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