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Strachey Lecture: How Innovation Works - Serendipity, Energy and the Saving of Time · Strachey Lectures

• 0:01
  Hi, my name is Mike Wooldridge, I am head of Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford.
• 0:07
  I am, as you might guess, home. I like, I guess most people on this on this webinar are.
• 0:13
  It's my very great pleasure to welcome you to the straight.
• 0:17
  She lecture for Michaelmas term 2020. This is, I think, the first straight lecture that has been completely virtual.
• 0:26
  You could regard that as a feature or a bug, depending on your point of view.
• 0:31
  As with all of these kind of events, glitches happen. The technology is not perfect and we're having to coordinate things very remotely.
• 0:39
  So if things go wrong back with us, we will recover very, very quickly, I'm sure.
• 0:43
  So on to today's lecture. Today's lecture is by Matt Ridley.
• 0:50
  Matt Ridley is a Matt Ridley, sits in the House of Lords on the conservative benches.
• 0:59
  He has been there since 2013. His books have sold over a million copies.
• 1:04
  They've been translated into 32 languages and they've won several awards.
• 1:09
  His books include The Red Queen Genome, The Rational Optimist and the Evolution of Everything.
• 1:14
  And the reason he's here today is that his most recent book is entitled How Innovation Works.
• 1:18
  It was published in 2020. He joined the House of Lords in February 2013.
• 1:24
  He served on the Science and Technology Select Committee in the Artificial Intelligence Select Committee.
• 1:31
  He was founding chairman for the International Centre for Life in Newcastle.
• 1:35
  He created the Mind and Matter column for The Wall Street Journal in 2010, and he was a columnist for The Times.
• 1:40
  In 2013 through to 2018, he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Academy of Medical Sciences.
• 1:47
  And he is a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences, and he lives in Northumberland.
• 1:54
  You may wonder what is the special interest in maths? Well, two reasons.
• 1:58
  Firstly, I encountered maps through his service on the House of Lords Select Committee for Artificial Intelligence,
• 2:03
  which I gave evidence at, and and he has a special interest in that.
• 2:09
  But in addition, his most recent book is on innovation and Innovation is something which in the Department of Computer Science,
• 2:17
  we are extremely active in at the moment. This is an unprecedented time with respect to innovation in the Department of Computer Science.
• 2:26
  We have a range of spin off companies which have been enormously successful over the last few years.
• 2:32
  So we look forward to hearing what Matt has to tell us about how innovation actually works.
• 2:37
  Before I go any further, I have to give a very big shout out to our sponsors.
• 2:42
  We are this year, as always, extremely grateful to acknowledge the sponsorship of Oxford Asset Management.
• 2:50
  They had been sponsoring our lectures now for a number of years,
• 2:53
  and they have enabled us to do things with these lectures that simply weren't possible previously to take to bring PE,
• 2:59
  bring over speakers and to reach an audience that we wouldn't have been able to do previously.
• 3:04
  So we are extremely grateful to Oxford Asset Management. I think they would probably like me to say that they are hiring.
• 3:10
  So if you're interested in machine learning, for example, if you're interested in finance, Oxford Asset Management are currently hiring.
• 3:17
  And a number of our graduates and indeed one of my DFL students says has gone to work for them in the past.
• 3:23
  So that's Oxford Asset Management. As always, we are extremely grateful to them.
• 3:27
  So without further ado, what I'm going to hand over now would do now is hand over to Mat's lecture.
• 3:32
  So let's go live with Mat's lecture. Thank you. Good afternoon.
• 3:47
  It's great to be with you. It's a huge honour to deliver the stretchy lecture, and I'm most grateful to Michael Wooldridge for inviting me to do this.
• 3:55
  I've learnt a lot from him about artificial intelligence and other matters, and it's a real honour to be with you this afternoon.
• 4:03
  I only wish I could be in Oxford in person.
• 4:08
  The topic of my talk is innovation, and that's an enormous important subject and one on which an awful lot of people know an awful lot.
• 4:18
  What am I trying to bring to this topic? I think I'm trying to bring the perspective of an evolutionary biologist who has written about technology
• 4:28
  for 20 or 30 years and who has become more more interested in this mysterious phenomenon called innovation.
• 4:37
  What it is, why it happens to human beings at all.
• 4:41
  Why it happens when and where it does.
• 4:44
  And why it takes place quickly in some sectors and slowly and others and at different times and in different places at different rates.
• 4:56
  I believe it's a somewhat mysterious phenomenon. I don't think we fully understand innovation.
• 5:01
  Economic theory struggles to formally incorporate innovation and to explain why it's occurring, even though it relies upon it.
• 5:12
  Innovation is the main theme of the last few hundred years of human history.
• 5:16
  I would argue it explains the extraordinary enrichment of the human species, the incredible decline of poverty of recent decades.
• 5:25
  But also many of the trends that affect our politics are economics, our warfare and so on.
• 5:32
  So innovation matters. And this has been driven home to us enormously by the current pandemic.
• 5:39
  The fact that we entered this pandemic without having done enough innovation to our method of developing vaccines,
• 5:46
  for example, is, I think, an important point lesson that we need to learn.
• 5:52
  We haven't been able to improve the rate at which we produce vaccines or the efficiency with which they work much in recent decades.
• 6:01
  That may be changing. These messenger RNA vaccines and the one from Oxford have been developed at great speed and look to be very promising.
• 6:10
  But it took the pandemic to shake us out of what was essentially a complacency about medical innovation.
• 6:17
  In recent years, I would argue. So we need more innovation, not less.
• 6:21
  If we are to survive the 21st century in good order.
