How to be human | Christoph Burkhardt | TEDxUniversityofWürzburg

Seventy thousand years ago we became what we are today, Homo sapiens. We moved on from just a human being to being something that is smart, something that can think, and something that started to make progress. And this is where we are today.

We started making progress for 70,000 years. 12,000 years ago we had the second major revolution. The first one was the cognitive, the second one was the Agricultural Revolution. So 12,000 years ago we decided to move on from being hunters and gatherers to staying at home, becoming farmers, and creating cities to live in larger societies. And our progress exploded.

500 years ago we saw the last, the third major revolution in human history, and that was the Scientific Revolution. Pretty much everything we talk about today regarding progress and innovation is driven by this 500-year change of everything — how we know, how we deal with knowledge, how we experiment, and how we distrust our intuition.

But basically, for the last 70,000 years we have created progress in pretty much every area of our lives. And then 70,000 years later, today, we pulled all our creative capabilities together. We put everything we know together to build that one thing that would change everything forever: the selfie stick.

Now, this is a piece of technology that solves a particular problem that pretty much no other animal has. If you imagine an alien coming to Earth and your job would be to explain what a selfie stick is for, this is not an easy job, because you would have to explain that people like to take pictures of themselves, and then they like to post these pictures online. And because our arms are not long enough to take good pictures of ourselves, we need this device.

So it solves a problem that only humans have. In our history, innovation always happens when we have a question there's no answer for, or a problem there is no solution for. So in terms of is this a good idea — well, this is a specifically human idea, that's for sure.

Another idea I want to talk about is this one. 1927, we are in London. The air on the streets is so bad, so polluted, that you can't take your child outside to play. Now what do you do? This is the solution to the problem. It's called the baby cage, and it comes in this self-assembly box. You put it together outside your window on the fifth floor, and you see the baby's happy. The baby cage.

Now when we think about what's a good idea and what drives progress for us as human beings, what takes us from 70,000 years ago to today — it's the question: what is a good idea, and how do we know this is a good idea? How do we know that something is worth pursuing and other things are not?

Today you might have a feeling that this is not the solution to the problem. Again, the problem is the air is too bad on the streets, so the solution is the baby cage. Now when we think about problems and solutions, we need to ask: where does it come from that we believed at some point this is a good idea? A hundred thousand pieces sold — so this was a commercially successful innovation — but are we making progress by doing this stuff? And how do we know today this is maybe not the solution to the problem anymore?

Well, it comes down to this big word: assumptions. This is what drives us. We use assumptions as the building blocks of what we know about the future. Everything we know, everything we predict, everything we imagine is based on assumptions in certain areas.

Now when you want to study assumptions, there's a great place to go to — that's the church. I'm the son of a pastor, so I got to see a lot from this church and religion. Religion is based on very strong assumptions. When you live in the US you come across a particular type of assumption that couldn't be any stronger, and this has a lot to do with how humans think about progress.

There are people who believe that everything has been created for us — creationism. They believe in intelligent design. Many humans on this planet believe in intelligent design. When it comes to innovation and progress, we believe that it takes an intelligent designer to create stuff. We believe that it takes creative geniuses to design.

What we don't see is that there are many questions that are open about this belief. Now what I'm concerned with is not whether this is right or wrong, or whether this is a good thing or not. This is just the wrong question. I want to replace this question with: what are the assumptions that drive our beliefs? What are the assumptions — the things that we just take for granted that we don't question?

Now another thought experiment, just to get to these assumptions: imagine you are an intelligent designer. You are the creator and your job is to design human beings. Would you design them like this? Now think about it. Your job is to design the men in the room. Gentlemen, you might have noticed that you have nipples too. What for? If you are an intelligent designer and your job is to design the product 'human being,' why would you put things on us that we don't need, that obviously have no function?

And if you think further about how we as human beings function biologically, there seems to be a lot of flaws. Some things are kind of weird. Reproductive fitness seems to be one of the things you need to fix as an intelligent designer. You want to make sure that we survive, so why would you put — just thinking — why would you put the male testicles outside the body? These are kind of crucial for our survival, yet you put them outside the body, completely unprotected. If you're an intelligent designer, why would you do that?

Now the question is not is intelligent design right or wrong. The question is what's behind it. I think we have a conception of talent behind that that's very similar to intelligent design. We celebrate people like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs because they have something that we don't have — they have creative genius. And we invent this strategy to think about talent in this way so that we can say, well, I do not develop products and services and business models or generally ideas that change the world because I don't have the talent. And this is dangerous.

So now the question is: when is an assumption good for us, and when is an assumption bad for us? When we talk about innovation and progress, we need to talk about evolution rather than revolution, because what really happens is not that human history is a chain of revolutions in which a creative genius, an intelligent designer, created one level after the other and we are better than before. Really what happens is a constantly evolving system.

