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d1s1-alex-lightman
I'm Alex Lightman. I'm very excited to be here. I chose the theme for the conference. I'm going to give Joseph Jackson props. The talk of my talk is the Rise of the Citizen Scientist in an eversmarter world. It emerges out of the call for arms. People will talk to you about ending aging, and the philosophy. I only have ten minutes, so I will be short about it. NIck Bostrom has said that combating aging is that more existential risks will happen in our lifetime. These generations that face these challenges; this is why I write a lot about the deficiet on facebook. You think you're going to be around only for 10 more years? If you live for 150 years, there's going to be peak uranium, peak unstability, peak everything.
Thousands of things are going to have peaks, peak oil utilization, climate change, by 2050 we will possibly lose 25% of all species on earth. Once in a century storms don't bother you if you live 65 years, but if you live to 150, you're going to see this a lot. Tectonic shifts, the world is just sitting on a big ball of magma. The unforseen. So, I think the rise of open science is something that started a long time ago, when Aristotle programmed Alexander the Great to collect soil samples and flora and so on. The answer for this was that Aristotle wanted to collect all of the soil samples, and he couldn't go, and he wanted his student to do it. There was a boom in the 1800s when the mathematicians corresponded with each other, and challenged themselves to compete for prizes. Reputation became the currency for these. If you were the coolest or hottest in Italy, the hegemony might sponsor you. John Smart is going to talk about the brain preservation prize. We're going back to the renaissance, the enlightenment, it was very fruitful. I am going to give some examples. Sir Isaac Newton drove out of the play in 1665, and came up with thousands of tools and techniques for doing things, like how much fuel you would need to take a rocket to the moon. He did it at home, without a university or corporate or government resources. He came up with optics, gravity, and so on. So, why do the planets have an elliptical orbit? Gravity. Benjamin Franklin measured the temperatures in the ocean, and because of the thermal conveyer belt, found a temperature differential. The whuffie was as a citizen scientist. Let's have him help us figure out how to make a nation. Albert Einstein developed relativity as a hobby as a patent clerk. Steve Wozniak and the homebrew computer club were producing hackers and entrepreneurs, they originally got together to share scifi books, so that you could buy scifi books. I have that story from Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft. Everyone one of those guys became a millionaire. Apple just surpassed them to become the most valuable company in that sector past Microsoft.
The Manhatten Project. Albert Einstein used his citizen scientist whuffie to get a letter out, yeah here's how to do it. Oppenheimer said that if you put him in charge, he';ll make it happen. The Large Hadron Collider, the scale necessitates the funding from governments. Small science at universities is done by team and communities. What's the basic research budget of the US is? It's $150B per year. It's publish or perish, you're there to win grants. We're about the rise of the citizen scientist. If you want more background, sort of about the infomercial. All of the talks are very short, so we're introducing you to a lot of different talks. There's the return of the individual inventor, the mania for measurement, the facebook ever-smarter friend effect, prizes and grants, all of this are contributing.
Moore's law says that the transistor density is doubling; the vacuum tubes and resistors and so on are similar. Kurzweil is flying from Colorado and then back to LA. The cost of the equipment- an educational thermocycler- the LavaAmp PCR in the hundreds of dollars. Computer simulation and analysis. Theory and experimentation. There was this amazing paper that I like, because I worked in 3D paper, modeling and simulation and visualization are a core part of the science process, and that gets cheaper according to Moore's law. You have disposable bioreactors, you can fit these in a basement lab. Genomic pricing: 2003 it costed $300M to get a human genome. The first personal genome for $2M, in 2008 it was about $60k for applied biosystems, or $5k for Complete Genomics. I think this year we will hit $1k. And next year maybe $500 to $100, and doing this in your basement?
The return of individual inventors. In the early 19th century, individual inventors outnumbered the corporate inventors. In the 1920s, the institutions became the boom in patents. But now we're seeing another boom, where intellectual property rights are about this; Lawrence Lessig suggests that corporations are keeping from happening. Also open source manufacturing that Bryan Bishop has been talking about: creating new tools; new tools can be turned into projects. Mobile microscopes to attach to your iphone.
Also measurement. There's a wonderful book: Quantification in Western Europe. It says that the Europeans were marginal about 1000 AD, but about 1500 AD they took over the world. They had a mania for measurement. Only madmen and englishmen go out during the noonday sun. What did the englishmen do? They were rolling things out, and measuring it. Every single yard in India was mapped. This allowed them to build railroads. You have advancements in measurement and so on.
I am a runner. We both did the San Diago Marathon. I ran the New England Junior Championshimp Team in 1976. Coming back to marathoning is that everyone knows his or her heartrate, there's a thousand times the data that runners are keeping. Also measurement that allow simulations and visualizations. Cheaper sensors and so on, allow the citizen scientists to enhance their mutual measurement capability. Sometimes they track stars from passing off observations from observatory to observatory. Ever-smarter networks.
Social networking gets you to meet like-minded people. Tools like Facebook can be leveraged. Who here is a friend of mine on Facebook. This competency is here. I think there's an interesting effect thing, smarter curators (Jason Sylvia). I had more friends than Jason, wow. Take that Jason. He's on CurrenTV, they get smarter news stories that allow them to get smarter friends. The less smarter friends are playing Mafia Wars, they are spamming about geese for your farm. You start getting your account disabled at 3k, so I look for excuses for someone to get off the island. Okay, so the result is self-emerging R&D teams out of the commentators. Certain people that I like, I've helped extend job offers based on their facebook comments.
You should read Cory Doctorow's book about down and out in the magic kingdom. You help people, you gain reputation. For instance, I would just say, this is just, what David Orban, he is the coolest guy I know, and every so often I give a shout out on facebook. Chris Smedley gave a shout out to David Orban, and that's how people get more opportunities thrown out at him. David Orban is getting so many speaking things, because I've had so much trouble finding the right date. The challenges and X-Prize. Peter Diamandis said that the original policy was this hole in one chance policy, like $10k or $20k for the hole in one that paid $10M, and the teams spent $100M, but because they come to global and national prominence, that's a huge leverage of a few orders of magnitude. Innocentive is a way for people to make teams to get together to make money. Proposal: scientific seed microgrants to bootstrap citizen science. The purpose of this conference is to meet up with someone, to have a project, and have something published, make something happen.
Kudos as currency. Socrates. It amuses me to see how afraid you are, lest the people should accuse you of recommending useless studies. Entry cost of science is going down. Monetization, democritization, ever-smarter world. Citizen scientists are increasingly empowered. All of this will be on slideshare, and just wanted to mention: the next H+ Summit will be on the 4th, 5th, 6th, or 7th on December.
Also in London, 29th and 30th, we'll have it in Europe. John Wiley changed my book on 4G. The only books that our proof-reader changed it. H+ Summit at Harvard or MIT. The next event that has our endorsement. You can talk to him, the Open Science Summit will be next month at the end of the month, at Berkeley. Thank you for your time, come up and introduce yourself, I want to help you get your project accomplished.
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