Our surprise guest on our final day is Julian Assange, founder and editor in chief of Wikileaks. (Okay, not a surprise to me – I had an enjoyable argument with him about singularity theory last night.) Chris Anderson, TED’s founder, interviews him onstage and talks through Wikileak’s mission, structure and history. Julian is in fine form, and when Chris begins by asking if it’s fair to say that Wikileaks has released more secret documents that the collective enterprise of journalism, Julian allows that it’s an embarrassment for journalists to have such a comparison made.

Chris walks through some of Wikileaks’s most notable stories, beginning with the Project KTM report, a corruption report that contained information damaging to the Moi administration in Kenya. The report, viewed as a holy grail for understanding corruption in Kenya, was released by Wikileaks shortly before parliamentary elections and, Julian tells us, shifted the vote 10% according to intelligence reports.

Wikileaks is now best know for the release of the “collateral murder” video that depicts the killing of two journalists and multiple civilians by an Apache gunship in Iraq. Asked by Chris what was important about releasing the video, Julian tells us that it was important for understanding the “gross disparity in force” between potential insurgents with small arms and a helicopter gunship and for the impression that American forces were “looking for excuses to kill, targeting people rescuing the wounded.”

Chris asks why Wikileaks encourages the leaking of secret information. Julian gives the most clear response I’ve heard him offer to this oft-asked question. “There’s lots of information in the world that can achieve reform. Information that organizations spend effort to conceal is a signal that it’s information that could do good.” He acknowledges that not all secrets are fair game, allowing that people’s personal medical records should be allowed to be secret.

There’s not much disagreement in the crowd when Chris Anderson, exploring the tensions between secrecy, journalism and power, asks whether they see Assange as “a people’s hero” or a dangerous provocateur – the vote is overwhelmingly for the former and Assange seems slightly disappointed.

We look at a recently released document concerning an oil leak in Albania, which
new leak – oil leak in Albania which appears the obvious product of corporate negligence. When Wikileaks released the document, they were approached by the company to ask the document be removed. His team engaged with the corporation, asking for confirmation that it was their document, specifics on what the document was about… all of which helped serve as provenance for the document. Julian described this as one of his favorite ways of identifying and verifying materials.

Asked if Wikileaks has documents about BP, he allows that it does, but hasn’t released them. He explains that their “publication rate is minimized by a reengineering and fundraising effort” that’s been ongoing for some months now. The reengineering is to help the site cope with the high loads it faces due to widespread attention. Julian notes that it’s been difficult to grow the organization for fear that expanding too quickly will compromise security.

Chris makes reference to one the details of Julian’s childhood reported in a recent New Yorker profile – that Julian attended 37 different schools growing up. Julian confirms that his childhood was spent with parents who worked in the film industry, and later running from a cult. Chris asks if this is a recipe to create paranoia, leading Julian to quip, “The movie industry?”

Asked further about his background and motivations, Julian offers the thought that “capable generous men don’t create victims; they nurture them.” One way to help victims is to “police perpetrators.”

The interview closes with questions about Wikileaks’s recent work in Iceland. A leaked report on the banking industry and the financial collapse – which had devastating implications for Iceland – was due to be the subject of a television broadcast, but a court injunction moments before the story went to air prevented the release of information. Wikileaks posted the text of the report and Icelandic readers discovered it through the site. The incident led to a sense that Iceland shouldn’t suffer from these restrictions on journalistic freedom in the future. And so Wikileaks has cooperated with Icelandic parliamentarians to pass legislation that helps the country act as a data haven.

I was packing to go after Professor Wolff’s lecture and folding my tent when I got distracted by William Perrin‘s talk and ended up staying later than I’d planned. Perrin is a community activist who has focused on his neighborhood of King’s Cross for the past eight years. He introduces us to some of the neighborhood’s challenges – a rash of cars burned by hooligans for fun, widespread public drug sale and use, a large population of drug-addicted prostitutes, a group of drunken young teens who would steal and race motorscooters during Arsenal football games. All, he tells us, within 400 meters of one of London’s major railway stations.

(This is, amusingly enough, the neighborhood I’m enroute to as I write this, as it’s where the Guardian newspaper’s offices are.)

Perrin reacted by becoming a member of every community organization he could, and found himself flooded with information, both online and off. He began summarizing and sharing his summaries online as a way of coping with the mass of data and discovered that collating this data was a hugely helpful community function. He points to a collection of other community information blogs at Openly Local.

