As a data scientist, I literally spend my day predicting the future.

I try and model systems and businesses,

and I use really cool tools, like artificial intelligence or blockchain

to help understand what makes humans tick.

And what I found most fascinating from the past few years of my experience

and what's also been the most frustrating

is that all those expressions and all those clichés are true.

It bothers me; I don't know why.

The fact that the journey is more important than the destination.

The fact that to go further and look further,

you stand on the shoulders of giants.

That those who don't understand what history was

are doomed to repeat it.

In "The Tempest," William Shakespeare wrote that "What's past is prologue."

I think a lot of people recognize this expression

to mean that everything that happened before was exposition,

that to live in the present is what's important.

Data has shown me that that's different.

To me, "What's past is prologue" means

is that the future can be based on a barometer of the past

and understand the trends, signals, and patterns of where we've been

can show us what we've done before, and where we're going to go.

This presentation is an argument for basic income.

Let me show you how I get there.

I start in 1696 in Britain, as part of the glass tax.

In an effort to raise revenue,

the British Parliament created a prohibitive tax

on glass and window panes, and the like.

It meant that glass and windows were so expensive

that, literally, lords and ladies would take glass out of their houses

and bring them up to their summer castles for fear of theft or breaking.

If you were just a person living in the city,

you lived most of your internal life in darkness.

It affected things that people had never considered before

in different ways.

Architecture, interior design -

your dining room didn't have a table in the middle,

you'd hit your shins in the darkness.

People had a bench by the side of the room

and a large board up against the wall.

When it was time to have a meeting or have a meal together,

they would take the benches, sit everyone down,

bring the board on everyone's lap.

That's where they had their meeting. That's where they had a discussion.

That's where we got the term "board meeting."

(Laughter)

Not only that, that guy at the end, that guy in the chair,

he was in charge, he ran the show.

That's right.

That guy was the chairman of the board.

(Laughter)

To me, it is fascinating how arbitrary choices from the past

can affect the future centuries later

in ways people can't understand or think about at all.

And we are coming to one of those critical junctures

and choice points again soon.

I'm going to skip ahead a couple of decades

to the British countryside.

The Church of England, in an attempt to reorganize themselves,

split up the country into various plots and created parsonages.

Each one of these sections had a reverend.

His job was to help guide the flock and all the things that reverends do.

These people were given a strong education.

They were given enough resources

to understand where their next meal was coming from,

and they were sent on their way.

This was arguably one of the first times a society had a class of people

who were academic, well read, and didn't really have that much to do.

What did these reverends do?

They changed the world.

The Reverend Edmund Cartwright created the power loom

and brought up part of the Industrial Revolution as we know it today.

Automation, improving in process, happened because of that.

The Reverend John MacKenzie Bacon

was the father of modern aerial photography.

He showed us the first pictures of cities from above,

revolutionized urban planning and city design.

The Reverend William Buckland

wrote the essay on the principle of population.

You know this already what he learned back then.

Cities only grow when there's an excess of food

more than is needed to sustain the population.

The Reverend William Greenwald was the father of modern archaeology.

Before him, people would just go to dig sites

and grab stuff because it looked cool and brought it home.

He was one of the first people to suggest

that we apply proper scientific rigor and scientific method,

and revolutionized the field of archaeology.

It wasn't just the reverends, too,

it was their families, their children, their spouses.

When people knew there was a roof over their head

and a meal coming to not worry about, their creativity flourished.

I bet you know at least half a dozen names on this list of people

who were either children or spouses of these reverends -

Hook, Wren, Bronte, Tennyson, Carroll, Jane Austen.

These people were so profound

in their ability to push arts and science further

that even centuries later, we still consume their art

and the ways it affects us that have never been considered before.

We as a society, we as a culture, push further and go farther

when we take the tools that have been built before us

and go to the next obvious step.

Because those expressions are true, those clichés are all true.

Most people thought it was actually Isaac Newton who said it,

but it was Bernard de Chartres who said,

"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

The fact that every time that we want to try to push culture further

and make society go that little bit further,

that we don't need to go back to the beginning

is because we use the tools and processes of people who were built before us.

And that's how we advance as a society and as a people.

It has never been easier

to try and push these ideas ahead and move forward.

