Surviving Progress - Economic Growth at any Price? | FD Finance

in defining progress.

I think it's very important to make a

distinction between good progress and

bad progress. I mean things progress in

the sense that they change

both in nature and in human society.

There appears to be a clear trend

towards increasing complexity

as change proceeds.

We tend to delude ourselves that these

changes always result in improvements

from the [music] human point of view.

We're now reaching a point at which

technological progress and [music] the

increase in our economies and our

numbers threaten the very existence of

humanity.

We copied

Okay, your transmitter key. That's why

we couldn't read

what is progress. Uh,

I think

that's too hard a question.

[music]

Um,

when I think of the word progress, Our

flag is red, white, and blue. But our

nation is rainbow.

Progress will not come easy. It will not

come quick. But today, we had an

opportunity to move forward.

It seems like we're stuck in this trap

for the last 200 years of since the

industrial revolution where we think

progress is more of the same. Like we we

should make our machines better and get

more machines, but we've been doing that

for 200 years. So doing more of that is

not progress. We're like stuck in this

like a record.

things that start out to seem like

improvements or progress. These things

are very seductive. It seems like

there's no downside to these.

But when they reach a certain scale,

they turn out to be dead ends or traps.

I came up with the term progress trap to

define human behaviors that sort of seem

to be good things, seem to be to provide

benefits in the short term, but which

ultimately lead to disaster because

they're unsustainable.

And one example would be going right

back into the old stone age, the time of

when our ancestors were hunting

mammoths. They reached a point where

their weaponry and their hunting

techniques got so good that they

destroyed hunting as a way of life

throughout most of the world.

The people who discovered how to kill

two mammoths instead of one had made

real progress. But the people who

discovered that they could eat really

well by driving a whole herd over a

cliff and kill 200 at once had fallen

into a progress trap. They'd made too

much progress.

Our physical bodies and our physical

brains, as far as we can tell, have

changed very little in the past 50,000

years.

We've only been living in civilization

for the last 5,000 years at the most,

which is less than 0.2% of our

evolutionary history.

So the other 99.8 we were hunters and

gatherers. And that is the kind of way

of life that made us.

We are essentially the same people as

those stone age hunters.

What makes our way of life different

from theirs is culture has taken off at

an exponential rate and has [music]

really become completely detached from

the pace of natural evolution.

So we are running 21st century software

[music]

our knowledge uh on hardware that hasn't

been upgraded for 50,000 years [music]

and this is lies at the core of many of

our problems.

All of this is because our human nature

[music] is back in the hunting gathering

era of the old stone age whereas our our

knowledge and our technology in other

words our ability to do both good and

harm to ourselves and to the world in

general uh has grown out of all

proportion.

One thing to remember of course about

the human mind is that it's not that

fundamentally different from say the

brain of a chimpanzeee.

Most of the human brain, the basic

structure of the brain is much older

than than human species. Some of it goes

back to bacteria. Some of it goes back

to worms. Some of it originated in the

first mammals. Some of it in the first

primates. Some of it in the first human

beings. Very little of it, however,

changed in the last 50,000 years. And

so, most of what we do, we do with

hardware components that are much older

than any of the problems that we face.

When I first began to study chimps, I

thought that the task was to just map

out more and more similarities to find

areas of cognition that hadn't been

studied yet and simply show that chimps

were just like us.

Good job.

You can imagine teaching a small [music]

child to stand up a block upright. And

you can teach a chimp to do the same

thing. Oh, I'll set up the block here.

Set up a block here. I can see

everything. [music] It's very very clear

and I get a a piece of fruit for doing

it.

But what happens when you introduce

[music] a small subtlety into this

situation where you trick them and just

make the block uh offc center just

enough that it keeps falling over? Well,

the chimp will come in, set up the good

block,

set up the the the block that we've

tricked them with, but then it falls

over.

Well, the chimp can see that it's not

the way it's supposed to be. So they try

again and they try again and they move

it to one place and they move it to

another place and they keep trying to

get it to stand up because they know

what is supposed to happen but they have

no understanding or no inclination to

ask why. What unobservable part of the

situation is causing that block to keep

falling over.

The young child will enter, set up the

good block, try to set up the the the

the block that we've tricked them with.

But when it falls over, well, first

they'll try again and maybe try again,

but very quickly they'll turn it over,

feel the bottom of it, shake it, try to

discern what unobservable property of

that block is causing it to fall over.

That's the the fundamental core

difference, I believe, between humans

and chimps that humans ask why. [music]

We're constantly probing for

unobservable ex uh uh phenomenon to

explain the observable. [music] It's

what's driven us to discover gravity.

