The very foundations

This week, as all the TED micro-dispatches migrated out from Long Beach, I had this thought:

Fol­low­ing all the #TED tweets is totally the Alle­gory of the Cave. I kinda like it. Shad­ows of ideas.

Now that it’s over, one big theme seems clear to me. Er, I’m not sug­gest­ing that this was actu­ally the theme of the con­fer­ence! Rather, it’s just the shadow that I glommed on to from far away:

In sev­eral dif­fer­ent domains, what we need most is inno­va­tion at the most basic level—at the very foundations.

The big three:

Energy. I was really taken by (the shadow of) Bill Gates’s pre­sen­ta­tion on car­bon and energy. The the­sis is sim­ple: we need an energy mir­a­cle! The sta­bi­liza­tion wedges aren’t enough. Incre­men­tal improve­ments to exist­ing infra­struc­ture isn’t enough. We really need some fun­da­men­tally new tech­nolo­gies and processes.

Edu­ca­tion. Sir Ken Robin­son made a famil­iar argu­ment about education—basically that the way we do it today is stuck in 1915. But stop a sec­ond to really think about the most rad­i­cal ver­sion of this argu­ment, and what it implies. I mean, what could be more foun­da­tional, more fabric-of-space-time than school—not just the ped­a­gogy but the social struc­ture? What’s more uni­ver­sal than high school? But no, it’s a rel­a­tively recent inven­tion, of course—and it will get replaced by some­thing else. This inno­va­tion actu­ally seems the most inevitable to me. It’s not a ques­tion of if, but sim­ply of who and how: who will artic­u­late the new mod­els and how will they sup­plant tra­di­tional school. But, take note: as with cli­mate, the “sta­bi­liza­tion wedges” (things like Teach for Amer­ica and KIPP) are great efforts, but not truly trans­for­ma­tional. They don’t change the foundations.

Law. This was the biggest sur­prise to me: Philip Howard argued that law is way too com­pli­cated. Okay, that wasn’t the sur­prise; the sur­prise was that he thinks we can actu­ally change it. This seems to me like the hard­est prob­lem, because the foun­da­tions are deep­est. I mean like 12th-century Eng­land deep. I’ve hon­estly never con­tem­plated the notion that we could over­haul the way law itself is writ­ten and practiced—which says a lot, because as you know I’m gen­er­ally up for rethink­ing and reboot­ing. I’m going to check out Howard’s book.

Now:

I think these three domains are all espe­cially impor­tant and inter­est­ing because they’re all meta–domains. That is to say, they deter­mine the play­ing field for many other domains, so changes here cause chain-reactions. There’s huge lever­age. Change any of these, and you change the econ­omy. You change tech­nol­ogy. You change fam­ily struc­tures and land-use patterns.

And that’s true for energy most of all, of course. Hop­ing for a mir­a­cle is not a real strat­egy, I know; but don’t for­get that the early days of steam power, oil and elec­tric­ity all had a bit of the mirac­u­lous to them. Some new energy-harvesting process, or some rad­i­cally more pow­er­ful kind of bat­tery: either could trans­form soci­ety. Changes in energy end up chang­ing every­thing else—law and edu­ca­tion included. How excit­ing is that?

(Yes, I am mostly just look­ing for some­thing to occupy my brain TED-wise until they post Jane’s talk.)

3 Responses

robertogreco says:
February 15, 2010 at 5:41 pm
It seems like in all three of these domains (and oth­ers like finance/banking), the cur­rent sys­tem has become too com­plex or bureau­cratic to be fixed or reformed. Ben­e­fit­ing from sim­plic­ity and flex­i­bil­ity, star­tups will pass them up, per­haps with a vari­ety of solu­tions com­pet­ing at first, until one spe­cific solu­tion catches hold. And, in all three domains, the solu­tions can take root at small-scale and/or local level, often resem­bling the his­toric sys­tems that pre­ceded the cur­rent ones: local energy (water wheel and wind­mills become solar pan­els or unknown tech­nol­ogy), local edu­ca­tion (appren­tice­ships become online/in-person men­tor­ships), and local law (not so sure here — some­thing to do with shared com­mu­nity val­ues as opposed to spe­cific rules and regulations?).
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Matt Penniman says:
February 16, 2010 at 11:50 am
I think local energy, local edu­ca­tion, and local law are com­pelling ideas, but I also want to hold out the pos­si­bil­ity that change this fun­da­men­tal will require coop­er­a­tion on a scale we’ve never seen before. What if the best way to meet our energy needs turns out to be orbital solar power — but only a broad con­sor­tium of the EU, US, China and India has the resources to build the nec­es­sary infra­struc­ture? How can we evolve or rev­o­lu­tion­ize our polit­i­cal sys­tem to the point where that kind of buy-in from that many peo­ple becomes possible?
I think edu­ca­tion may require sim­i­lar economies of scale — although first, I think we need to reach some broad agree­ment about the pur­pose of edu­ca­tion. Are we just try­ing to repro­duce the elite? Bring up the next gen­er­a­tion of tech­nocrats? Or should edu­ca­tion aspire to a true equal­ity of oppor­tu­nity? This makes a huge dif­fer­ence in what insti­tu­tions end up look­ing like; com­pare a place like Trin­ity Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­sity with Har­vard or Yale.
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Matt Penniman says:
February 22, 2010 at 2:30 pm
Inci­den­tally, World­Chang­ing also had a good post about Gates’ pre­sen­ta­tion and what it means:
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/010976.html
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