• 6:27
  Well, what I want to do is start sharing a few slides and talk through what I think are the important themes of innovation,
• 6:35
  and these come from my new book, How Innovation Works, which essentially tells a bunch of stories.
• 6:44
  I tell stories about the search engine and the steam engine, about vaccines, about vaping and after telling stories.
• 6:52
  I then try and distil out some lessons about what the patterns of innovation are.
• 6:57
  And I think they're slightly different from what we generally assume. So let me start by sharing some slides on my desk at home sits this object.
• 7:09
  It's an Australian handshake's of the kind used by Homo erectus.
• 7:14
  Half a million years ago, my wife bought it for me on eBay.
• 7:19
  And right next to it sits an object of exactly the same size and shape.
• 7:25
  And it sent a real shiver down my spine when I noticed the similarity. These two objects both designed to fit the human hand.
• 7:31
  Half a million years apart. It's an extraordinary connexion with our ancestors.
• 7:36
  And obviously, in a sense, that is half a million years of innovation to go from one object to the other.
• 7:45
  The differences between them are quite instructive, I think,
• 7:47
  because whereas the axe is made from a single substance and used by a single person who also made it.
• 7:54
  The mouse is not made by me, but it is used by me and it's made of lots of different substances, plastic and silicon and metal and so on.
• 8:03
  And it embodies lots of different ideas, ideas that occurred to different people at different times, in different places.
• 8:09
  And that, to me, is what innovation is all about,
• 8:12
  is about the sharing of ideas to increase the usefulness and efficiency of the objects and indeed the habits.
• 8:20
  The nonmaterial things by which we organise our world.
• 8:26
  And just to drive home what innovation can do.
• 8:32
  This is a chart of the number of people dying of malaria in the world between 1990 and 2003, and it was increasing at that time.
• 8:43
  And because of climate change, there were widespread predictions that it would increase even faster in the 21st century.
• 8:49
  That malaria mortality was something that was going to get worse, not better.
• 8:53
  But then in 2003, the graph simply went into reverse.
• 8:57
  And a huge decline in mortality from malaria ensued, largely thanks to improvements in the dreadful malaria mortality in sub-Saharan Africa.
• 9:10
  What happened in 2003? In 2003, an innovation was promulgated.
• 9:17
  Was was was spread across the continent of Africa, largely with the help of the Gates Foundation.
• 9:23
  It wasn't antimalarial drugs. It wasn't anti mosquito campaigns.
• 9:30
  It was the mosquito sorry. The insecticide impregnated bed net, the mosquito net with insecticide painted on it, a very simple low tech solution,
• 9:41
  which turns out to have been responsible for the vast majority of that decline in malaria mortality.
• 9:46
  And I was curious as to where this innovation came from, who came up with the idea and why has it been so effective?
• 9:53
  And I eventually tracked it back to a paper that was published in 1983 by some scientists from France,
• 10:04
  Vietnam and Burkina Faso who did a rather beautiful experiment in which they simply set up 36 huts in Burkina Faso,
• 10:12
  each designed as mosquito traps, as well as to mimic ordinary hut design.
• 10:18
  And they caught all the mosquitoes that tried to get into the huts and they caught all the mosquitoes trying to get out of the Hudson.
• 10:24
  They measured whether they were alive or dead and whether they had eaten a blood meal or not.
• 10:29
  And so on. And volunteers slept in these huts for several weeks.
• 10:34
  And they found that a mosquito and it was very helpful.
• 10:38
  Mosquito net with holes in it was not very helpful.
• 10:42
  Mosquito net with insecticide impregnated into it was very helpful, even more so than an ordinary mosquito net.
• 10:48
  A huge deterrent effect and remain just as effective even if it had holes in it.
• 10:55
  So having holes in it, which is mosquito nets often do after a time of use, did not detract from the effectiveness of this technology.
• 11:03
  It's a beautiful experiment. My point is that nobody's heard of this experiment.
• 11:08
  Nobody knows who Frederick Dairy at is. Who is the lead author on this?
• 11:12
  I contacted him and my bad French. I had communicated with him about how this came to be.
• 11:19
  And it's this sort of low tech, unheralded, unprofitable innovation that really can change the world.
• 11:29
  My first point that I took from the world, from the stories of innovation that I told, is that innovation is different from invention.
• 11:38
  It's not the same thing. Invention means coming up with a new device.
• 11:43
  Innovation means making that new device practical, affordable, available.
• 11:49
  And that isn't easy. In fact, it's often a lot more work than coming up with a new device in the first place.
• 11:55
  And there are innovations such as container shipping, which drastically reduce the cost of shipping goods around the world starting in the 1960s,
• 12:05
  which are not inventions at all, are not based on new technologies.
• 12:09
  They are simply taking existing technologies and redesigning them in in useful ways.
• 12:18
  So it's very important, I think, not to get hung up just on the famous inventor who has the first idea,
• 12:26
  but to think about the people who then take these ideas and turn them into practical, reliable and affordable technologies.
• 12:35
  To drive home the point, there's a rather funny story that was told by Charles Townes, the inventor of the laser.
• 12:41
  He said, there's a beaver and a rabbit. Looking at the Hoover Dam at the beaver says to the rabbit.
• 12:48
  No, I didn't build it. But it is based on an idea of mine.
• 12:52
  An all too often we focus on the person, on the beaver,
• 12:56
  on the person who first has the idea rather than on the people who turn those ideas into practical realities.
• 13:02
  I think that's an important lesson of innovation. Innovation is also serendipitous.
• 13:08
  That is to say, there's a lot of accidents,
• 13:10
  a lot of times people set out to invent one thing and they end up inventing something completely different.
• 13:17
  And just as useful or more so. Kevlar, Teflon.
