welcome welcome to this meeting with Professor or seabright Mr Francis Keaney that lives in London but it was here during the festival was telling me that it looked almost incredible to him to be in Italy and someone retorted that we're not in Italy we are in the region of Trentino but since we are Infantino and in italy at the same time i thought that we should start one minute past 12:00 professor Seabright is an economist but apart from his specialist activity his very famous for a book he published in 2005 there called the company of strangers I deliberately give you this name in English and I'm doing so because although it was immediately translated into Italian I don't think it is available in book shops now at least I tried to find it on the web but I could not find the Italian Edition but the second reason why the English version is more easily available is that it was reprinted again just a few weeks ago by the Princeton University Press in a revised edition so there is a brand new version in addition to making some specific considerations on monetary economics there's also one more chapter chapter 8 which refers to the 2008 2009 economic and financial crisis the purpose of this book is to provide an answer to a very simple and key question that is at the basis of our economic life there's a very simple type of exchange there's a relationship between and among individuals and it's curious to think that over all its history mankind has used this type of exchange instead of using other functions that we have like diffidence or violence so why did we privilege this type of relationship between and among individuals which then made all economic life possible is actually the question that attracted the attention of Paul seabright and his book is trying to provide an answer to this question his book which is really fascinating to find an answer to this question Paul Seabright goes far beyond the borders of economic science calling into question a number of other areas from paleontology do neurosciences which will also refer to today as well as sociology history and so on so it is in no way a specialist text it's a kind of near humanistic attempt to venture into areas which are beyond one's own specialty in an attempt to draw information from all possible areas of knowledge so it's a kind of intellectual journey and I just started reading this new edition which has been in the book shops just in the past two weeks or so as all journeys it requires quite a lot of courage intellectually if not physically and I would say even emotionally it is quite difficult from all these stand points to challenge all that knowledge you have in an attempt to look for something new the same type of approach will be followed by Professor Sebright today during his lecture I've been here for a couple of days and have followed many interesting presentation but I believe that today's topic selected by Professor seabright as a strong resonance with all the matters that have been discussed in the past 48 hours or so on thinking in particular of Alexander Steele and John Connors lecture at palazzo Jory Mia that spoke at length about the excess of information from that surrounds us in our times and there were also a number of interesting discussions on the role of Google which in a way governs this huge amount of information and there was also another presentation that I found very interesting yesterday presentation by the Bhutan prime minister who talked about how to grow and how to develop in a framework of increasingly limited resources and I was particularly surprised to see that this was a a statement made by people from a developing country where people don't really like the idea that they cannot develop too much and on the contrary we saw that there are people who are aware of that whenever we talk about digital world we may run the risk of believing that development can be endless we add by jika bytes terabyte to the internet a virtual world is often taken as a new path to development which unlike the material growth material the wealth development in which has occurred in the past century there's virtually limitless but I believe polled Seabright will let us understand that even that kind of development has some intrinsic limitations and there's a scarcity of resources but I don't want to take more of your time and I'll give the flow to policy right let me just make just one final point you found the Italian translation of Professor seabright presentations that his slides as PowerPoint and he added a few changes so there are two or three of the images that he's going to show that are not among those that have been translated but I don't think that's really a problem thank you very much thank you Pietro for this wonderfully generous introduction it is a fantastic privilege for me to be speaking in this extraordinary festival which I have been amazed by and delighted by and to speak in this place in this room this is an extraordinary privilege I'm also aware of a heavy burden of responsibility symbolically speaking because in the city which is emblematic of the counter-reformation I'm speaking at an hour when all good Catholics should be in church and I hope very much to be worthy of my claim on your attention I would like to start by asking you in the audience the question and please answer and you may answer in Italian and answer quickly what's happening in this picture somebody Tommy Donna Bethell public education stuck at the end of an exchange yes I think that's right anybody else want to say more about it a discussion maybe yes I think it's probably a market it's somewhere in Africa now who is buying and who is selling the child is selling okay I think you're probably right who is buying the women are buying right how do you know that by by their face what is it about their face their they're waiting you say worried okay they're worried maybe anybody any other suggestions as to how do you know can I point out something that it's very unusual for children to sell things you live in a country where ever I think it's illegal mostly for children to sell but you immediately guests that the child was selling I think you're right but what is it about the child that tells you he's selling exactly exactly the reason you know the boy is selling is because he is not looking and the goods the women are looking at the goods and so you can work out from this that the boy already knows what the birds are so he is the seller now I may be right I may be wrong but I want to point out to you that you have just performed an amazing act of mental inference you have immediately worked out who is selling in this market even though it's very unusual in your experience to see children selling and you did so so fast that you could not tell me immediately how you made this calculation and this picture is an example for me of the fact that our brains have an astonishing capacity to process information about our social relationships and to draw economic inferences from this information in other