The ability to take this thing over here and combine it with that thing over there

and produce something new has never been easier, faster,

less expensive or less involving risk than it is right now.

I can't guarantee you

that the idea of combining this thing and that thing will work,

but you'll know quickly if it's going to fail, or if it has legs.

Never was that way before.

Technology usually got in the way more than it helped.

This is special.

Back then, it was a problem.

Example number one, let's talk about audio recording.

The ability to take a song or music and record it to a wax disc

was incredibly difficult.

And if someone made a mistake, if a microphone screwed up,

or if someone dropped something on the ground,

you had to throw it away and start all over again.

Oh, you're already on hour two?

Sorry, it doesn't care. Start all over.

In fact, the audio engineers, too, they had a huge problem.

Let's say you're recording a symphony in a concert hall.

Let's say if the sound got all screwed up.

You can't have a violin and a clarinet near each other next to the tuba,

the tuba would be too loud.

The hack from the sound engineers was to actually move the instruments

around the entire theater.

So you'd have the flutes nearby.

You'd have the tubas in the background.

The drums were so loud,

they actually were down the hall, down the stairs in a separate room.

They had to create a series of mirrors

so the drummers can see the conductor to know when to play.

If you were a soloist, you were pushed on a little dolly.

When it was your turn,

they'd push you up to the front, right near the microphone to hear it.

When you were done, they'd pull you right back again.

And if at any time in any one of those songs

if someone, one person, made a mistake, you threw it out, and you started again.

You didn't take risks.

You didn't have the time or the opportunity.

Now if I want to try something new,

if I want to see what it sounds like when a guitar gets loud,

I just press the guitar knob and turn it up a little bit.

Never before have we had the ability for technology

to make our life easier and push our creative drive further

than we have right now.

But it wasn't always like that.

It was difficult.

If you go back to the war,

planes coming overhead as part of a bombing run

was a huge problem.

Before radar,

people didn't really have good solutions to figure when the planes were coming.

Planes are high. Planes are fast. Planes are far away.

We took the best people in the allied resource.

We took the entire knowledge of what we have to do

to figure out how to find planes,

and we came up with this.

Giant earphone-like tubes.

(Laughter)

And a soldier who's hopefully really good at hearing stuff.

(Laughter)

Listening,

hoping to hear their propellers.

Stretching, yearning, going that little bit further

just to hear, to buy an extra minute or two,

so people can run down to safety.

We don't have this problem anymore.

Radar has basically solved the problem in many respects.

I can go to the store

and for a couple of bucks buy a little radar in a box.

I can put it in my car, on my bike.

I can put it in my hat and do a lot of cool stuff if I wanted to.

It has never been easier to give a chance and see if it works.

Will that idea work?

I got no clue,

but I'll know quickly if I can move on and try something else.

It wasn't always like that.

Technologies often got in the way.

Do you ever wonder why people in old photos don't smile?

Yeah, I see some nodding heads.

I'm going to be embarrassed about this.

When I was a kid, I literally thought

that everyone born pre-1920 was just miserable, sad, and surly.

(Laughter)

Turns out this was a technical problem.

To actually exist

and have a camera take a picture back then required a huge amount of light.

It required a huge amount of time

to sit there and let the light expose the film.

So if you're going to take a photo of someone moving,

it's going to screw up.

So when they'd say "Don't move,"

you don't move.

Because you know if you move,

you're going to ruin the photo,

and then you've got to start again.

This was a huge technical problem at the time.

That's why people were told to not keep their smiling face

because I don't know about you,

but smiling for a minute starts to look insincere.

(Laughter)

Instead, they said, "Use your resting face.

If you don't have a nice looking resting face,

sorry, that's the photo that you get."

(Laughter)

It's not like that anymore, right?

We've solved a lot of these technical problems.

Most people have a camera in their own pocket.

I take a thousand photos, pick the best three that I like,

and I throw the rest away.

I don't need to know about focus and aperture

and all these types of technical terms to take a fairly good photo.

Technology has made it

so that the creativity can push us further than we have before.

If you want to build different tools,

if you want to bring these things together,

it's super easy.

Machine learning, too.

If you want to take some cool new AI things

and move to the next step and go forward, it's fine.