• 13:22
  The Post-it note were all invented by people looking for something completely different.
• 13:28
  In the case of the Post-it note, Art Fry was one of the people working at 3M.
• 13:34
  They were looking for a glue that would work with paper. They couldn't find one.
• 13:37
  They came up with this substance that worked as a temporary glue and they thought, that's useless.
• 13:43
  And then after I thought, I have to go to choir practise this evening, if I put this glue on the back of some bits of yellow paper,
• 13:50
  I can keep my place in my hymnbook and not damage the handbook when I take those bits of paper away and the Post-it note was bought.
• 13:57
  Something like DNA fingerprinting is a fine example of an incredibly important technology used in forensics and other methods,
• 14:07
  which was invented completely unexpectedly.
• 14:13
  It was thought that DNA work was going to be useful in medicine. Nobody saw it transforming criminology, and yet it did in the hands of Alec Lester.
• 14:22
  That's our Alec Jeffries of Lester. Now, innovation is disruptive.
• 14:27
  We know this. This is the famous point that innovation comes along and changes the world rather dramatically.
• 14:34
  Here's a good example of this. A picture of Easter morning in nineteen hundred on Fifth Avenue,
• 14:40
  one car amongst hundreds of Horse-Drawn vehicles, the same place on the same day, 13 years later.
• 14:51
  Not a single horse in sight. Hundreds of cars. That is the speed at which innovation can change the world.
• 14:58
  Just 13 years between those two pictures.
• 15:02
  But I make the case that the more you look into disruptive innovations, the more you find that they are actually underpinned by gradual processes,
• 15:13
  by processes that build very slowly towards the moment when disruption happen and continue to evolve after the disruption has happened.
• 15:22
  So the most disruptive thing that has happened in our lifetime has been the rise of the silicon chip,
• 15:27
  the integrated circuit and the whole digital world that has come with it.
• 15:34
  And that seems very sudden in many ways.
• 15:36
  But when you look at what's happened, the incremental improvement in computing as a result of miniaturisation of silicon technologies,
• 15:48
  which we call Moore's Law after Gordon Moore, who noticed it in the 1960s,
• 15:52
  has inched forward incrementally for not just 50 years, but more than 100 years, because the last of the old technologies,
• 16:02
  things like vacuum tubes, were almost as good as the first of the new ones, the transistor.
• 16:08
  There are no step changes on this chart. This is the performance of computers over time.
• 16:15
  Basically, in terms of calculations per second, per thousand dollars. And it just marked she's incrementally upwards.
• 16:22
  You had to invent each new technology to move on to the next one.
• 16:25
  And even when Gordon Moore identified Moore's Law in 1964 and said this process is going to double every 18 months.
• 16:33
  We weren't able to say, well, to [INAUDIBLE] with that, let's double it in six months.
• 16:39
  Let's jump ahead. If we're gonna we're gonna double it every 18 months.
• 16:43
  Why do we quadruple it in 18 months? It turned out not to be possible.
• 16:47
  And I think this is a general observation that there is actually much more gradual background to disruptive
• 16:54
  innovations than we've tended to get a bit hung up on the idea of disruptive innovation recently.
• 17:01
  Innovation is also an evolutionary phenomenon. I wrote a whole book called The Evolution of Everything,
• 17:07
  arguing that evolution is a good explanation of how our technology and all our other parts of culture change.
• 17:14
  You can see descent with modification in our devices. You can see how one thing is derived from a parent and gives rise to offspring.
• 17:24
  The first motorcars looked like a cross between a horse carriage and a steam engine with a little bit of bicycle thrown in and so on.
• 17:32
  It was only after that that they took on characteristic features of being a car.
• 17:37
  The mobile phone has evolved to get smaller and smaller and then to get bigger and bigger again.
• 17:42
  Or recently. And evolution is innovative in another way.
• 17:48
  When you get on an aeroplane,
• 17:49
  you probably hope that it is designed by an intelligent designer that a clever person put together design for this aeroplane.
• 17:58
  But actually, when you think about it, he didn't. All he did was take a previous design and adapt it and so on.
• 18:05
  Back to the Wright brothers. People don't start from scratch.
• 18:10
  And along the way, there are failed designs that don't work and get discarded.
• 18:14
  This is exactly like natural selection. Here is the French philosopher Allar making the same point in nineteen hundred and eight.
• 18:22
  Every boat is copied from another boat. That's reason as follows.
• 18:25
  In the manner of Darwin, it's clear that a very badly made boat will end up at the bottom up to one or two voyages and thus never be copied.
• 18:32
  One could then say with complete rigour that it is the sea herself who chooses the boats to designs the boats,
• 18:39
  choosing those which function are destroying the others.
• 18:44
  One of the consequences of this way of seeing the world is that you suddenly realise that we are too creationist about the world.
• 18:52
  We have learnt not to be creationist about the natural world.
• 18:55
  When we see a rainforest, we don't immediately assume that its complexity is the result of an intelligent designer.
• 19:01
  But we are creationists about the human world.
• 19:04
  When we see order in the human world, we assume that someone, whether it's a government, government or or a designer, is in charge.
• 19:11
  But actually, there are lots of things that, in the words of Adam Ferguson, the 18th century Scottish philosopher,
• 19:18
  are the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.
• 19:23
  So the English language, for example, is a human invention.
• 19:28
  It's not a natural phenomenon, but there is no sense in which it is the execution of design.
• 19:34
  There is nobody in charge of designing it. There was nobody who started designing it.
• 19:38
  If it evolved through the use of certain habits in language by some people and the discarding of other habits until it became the English language.
• 19:48
  And the same is true of modern the modern economy in many ways.