words we can understand the social and economic relationships in a situation so fast that we cannot explain immediately how we have reached these conclusions so that's the first picture I want to show you now I'd like to show you a second picture this man is called GP Sawant and according to the New York Times who wrote his profile in 2007 he lives in Mumbai in India and he is a professional letter writer I encourage you to go and see the article because his story is rather touching he writes letters for people who cannot write letters for themselves he writes letters to the government he writes letters to somebody's boss to ask for a pay rise he writes letters to four people who are in love and most charming of all he writes letters without a for the many prostitutes who come to Mumbai from the countryside they arrive at the main train station in Bombay and they go to do this dangerous and difficult and unpleasant work and they have to tell their families at home in the villages what they're doing and they don't want to tell their families that there are prostitutes so this man who is a sort of poet of the urban life writes letters to their families on their behalf explaining some invented story about their job and maybe about their nice friends and about the pleasant place where they live and the families believe this and the families are happy and the girl's honour is for some time at least safe now the New York Times tells us that this man's livelihood is disappearing and the reason why it's disappearing according to the New York Times is that the mobile telephone is replacing letters nobody writes letters anymore so they all send texts to their families and if they send texts his job is disappearing now when I read this story I was surprised because I remembered having read a wonderful book that was published in 1851 in London called London labor and the London poor by a remarkable man called Henry Mayhew and in this letter in this book he describes the many kinds of jobs that people do in a big nineteenth-century city like London including the people who sweep up the garbage and the people who sell and one job which doesn't exist today which is the job he calls screamers or writers of begging letters and petitions and in 19th century London like I suspect in 19th century Italy there were many many professional letter writers and their livelihood disappear many many decades before the mobile telephone what made their livelihood disappear was not the mobile telephone it was the fact of universal literacy when everybody can write their own letters they don't need a professional letter rack'em so why am I telling you this story well it's common to hear people say that information and communications technology has wonderful potential for the world economy and I believe that and everything I say today is going to be consistent with my faith in information and consumer and communications technology but people sometimes say well if you look at how it has changed the lives of people who have trained in computer programming in India you see the huge potential for the rest of the country and that's where I want to warn us not to be too optimistic because many of the benefits which information and communications technology brings to computer programmers in Bangalore for example are benefits like the benefit from being the only letter writer in your village there are benefits which will only last so long as other people do not acquire the same skill now I want to explain this argument to you and I'm going to do so by arguing that information and communications technology works by bringing people together by matching people and the ability of this technology to match people together is going to be limited by the shortage of what I think is the most scarce resource in the world and that is the resource that you have between your ears your brain and specifically the ability of your brain to pay attention and it may be as I'll describe to you in in a few moments that the faith that we have that the ability to write a computer program for example may bring great hope to the world's poor will come up against the shortage of people's attention and we will find that the ability to write a website or to have a fantastic Facebook page which five years ago might have given you a source of income will no longer be a source of income so what am I going to cover the first thing is just to tell you one or two facts about what ICT information and communication technology are actually doing in poor countries then I want to talk about how it works to match people together and I want to distinguish two kinds of problems which are solved by the matching technology the first problem is what we call a coordination problem so a coordination problem is what happens if two drivers and cars are coming down the road towards each other and they have to decide which side of the road they drive on and as you know each country has its own rules so the country where I was born the United Kingdom you drive on the left and Italy you drive on the right and many years ago when Nigeria made the change the Minister of Transport announced publicly that the change would be made gradually I think he meant that the preparations would be gradual not at the moment of the change would be gradual then I want to tell you a little bit about three important findings in neuropsychology which tell us what exactly are the limits on the ability of our brain to process attention and then I'm going to ask the question about what does that mean in the long run for the world and its development so let's start with the good news okay these are two people in Africa using mobile telephones and it is truly wonderful if you travel in Africa as I have done in places where the roads are almost non-existent and you can see people many very poor people have either telephones of their own or the ability to buy telephone time by the second from somebody else who does so here are a few numbers Africa has now nearly 350 million mobile phone subscribers that's a lot of people India has 433 million China 506 there are nearly 5 billion subscriptions in the world ok now 5 billion is a big number you probably can't imagine how big 5 billion is I like to think that 5 billion is the number of days that it would take your hair to grow from here to Morocco ok it's a lot of days and it's a lot of people now what are these people doing with their mobile telephones they're not just chatting to each other they're doing many important and life-saving things so they are using mobile banking they are transferring money to each other with an SMS text message they are consulting the doctor if you see as I have seen families whose children die because they cannot afford to take them to the doctor and die because they cannot afford to ask anybody what has to be done to save the child's life then you can imagine what a wonderful lifesaver a mobile telephone can be the internet there are not so many subscribers there are less than 100 million in