It's what's driven [music] us to probe

into the mysteries of quazars. And it's

the same thing that drives us to probe

into the mysteries of each other in our

everyday lives. Why does she keep doing

that? Why does he keep behaving like

that? He must think this. He must

believe this. I I don't understand why

why why why.

So the upside of the human capacity to

ask why to [music] continually probe

behind appearances and to try to find

out how the world really works is we

develop fabulous new medicines. We

develop fabulous new therapeutic [music]

techniques to take care of people. Uh we

invent the whole cascade of modern

technology.

But the downside is that we invent the

whole cascade of modern technology.

Arguably, we are the most intellectual

creature that's ever walked on planet

[music] Earth.

So, how come then that this so

intellectual being is destroying its

only home? because we only have the one

home.

Maybe one day people will be on Mars,

but for the moment we've got planet

Earth and we are destroying, we are

polluting, we are damaging the future of

our own species, which is very

counterproductive from an evolutionary

perspective.

This capacity that seems so wonderful to

us, the ability to ask [music] why, the

very ability that undergurs modern

science as a double-edged sword.

If humans go extinct uh on this planet,

I think what's going to be our epitth on

our gravestone is why

I'm getting to like driving this

machine. Think I overdid that one.

Yeah, it was clean out of sight.

Oh, you think you're so clever.

Okay,

we have the ability to think into the

future, but most of our mechanisms, most

of our brain mechanisms evolved before

we had any ability to think forward to

the future. And when it made some sense

for decisions to be short term and so a

lot of our brain mechanisms, um, what I

call our ancestral mechanisms or our

reflexive mechanisms are tuned to making

snap decisions right away, like fight or

flight. You see the lion, either you're

going to fight or you're going to run.

no time to think about, you know, the

long-term consequences. And that's good

when we're stressed about something

immediate that we can deal with, for

example. But those very systems that

work by reflex are not so good at

cooperating with these more modern

systems, the deliberative systems that

allow us to make long-term decisions and

say, "Well, is this good for me? Is it

good for my society, for my planet?

Between the fall of the Roman Empire and

Columbus sailing, it took 13 centuries

to add 200 million people to the world's

[music] population. Now it takes only 3

years.

A simple thing like pasteurization, the

warming of of milk so [music] that the

bacteria are killed and the control of

um smallpox, [music] things like that

have led to

a great boom in human numbers.

[music]

So overpopulation, which nobody really

wants to talk about because it cuts at

things like religious beliefs and the

the freedom of the individual and the

autonomy of the family and so forth, is

something that we're going to have to

deal with.

We probably have to work towards a much

smaller worldwide population than six or

seven billion. We probably need to go

down to a half that or possibly even a

third of that. if everybody is going to

live comfortably and decently.

The other side of this problem and

perhaps the more dangerous side is the

footprint of the individuals at the top

of the social pyramid who are consuming

the most. Somebody in the United States

or Europe is consuming about 50 times

more resources than a poor person in a

place like Bangladesh.

If China were to reach the level of

consumption of say the United States or

Europe, it's very unlikely that the

world could support the addition of a

billion consumers at that level.

Let's say in China maybe 200 300 million

people are quote unquote affluent you

know they could afford relatively

speaking you know what we can in the

west in India and also whatever 200

million you know so you add up these

these affluent

segments of population in these

developing countries or marine countries

but still you come up with no more than

one and a half maybe 2 billion people.

So there is still 5 billion people

waiting to tap into these bonanzas of

you know plentiful food, cars, decent

housing, right? Higher education for

their children. So the potential demand

for resources is immense.

Hello.

Oh,

speech speech.

running.

Number one,

What I love

Don't trip out.

[music]

Okay.

Oh yeah,

Fishchech.

Fore

speech.

for thousands of years. You know, China

has the longest continuous civilization

in the world

and it is only uh during the recent

period of time when the European

countries started to industrialize that

China started to lack behind. And

therefore, you know, uh, between the

first opium war in around 1840 all the

way to about 1978,

China went through a roller coaster of

great humiliations, wars of aggression

by foreign nations, uh, Japanese

aggression against China, civil war,

collapse of theQing dynasty, great

cultural revolution, chaos in China that

when Deng Xiaoping reemerged in 1978,

He basically pointed out the only

correct path.

We need to go onto a path of growth

[music] and China need to modernize and

industrialize. And I think that's you

know the beginning of China's correct

development onto a right path.

Some people have written about um

natural capital, the capital that nature

provides, which is the clean air, the

clean water, the the uncut forests, the

the rich farmland. Um and the minerals,

the oil, the metals, all of these things

are the capital that nature has

provided. And until about 1980, human

civilization was able to live on what we

might term the interest of that capital,

the surplus that nature is able to

produce. Uh the food that farmland can

grow without actually degrading the

farmland or the number of fish you can

pull out of the sea without causing the

fish stocks stocks to to crash. But

since 1980, we've been using more than

the interest. And so we are in effect

like somebody who thinks he's rich

because he's spending the money that

he's been left in his inheritance. Uh

not spending the interest, but eating

into the capital.