• 19:52
  Ten million people eat lunch on a normal day, or at least they did before the pandemic.
• 19:58
  The amount of food that they need and the right types of food are available for them every day, day in, day out.
• 20:06
  Despite the fact that they might make up their mind at the last minute what they're going to eat.
• 20:12
  How is that possible? Who's in charge? Who is London's lunch commissioner?
• 20:17
  And why is he so incredibly clever? And of course, the answer is there is no such person.
• 20:24
  It's a market. It's a bottom up process, not a top down one.
• 20:28
  Now, evolution works by recombination. That is to say, different genetic sequences get mixed together in the process called sex.
• 20:36
  So that you get new combinations of genes and that enables evolution to be innovative.
• 20:43
  The same is true of technology, that we will recombine existing technologies in new forms to make new technologies.
• 20:52
  In fact, almost every technology you can think of is actually a combination of other technologies.
• 20:58
  And often it's just the same technologies combined in different ways.
• 21:01
  My favourite example is this thing. It's called the pill camera. It takes a photograph of your insides if you swallow it.
• 21:08
  It came about after a conversation over a garden fence between a gastroenterologist and a guided missile designer.
• 21:15
  That's the process that I call ideas having sex, because it is a very precise analogy with the way sex works in evolution.
• 21:27
  Now, the other lesson that I learnt was that innovation is collaborative.
• 21:32
  It is not something that people hardly ever achieve on their own or in secret.
• 21:39
  The idea of the brilliant inventor sitting in his ivory tower scratching his head is generally a myth.
• 21:45
  The more you look into them, the more it turns out that these stories are just not true, that people were having to build on the work of other people,
• 21:53
  but also talk to other people and share ideas with other people in order to be innovative.
• 21:59
  Here's a very nice example of that process. This is a photograph of an epic moment in the history of flight.
• 22:07
  This is Samuel Langley's attempt in nineteen hundred and three to take off from the roof of a houseboat on the Potomac River near Washington.
• 22:18
  In a aeroplane designed from scratch.
• 22:22
  Samuel Langley was a brilliant man. He was an astronomer. He was the head of the Smithsonian Institution.
• 22:28
  He got an enormous grant from the US government to build an aeroplane. He said, I know how to do it.
• 22:32
  He went off in secret and did it. And as you can see, it flopped straight into the water.
• 22:38
  It barely went 20 yards. The pilot was wearing a Coke.
• 22:44
  Bob to the surface and swim to safety 10 days later on a beach off North Carolina to humble bicycle mechanics from Dayton,
• 22:56
  Ohio, managed to achieve what Langley had failed to achieve.
• 23:01
  The Orville and Wilbur Wright got an aeroplane into the air and they had done everything right.
• 23:08
  That Langley had done wrong. They had collaborated with other people.
• 23:14
  They had, particularly a man named Octave Chanute in Chicago, had been an incredibly important source for them.
• 23:21
  He was a sort of node in a network who communicated with everyone in the world who was interested in flight.
• 23:27
  And he downloaded their brains to find out what they knew about gliders, about kites, about aerofoils files, about wind tunnels, about everything,
• 23:36
  and particularly the ideas of a brilliant Australian named Lawrence Hargrave, who had made real progress,
• 23:43
  particularly in the development of the box kite, as a way of understanding how to how to do a controlled flight.
• 23:50
  And all of this was what the Wright brothers were drawing on. And then they were doing a ton of experiments themselves.
• 23:56
  They were not pretending to know the answer from scratch.
• 24:00
  They did years and years of experiments with gliders in North Carolina before they ever added an engine to their aeroplane.
• 24:10
  So our technology is an incredibly collaborative thing.
• 24:13
  When you think about it, there's a famous essay by a man named Leonard Reid written in 1958 called A Pencil,
• 24:20
  which is a by a pencil trying to work out how it came into existence.
• 24:25
  And the pencil concludes that it was the result of collaboration between millions of people, hundreds of thousands,
• 24:32
  at least, because there were people who were cutting down trees to make the wood for the pencil.
• 24:37
  But they were drinking coffee and the coffee was drunk by somebody else.
• 24:41
  Sorry, it was grown by somebody else.
• 24:43
  And and that their wood was taken by somebody to a mill where it was milled and then it was shipped to a factory.
• 24:51
  And all these people were involved in this process, hundreds of them, thousands,
• 24:56
  maybe hundreds of thousands or even millions, as I say, involved in making one pencil.
• 25:01
  And yet the amazing thing was. In all those millions of people, there is not one person who knows how to make a pencil.
• 25:10
  The knowledge is not held inside a single head. It's shared between heads.
• 25:15
  The person working on the factory floor in the pencil factory doesn't know how to cut down a tree.
• 25:21
  And so on. So the reason innovation happens to our species, I reckon, and not to others, except with very few very minor exceptions.
• 25:34
  Is because our species is uniquely fascinated by the process of exchange.
• 25:39
  It's very, very hard to find other examples in the animal kingdom of animals that want to swap one thing for another and do so regularly.
• 25:48
  And yet we're obsessed with it. It comes very naturally to us in all societies at all times.
• 25:55
  It has been a feature and it's been part of human life forever, a hundred thousand years.
• 25:59
  Adam Smith spotted this. He said no man ever saw a dog make Ferencz deliberate exchange of a bone with another dog.
• 26:09
  One of the consequences of the importance of experimentation to reach innovations
• 26:16
  is the trial and error features in all the stories about great innovators.
• 26:21
  If you ask innovators like Art, pray with the Post-it note or Thomas Edison with the light bulb, how did you do it?