China only 8 million in India but of course each subscription is used by many many people so over 400 million Internet users in China nearly a hundred million in India and in two billion in the world and the benefits are extraordinary I've mentioned benefits for health benefits for trade in Africa many traders who might wish to engage in an exchange with a partner don't know if the partner is going to show up but the day when they promised and at the place where they promised but if they know that they have the partners mobile phone number they're willing to take the risk of going with their goods and making the economic exchange so trade is helped by these communications similarly education is being transformed I would encourage you to go and visit on YouTube a series of films made by the Khan Academy and the Khan Academy has been started by a person who used to run a hedge fund in California and who makes videos in which he explains how to do algebra and calculus and chemistry in terms that people all across the world can understand India now has two million trained computer professionals and they are transforming the economy around them both for themselves and their families and for the society in which they live so this is all the good news and nothing I say next is going to take away from this good news but let me remind you what does ICT do it matches people together and the matching as I said falls into two categories think of coordination problems how do you find somebody who wants to find you so maybe you and your friend are going to meet in the center of Trento where do you meet maybe there are several different places maybe you could meet at the train station maybe you could meet at the Duomo maybe you could meet at your favorite cafe what does the telephone do it helps you to coordinate you're both happy and this works often when you meet strangers as well as friends so if you want to take some simple examples in the United States more than in Europe people put bumper stickers on their cars to say something about who they are so if you are an Obama supporter at the last election you would put an Obama bumper sticker and this would help to put you in touch with other Obama supporters if you are a McCain supporter you would be signaling your presence to other McCain supporters nobody would cheat why should you cheat if you're an Obama supporter you don't want to meet McCain supporters if you're a McCain supporter you don't want to meet Obama supporters so it's naturally honest and some kinds of economic service are naturally honest to a taxi service for example you call a taxi and they send a taxi to you why would the taxi want to come why would you want to tell the taxi the wrong place why would the taxi want to advertise it's number saying it's available when it isn't available so the communication is about coordination nobody has an incentive to cheat but now think about other kinds of communication I want to sell you a product I want to tell you that my product is the best product how do you know I'm telling the truth everybody wants to claim that their product is the best product and the trouble with the communications revolution is that it allows the producer of the best product to tell you that and it also allows very cheaply the producers of all the other products to pretend that they are the producer of the best product so when honesty is a problem communications technology makes life easier for the honest people and for the cheat and that becomes very difficult in order to sort out the honest people from the cheats you have to see what is a credible claim and credibility is really at the heart of what communication has to be about so let me give you some examples in the nineteenth century particularly in the United States many people would sell patent medicines and patent medicines pretended to be the cure to every problem you could imagine but many patent medicines were very dangerous and advertising and regulation both arose as a way of trying to separate the credible from the fake claims let me give you another interesting example about selling cars you may have seen this person and you may have seen that car when Citroen launched that car a few years ago they asked the supermodel Claudia Schiffer to advertise it for them now when I first looked at this I was a bit surprised I thought what does she know about cars would I trust her belief about engineering then the second thing I thought was I bet she drives a Porsche anyway but then I realized why did the manufacturers of the car want to pay such a large amount of money to hire her because the one thing we all know about her is that she earns a lot of money a seriously large amount of money so she's very expensive and I thought why should they pay that and then I realized that's the whole point if you are manufacturing a car a new car and nobody really knows if your car is going to be a success or not the fact that you can afford to pay for a Claudia Schiffer advertisement campaign means that you must be very confident about the quality of your car and that is why this advertisement is credible because you do something expensive and maybe wasteful because only the producer of the good product could afford to do something so very costly I'll give you another example which comes from a very nice book by Jeffrey Miller called spent he is an anthropologist and he observes our behavior with much good humor he says why do some people own rare breeds of pet animals because rare breeds are very delicate they take a lot of looking after and they have very delicate health and they take a lot of your time and his answer is that the time and effort in looking after a rare breed of pet is the whole point because it signals to other people that you are the kind of person who is very conscientious you take time and you take trouble and you can be trusted because you won't let somebody down when they need care and if you want to test that theory the best way to test it is that if you see a single woman walking in a park and you see that she's willing to say hello to a single man that she's never met before it's likely that that will be because both of them are walking a dog it's the safest way to meet unattached people who are reliable because if the dog takes a lot of looking after then you know that these people are probably to be trusted let me give you an example of advertising in nature this is an example from an insect we know that in most natural species the male's compete heavily for access to the females because the female eggs are scarce but the male's produce lots of sperm and the males can fertilize many females I'm going to show you a very interesting exception to this rule it's an insect called the dance fly and these insects mate because the females gather together in large sort of insect discotheques called Lex and the males come to the swarming females and they bear presence and the presents are little as in animals that they've killed little arthropods that they've killed and