The last time I visited the New York

Stock Exchange was in 1980, and the mood

sure was different then.

Government with its high taxes,

excessive spending, and overregulation

had thrown a wrench in the works of our

free markets. [cheering]

[applause]

With tax reform and budget control, our

economy will be free to expand to its

full potential,

driving the bears back into permanent

hibernation. That's our economic program

for the next four years. We're going to

turn the bull loose.

[cheering]

[applause]

The world is is this big.

It's not this big. And it can't be this

big. It's just this big. It's a finite

sum.

Instead of thinking that nature is this

huge bank that we can just this endless

credit card that we can just keep

drawing on, we have to think about the

finite nature of that planet and how to

keep it alive so that we too may remain

alive.

Unless

we conserve the planet, there isn't

going to be any the economy.

The ice age hunter is still us. It's

still in us. uh that those ancient

hunters who thought that there would

always be another herd of mammoth over

the next hill shared the optimism of the

stock trader that there's always going

to be another big killing on the stock

market in the next week or two.

Get your bets now, ladies and gentlemen.

Popcorn, peanuty bitty popcorn, hot

drink. Cold drink. Step right up, ladies

and gentlemen. Step right up.

If you're watching the Earth, say over

the last five or six thousand years and

you're speeding up your film, uh what

you see is civilizations breaking out

like forest fires in one pristine

environment after another. And after a

civilization has arisen and sort of

burned out uh the natural resources in

that area, then it dies down and another

fire breaks out somewhere else.

And now of course we have one huge

civilization all around the world which

we have to confront the possibility that

the entire experiment of civilization is

in itself a progress trap.

The Dow plunged more than 500 points

yesterday.

It was the biggest Dow decline ever

seemly on the brink of collapse.

And while banks have failed and shares

have plummeted, the effects are working

their way down to all of us.

When will the economy turn around? Yes,

I'm not an economist, but I do believe

that we're growing. And uh I can

remember, you know, this press

conference here, people yelling

recession this recession that as if

you're economists.

And uh I'm an optimist. You know, I I I

believe there's a lot of positive things

for our economy. Faith in progress has

become a kind of religious faith, a sort

of fundamentalism, rather like the

market fundamentalism that has just

recently crashed and burned. Um the idea

that uh you can let markets rip is a

delusion just as the idea that you can

let technology rip and it will solve the

problems created by itself in a slightly

earlier phase. You know that that that

has become um a belief very similar to

the religious delusions that caused some

societies to crash and burn in the past.

written

records go back about uh 4,000 years and

from 2000 BC to uh the time of Jesus. It

was normal for all of the countries in

the world to periodically cancel the

debts when they became too large to pay.

So you have Sumer, Babylonia, Egypt,

other regions uh all proclaiming these

debt cancellations and the effect was to

make a clean slate [music] so that

society would begin all over again.

This was easy to do in a society where

most debts were owed to the state. It

became much harder to do when enterprise

and credit passed out of the hands of

the state into private hands and into

the hands of an oligarchy.

And the last thing they wanted was to

have a king that would actually cancel

the debts and restore equality.

Rome was the first country of the world

not to cancel the debts.

It went to war in Sparta, in Greece to

overthrow the governments and the kings

that wanted to cancel the debts.

The wars of the first century BC ended

up stripping these countries of

everything they had. Not only did it

strip the temples of gold, it stripped

the public buildings, it stripped the

economies of their reproductive

capacity, it stripped them of their

water works, it made a desert out of the

land. And it said a debt is a debt.

The collapse seems to have been closely

linked to ecological devastation which

led to all sorts of social and economic

and military problems. In the early

stages of the Roman Republic, you had um

fairly egalitarian landowning system.

The peasants had access to public land.

But as the Roman state became more

powerful and the lords and the uh the

generals

began to appropriate public land for

their own private estates, more and more

peasants became landless. At the same

time, erosion was of serious problem. So

bad that the some of the Roman ports

silted up with all the top soil that got

washed down from the fields into the

river. And archaeologists have been able

to establish how badly degraded much of

Italy was uh by the fall of the Roman

Empire and how it took a thousand years

of much reduced population during the

Middle Ages for fertility in in Italy to

rebuild.

What was absolutely new uh in the Roman

Empire was irreversible concentration of

wealth at the top of the economic

pyramid. And that's what progress has

meant ever since. progress is me meant

you will never get back what we take

from you. Uh that's what brought on the

dark age and it's what's threatened to

bring in the dark age again if society

doesn't realize that if it lets the uh

wealth concentrate in the hand of a

financial class. This class is not going

to be any more intelligent and long-term

in disposing of the wealth than uh its

predecessors were in Rome or in uh other

countries.