• 26:27
  They always say, I just tried and failed. Tried and failed. Tried and failed until I succeeded.
• 26:32
  Or other as Adam as Edison said, I've not failed. I've just found 10000 ways that won't work.
• 26:38
  Edison tried six thousand different types of plant material before he settled upon Japanese bamboo to make the filament of his first light bulb.
• 26:49
  He was searching and searching for something that would have durability that would last a long time when you switch the light bulb.
• 26:56
  And he wasn't satisfied until he'd found the perfect thing.
• 27:00
  That's an incredibly important feature of innovation and it's one that is often not appreciated.
• 27:05
  You don't get the answer right first time you keep trying until you do.
• 27:11
  Now, there's another weird thing about the light bulb. 21 different people invented the light bulb independently.
• 27:18
  There was Edison in England. There was sworn inward. Russia, there was digging and so on.
• 27:26
  And as far as we can make out, none of these people communicate with each other.
• 27:29
  We all came up with the idea independently and this is a very common phenomenon.
• 27:33
  It's called simultaneous. Kevin Kelly writes about it very entertainingly in his book, What Technology Wants and.
• 27:42
  At first sight, it seems rather weird,
• 27:46
  almost as if there is a deity reaching down from the sky and implanting the idea of the light bulb in 21 different minds at the same time.
• 27:54
  But when you think about it, it's much more likely that what's going on is that the contributing technologies of electricity,
• 28:01
  of glass, of vacuums, et cetera, have just reached the point where it's inevitable someone will see this,
• 28:08
  that there's something wholly inexorable about innovation in certain fields once it gets to a certain point.
• 28:15
  You can't stop it even if you want to. This is probably more easy to understand.
• 28:20
  If you think about a more recent example, the search engine is probably the most useful invention of my lifetime.
• 28:28
  I use it pretty well every day. It was invented in the early 1990s.
• 28:33
  Soon after the Internet, and in retrospect, it's kind of inevitable that it would get invented then,
• 28:41
  because if Sergei Brin had never met Larry Page and founded Google, we would still have search engines.
• 28:47
  There were lots around before Google and there were lots of rivals.
• 28:52
  And they all came up with search engines because it was sort of obvious that
• 28:59
  people were going to want to search the Internet to find what they wanted.
• 29:04
  So it didn't matter if by chance, Larry Page had not met Sergei Brin, we would still have search engines today.
• 29:15
  But if you go back to the late, late 1980s and you read the literature about the Internet.
• 29:22
  The nascent Internet, nobody sees search engines coming, at least very few people, and they only very sketchily,
• 29:30
  and indeed, the people who invented search engines didn't really understand what they were doing.
• 29:34
  Page and Brin didn't think they were inventing a search engine.
• 29:38
  They thought they were cataloguing the Internet. At first. So there's something strangely asymmetric about innovation.
• 29:46
  It's fantastically obvious that it would happen when and where it does. When you look backwards, but it's not at all obvious when you look forwards.
• 29:56
  So innovation is inexorable, but it's also unpredictable.
• 30:02
  To illustrate this, let me just tell you the story of the 20th century in terms of two particular technologies.
• 30:10
  In the first half of the 20th century, there was a ferment of innovation in transport and almost no innovation in communication and computing.
• 30:19
  There were cars that were planes, there were helicopters that were rockets.
• 30:23
  Space travel, those you know, all this kind of stuff began in roughly the first half of the 20th, 20th century.
• 30:33
  Whereas the telephone predates the 20th century and it was still around in 1950 in very similar form.
• 30:42
  So no wonder in the 1950s, future ologists are obsessed with transport.
• 30:48
  They go on and on about how in the future we're going to have flying cars and personal
• 30:53
  jet packs and routine space travel and supersonic airliners and all that kind of thing.
• 30:58
  None of which happened because in the second half of the 20th century, almost nothing came along in the way of transport.
• 31:05
  I mean, we flew seven full sevens for 50 years without changing TEAC design.
• 31:12
  Whereas there was a ferment of innovation in computing and communication.
• 31:18
  Now, I don't believe you could have predicted that switch. And indeed, I don't think we fully understand why it happened in some sense.
• 31:26
  Transport hit a brick wall. It hit diminishing returns.
• 31:31
  And by the way, it implies that computing and communication might do the same at some point in the near future,
• 31:36
  the next 50 years might not be about computing and communication to the degree we expect it will be today.
• 31:45
  Here's an image from the year I was born, 1958, of what they think the future is going to be like in the year 2000,
• 31:52
  mailmen are going to be delivering ordinary mail.
• 31:54
  There's no such thing as e-mail, but they're going to have rockets strapped to their backs so they can jump from house to house.
• 32:00
  Didn't quite turn out like that. Not everybody gets prediction wrong.
• 32:05
  Here's a picture from Germany in the 1930s showing us doing pretty well exactly what we're doing right now.
• 32:15
  But one of the things about the unpredictability of innovation is that it leads some very,
• 32:20
  very clever people to say some very, very stupid things about the future. And I'm sorry, but I'm going to embarrass four of them.
• 32:27
  And his brother, the man who split the atom,
• 32:29
  said in 1933 that anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of the atom is talking moonshine.
• 32:36
  Ken Olsen, chairman of the company that made the mini computer and was one of the most successful companies,
• 32:41
  computer companies of the 1970s making the smallest computers, said there's no reason I want a computer in there at home.
• 32:50
  Paul Krugman, Nobel prise winning economist, said in 1998, by 2005 or so,
• 32:56
  it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy will be no greater than the fax machines.
• 33:02
  And Steve Ballmer, chief executive, Microsoft 2007, said there's no chance the iPhone is going to get market share in this market.