The technology isn’t the most important story in thinking about technology and social change, Perrin tells us. He’s had the most success with extremely simple technology. A short video of the noise from gravel, poured into a metal box, at the cement plant down the road from his flat was enough – plus lots of email – to persuade the CEO of Cemex to change local procedures so the company would be a better and less noisy neighbor. Perrin is openly critical of pundits who posit the utility of new, complex technologies to enable social change – he takes a swipe directly at Clay Shirky and his enthusiasm for platforms that might enable community drafting of legislation. And he tells the TED community that they are general at the bow wave of technological change, while the people living in communities are usually deep in the wake.

So he suggests a possible pledge for young, net-savvy leaders, like Obama and the new UK administration, which he calls the TED Global Internet Pledge:

“For my government, the internet is now the primary means of communications with the public for policy formation and service delivery. We shall extend basic training and support to people who cannot use the internet, enabling them to do so. Our public institutions must change themselves to make this happen within existing budgets, within 12 months.”

The commitment to using simple online tools and to ensuring they are widely available will do more to support revitalized civic life, he proposes, than a wealth of innovation in new tools for civic engagement.

And that’s all, for me at least. The conference had a couple more speakers and punting on the Thames, but I’m off to London, Abuja, Lagos and Accra. While this wasn’t my first time speaking at TED, it was the first time I gave a long talk, and was certainly the most attention I’ve ever gotten at a TED event. I’m very grateful for TED for showcasing my recent work, but I have to say, microfame is a real distraction from the blogging. Sorry that I wasn’t up to my usual levels of prolixity for this event. As always, thanks to the organizers, everyone who spoke and everyone who listened. And back to your regularly scheduled, significantly sparser blogging starting now.

Dimitar Sasselov uses a recent event in history – the reburial of Copernicus with honors in his native Poland – as a way of discussing a major discovery in his own work. Like most of his contemporaries, Copernicus had been buried in a communal grave. Scientists found hairs in a book which they knew to be in his library and attempted to match them to remains in the crypt where he was buried. By comparing DNA, they were able to make a confident match and exhume his remains, reburying them with the recognition deserving of the man who changed our understanding of the solar system to a heliocentric one.

Despite advances in DNA sequencing and other technologies, Sasselov tells us that it often seems like we’re not making much progress in answering the essential questions of life. What is life? What is the origin of life? Is there life on other planets or are we alone?

With the launch of a new telescope, the Kepler telescope, there’s a new way to look for earth-like planets in orbit around other stars. The telescope uses the transit method – it looks for the mini eclipse that occurs when a planet passes in front of a star. By detecting the dimming of the light, the users of the telescope are able to extrapolate the size and period of orbit of the planets blocking the light.

In our solar system, we have five small, earth-like planets and a smaller set (four) of differently sized gaseous planets. Copernicus believed that there was a harmony in the relationship of planet size, a distribution with more small planets like ours, and fewer large ones.

For years, it looked like Copernicus had gotten it wrong – it seemed like large, gaseous planets were more common. But this is likely just because we can only see the big ones. With Kepler now in use, this pattern is inverting – a set of 1160 observations shows far more small, earth-like planets in orbits around varying stars, and a smaller set of large gas giants – basically, a Pareto distribution with respect to planetary size.

Sasselov extrapolates from this data to suggest that there are a large number of earth-sized planets out there. Size matters, because life as we know it is more likely to occur on small planets, capable of supporting an atmosphere or liquid water. He suggests there are 100 million potentially habitable planets and that the next research project is to start studying them, trying to understand their chemical composition and, therefore, the possibility they support certain types of life.

If these experiments to enumerate planets are one form of exploring the possibility of non-terrestrial life, another major approach – which he explains as two sides of a bridge being built to join over a river – is lab experimentation. Recent experiments show that agitation of chemicals in liquid water can lead to the formation of bubble membranes that resemble cell membranes. This offers the intriguing suggestion that cell structures could be universal.

It’s easy to see ourselves as insignificantly small in the scale of the universe. Sasselov takes off his tie, asks us to imagine its length as that of the universe. Our planet is the size of an atom in this scale. But in time scales, the fraction of time our planet has been in existence is a large portion of his tie – a handful or so. Perhaps this helps us see our place in the world is not insignificant.

Stefan Wolff is a scholar of ethnic conflicts and civil war. He tells us that, while there’s seldom good news when we talk about these topics, there are reasons for hope. Specifically, he’s hopeful about three factors: leadership, diplomacy and institutional design.