[music]

Well, the term oligarchy obviously

sounds a little a little esoteric. It

just means a small group of people who

have got a lot of political power based

on their economic power.

We like to think of the United States as

being much more democratic, much more

spread out in terms of who has the

power. and and oligarchy is something

that's usually associated with

relatively poor countries. But that view

has to be updated because we've got an

essential part of of that problem, that

structure in the United States today.

The people who got all this economic

power were in the financial sector. It

was Wall Street. If if I can, you know,

use that that shorthand expression. Wall

Street became really powerful. They used

that power to buy influence in in

Washington, get uh more deregulation, so

to get more of the playing field shaped

in the way they wanted, which was no

government intervention, no restrictions

on what they're going to do. That

enabled them to make a lot more money,

which bought them more political power,

and this went on for a considerable

period of time until, of course, there

was an enormous crash.

But basically, you come to us today on

your bicycles after buying Girl Scout

cookies and helping out Mother Teresa

telling us, "We're sorry. We didn't mean

it. We won't do it again. Trust us."

Well, I have some people in my

constituency that actually robbed some

of your banks and they say the same

thing. They're sorry. They didn't mean

it. They won't do it again. Just let him

out.

Do you understand that this is a little

difficult for most of my constituents to

take that you learned your lesson?

The bankers can't stop themselves. It's

in their DNA, in the DNA of their

organizations to take massive risks, to

pay themselves ridiculous salaries and

and to collapse. And that the more that

reasonable, responsible people of the

center and the left and the right see

this,

the closer we get to finally

constraining the power of of these uh

outofc control financial oligarchs. It's

not a mystery. It's not a surprise that

we know we have crisis every 5 or 10

years. You know, my daughter called me

from school one day and said, "Dad,

what's a financial crisis?" And without

trying to be funny, I says, "It's the

type of thing that happens every five to

seven years." And she said, "Why is

everyone so surprised?" So we aren't s

we shouldn't be surprised.

I read scrolled on a wall somewhere that

every time history repeats itself the

price goes up.

If you look at the increasing complexity

of civilization, what you can see

towards the end of the classic Maya

period is the enormous amount of effort

being put in to build uh palaces and

temple precincts that are controlled

entirely by the nobility and from which

one imagines the the peasantry was

excluded just as the the ordinary folk

are excluded from gated communities in

many countries today. And one imagines

also that therefore the people at the

bottom were becoming more and more

disenchanted with the rulers as they

felt that the social contract that had

once existed that the rulers were kind

of uh the mediators between the gods and

themselves and would help them get good

weather and good crops and all of that

as they saw that beginning to break down

and the rulers in effect losing touch

with the people whom they claim to

represent. uh is a pattern I think we

can see a lot in the modern world now.

Every society in history for the last

4,000 years has uh found that the debts

grow more rapidly than people can pay.

The problem is a small oligarchy of 10%

of the population at the top to whom all

of these net debts are owed to. You want

to anull the debts to the top 10%.

That's what they're not going to do. The

oligarchy is running things. They would

rather enull the bottom 90% right to

live than to enull the money that's due

to them. They would rather strip the

planet and shrink the population uh and

be paid rather than give up their

claims. That's the political fight of

the 21st century.

Well, my job on Wall Street was to be

balance of payments economist for the

Chase Manhattan Bank in the 1960s.

My first job there was to calculate how

much debt could uh third world countries

pay. And [music] the answer was well,

how much do they earn? And whatever they

earn, that's what they can afford to pay

in interest. that our objective was to

take the entire [music]

earnings of a third world country and

say ideally that would be all paid as

interest to us.

Look, don't give me a hard luck story. I

hear them every day and quite frankly,

they bore me.

The facts are simple. In 1973, this bank

gave you a loan and you still haven't

paid it back.

Admittedly, you paid back the initial

sum but not the interest, which to date

amounts to nine times the amount

originally borrowed.

Nine times.

So, you better get your act together.

Times are tough and we're all having to

clamp down.

And don't look at me like that.

This is a bank not a charity.

The number one cost for foreign lending

uh through some of the multilateral

institutions such as IMF and World Bank

is uh the death toll on the continent.

We can look at the support of dictators

[music]

that took place u 30 years a uh from

1960 till 1997

of a brutal dictator.

He was given humongous loans. Everyone

knew he wasn't using that for the

population. He was propped up as one of

the biggest leader in in the whole

African continent.

While your country is young, only 10

years of age that it has had a period of

progress in that period

which has

been an example

for nations throughout the world.