• 33:09
  No chance. They are being wrong footed by the unpredictability of innovation.
• 33:16
  These people. And I think the main reason and it comes back to disruption, to gradual trends suddenly turning sudden.
• 33:27
  Is because innovation is non-linear. It doesn't progress in a straight line from one technology to the.
• 33:36
  Roy Emara is the person who said the cleverest thing about this.
• 33:40
  I think he was a computer scientist in Silicon Valley in the 1960s and he said we underestimate the impact of a new technology in the long run.
• 33:49
  But we overestimate it in the short run. It's more like that.
• 33:55
  Nothing much happens for some years, and then suddenly the world has changed.
• 34:01
  And it's worth thinking about where today's technology sit on that curve.
• 34:07
  I mean, the Internet isn't. I think we can all agree not disappointing.
• 34:10
  Whatever Paul Krugman might have said it is, it is outperforming our expectations at this stage.
• 34:19
  Genomics has been disappointing. Bill Clinton in 2000, when the first human genome was sequenced, talked about the imminent curing of cancer.
• 34:28
  We haven't achieved nearly as much as we would like with genomics, and yet we are suddenly seeing some pretty dramatic breakthroughs at the moment.
• 34:35
  Think again of the messenger RNA vaccines, for example. I.
• 34:40
  Well, Michael might put me right here,
• 34:42
  but I suspect we aren't quite through the disappointing phase with some of the technologies we're excited about yet.
• 34:49
  The driverless cars may prove a little more difficult than we think before.
• 34:53
  Indeed, they do change the world at some point. And as for block chain, I believe that it's hardly begun to disappoint us.
• 35:00
  But that doesn't mean we should write it off in the long run.
• 35:05
  Now, there was a very important point that the merged from the stories that I told in my book,
• 35:10
  and that is that whereas we think in terms of the linear model of science and technology,
• 35:16
  that science leads to technology, which leads to applications, which leads to business.
• 35:23
  In fact, it's very rarely as simple as that, because technology is often the seed of science as well as the fruit and can sometimes be both.
• 35:32
  It can sometimes come out of science, but then lead to new scientific breakthroughs is quite a nice example.
• 35:39
  This man is called Philip Horvath.
• 35:41
  He worked for a yoghurt making company in France and the Nobel Prise that was won this year by two brilliant scientists,
• 35:54
  Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, for the invention of Crispell gene editing.
• 36:03
  Looks at first sight like a purely academic discovery made in universities.
• 36:10
  But actually, where did they find out about crisper?
• 36:14
  Where did they find out about these strange palindromic sequences in genomes of bacteria that could be repurposed to editing genes?
• 36:23
  They found out about them from Felipe Horvath in the yoghurt industry.
• 36:28
  And why was the yoghurt industry studying bacteria and their genes?
• 36:33
  Because the yoghurt industry depends on bacteria and sometimes they get viral infections.
• 36:38
  So they need to understand the immune system of the bacterium and the immune system of the bacterium
• 36:43
  turns out to be to carry libraries of virus genomes so they can be recognised by the defensive system,
• 36:51
  which chops up the DNA of the viruses. And this is what we have repurposed for gene editing.
• 36:58
  So in a sense, it comes out of industry and goes into academia rather than the other way round.
• 37:04
  Now, you take the story further back to Francisco. He Mahiga in Al Jazeera said it's back in university again.
• 37:10
  So these tech technologies, these innovations can start in industry or they can start in academia and they can go in both directions.
• 37:22
  An even more dramatic example when you think about it, is vaccination itself or rather inoculation as it was when it first started.
• 37:31
  Which was brought to Britain and thereby to Western Europe by a rather remarkable woman,
• 37:37
  literary woman called Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who was in that she was the wife of the ambassador in Constantinople.
• 37:49
  And she then picked up while there this habit of inoculating people against smallpox, children against smallpox.
• 37:58
  She brought it back to England, persuaded the Prince Wales and others to try it and did to our own children.
• 38:03
  And despite being extremely unpopular with the medical profession, it caught on and it saved a lot of lives about the same time.
• 38:11
  The same thing happened in North America because of a preacher named Cotton Mather who had a
• 38:21
  slave called Uneasiness and the slave brought with him from Africa the concept of inoculation.
• 38:29
  Cotton mother gave it as Abdelal Boylston, a medick who inoculated half the students at Harvard when a smallpox epidemic was
• 38:39
  threatened and had to lock himself in a cupboard for more than a week to escape the mob,
• 38:46
  which wanted to kill him for this dangerous experiment. But it succeeded and it proved it right.
• 38:53
  The point is that these people have a humble slave.
• 38:57
  A woman with no scientific education.
• 39:01
  Invented this, and it was used for hundreds of years without us having the slightest scientific idea of white work.
• 39:11
  It wasn't till well after Pasteur that we really understood why inoculation or vaccination works.
• 39:20
  So technology can precede science by quite a long time.
• 39:26
  Another theme that emerged is the common fear that innovation will destroy jobs from the Luddites in the 18th century to today.
• 39:37
  It's been there's been repeated waves of worry that automation is going to steal jobs.
• 39:42
  It doesn't happen. It won't happen.
• 39:45
  And the reason is because it creates new kinds of work and because it although it does save us time, it doesn't replace work.
• 39:59
  If you. And trying to explain what a software engineer is.
• 40:08
  Innovation also enables us to do more with less thanks to innovations in agriculture.
• 40:13
  We grow 68 percent. We use 68 percent less land to produce a given amount of food.
• 40:19
  We use 13 percent as much aluminium and a drinks cannas. We did when they were first invented.
• 40:24
  LCD lights use less than a quarter as much electricity to produce the same amount of light as they did.