they offer them as food to the females now the females really value this food it really improves their chances of successfully bearing young so when a male with a big chunk of food that arrives the females the wild and they compete and how do they compete they have evolved sacks full of air on their abdomen I'm going to show you this is a male dance fly and you see it has quite a slim abdomen but this is a female and if you contrast it you will see that the female has this sac of air and she can blow it up with air to make herself look very fertile it's the same principle as silicone breast enhancement except that it's a lot cheaper and the important thing is that it works at least I don't know about the silicone breast enhancement but their insect enhancement works because the females with the larger abdomens are genuinely more fertile even if they are also exaggerating how fertile they are so in other words the advertisement is an exaggeration but it's not completely wrong and you may draw whatever conclusions you like for human advertisements as well now I've been explaining to you matching and how matching solves the problem of finding somebody who has an incentive to exaggerate the benefits that they can offer you now I said to you that when machen solves a coordination problem like where to find a taxi then everybody is really better off everybody gets to meet a person who wanted to meet them but when matching is about credible signalling it's not so good because for every dance fly every male dance fly who gets the desirable females there are some male dance wise who don't get them so for every producer of good quality products there is some other producer of not so good quality products who doesn't get the customers as signaling becomes cheaper and easier everybody invests more they all invest more in advertising and signalling and communication and it's good for them because it helps them to stand out from the crowd but it can't be good for everybody because not everybody can be best and if it's important to you to persuade others that you are the best then not everybody can win and that's the problem which information technology is going to come up against that there is a scarcity of attention which can be lavished on the best each of us hopes that we can be the best and the technology cannot make us all the best it can even sometimes make it worse and I'm going to read to you a little paragraph here from a book called the winner-takes-all society which is about opera singers winner-takes-all markets that is to say markets where the people who are the best get a large amount of the business have proliferated in part because technology has greatly increased the power and reach of the planet's most fifteen performers at the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries the state of Iowa in the United States alone had more than 1300 opera houses and thousands of tenor singers and adequate if modest livings performing before live audiences now that most music we listen to is pre-recorded the world's best tenor can be literally everywhere at once it costs no more to stamp out CDs from Pavarotti's master recording than from some less well-known tenor millions of us are willing to pay a little bit extra to hear him than the other singers and this explains why Pavarotti earns millions of dollars per year as most other tenors who are nearly as talented as him struggle to make a living at all so we have seen this not just with opera singers we've seen it with footballers we've seen it with actors and musicians we've seen it with authors now technology makes it easy for us to do things like publish our own books you can produce your own books you can produce your own movies you can produce your own video clips you can produce your own musical CDs but most of the CDs and books that are produced now don't earn anything for their authors think of all those - those clips on YouTube they don't earn anything for the authors because it's more and more difficult as the number of Clips increases to get the world's attention so what I want to do is to ask what are the psychological limits behind the world's attention constraint why can't we pay attention to all of those clips on YouTube at a time it's not just time it's also attention so what I want to do is to tell you really three things about the neuropsychology of attention scarcity this is the answer the question where are the bottlenecks the limits in our brain now the first thing to know is that some channels by which we process information have much tighter constraints on the total bandwidth the total amount of information that can pass through than do other channels at the start of this talk I showed you a comparatively high capacity high bandwidth channel that was the part of your brain which is responsible for assessing phases you can look at somebody's face and you can tell from the position of their eyes from how they smile and from many other things about their face whether you are willing to trust them or not I am doing some experiments with my colleagues in Toulouse which I don't have time to tell you about now but maybe we can discuss it in the questions in which we show that people's ability to smile convincingly is an important task an important ability that helps them to create economic trust and smiling convincingly gives you an economic return but as the picture showed you at the start of the talk most of that is pre conscious most of the things that we can work out about other people's faces happen not in our conscious attention but in our pre conscious attention our conscious attention is much more limited and in particular it's limited by what we call working memory and working memory is the thing that you use when you try to remember somebody's telephone number they tell you a telephone number and roughly speaking you can keep seven digits of that number in your working memory at the same time you can train your memory a bit you can maybe go up to nine digits but that's about it and many of our tasks in modern digitalized economy use working memory which is much more constrained than our ability to take in faces and other things now the second thing I want to tell you is that our ability to pay conscious attention to the world around us is much more limited than we think and in order to show you this because I can tell you but how do you know whether to believe me I want to show you I'm going to run for you a very short YouTube clip it lasts one and a half minutes and I want you to pay very close attention to this okay because what you're going to need to do is to count the number of times something happens okay you're going to see a team of basketball players passing the ball to each other and I want you to count how many times the ball is passed between players who are wearing white okay so here is the clip pay very close attention and at the end I will ask you how many times the ball was passed so how many people how many people and how many passes 15 15 okay let's see what