There are certainly reasons to worry about ongoing civil war. Wolff reminds us of recent civil conflicts in Georgia, Kenya, Sri Lanka, Israel and Palestine, Darfur and Iraq. But there’s good news as well. In the long term, there’s an overall decline in the number of civil wars, and we’re seeing roughly half as many as there were in the 1990s, with fifty civil wars. Death rates are lower from combat casualties, though the trend is less unambiguous. And there’s a decrease of 2/3rds in civilian casualties, which is great, but those statistics don’t consider the tragically common other effects of conflict on civilians – torture, rape and maiming.

So why is the situation getting better? Sometimes there’s a military victory, like with the victory of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. But these rarely show up as resounding successes. Wolff tells us an African colleague once told him, “The ceasefire on Tuesday night was reached just in time for the genocide to start on Wednesday morning.”

Looking at success stories might help us. The Northern Ireland peace process mediated by Senator Mitchell was a resounding success and has led to lasting peace in Northern Ireland. There were very clear conditions for participation in negotiation – a firm commitment to exclusively peaceful means. Agreements were innovative and let all parties see their core concerns addressed. People built cross-border institutions that link Belfast and Dublin and acknowledge Irish dimension of the conflict. There was an acknowledgement of rights of individuals and groups, and local leaders rose to the challenge of compromise.

This isn’t the only success – stopping the civil war in Liberia, preventing civil war in Macedonia, and ending the conflict in Aceh – in each case, institutions have stood up to the promise of making peace instead of sustaining conflict.

Why didn’t Oslo work as a process for peace in Israel and Palestine? The process didn’t include enough of the issues – instead, it left them to local leaders, who soon disengaged, became distracted. The Southern Sudan peace process wasn’t comprehensive enough, and may lead to resumption of conflict.

In Kosovo, failure of a negotiated solution led to de facto partition. Here we should probably blame the intransigence of local leaders, and the failure to settle for less than full demands. Western support for Kosovar independents probably didn’t help either, and the failure to build institutions to address concerns of Serbs and Albanians alike contributed.

Even when situations less than optimal, Wolff tells us, leaders have a choice and can make a difference for the better. A cold peace is better than a hot war for everyone involved. But these sorts of solutions don’t happen automatically. Leadership has to be capable, determined, visionary. Leaders need to connect to each other and to followers, so they can bring them along on a long and arduous journey.

Diplomacy must be well resourced, sustained, and a use a mix of pressures. It needs to push for equitable compromise, and involve a broad coalition of local, regional and international supporters.

Institutional design should focus on issues, innovative thinking, and be supported by well-funded implementation.

Parties involved need to move away from maximum demands, towards compromise. And we all need to invest in developing leaders who have the skills, vision, determination to make peace so that “the child soldiers of today can become the children of tomorrow.”

Ze Frank is a very funny man. He’s also an extremely sweet and caring guy. And while his talk at TED features some of his classic collaborative web performances – the Earth sandwich, YoungMeNowMe – most of the talk is about recent projects that focus on our need to feel and to be felt.

The star of the show is Ray, whose song, written to help his daughter cope with the stresses and pressures of her job, begins, “I’m about to whip somebody’s ass.” Ze’s fans began to remix the song, which he compiled into an album and promised to deliver it to Ray… if his fans could fin him. They did, two weeks later, and Ze flew to St. Louis to meet Ray, who turns out to be a preacher, and who was amused that his gesture for his daughter had gone viral.

Ze tells us that there’s a real challenge with technology that’s supposed to connect us – lots of people who build this technology are not good at connecting with people. He’s hoping to do better.

One project – A Childhood Walk – asks you to remember a walk you took as a child over and over again, take the walk again in Google street view and post a photo and the memory associated with it.

Another – from 52 to 48 with love – urged polite messages of reconcilliation between the left and right in the US in the wake of the 2008 elections. Right wing blogs concluded that this was condescending and Ze received reams of hate mail. He built a collage of some of the angriest bits, printed it on paper and asked people to fold them into “angrigami“, creating something beautiful out of this strong emotion.

Recent projects include a pair of songs, a beautiful “scared mantra” for a child who has trouble sleeping, and a “chillout song” for a woman named Laura going through a hard time. The song ended up involving the participation of hundreds of singers, who joined in telling her, “Hey, you’re okay, you’ll be fine, just breathe.” It’s a good message for all of us.

Rachel Sussman is photographing organisms that are more than 2000 years old. The project was inspired by Jamon Sugi, a two thousand year old Japanese Cedar at a remote island called Yaku Shima. The project is a combination of philosophy, photography and history, starting at year zero and working backwards.