• 40:31
  Now, one of the consequences of this is that innovation enables us to use fewer resources.
• 40:38
  And that means that innovation is potentially infinite because we won't run out of resources if we are able to use this through innovation.
• 40:51
  That is to say, innovation and economic growth can simply ask us to do more with less.
• 40:57
  And that will enable us to keep innovating pretty well indefinitely into the future.
• 41:06
  I also came up with the conclusion that a bad and innovation,
• 41:10
  great big employers that are huge free trade zones like the Ottoman Empire, for example, was very resistant to innovation.
• 41:19
  Something similar in the Ming Empire in China. Even the Roman Empire wasn't actually very innovative compared with the dark
• 41:26
  edges that came after or compared with the Greek city states that came before.
• 41:32
  And why? Because attention, essentially their very top down bureaucratic places where people at the centre tell people what they should do.
• 41:41
  They don't allow for the freedom and experimentation to trial and error.
• 41:45
  That is so crucial to innovation. Something similar happens in big companies.
• 41:50
  Kodak was blown away by digital photography.
• 41:55
  Nokia became the most spectacular success story of the mobile phone industry and hugely innovative company.
• 42:02
  I was then blown away by the switch in mobiles from voice to data.
• 42:09
  Big companies just become too invested in existing technologies to bureaucratic
• 42:14
  and slow in their decision making and too intolerant of experimentation.
• 42:18
  And maverick ideas. We think we're all in favour of innovation, but actually there is huge resistance to innovation.
• 42:29
  It comes from big companies that try to put barriers in the way of competitors.
• 42:34
  It comes from pressure groups that play on our conservatism and our caution about the future.
• 42:43
  And it comes from our interest in regulating, which often leads to barriers to innovation.
• 42:52
  He's a very nice example of how. Hope stick in the mud.
• 42:58
  We are sometimes about new stuff. Coffee. Coffee was an innovation in the 16th century in all of Europe where wherever it appeared, it was banned.
• 43:10
  It was made illegal. It was forbidden. It was driven out.
• 43:16
  There was coffeehouses, but closed down coffee pots were were destroyed.
• 43:23
  It's an it's an extraordinary story. And the attitude was very similar to the attitude.
• 43:29
  Genetically modified crops. Today in Europe, frankly. This stuff is dangerous.
• 43:35
  We don't know enough about it. The precautionary principle says we should not have it.
• 43:40
  Now, where was this opposition coming from? A lot of it was coming from the beer and wine industry, which in one case in Marseilles,
• 43:49
  actually paid for a university to produce a pamphlet saying that coffee was bad for you.
• 43:55
  So science could be bought and paid for in those days, as it can be.
• 44:01
  Occasionally today. But the other source of opposition to coffee was from rulers because rulers didn't like the fact that people met in coffee houses.
• 44:16
  And gossiped. And when they go sit in a coffee house gossiping, they might talk about whether the king is doing a good job or not.
• 44:27
  And they might even decide that he's not. And this is not to be encouraged.
• 44:32
  Basically, coffeehouses are the source of fake news. Here is King Charles, the second banning coffeehouses, the source.
• 44:39
  By the way, of the Royal Society. It was a coffeehouse here in Oxford. But here he is banning coffee in the 60s, 70s.
• 44:48
  As for coffee, tea and chocolate, I know you could they do.
• 44:51
  Only the places where they are sold are convenient for purses, peasants to meet in, sit half day and discourse with all companies that come in.
• 44:57
  Of state matters. Talking of news and broaching of lies are reigning the judgements and discretion of their governors.
• 45:03
  Censoring all their actions and insinuating into the is that the people are prejudice against them,
• 45:08
  extolling and magnifying their own past knowledge and wisdom and blah, blah, blah.
• 45:12
  You get the point. He didn't like fake news. Fortunately, it proved impossible to ban coffee.
• 45:19
  It just kept coming back. Now, if, as I argue.
• 45:26
  The great theme of innovation is freedom. The freedom to experiment, the freedom to make mistakes.
• 45:31
  The freedom to change direction. The freedom to to fail and start again.
• 45:36
  The freedom as the consumer to express a preference amongst different competing innovations, particularly.
• 45:43
  How do I explain China being one of the innovative parts of the world today?
• 45:50
  Is that not because actually China is innovative, because it has a policy, a top down policy of innovation?
• 45:57
  I don't believe that's the right way to read China at all. I think what happened after the fall of Mao Tse tung in 1970.
• 46:06
  A pin was that China became a very free place economically, even while it was a very unfair.
• 46:16
  I'm not sure that a new political party, but if you invented a new widget and you just joined us,
• 46:22
  you faced many that you are actually bureaucratic rules and delays than you did in the West.
• 46:30
  You actually could get up and running with your new factory and you selling a new device much quicker than in the West.
• 46:37
  And that has been true for most of the last four decades. Branding.
• 46:43
  I believe the Xi Jingping regime is now economically illiberal as well as politically, and that we will see innovation stifled in China in the future.
• 46:53
  Something similar happened in China a very long time ago.
• 46:57
  Around a thousand years ago in the song Dynasty, China was an incredibly innovative place with the invention of gunpowder, compasses.
• 47:11
  Printing money. The printing press. All these kind of things.
• 47:15
  It was it was a time of rich innovation. And the reason was because that dynasty ran a very decentralised empire.
• 47:27
  Essentially, it was a series of city states that were self-governing, that were run by merchants.
• 47:32
  They could do what they want. They could trade. They could experiment. They could innovate.
• 47:37
  Then after Ramon Mongul interregnum, along comes the Ming Empire and says no, from now on, we are going to tell you what you can do from the centre.