the true answer is correct answer is 15 well done now the second question how many people saw the gorilla the rest of you didn't see the gorilla that is about 20% of you saw the gorilla now do the rest of you believes that there was a gorilla you think let me show you the gorilla okay now watch slowly well well may I make you a sincere recommendation if you are ever witness to a crime and you have to give evidence in court please do not tell the judge that you once watched a video with the gorilla in it who went like this and you didn't notice the gorilla okay the court would never trust you again what is this show it shows us that we are paying much less attention to the things going around us around us than we think we are attention is very scarce and interestingly and this is the third piece of neuroscience finding that I want to tell you about the kind of attention that uses our working memory you know the the kind that uses that we need for memorizing phone numbers is actually more easily distracted than the kind that processes images now that might seem strange because you might think that the rational thing to do if you have a very scarce part of your brain capacity is that you want to make it less distractible but our brains don't work like that why because the same part of our brain that uses working memory also chooses how to allocate our attention between different tasks so when we're doing things that are using our working memory intensively we are even less well able than the rest of the time to choose how to allocate our attention according to its relative importance so it's bad news really it's those times when we most need our working memory that we're most unable to guarantee it free from interruption and disturbance and so what is the there's only so many things that we can do with our attention at any one time and we are bad at screaming out claims because we need the working memory to choose how to allocate our attention but there's not enough of it because we are using our working memory for tasks that when we were evolving in Africa we didn't need to do very much things like reading text on a screen things like making a telephone number things like reading a book and when we evolved in Africa we allocating are scarce trained attention to the things that really matter then like looking at people's faces and deciding whether we could trust them but not for the things that didn't matter then like reading books so what's the result we have this very scarce working memory attention but it's being flooded all the time with advertising and spam and distraction and what do we feel like we feel that we can't we are overwhelmed by distraction but at the same time we can't get the attention we feel we deserve from the people we want it from from our bosses and our friends and our lovers and our customers and our children we feel that somehow the ability to choose rationally between the claims on our attention is not working right now if that's bad news it's going to get worse because most types of internet search are going to involve more and more of these claims on scarce attention up to now most kinds of matching have been what we call one-sided so you want to find a firm that can sell you something and you have to be very choosy about what kind of firm you look for and the search engine can help you do that but the firm doesn't have to be choosy about you if you find the firm they're pleased they have more customers but a lot of kinds of matching which will be more important in the future are what we call two-sided so if I want to find somebody to go on a date and I don't just want to get the person who matches my ideal characteristics because the person who matches my ideal characteristics probably would like to match with somebody much better than me so I have to do a difficult task I have to find the person who has the best characteristics but who also amazingly is interested in me and that's really hard that's a hard computer science problem it's hard to write search algorithms that do that and it's also hard quality problem because both of us have an incentive to lie about our characteristics and as social networking expands so Facebook and so on becomes more important you're going to find that most search is not like tapping in a description of a firm that you want to sell your product it's going to be about things like finding a professional partner who could work well with you or finding a PhD supervisor who's interested in supervising you or finding a date or finding people to work in your company who really like the kinds of things that your company does and that's going to become more and more difficult search problem so what about the future well I started by saying that in a world when not many people can write the ability to write gives you a good job today we're in the world in which not many people can program a computer even simply the United States employed last year over three million computer professionals in many different sectors it's difficult to compare that with the rest of the world because the statistics are not the same but India employed 2.3 million people in its software industry now not everybody who works in the software industry is a computer professional and many computer professionals don't work in the software industry but it shows that the US and India now have roughly the same numbers of software professionals and pretty well anybody with a good IT training can get a job but in the future that may not be true anymore because to get a job you need a skill which is scarce and there are two ways to do that one is you undertake a training and it's a training that gives that is not available to everybody and so it gives you a scare a skill that not everybody has or the other thing is that you have a skill but you exercise it with real creativity and with real charm and you are better at doing it than the other people who can do it now how can we tell where the IT training is going to be like the first thing is it going to be like weeding that disappears the it's no longer scarce or is it going to be the kind of skill that people can exercise with creativity and charm and I puzzled a long time over this to try and see how we could see what the future would look like and then I had an idea in this graph I'm going to show you these are some statistics from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics which show that some kinds of jobs differ from each other not in that average or median earnings of the people in those jobs but in how widely unequal the earnings are so here are six jobs in the United States which earned the same median wage so in measured in dollars per hour it's about twenty four dollars per hour but if you look at the the steepest curve those our film and video editors if you look at the least steep curve there's a signal and trick track switch repairers and in between come arbitrators mediators and conciliators forensic science technicians sorry edit other editors not film editors