So what does Charles Darwin say about evolution? He says it's not the strongest or the most intelligent of a species that survive — it's those that are most adaptable to change. Well, guess what, the same is true for our ideas. If you think about the selfie stick, it's not the best, it's not the most intelligent idea that survives. It's just the one that makes sense right now because it solves a problem right now.

Interestingly, Darwin also said this. So this is a prediction that's based on one of his assumptions, and he was obviously wrong because a lot of people felt very offended by his theories. The theory of evolution itself is not free of assumptions that don't make sense or lead to a wrong conclusion or prediction. Even there, there is an assumption that did not make sense.

So 2004, someone had another idea for a smartphone. Rather than taking pictures of yourself, he would throw this up high — as high as he could. That was also the name of the app: 'Throw Your iPhone As High As You Can.' Now this is a good idea from a conceptual viewpoint. You are a creator, you want to drive innovation by providing a smartphone to people, and then their idea is to throw it as high as they can.

What happens is the iPhone is in freefall without gravity for a split second when it's up in the air. From that moment it just measures the time until it reaches the bottom, and from that time it knows how high it was. That's the technology behind it. So what the app does is build an international high score and make sure people can compare themselves to everyone else in the world. And now people throw their iPhones up in the air as high as they can, and of course many of those don't catch the iPhones when they come back. Until Apple finds out why so many broken iPhones show up at the store and bans the app.

Now the question is not 'is this a good idea' but why do people — based on what assumptions do people think this is a great idea to throw my iPhone as high as I can? What makes us human is the real question. Why do human beings do that? Because there are so many unanswered questions around why we do what we do. Instead of asking 'does that make sense' we need to ask: what is it that drives our assumptions?

Now, predicting stuff is incredibly difficult, and we're not very good at it because it means we have to imagine something, and we're not very good at imagining stuff that we haven't experienced. We are very good at imagining self-driving cars because we've seen cars driving around. We can imagine being a winner of a lottery because we've all seen winners of lotteries. We're not so good at imagining losing a lottery because we don't see losses very often, and that's the purpose of lotteries.

So we can imagine being the winner and it's a good feeling. Predicting stuff is very often not driven by a very logical conclusion for which we have proof, but based on all the stuff we believe in. And there's of course a lot of stuff that we don't know, so we have to believe.

Now how do we predict, and what really is a prediction? This is the only data set I want to show you. In red you see the amount of people that drown in swimming pools, and in black you see the number of movies Nicolas Cage is in in a given year. And you see the connection, right?

Now what's your conclusion? The natural human conclusion would be: we build a committee and do not allow Nicolas Cage to make any more movies, because obviously he's responsible for the rise in drownings. Nicolas Cage kills people in swimming pools. Is that the conclusion we can draw? Of course, but humans are made to see patterns. We are trained to see things that are not there, and based on this thing that's not there, we build assumptions and these can get very strong.

The conclusion here could of course go in both directions, but the reality is there's absolutely no connection between the two, which you see when you look into the future and the past of this timeline. This is only a very narrow perspective of what's really happening. There is no connection before and after, but this looks like a correlation. It really does not have the purpose for a meaningful correlation, but we want to see it. So we build our predictions based on data like this.

Now this is one of my favorite quotes. It's from Gottlieb Daimler, and he said that the demand for cars can't be higher than one million. He said this in 1909, by the way. He said there won't be more cars than that because there is no demand for more cars than that. And his conclusion, or his assumption driving this conclusion, is because there are not enough people who know how to drive a car. At the time you had to be a professional car driver — you had to have a chauffeur.

Well, of course he didn't know that we today would develop self-driving cars, so the whole basis of his argument is gone. What we see is the problem of a prediction is usually not the prediction — it's the assumption that it's based on. So instead of working on the prediction, we need to start working on the assumptions. But they are hard to find.

Immanuel Kant says that enlightenment is man's emergence from a self-imposed immaturity. And that is not nice. So to get out of this, to get better at finding our assumptions and building better predictions, we need to get our self-imposed immaturity fixed. Immaturity means we can't use our mind in the way that we want to use it because other people influence what we think, and this is self-imposed. That means not someone else is responsible and in charge of fixing this — but us.

That means we need to focus our minds on the beliefs that we all carry. We need to focus on the assumptions that we have — every single one of us. That's the job, says Immanuel Kant. And now that in the end takes one thing, and that's courage. And courage is a little tricky.

There's a great quote from a Disney movie that I like: 'Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is the realization that some things are more important than our own fear.' Now I have this little prediction journal, and two months ago I wrote in that journal: 'Donald Trump — never gonna happen.' Well, based on what assumptions? I did not look at my assumptions, and of course you see that I was terribly wrong. And so were many other people, most other people.

What drives our assumptions is very often that we ignore what we really should look at. So to get to that courage — instead of assuming that we are right and then looking for evidence for our assumption and making our beliefs even stronger — we need to start questioning our own assumptions. And the big deal in the end will be to start always with the assumption that we're wrong, rather than giving in to our need to always be right. Thank you very much.