You have moved forward economically.

You have established unity in your

country

and you have a vitality

which impresses every visitor when he

comes to Congo.

What is interesting is all the money

plunder from all the international debt

is found in western banks. So as he was

removed from power, the money never

returned to the congalles.

the population didn't have access to

medical uh services, didn't have access

to adequate education,

living wage and uh it continued till

today. Now the como has a 14 billion

debt. It's been structured in a way

where the people uh do not benefit and

the human cost is uh so high. You know

in the com we have 6 million death since

1996.

Rich countries lend a so-called

developing country a big whack of money.

debt is incurred on behalf of people who

have nothing to do with it, don't know

anything about it, then they're expected

to pay pay the price by by scraping off

their livelihood, turning it into money

and giving it to somebody else.

How could the the money given to the

Congo benefit to the people, use some of

the funds to make sure that there are

strong institution within the country

that will protect against uh human

rights violation and so many other

issues that we face. But these funds are

not used for that because whenever it's

given they tell you specifically what

project you have to use it for and

mainly is usually mining project uh to

get access to resources.

[cheering]

economical.

You can relate the destruction of the

rainforest in Brazil directly to the uh

Wall Street and London uh financial

sector. Uh it the story begins in 1982

when countries couldn't pay their debt

anymore and the result is that the Latin

American countries generally stopped

paying because they said we're already

paying all of the balance of payment

surplus we have uh to the banks.

We don't have any money to import to

sustain living standards. We don't have

money to import to build new factories

and to pay the debt. So the

International Monetary Fund at that

point said don't go bankrupt. You have

an option. You can begin to sell off the

public domain. You have plenty of assets

to sell to pay us. You can sell off your

water rights, your forests, your subsoil

mineral resources. You can sell us your

oil rights. And so Brazil, Argentina,

and other countries begin to sell off uh

their resources to private investors.

And the private investors bought these

resources on credit.

Step one.

Fore

control progress.

Wonder

contest.

Love.

for

par.

in various

The the forest

Yeah,

this is some

[cheering]

Foreign

speech. Foreign speech. Foreign speech.

Uncle Milch.

can destroy.

International

[applause]

Brazil.

They're cutting down the rainforest.

They're emptying out the economy.

They're turning it into a hole in the

ground to repay the bankers. That's the

financial business plan. That's how it

ends up because the bankers can always

take their money and begin digging holes

in another country and emptying out that

country. [music] That's the global

financial system.

[music]

Amazon.

The economists say if you clearcut the

forest, take the money and put it in the

bank, you can make six or 7%. If you

clear cut the forest, put it into

Malaysia or Papa New Guinea, you can

make 30 or 40%. So, who cares whether

you keep the forest? Cut it down. Put

the money somewhere else. When those

forests are gone, put it in fish. When

the fish are gone, put in computers.

Money doesn't stand for anything. And

money now grows faster than the real

world. Conventional economics is a form

of brain damage.

Economics is so fundamentally

disconnected from the real world. It is

destructive. If you take a an

introductory course in economics, the

professor in the first lecture will show

a slide of the economy and it looks very

impressive, you know, raw materials,

extraction, process, manufacture,

wholesale, retail with arrows going back

and forth and they try to impress you

because they think they know damn well

economics is not a science, but they're

trying to fool us into thinking that

it's a real science. It's not. Economics

is a set of values that they then try to

use mathematical equations and all that

stuff and pretend that it's a science.

But if you ask the economist in that

equation, where do you put the ozone

layer? Where do you put the deep

underground aquifers of fossil water?

Where do you put top soil or

biodiversity? Their answer is, oh, those

are externalities.

Well, then you might as well be on Mars.

That economy is not based in anything

like the real world. It's life, the web

of life that filters water in the

hydraologic cycle. It's microorganisms

in the soil that create the soil that we

can grow our food in. Nature performs

all kinds of services. Insects fertilize

all of the flowering plants. These

services are vital to the health of the

planet. Economists call these

externalities. That's nuts.

[music]

[music]

Unlimited economic progress in a world

of finite natural natural resources

doesn't make sense. It's a pattern that

is bound to collapse and we keep seeing

it collapsing. Uh but then we build it

up because there are these strong vested

interests. We must have business as

usual and you know you get the arms

manufacturers, you get the petroleum

industry, you get the pharmaceutical

industry and all of this feeding into um

helping to create corrupt governments

who are putting the future of their own

people at risk.

You can imagine liies growing in a pond.

Liies grow very rapidly. They double

every day.

They're going to cover the whole surface

and there won't be any way of the fish

getting oxygen and all the life is going

to die in the pond. That's how rapidly

things can grow. One day you're half

full of liies, the next day you're dead.