forensic science technicians and then dietitians and nutritionists and what this is telling you roughly is that people who are repair signals and tracks have a skill which more or less everybody uses in a similar way and so the best ones don't get paid much more than the least good ones but film and video editors have a skill which can be exercised with much creativity the best ones are very much in demand and the best ones work with the best other professionals and they earn much much more money now here's the question I asked myself I wanted to know how is this distribution of earnings changing over time in particular in one of the industries that has been most affected by technical change in recent years which is the movie industry in the United States so here is a graph which I want to explain to you quite carefully on the left hand side the far left you will see two pairs of columns and these are jobs that most people would agree are relatively low skilled jobs and they have remained about the same as they were before so the blue the very far blue column tells you how much the person in the 90th percentile earned as a multiple of the person in the 10th percentile and it was just under two times and there's that's a parking lot at a tandem and in the blue is the data from the year 2000 and the red is the data from the year 2009 here is a fast-food Chef somebody and McDonald's okay again you could be you know the best fat fast food chefs are a little bit better than the not-so-good fast food chefs but there's not a lot of difference and sure enough nothing's changed very much you can look at some better paid occupations and ones with a bit more creativity but that haven't changed very much and so these are accountants these are lawyers they're actually paralegals because the lawyers most lawyers won't release their earnings for these statistics and now here in the middle of the diagram is a set of occupations in the movie industry and what I guessed was that some of the occupations in the movie industry have probably become less creative over time so if you look at these ones here you find broadcast technician camera operator and projectionists and what do you see they had quite high dispersion of earnings in 2000 but it's been going down the earnings dispersion has become flatter and that makes sense because in the early days of hi-tech camera work a camera was a complicated difficult thing to operate and the really good camera operators were worth a lot more than their not so good ones but the technology's been making it easier it's now much easier for people to learn how to be a pretty good camera operator so the dispersion has been falling contrast that with film editors actors look at the huge already huge dispersion of earnings of actors and that's got even bigger it's gone from over seven times two over nine times and even makeup artists if you're a creative makeup artist you get hired with the best actors you appear in the highest-selling movies and your life is very nice a few little things here you might notice models their earnings have increased a bit more you might be surprised that the dispersion is so small you might say well we know Claudia Schiffer earns huge amount of money but remember this measure is the comparison of the 90th percentile and the 10th percentile claudia schiffer is not at the 90th percentile she's not even at the 99th not even the 99.9 most model you can be very very beautiful and you're still only earning quite a small wage here rather sadly is the profession of bailiffs a bailiffs are people who come and repossess your house if you can't pay the mortgage and these people sadly have been getting more creative over time writers and authors interestingly on average the creativity has been going down why because it's like models the very best writers and authors the one hundredth of one percent in huge amounts but it's now easier to become a reasonable published author it's much less expensive you can publish your book even yourself and now this is what I wanted to show you here are two types of profession in the computer industry here are programmers and here are people who work in computer support now programmers have been becoming gradually more creative why because think of the kind of work they do they write computer games and to write a computer game it's not enough just to be technically skilled you have to be imaginative inventive creative but here are the people and there are many many more of them who work in IT support and what do we see the earnings of dispersion has been going down their works become a bit less creative it's become more routine and relatively speaking less well paid so I nearly finished what what kind of conclusion can we draw from all this well that very last pair of columns on the right-hand side of that graph in some sense warns you that peuta skills however much they may help the world to solve problems of poverty maybe a little bit like literacy skills reading and writing in the sense that some of the great benefits that they yield today to the few people who have them will no longer be so great in a world in which everybody has them in particular some kinds of information technology skills offer diminished opportunities for creativity and that has a possible worrying long-term implication many people who will pay for expensive education to get trained as 19 literate people but who find at the end that they can't get jobs or they can't get very creative jobs in China and particularly in India there is another very worrying feature which is that as many of you know selective abortion is meaning that the number of girl children who are being born is falling rapidly compared to the number of boy children and it's likely that China will have by the year 2030 something like 50 million men who will never find a wife and the more of those who are internet savvy and can get online to express their frustrations and grievances the more dangerous potentially that frustration will be so I want to conclude not by saying that the benefits from ICT for development are illusory they're not they are wonderful they are extraordinary and in many areas like health and education they are truly transforming the prospects for hundreds of millions of the world's most desperately poor people but we have to keep a sense of perspective they are not the magic bullet that will solve everything and in particular we cannot think that just giving computers to people is going to solve the pickle tea for them of finding a livelihood because when everyone has a computer then the person with the computer is no longer sure to be able to use that computer to get a job and we will have to think much more creatively about how to include people in a sustainable world economy in the very long run we cannot assume that information and computer and communication technology will do that job for us thank you for listening to me I look forward to your questions regrets of all subtract that of Hermes Sudirman thank you very