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The power to think ahead in a reckless age

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    So in the winter of 2012,
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    I went to visit my grandmother's house
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    in South India,
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    a place, by the way,
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    where the mosquitos have a special taste
    for the blood of the American-born.
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    (Laughter)
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    No joke.
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    When I was there,
    I got an unexpected gift.
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    It was this antique instrument
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    made more than a century ago,
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    hand-carved from a rare wood,
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    inlaid with pearls
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    and with dozens of metal strings.
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    It's a family heirloom,
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    a link between my past,
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    the country where my parents were born,
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    and the future,
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    the unknown places I'll take it.
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    I didn't actually realize it
    at the time I got it,
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    but it would later become
    a powerful metaphor for my work.
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    We all know the saying,
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    "There's no time like the present."
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    But nowadays, it can feel like
    there's no time but the present.
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    What's immediate and ephemeral
    seems to dominate our lives,
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    our economy, and our politics.
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    If you think about it, our species
    evolved to think ahead,
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    to chart the stars,
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    dream of the afterlife,
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    sow seeds for later harvest.
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    Some scientists call this superpower
    that we have "mental time travel,"
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    and it's responsible for pretty much
    everything we call human civilization,
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    from farming to the Magna Carta
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    to the internet,
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    all first conjured in the minds of humans.
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    But let's get real:
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    if we look around us today,
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    we don't exactly seem to be
    using this superpower quite enough,
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    and that begs the question, why not?
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    What's wrong is how our communities,
    businesses and institutions are designed.
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    They're designed in a way
    that's impairing our foresight.
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    I want to talk to you about
    the three key mistakes
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    that I think we're making.
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    The first mistake is what we measure.
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    When we look at the quarterly
    profits of a company
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    or its near term stock price,
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    that's often not a great measure
    of whether that company's
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    going to grow its market share
    or be inventive in the long run.
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    When we glue ourselves to the test scores
    that kids bring back from school,
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    that's not necessarily what's great
    for those kids' learning
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    and curiosity in the long run.
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    We're not measuring
    what really matters in the future.
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    The second mistake we're making
    that impairs our foresight
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    is what we reward.
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    When we celebrate a political leader
    or a business leader
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    for the disaster she just cleaned up
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    or the announcement she just made,
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    we're not motivating that leader
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    to invest in preventing
    those disasters in the first place,
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    or to put down payments on the future
    by protecting communities from floods
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    or fighting inequality
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    or investing in research and education.
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    The third mistake
    that impairs our foresight
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    is what we fail to imagine.
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    Now, when we do think about the future,
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    we tend to focus on predicting
    exactly what's next,
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    whether we're using horoscopes
    or algorithms to do that.
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    but we spend a lot less time imagining
    all the possibilities the future holds.
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    When the Ebola outbreak
    emerged in 2014 in West Africa,
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    public health officials around the world
    had early warning signs
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    and predictive tools
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    that showed how
    that outbreak might spread,
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    but they failed to fathom that it would,
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    and they failed to act
    in time to intervene,
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    and the epidemic grew to kill
    more than 11,000 people.
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    When people with lots of resources
    and good forecasts
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    don't prepare for deadly hurricanes,
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    they're often failing to imagine
    how dangerous they can be.
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    Now, none of these mistakes
    that I've described,
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    as dismal as they might sound,
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    are inevitable.
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    In fact, they're all avoidable.
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    What we need to make
    better decisions about the future
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    are tools that can aid our foresight,
    tools that can help us think ahead.
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    Think of these as something like
    the telescopes that ship captains of yore
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    used when they scanned the horizon,
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    only instead of for looking
    across distance and the ocean,
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    these tools are for looking
    across time to the future.
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    I want to share with you a few of
    the tools that I've found in my research
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    that I think can help us with foresight.
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    The first tool I want to share with you
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    I think of as making
    the long game pay now.
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    This is Wes Jackson, a farmer
    I spent some time with in Kansas.
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    And Jackson knows that the way
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    that most crops are grown
    around the world today
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    is stripping the Earth
    of the fertile topsoil
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    we need to feed future generations.
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    He got together
    with a group of scientists,
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    and they bread perennial grain crops
    which have deep roots
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    that anchor the fertile topsoil of a farm,
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    preventing erosion
    and protecting future harvests.
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    But they also knew
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    that in order to get farmers
    to grow these crops in the short run,
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    they needed to boost
    the annual yields of the crops
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    and find companies willing
    to make cereal and beer using the grains
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    so that farmers could reap profits today
    by doing what's good for tomorrow.
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    And this is a tried-and-true strategy.