You could say that today we're in the

point at which the lily pond is half

full. The uh life is being snuffed out

of national economies uh and the debt

goes on doubling. How long can it do it?

It has one day to go.

All the civilizations of the past and I

think our own only seem to be doing well

when they're expanding, when the

population is growing, when the

industrial output [music] is growing and

when the cities are spreading outwards.

Eventually you reach the point at which

the population has overrun everything.

The cities have expanded over the

farmland.

The people at the bottom begin to starve

and the people at the top lose their

legitimacy.

And so you get uh you get hunger, you

get revolution.

Now, one kind of scary thing about the

moment we're in is that for the first

time, there's kind of only one system.

So if the whole thing goes down, you

won't have what you've had in previous

eras of epic collapse, which is that

even though one civilization goes down

and may take a while to recover, there

are other robust civilizations that are

kind of the guardians

um of progress.

In that sense, some of the things that

have been reassuring in the past about

progress don't necessarily apply to the

current situation because once you once

you get to the global level, you've only

got one experiment working.

That's just the inevitable culmination

of its growth ever since the stone age.

And there were weigh stations along the

way like the Roman Empire. And now here

we are and uh more and more people are

in the same boat and they face problems

and either they will solve them together

or suffer together and you know possibly

on a catastrophic scale.

We are entering an increasingly

dangerous period of our history.

[music]

Our

genetic code still carries the selfish

and aggressive instincts that were of

survival advantage in the past.

But I'm an optimist.

[music]

If we are the only intelligent beings in

the galaxy, we should make sure we

survive and [music] continue.

If we can avoid disaster for the next

two centuries, our species should be

safe.

[music]

We have made remarkable progress in the

last 100 years.

[music]

Our only chance of long-term survival is

not to remain inwardlooking on planet

Earth, but to spread out into space.

I was at a conference uh a few years

back uh with George Lucas and uh he came

up and said, you know, you know, there's

there's only two hopes for humanity. Uh

either we find another planet to

colonize after we've destroyed this one.

uh or perhaps your technology uh meaning

what we're doing with the genetic code

uh might be able to allow us to

transform ourselves uh or other aspects

of the planet where we could continue to

live here. We are here to celebrate the

completion of the first survey of the

entire human genome. Without a doubt,

this is the most important, most

wondrous map ever produced by humankind.

We are announcing today for the first

time our species can read the chemical

letters of its genetic code.

For the last several years, my team has

been actually sailing around the world

collecting all the species in the ocean,

the microcies on filters, and we isolate

all the DNA all at once from all of

them.

I have a novel way of looking at these

genes. I view them as the design

components of the future.

It's a mind-boggling concept even though

we're doing it every day. Uh that we can

simply uh start with four bottles of

chemicals, write the genetic code and

change the genetic code of species,

basically developing new species. And we

can try and find ways to make uh fuels

that other people haven't even imagined.

We can do this with novel sources of

food. uh we're limited by only by our

imagination and whatever biological

reality is.

When we consider trying to replace oil,

we use billions of gallons of oil a

year. It's uh I can't even I think I

have a pretty good imagination envision

what a billion gallons of oil is. uh and

making a billion gallons of oil uh from

invisible microbes uh is a certain leap

of faith. But in fact, that's that's how

we proceed in science.

Instead of writing software for

computers, we can now write software for

life.

By changing and taking over evolution,

changing the time course of evolution

and going into deliberate design of

species for our own survival,

at least gives us some points of

optimism uh that we have a [music]

chance to control our destiny.

Uh we're here today to announce uh the

first synthetic cell. This is the first

self-replicating species that we've had

on the planet whose parent is a

computer.

One of the challenges that that faces

the human species is we are more and

more in a position of acting like gods.

This has been true for a while because

we've had the ability to change the

climate, for example. This is going to

be even more true with genetic

technologies. We're going to be able to

manipulate other species and eventually

ourselves.

We're going to be in a position of

controlling our own fate in a way that

no creature has ever in, you know, a

billion years on the planet had an

opportunity to do.

I once wrote a poem in which a mad

bishop said and man became God became

greater than God in the godhood of man.

I do not see anyone living in this

materialistic society as being anything

like God. I don't know what God is, but

uh in my wildest dreams, I would never

conceive [music]

of God or a god as being like uh a

modern human being in a materialistic

society.

We're we're anything but godlike. I I

think the challenges are so

overwhelming to all of us

uh that we're all trying to just use

whatever new tools we can uh to try and

change the future.

Synthetic biology is a progress trap

excellence.

Biologists have pointed out that these

engineering approaches is all very well

and the engineers can try to treat life

as though it was some sort of computer

or engineering substrate. Um but

ultimately the microbes are going to end

up laughing at them that uh that life

doesn't work like that.

