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I propose an experiment,
even though I never managed to complete it...
An experiment -- this is a sheet two-tenths of a millimeter thick.
I put it down, get on it. Now I'm two-tenths of a millimeter taller.
I refold it. I know, it doesn't seem like a great experiment but...
I refold it, now I'm four-tenths of a millimeter taller.
I fold it again and now I'm almost a millimeter taller.
I guess none of you have noticed the difference in height.
Now we adopt two hypotheses.
Suppose it takes 5 seconds every time we fold the sheet
and that we are always able to refold it.
What's going to happen is that after 2 minutes
we'll be able to achieve a thickness that allows us
to reach a distance of about 3.3 km.
That is the top of Marmolada, for example.
If now we spend 205 seconds, we'll be able to create
a column to wedge between the Earth and the Moon.
This is the phenomenon of exponential growth,
something that starts shyly and then grows.
If we get...
If we look at technology trends, technological indexes,
we see that they grow exponentially.
Here's a graph illustrating the speed records of biped robots.
I promise, it's the first and last graph I'm going to show.
You see the exponential trend at the start, then, at a certain point,
exponentiality ends and it takes years to create a new paradigm.
What is strange is that minds don't work exponentially.
Minds need time to create an idea.
So one wonders how do we get from the linear mind
to the exponentiality of technology, or techological product.
Well, the answer is in this slide -- it's not the right one, of course.
It's not the right one because this is a cooked meatball.
We have to think of a raw meatball instead.
If we imagine an idea as a raw meatball, a great idea,
and imagine a tray full of bread crumbs,
the technology, the evolution of technology is this:
to make the idea roll, make the meatball roll
and attach itself to the previous ideas.
A new paradigm, a new idea, is not a product in itself,
it generates no growth but, by absorbing all the previous ideas,
it generates a product, a new innovation.
There are many available bread crumbs at the start,
little by little the meatball saturates,
so we saturate the exponentiality index.
Here's an example. In the '70s,
the idea of the unidirectional wheel was conceived.
It allowed an aerobotical platform to move in every direction,
was then applied to cars, soccer-playing robots, service robots and so on.
This is the value of rolling a meatball.
Now one could ask, "OK, what is the meatball engine,
that makes the meatball roll?"
One could say the engine is money,
but there's another factor that seems to me more important.
Happiness. I agree that happiness could be divided into two types:
the hedonistic happiness -- the picture on the left,
it needs no explanations.
And the happiness so called "flow happiness",
the happiness that allows one to be happy when able to carry out
a hard task successfully -- otherwise there is frustration.
In this case one reaches happiness through
the union of many ideas, so making the meatball roll.
This gives a great input of happiness to our brain.
Where did I come up with this idea?
You see on the left, I had the chance to stay 2 years in South Sudan,
a land with happiness criteria totally different from ours.
There, happiness is based on cows.
One is happy when a calf is born, unhappy when a cow dies,
and very unhappy when someone steals your cows.
When a man gets married and so spends a lot of cows
to buy his wife, he's unhappy and happy at the same time.
I assure you, I can say it with certainty,
an ethnicity like the one from Sudan doesn't know meatballs.
It's a fact.
Neither physical meatballs nor the metaphorical ones,
indicating the evolution of technology.
They don't know what to do with the combination of many ideas
in an attempt to combine ideas in order to look for happiness.
It's strange, because right in a land
totally devoid of this criterion of happiness,
I realized how much I carried this criterion inside me
ever since I was in Italy.
Looking in more detail, one realizes there's a subtle link
between the concept of happiness during various periods
- such as Hellenistic period, Middle Ages, Renaissance and so on -
and various increases in technology recorded in those periods.
The link is much subtle than you think.
Seen this way, it's clear that linking happiness to technology
can make life look like an amusing game.
At this point in my life, I realized that
personally, I'm not interested in the ingredients of meatballs.
I'm interested in making the meatballs roll.
As a child, I amused myself fitting little objects into big objects.
I realize that now I'm happy when I can make a meatball roll.
Of course, this might make you laugh.
To associate something so trivial, a meatball,
with something so serious, creativity,
especially business creativity.
But it's also true that laughing at serious things
is an edifying activity, unique,
that can make you realize life is nothing but a succession
of laughable events sometimes taken too seriously.
(Applause)