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    In fact, it was used
    by George Washington Carver
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    in the South of the United States
    after the Civil War
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    in the early 20th century.
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    A lot of people have probably heard
    of Carver's 300 uses for the peanut,
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    the products in recipe
    that he came up with
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    that made the peanut so popular.
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    But not everyone knows
    why Carver did that.
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    He was trying to help
    poor Alabama sharecroppers
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    whose cotton yields were declining,
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    and he knew that planting
    peanuts in their fields
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    would replenish those soils
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    so that their cotton yields
    would be better a few years later.
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    But he also knew it needed
    to be lucrative for them in the short run.
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    All right, so let's talk about
    another tool for foresight.
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    This one I like to think of as keeping
    the memory of the past alive
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    to help us imagine the future.
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    So I went to Fukushima, Japan
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    on the sixth anniversary
    of the nuclear reactor disaster there
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    that followed the Tohoku earthquake
    and tsunami of 2011.
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    When I was there, I learned about
    the Onagawa Nuclear Power Station,
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    which was even closer
    to the epicenter of that earthquake
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    than the infamous Fukushima Daiichi
    that we all know about.
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    In Onagawa, people in the city
    actually fled to the nuclear power plant
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    as a place of refuge.
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    It was that safe.
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    It was spared by the tsunamis.
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    It was the foresight of just one engineer,
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    Yanosuke Hirai,
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    that made that happen.
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    In the 1960s, he fought
    to build that power plant
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    farther back from the coast
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    at higher elevation,
    and with a higher sea wall.
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    He knew the story of his hometown shrine,
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    which had flooded
    in the year 869 after a tsunami.
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    It was his knowledge of history
    that allowed him to imagine
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    what others could not.
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    OK, one more tool of foresight.
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    This one I think of as
    creating shared heirlooms.
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    These are lobster fishermen
    on the Pacific coast of Mexico,
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    and they're the ones who taught me this.
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    They have protected
    their lobster harvest there
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    for nearly a century,
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    and they've done that by treating it
    as a shared resource
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    that they're passing on to their collected
    children and grandchildren.
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    They carefully measure what they catch
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    so that they're not taking
    the breeding lobster out of the ocean.
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    Across North America,
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    there are more than 30 fisheries
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    that are doing something
    vaguely similar to this.
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    They're creating long-term stakes
    in the fisheries known as catch shares
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    which get fishermen to be motivated
    not just in taking whatever they can
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    from the ocean today
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    but in its long term survival.
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    Now, there are many,
    many more tools of foresight
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    I would love to share with you,
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    and they come from all kinds of places:
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    investment firms that look
    beyond near term stock prices,
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    states that have freed their elections
    from the immediate interests
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    of campaign financiers.
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    And we're going to need to marshal
    as many of these tools as we can
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    if we want to rethink what we measure,
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    change what we reward,
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    and be brave enough
    to imagine what lies ahead.
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    Not all this is going to be easy,
    as you can imagine.
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    Some of these tools
    we can pick up in our own lives,
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    some we're going to need to do
    in businesses or in communities,
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    and some we need to do as a society.
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    The future is worth this effort.
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    My own inspiration to keep up this effort
    is the instrument I shared with you.
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    It's called a dilruba,
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    and it was custom-made
    for my great-grandfather.
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    He was a well-known
    music and art critic in India
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    in the early 20th century.
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    My great-grandfather had the foresight
    to protect this instrument
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    at a time when my great-grandmother
    was pawning off all their belongings,
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    but that's another story.
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    He protected it by giving it
    to the next generation,
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    by giving it to my grandmother,
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    and she gave it to me.
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    When I first heard
    the sound of this instrument,
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    it haunted me.
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    It felt like hearing a wanderer
    in the Himalayan fog.
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    It felt like hearing
    a voice from the past.
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    (Music)
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    That's my friend Simran Singh
    playing the dilruba.
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    When I play it, it sounds
    like a cat's dying somewhere,
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    so you're welcome.
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    (Laughter)
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    This instrument is in my home today,
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    but it doesn't actually belong to me.
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    It's my role to shepherd it in time,
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    and that feels more meaningful to me
    than just owning it for today.
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    This instrument positions me
    as both a descendant and an ancestor.
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    It makes me feel part of a story
    bigger than my own.
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    And this, I believe,
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    is the single most powerful way
    we can reclaim foresight:
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    by seeing ourselves as
    the good ancestors we long to be,
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    ancestors not just to our own children
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    but to all humanity.
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    Whatever your heirloom is,
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    however big or small,
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    protect it
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    and know that its music
    can resonate for generations.
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    Thank you.
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    (Applause)
Title:
The power to think ahead in a reckless age
Speaker:
Bina Venkataraman
Description:

more » « less
Video Language:
English
Team:
closed TED
Project:
TEDTalks
Duration:
12:31

English subtitles

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