(Ian Goldin) Great, thank you: it's wonderful to be with educators
who care about the intersection of learning and technology,
because that's going to shape the future.
Whether we're able to get this right or not
will determine whether we have a glorious 21st century
or a period of unmitigated risks.
The walls are coming down everywhere and it's difficult to not think about this,
being so close to it, here in Berlin,
25 years ago, these walls coming down.
But it's not just about physical walls coming down,
it's about mental walls, it's about financial walls,
it's about technological walls.
All the walls are coming down, and it's that...
which makes this the most exciting century in the history of humanity.
It changes all of our lives in surprising ways.
And it's certainly changed mine.
I was living in Paris when this wall came down.
I didn't imagine that it would touch me personally.
I thought it was about Eastern Europe, about the Cold War, about something else.
But within 6 months, I would, much to my surprise,
I was invited to have dinner with President Mandela in Paris.
He wasn't president then, he had just been released from prison.
But he was released because the Cold War ended.
And the defining feature of this period we live in our lives
is that what happens elsewhere will dramatically affect us in new ways.
It's this change that results from the walls coming down.
And it's this change that will shape education going forward
and technological progress.
And of course, the other fundamental period of -- in this time --
is technology, technology, which got off the ground
at the same time as the Berlin Wall came down, over 25 years.
This exponential growth in virtual connectivity.
And now we have a world of 5 billion literate, educated people
whereas we had a world, only 30 years ago,
of well less than a billion connected people.
Four billion more literate connected people in the world,
and this is the engine of change,
where the people in the slums of Mumbai, Soweto's Al Pano (check)
or in apartments in Berlin,
they will contribute to change in surprising new ways.
And they're coming together.
There is a release of individual genius.
If you believe in the random distribution of exceptional capabilities, which I do,
there is just more people out there, educated, connected, giving, learning.
But I also believe in collective genius,
the capabilities of people coming together,
to form teams, to learn from each other
through the methods that we learned about this morning.
and in other ways.
So new cures for cancer being developed in 24-hour cycles around the world.
My lab in Oxford doing this with people in Beijing and San Francisco, in Palo Alto
and all over, in real time.
There is no sleep on innovation any more.
And that's the power, the engine, which brings change.
So if you think you've seen a lot of change
be ready for much more surprises.
This is the slowest time in history you will know.
It's going to get faster, the pace of change greater,
the surprises more intense.
It's always going to be
more and more difficult to predict what's next.
Uncertainty will grow because the pace of change is growing.
Because the walls have come down,
there are two billion more people in the world since 1990.
And that's because ideas have traveled, simple ideas,
like washing your hands prevents contagious diseases;
really complicated ideas like those embedded in vaccines...
in new cures for cancer and many other things.
Two billion more people coming together, most of them now urbanized,
and even those that aren't physically together,
virtually together.
A quite extraordinary moment in human history,
one where we've come together as a community,
like we were 150'000 years ago, when we lived in villages together,
our ancestors in East Africa, and the dispersed around the world
and now, reconnected.
And it's this reconnection which, I believe, gives us the potential.
But do we learn from it?
And are we able to think of ourselves in new ways,
because we're connecting in new ways?
Is this wall coming down changing the way we are and we think?
Or do we still think like individualists in our nation states,
pursuing our own self-interest and those of our countries,
not realizing that now, we are in a different game?
Now we're in a game in which we have to cooperate,
where we have to think about others,
where our actions, for the first time, spill over in dramatic new ways
and affect people on the other side of the planet.
This pace of education means that not only are we liberating ourselves,
but we're liberating people from all sorts of past habits.
And this change is leading to quick changes in social norms.
Acceptance of gay marriage is one of those,
but there'll be many, many, many others.
And so, what we think about as normal today...
will seem very strange in a few years' time:
the space of change driven by education,
more doctorates being created in China now...
than in the rest of the world put together every year,
more scientists alive today...
than all the scientists that ever lived in history,
more literate people alive today...
than all the literate people that ever lived in history.
This is the engine of change.
But it's not simply about more and more progress.
It's not simply that we know...
that this is going to get better and better.
It's about what's next.
We don't know what the future holds.
We live in this extraordinary moment of our lives...
where we've seen exponential growth in income: that's red.
And we seen this most rapid increase in population,
and income growth, even more rapid than population growth, which is why
people have escaped poverty at a pace that has never happened in history.
Despite the world's population increasing by two billion over the last 25 years,
the number of desperately poor people has gone down by about 300 million.
This has never happened before.
This is an incredible time, by far the best time to be alive.
Just while you're here, your average life expectancy should increase...
by about 10 hours.
That's the pace of progress.
What you're learning, and what's happening in the labs.
And it's that which makes me incredibly optimistic.
This is the age of discovery, this is the new Renaissance.
This is a period of creativity and technological change...
which hasn't been seen for 500 years.
This is from my stem cell lab in the Oxford Martin School:
the lab technician's skin turned into a heart cell.
And this is one of the extraordinary things that's happening...
that makes one so excited about the future.
A future of rising life expectancy, so children being born today...
in Berlin or elsewhere in Europe, life expectancies well over 100
and not having to worry about the things that I worry about,
like Alzeheimer's, Parkinson's and dementia.
But what skills are they learning today that will help them shape