worry the people can go off and do nothing

however it happens that people that have art

in their blood can't not do

nothing it's a calling it's like being

called to the ministry or so you don't have to worry

about the people who are gonna make the

thing here they want to do this the best thing can

ever happen to them is for somebody to fund them to

follow their instincts and yeah

70 percent of them are going to be not going to play

out but like in baseball and some other

sports those errors are not

errors but overhead it's really

important to think of when you're funding edge of the art research

that the things that don't work out

are not failure they're just overhead

for trying to do something really difficult and if

you're aiming high enough the successes you get like

Xerox

rocks the company made

return-on-investment themselves just on

the laser printer that we invented the era of about a factor

250 paid for park hundreds

of times over and the world

made a return on investment much much larger than

than that so the

this is kind of the inverse black swan idea

right Black Swan you don't worry about how rare

it is what you worry about is how big the disaster is

going to be when you get it the inverse Black

Swan the whites the super whites or the gold

Swan the gold Swan is don't

worry about stuff that doesn't work out

if worry about what the percentage that needs

to work out that will pay for everything else a hundred times

over and goose the human race into

a next level of thinking well

I can't think of a better way to finish our

we're a couple of minutes over time yes linking

at its place been blinking yeah on the idea of more though

more gold swans that's what we need

yeah well it's when I just to

finish off when I had my group at Disney for

five years really interesting

five years it was I gave a

presentation to the Disney executives on

Bret all the new ways to

kill the goose that was trying to lay the golden eggs that have been

invented since the fairytale like make

the goose a manager give the goose a deadline

want cooking

gold coins instead of eggs want

platinum eggs instead of gold and I

said no you guys are just completely

missing the point here if you've got geese that lay golden

eggs you can convert them into coins you can convert

them into platinum let the freaking geese

lay the frigging eggs

but Alan thank you very

honestly say it has been a huge privilege just working

with you on this for the last few weeks so thank you very much thank

you Joe and Alan I feel

there's a whole load of more exciting things in

that bag of tricks but maybe we'll find out what

in the well I had a feeling that nobody would read

the thing so I I even made a few slides up

but I decided to just since

slides a hundred thousand years ago I decided to just

go with a hundred kick it in old school I like it by

the way what here for people we're

in a roundhouse and

many of you are probably not engineers but

some might be you may not be

aware but almost every roundhouse especially in the UK

right the

trains are on this thing and

those trains those locomotives

were swiveled by usually one person with

no engines they

were just those turntables that the

engines were on were some of the most beautifully

engineered things done in the nineteenth century and

it's a kind of a

small as a beautiful thought to end this session with

Thank You Alan you don't need the transistors

so much you don't need the gas engine

so much you just need really good designers

really good design and engineering