• 47:44
  The capital is going to be full of mandarins who are going to organise the economy. They banned foreign trade.
• 47:50
  They told merchants that they could not leave their home town without a permit.
• 47:54
  They told them that they must send a memo to a Mandarin every month describing how much stock they
• 48:02
  had in their warehouse so that the mandarins could calculate how to feed the people of China.
• 48:10
  The result was disaster. The result was the total impoverishment of the Chinese nation for many centuries.
• 48:18
  So China does teach the lesson that freedom is important, but innovation.
• 48:27
  This is what innovation has done to the human race. This is GDP per capita.
• 48:32
  Since sixteen hundred, the most extraordinary hockey stick of a graph you will ever see.
• 48:39
  Data visualisation by our world in data. Max here in Oxford and.
• 48:46
  At every stage in. Intellectual people have said, by the way, this can't carry on.
• 48:53
  It's about to stop. We're about to hit the buffers. Pessimism has always been a bestseller.
• 49:00
  Throughout this period, just one example, Thomas Babington, Macaulay Macaulay, writing in 1830 reviewing a pessimistic book by Robert Subi,
• 49:10
  says, We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error, who say society's reached a turning point.
• 49:16
  We have seen our best days, but so said all who came before us.
• 49:20
  And with just as much apparent reason or more principle is that with nothing but improvement behind US rhetoric,
• 49:25
  expect nothing but deterioration before us. So actually, because of innovation, we face a bright future.
• 49:36
  Thank you very much. I will now. Stopped sharing my slides.
• 49:45
  OK, so are we. I enjoyed that lecture very, very much.
• 49:50
  We are struggling at the moment with the connexion to match for a Q and A,
• 49:55
  we know he's only got a few minutes, so it could conceivably be that he's been pulled out.
• 50:00
  We literally on the case. Now, if you go to the Q and A bar, you can enter some questions.
• 50:09
  We've already got one question in from Jeremy Gibbons. I've read it out. Jeremy says, You observed that innovation is serendipitous.
• 50:15
  What do you think about the incentives placed on academics by national research funders such
• 50:19
  as you can go awry towards planned innovation and research projects rather than serendipity?
• 50:24
  Wouldn't we be better with reliable, modest funding for following curiosity rather than a lottery for fewer targeted grants?
• 50:35
  Some interesting observations about artificial intelligence. And it would be fascinating.
• 50:40
  We could have an entire we could have an entire discussion about artificial intelligence are suspect and where that's going.
• 50:49
  We've got another question. Impacts of trade, limitations between countries on innovation.
• 50:55
  That's published on.
• 51:13
  I believe the vaccination map mentioned two referred to rather than variation, exposure to people to small amounts of the true smallpox virus.
• 51:19
  It wasn't quite the vaccination, but the somewhat truly dangerous variation.
• 51:36
  In your book, you're quite dismissive about the role of academia and government in promulgating innovation.
• 51:58
  Do you think any apparent inevitability of particular innovations when we look back is an illusion,
• 52:03
  where we just tell us after a story that something was inevitable to make sense of history in hindsight?
• 52:09
  I personally think there's a good deal of truth to that.
• 52:12
  I think we do tend to create stories to explain things in a way that doesn't necessarily reflect what actually happened on the ground.
• 52:23
  I suspect that innovation cannot be free for all, especially when it comes to medicine or weaponry or DNA data.
• 52:27
  What goals should future governments play? While we're waiting, let me just do a shout out again to Oxford Asset Management,
• 52:48
  our sponsors, but the tremendous over the last few years and as I said at the beginning,
• 52:53
  we've been able to bring in speakers that we simply wouldn't have been able to previously and to greatly expand the range of these these lectures.
• 53:01
  So we really are very, very grateful. And as I said earlier, Oxfam are hiring and they would love to hear from you if you're interested in finance,
• 53:08
  machine learning, artificial intelligence generally. And you could easily find them online.
• 53:17
  Okay, I'm afraid bad news. So it seems we've lost maths East has to get on at this point now to another engagement.
• 53:23
  That's a tremendous pity because I thought that was a really, really wonderful lecture.
• 53:28
  And we've got some great questions. So I am very sorry for that.
• 53:32
  Everybody, tech glitches, these things happen, it seems.
• 53:36
  Matt was having some connexion problems with teams and then just timed out and had to get off to another engagement.
• 53:42
  Well, I'm very, very grateful for Matt for a really, really thought provoking lecture.
• 53:48
  Can I suggest Matt is on Twitter, very active on Twitter. And perhaps one way forward might be to post some of the questions on Twitter.
• 53:57
  But I say I thought that was a genuinely fascinating lecture.
• 54:00
  Something a bit different, but something very, very thought provoking and something very,
• 54:04
  very relevant for a Department of computer science for which innovation is is is absolutely central to what we do now.
• 54:13
  So thank you, everybody. Thank you again to our sponsors.
• 54:16
  Apologies that we weren't able to deliver the Q&A session, but we were able to deliver, I think, a wonderful lecture.
• 54:22
  We will not be back to life straight. He lectures next term and I suspect we will not be back in Trinity term,
• 54:28
  even though I think the world will be looking at a lot better by Trinity term.
• 54:33
  In no small part, thanks, of course, to the wonderful work of our colleagues at Oxford and the development of the Oxford vaccine.
• 54:40
  But we will be having Straight's lectures.
• 54:43
  Clearly, we will have learnt from the experience today and we'll be able to deliver a much more polished Q and A,
• 54:48
  and I hope that by then I will have learnt to finally share my slides when I do my introduction.
• 54:55
  So thank you everybody for joining and we hope to see you again in Hilary to thank you.