much indeed professor Sebright for challenging so much what we have between our ears and even to the point that it's getting overheated personally I would have a number of questions but I want to leave room to questions by the audience first and foremost so the floor is open to any questions okay thank you for this very stimulating and very fun indeed presentation I just wonder about the last slide about your conclusion about the dangers of having so many men without women in India and China and I don't really get the relationship with the ICT I would rather think that after all with ICT those men could maybe look for women as well in the world and to some extent spread the problem so that maybe other men in other part of the world would would guess at least some part of the say incidence of these very bad problem this is just so I could just plain it better thing yes that's a very interesting question as I understand it and I don't have hard evidence about this but I have seen some intelligent journalistic reports ICT is actually making the problem worse in China in particular because it is enabling young attractive Chinese women to find partners overseas more easily than young Chinese men and therefore more Chinese women are linking up with foreign men than Chinese men with foreign women so that the the immediate impact seems to me to worsen the the problem as far as the overall link with ICT is concerned I wanted to use that as an example of a more general difficulty which is that much of what we do the most important things about our lives and love and marriage is one important thing but it's not the only one depend not just on our own abilities but also on the qualities of the that we can match with and people believe that the internet and telephony and so on makes us better able to find suitable matches but what I wanted to point out is that not everybody can find the best match and sometimes this improved communication technology increases the frustration because imagine yourself in the position of a young Chinese man with not very high earnings and you know you have maybe set your eyes on you know one of the nicest and most attractive young women in your village and then you discover that she has met somebody on the internet and she has gone abroad so you know it's bad news for some when it's good good news for others Yuli present I want to make a comment maybe it won't be terribly realistic but perhaps it them it might also be applicable and by the way I thank you very much indeed for your presentation that was fascinating now since the whole universe is energy although I'm of course a Christian I accept what science has taught us about the origin of life so we are part of that energy that's why I said that what I'm going to say may also be unrealistic supposing that we survive to the next nuclear explosion or some other catastrophe in some time from now we'll may be able to have communication worldwide through telematics information science internet and perhaps in the future mobile phones may become so small that we can even have them under our skins or whatever so it may become possible to have a very quick communication on a brand scale now if that is the case should that happen can we believe that if we don't want to become mere robots if there a chance that we can preserve human relations which is what can really save us and prevent us from becoming a mere chunk of energy as all other beings in the universe thank you well that is a cosmic question but I think I see a very serious point behind it which is that for us to be completely transparent and available to the communications of others might seem like a more warm and human position situation to be in but it would really be a nightmare if you're working memory which was focusing on what you were hearing in the conversation from saying your best friend was constantly being interrupted by 350 other people who all want to talk to you at the same time then you would not be able to pay attention to them and you would not be able to pay attention to your friend and a world in which we are no longer the masters of our own attention in which our attention can be too easily distracted by others would be no human world at all now I don't think that's the way we are going to develop but what is clearly true what follows from what I have said to you about the findings in neuroscience is that we cannot stretch the capacity of our attention to handle competing claims on our attention much further than it already exists what we need to do is to find more effective filters and the filters are going to be the really interesting and difficult challenge so think what happened when the first people began to browse on the internet and the first advertisers learned how to use a pop-up ad you remember pop-up ads the first pop-up ads were very effective just as the first spam emails were very effective and they worked because they were unfamiliar and they allowed us to be distracted until we realized that we had to put good filters in place now the best browsers control prop up ads or allow you to control pop-up ads if you don't want them the best email services control spam there will be I predict the equivalent of very sophisticated email and spam filters and pop-up ad filters but for a much wider range of things so your Facebook page if you have one I don't but if you have a Facebook page you'd have a large number of people who are your friends and it's much harder than it should be to control which of your friends gets which piece of information about you you can control a bit but if you think about how we actually behave as social animals we filter things very carefully I may go to lunch with you and tell you a piece of confidential information which I wouldn't tell to somebody else and that's a sign that you are my friend and if I told everybody then it would not be such a sign of our friendship that I could trust you with this information so what I think we're going to see is that this first period of cheap communication in which anybody can try to get my scarce attention is going to seem like the time when the very first spam emails arrived before we had worked out how to manage this in the future I think we will have very sophisticated software which limits quite severely the ability of other people to reach us and to distract us and you may think that that's sad you may think that psychologically we will be living inside gated mental communities maybe it's sad maybe it's not but it's inevitable but if our you know the man that gave me sim Bracken I'd like to ask a question I'd like to ask you a question with regard to the last point you made I remember when I was a university student that I learned that when does this car city of something that gets a value although I know that now they sell a seawater and London at five pounds a bottle to enable the best restaurants to cook fish so apparently things are changing there too but we was talking about things that are increasingly scarce such as attention