[music]

I think the problems that we're seeing

now, whether we're talking about hunger

and massive inequity, whether we're

talking about climate change or the loss

of biodiversity, have been driven over

the last 200 years by a system of overp

production of stuff and over consumption

of stuff. And uh and then that's been

inflated and inflated inflated to the

point where it really is not in any way

reasonable. um the the companies and and

those within governments who have

supported that that approach um are now

saying that they will provide new

technologies to continue that

consumption of stuff that level of

production. Um it's just not realistic.

Exon Mobile and Synthetic Genomics have

built a new facility to identify the

most productive strains of algae. Algae

are amazing little critters. They

secrete oil which we could turn into

bofuels. They also absorb CO2. We're

hoping to supplement the fuels that we

use in our vehicles to someday help meet

the world's energy demands.

Which is harder, mapping the entire

genome set that makes up a human being

or making algae produce energy?

Making algae produce energy is not hard,

but doing it on the scale required to

have a major economic and environmental

impact is going to be a huge challenge.

But uh we have good partner with that

with Exxon Mobile to try and get it to

the scale that it needs to be of

billions of gallons a year. A lot of

engineering is required for facilities

the size of San Francisco. Goodness.

Uh I think they're serious and we're

serious.

What we're seeing alongside the

development of synthetic biology is a

massive corporate grab on plant life.

Um, literally speaking, that means a

grab on land and a grab on seas as well,

where people are being moved off of land

to make way for the growing of plant

life that can be transformed into

plastics, chemicals, fuels, and so

forth. What drives synthetic biology is

not an attempt to to save the planet or

or help humanity, but an attempt to to

increase the bottom line for certain

very large corporations. If we're going

to feed the uh upcoming nine billion

people, uh we can't afford uh to use our

prime crop land uh for the trying to

produce the billions of gallons of fuel

uh that we use. what we're doing with

writing the genetic code, changing the

species allows us to use desert land uh

for we just need sunlight and CO2

uh for using these new engineered algae

for example

synthetic biology in a way you know it's

frightening but I'm I'm very sympathetic

to this on many ways that it would be

nice to get a more water efficient plant

but still it would still need water

cannot create a plant which needs no

water and no nitrogen or which totally

fixes all this nitrogen by sucking it

from the air. You know, just it cannot

go that far. This doesn't fundamentally

change the game. What fundamentally

changes the game and what people don't

want to hear and I'm coming across all

the time and people say, you know, don't

talk to us like that because just is no

starter. But for me, this is the only

starter. We have to use less.

The poor people need more. There is no

doubt about there's no discussion there.

If you are average villager somewhere in

Rajasthan or Punjab or or Nigeria, you

need more period. There basic human

decency compels you to say these people

need more more clean water, more basic

food, more education for their children.

The discussion closed right before it

begins to right. But as far as us is

concerned, we certainly could and should

do with much much much less. People have

been conditioned that things have to

always get go better and immediately as

you say limit something. People think

this is not getting better, but it would

be it's even a non-starter saying people

you should eat less. You should eat less

meat, right? That's even that's a

non-starter, right? You should use less

electricity, right? You should build

smaller cars. The other day I saw the

vice president of of GM talking about

the new GM, right? And one of his

journalists asked him rightly, you know,

but your cars are still so heavy and he

says, "Yes, we are working on it. What

is there to work on it?" Right? There

are so many things which we could do you

know not to surrender our standard of

living not to kind of live in a gut

really right you know but we don't need

one and a half ton car to go from red

light to red light in a city really

right people are not willing to go back

on these things most of them simply are

not because they've been totally

hijacked by this material culture let's

not underestimate this you know the the

the the persuasion the power of this

material culture is immense it's just

immense when I've seen so many people

being so genuinely unhappy that they

cannot afford a 50,000 square foot sorry

$50,000 bathroom remodeling right I mean

there's something wrong with that value

certainly right you know because

bathroom is a place where you should

spend like whatever 10 minutes to take

your shower brush your teeth so it

doesn't have to be worse but you know

how much how much money people ex again

on my mind because we are thinking about

redoing our bathroom right so it's on my

mind it's very interesting so for me

it's a chore because it has to be done

really but for many people it's kind of

a life affirming thing you know people

are renting I think storage spaces,

right, which they will never access in

next 20 years to store the junk which

they cannot store in their 5,000 square

foot homes today, right? So, do we need

that really? So, it's it's just amazing.