or memory can we expect to have the growth of a kind of economy of memory giving a kind of commercial value to these things the Empire created by Google and its income were in fact based on this what they did is they selected data which the time and attention of people they use Internet were not able to manage by themselves so on the one hand the spreading the diffusion of information may be a challenge to an economy that is now based on it can we hypothesize that this growing need to filter to select information will in a way create a new economy of attention and memory that's a fascinating question and the answer must be yes but it's not easy to see exactly how this new economy will function let me give you an example many economists correctly believe that when a resource is scarce the best thing to do is to give it an explicit price so when the Soviet economy collapsed many goods which didn't have explicit prices were able to be priced more efficiently and that was painful at first but led to much more effective utilization of the scarce resources unfortunately the economy of attention may not work very well with prices let me give you an example if I am looking on the internet for somebody to have a date I mentioned that there's this problem of reciprocal attention but it's not the only problem supposing that the best people the people I would most like to have a date with are very much in demand I might send a message to somebody saying I'd really like to go on a date with you what would I conclude if she writes back to me and say that's would be a pleasure my fee is five thousand dollars now that might be a market clearing price for her scarce time and of course in many in many contexts if what I'm looking for is not a date but is some professional exchange if she's my lawyer maybe five thousand dollars is the right price for her time and maybe that's something that but if it comes from somebody I want to have a date with it's signaling something to me which isn't quite what I want okay now what does that does that have wider implications yes and let me give you a very good example many providers of telephone and Internet services are getting very excited about the tential for facebook to allow them to make services available to Facebook users using targeting so if your friends or like the same restaurant as you then this makes you more willing to go to the restaurant and much future advertising will be based around your Facebook networks but some of these providers are hoping that they can use the old principles of pyramid selling to help them so your friends will be offered a small amount of money if they can persuade you to go to the restaurant with them and if they can persuade you to buy a CD and if they can persuade you to shop at the shop where you the advertiser has decided to now think about this do you really want to feel that when you talk to your friends on Facebook and you discuss the things that you care about and the movies that you like and do you want to feel that they're telling you what they're telling you because an advertiser has paid them I think not and I think most of us have an idea of a world in which prices are important because we are dealing with strangers essentially and the world in which prices don't matter because there is an exchange of something that is a signal about who we are about our identity now don't misunderstand me I'm I'm in favor of prices I'm an economist I think prices work pretty well in most circumstances but in this two-sided search world where we are looking for connections for Communities for friendships for loyalty prices will not be the way in which Oscars attention is allocated and we will have to find more creative and original ways to do that si prego para tener Anela slide the finale the relation in the last slide you showed us the wage spread in different types of activity one example is opened one one can open claim that an electronic engineer and the plumber are different because the one thing is the difference in muscle power and one thing is the difference between brain capability but today there's less and less space for the less gifted so the market economy was a way also to help the less gifted find their space if that was the case what can be the way in your opinion to enable the less gifted in terms of rivet creativity to find a job that's a question that it would take more than one extra lecture to answer properly I think we have some parts of an answer but we do not have enough one important thing that we must do is to think is to plan our educational systems for creativity and not just for skills politicians like to say you know we have to have an education system that gives people the skills they need but what I've suggested is that a skill which seems valuable today may only have its value because it's scarce and when lots of people have it it may no longer be so valuable but creativity can be taught creativity has some innate elements but it can be encouraged and it can be made to grow and for example I have seen interesting differences in international schooling systems because I've lived in both the UK and France and I've noticed very different styles of teaching of as my children have moved through their education systems in both of these countries roughly speaking the French system puts more emphasis on skills and some of them very good ones the British system puts more on creativity project work teamwork and both have weaknesses the the British system is bad at skills the French system is bad at creativity but I think we have to find ways in the education system to encourage both we also need to remember that there will be a need for social protection and insurance whatever happens however well skilled the workforce is in our countries there will always be some people in those workforces who have good skills but whose skills do not today bring them work and we will have to treat social protection as something which which is inevitable which will not disappear and which brings responsibilities I have no difficulty with the idea that if somebody is paid by the state to instead of working that they may need to do other things in return for that but the fact that your skills have not brought you a job should not be thought of as a matter of shame it should be thought of as one of the consequences which will continue for as long as the social market economy continues of the fact that when you undertake your education you do not always know what opportunities you are going to be able to use the education for so I'm sorry it's not a very um it's it's not a very complete answer but it's at least some of the elements of the answer to your very interesting and difficult question in order to be um a credible Krista processor Austral tomandamanda a cappella shareable zebra I think that we're going to take just one last question so as to leave some time to Professor Poole zbrush to some time to have lunch so I'm afraid this is this was the last question thank you very much she'll