So, uh it's it's it's it's it's it's

this is very difficult to put that genie

in the bottle. So, everything is defined

in this material thing. I could make it

a lot more coherent but you see this is

difficult because when you make it a lot

more coherent you make it prescriptive

and prescriptions never work really

because I don't have the solution I

can't sit there and say you know we

should follow this and by 2030

everything click and we all live happily

ever after right you know so I'm making

it deliberately uncle I could be you

know I could be very doctrinary I could

but you see I live for 26 years in a

communist society I'm inoculated against

any doctrinary grand solution saying you

know this is the pattern this is the

master this is the paradigm time which

you have to follow you know I'm just

totally set against it so I'm making

things deliberately kind of you know

messy incoordinated

because that's how life is we don't know

what pattern will emerge as long as we

are living amidst of this sea of

affluence and opportunities and material

uh riches it's just very difficult to

make this individual voluntary resolute

step and saying enough back limit very

difficult

I I was walking around pointing my

finger at everybody and you you know you

people and [music] you know blaming the

culture for its consumption. And finally

one day I came home and um

I had the air conditioners were on even

though there was no one home and I was

like wait you know I'm going around

blaming everybody else but the fact of

the matter is that my lifestyle requires

a huge amount of resource too. So how

can I blame other people and um and I

realized that before I go around trying

to change other people maybe I should

look at myself and change myself and

keep my side of the street clean. So I

came up with this idea that I would live

as environmentally as possible for a

year and see how that affected us.

So we did this no impact experiment. We

did it. We live in New York. We live in

the middle of New York City which made

it unusual because most people can you

know can think of environmental living

as some sort of a back to the land

thing. Um and of but of course back to

the land is not the right idea when it

comes to saving our habitat. If all of

us in New York were to go back to the

land, we would very much destroy the

land.

We're not biologically consumptive. This

has not got to do with human nature.

Human nature is to do what everybody

else does. That's human nature. That

that we want to and it's wonderful. It's

like I want to be with you. I want to be

the same as you. I want to love you and

I want you to love me. That's not bad.

So, so that's at the So, but that's also

part of the problem. I I want to be the

same as you and you consume. So, I'm not

going to be the first not to consume.

But it also tells us that if we can move

from non-conumption to consumption, we

can also move from consumption back to

non-conumption.

We need to begin by saying we're at the

end of a failed experiment and it's time

to say goodbye to it. It's an economic

experiment. It's a technological

experiment. It's been going on for a

couple of hundred years and uh it's not

worked. It's brought us to this this

this point of crisis. Then we can start

to sainly and intelligently say how can

we live within the real limits that our

planet gives us and create a safe

operating space for humanity.

Admittedly, we've used our brain in ways

that are detrimental to the environment

and society. But brains are beginning to

get together around the planet to find

[music]

um solutions to some of the harm that

we've inflicted. And you know, we humans

are a problem-solving species. We

[music] always do pretty well when our

backs to the wall.

It's easy now to see kind of a a giant

social brain or planetary brain because

it's in the it's in the physical form of

the internet. It it looks so much like a

nervous system. You almost can't miss

the analogy.

You might say that there have always

been a lot of little social brains

around the planet getting bigger,

starting to form little inter

interconnections among themselves.

[music]

Now more than ever, you could say

there's a unified uh social brain.

[music]

Even if the overall arc of history is

toward [music] an expanded moral

horizon, more and more people

acknowledging the humanity of more and

more different kinds of people, [music]

there's always the risk of backsliding

and it can be catastrophic. From a point

of view of strict self-interest, it is

imperative that we make

further moral progress, that we get more

and more people uh to acknowledge the

humanity of one another or it will be

bad for pretty much all of them. If we

don't uh develop what you might call the

moral perspective of God, um then we'll

screw up the engineering part of playing

God. Um because the the actual

engineering solutions depend on

seeing things from the point of view of

other people, ensuring that their lives

don't get too bad because if they do

it'll come back to haunt us. Um so you

know kind of half of being God has just

been handed to us and then the question

is whether whether uh we'll master the

other half of being God, the moral half.

The bad news is that the enlightenment

is sometimes hard to come by uh because

of human nature in some cases because

you know we've we've got these kind of

animal minds designed for a very

different environment facing novel

problems. So the enlightenment part is

going to require [music] some real

education and reflection and

selfdiscipline that may not come

naturally.

I think what we're up against here is

human nature. We have to reform

ourselves, remake ourselves in a way

that cuts against the grain of our inner

animal nature and transcend that ice age

hunter that all of us are if you if you

strip off the thin layer of

civilization.

We always have been the initiators of

this experiment. We've unleashed it, but

we've never really controlled it. But

now it's more likely that we're going to

come to grief because of environmental

problems. If we do, then that is really

nature saying the experiment of

civilization is a failed evolutionary

experiment. That making apes smarter is

a is a dead end. Uh so it's up to us to

prove nature wrong in a sense to show

that we can uh take control of our own

destinies and behave in a wise way that

will ensure the continuation of the

experiment of civilization.