The project features wonderful species like La Llareta – a three thousand year old shrub that looks like a strange pile of moss. She visited Greenland and photographed a map lichen, which grows a centimeter every 100 years. She tells us that visiting Greenland was more live traveling in time than in space, going to a place where you can grab foot-long trout with your hands from a running, glacial stream.

The trout aren’t very old – indeed, there are no animals in the set, as the oldest animal alive – a tortoise – is only 175 years old. A coral isn’t a very speedy animal, but there is one that’s 2000 years old off the shores of Tobago – it’s beautiful, nibbled by parrot fish and there’s an open question of whether it will be damaged by the Gulf oil spill.

But generally we’re looking at plants and fungi. Really big fungi.

The Armilaria Death Rings are caused by a predatory fungus, sometimes called honey mushroom or “the humungous fungus”. It’s best seen from aerial photography in rings of trees killed by the fungus.

Circles of plants appear in her work. A clonal colony of quaking Aspen is a single tree, with a single genome, but looks like a forest. It’s 80,000 years old, lives in Fish Lake, Utah, happens to be male, and in theory, is immortal.

The Sagole Baobab in Limpopo Province, South Africa, is two thousand years old. As they age, baobobs hollow out, because they become pulpy. She tells us about trees that have been used as a bar, a prison, a toilet.

Welwirschia, a primitive conifer, a shrublike desert tree, lives in Namib desert, where it features the longest leaves in the plant kingdom. To its south, in the bush veldt of South Africa, trees grow almost entirely underground with just leaves poking above the surface. This protects them from fires that sweep through the area. They, too, are astoundingly old. So are some creosote bushes in the US – 12,000 years old – which are slow spreading circles, in danger on their Bureau of Land Management land, which is open for ATV traffic.

In more serious threat are Siberian Actinobacteria. They’re 400-600,000 years old and we know they’re alive because we can document them doing DNA repair at temperatures below freezing. In her upcoming travel, she’ll go to Antarctica to photograph 5000 year old moss.

Why do this? The oldest living things are a record of the past, call to action, and a barometer of the future.

(Clay’s talk is similar to the one he gave at the Aspen Institute last year, though that talk was more than an hour long and, obviously, was able to cover more territory than an 18 minute TED talk. Here are my notes on that longer talk, which Clay was kind enough to vet and correct…)

WWF’s Jason Clay starts his tale of doing more with less with a story about his own childhood, growing up very poor on a farm in Missouri. When a scholarship allowed him to get out and go to school, he studied agriculture and anthropology. This eventually led him to working in a refugee camp in Sudan – “If you get a PhD and decide not to teach, you don’t necessarily end up in a refugee camp – you could always drive a taxi in New York.”

Using the techniques he’d learned as an anthropologist, he conducted interviews on how many people were raped, how many were arrested and tells us he was able to calculate with unfortunate accuracy how many body bags they’d need.

This wasn’t his path, he tells us. And so he found himself at a Grateful Dead show, talking to Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry’s, who asked him, “What can I do to save the rainforest?” The answer Clay offered: “Use nuts from the rainforest to prove the forest is worth more as forest than as pasture.” The product, Rainforest Crunch, was an enormous success – $100 million in sales – but he tells us it failed. “Why? The people who were gathering Brazil nuts weren’t people cutting the forest. We needed to be working on beef, timber and soy.”

Returning to Sudan, Clay tells us he wondered why didn’t people realize famine was caused by politics, not weather. An Oromo friend answered his question: “You can’t wake a person who’s pretending to sleep.”

Human beings are currently using 1.3 planets worth of resources for consumption. Yes, population growth is important, but so is the size of ecological footprint. The average American consumes 43 times the average African. When we’ve reached a planet of 9 billion people, all of whom are likely to consume twice as many resources, we’re at a load much, much higher than what we can sustain globally. Yes, we need to bring up efficiency and productivity, but we need to bring consumption down.

Clay asks if consumers should have a choice about sustainable products… or should we mandate that all our products are sustainable? It takes 1.8 seconds for the average American to make an average consumer choice. That’s not long enough for a consumer to figure out whether frozen lamb from New Zealand is better for the environment than fresh from the UK, or even if organic potatoes have fewer toxic chemicals than conventional. (The answer to both those choices is non-trivial – and in both cases is, “it depends”.)

So sustainability has to be a pre-competitive issue. And, Clay tells us, we need collusion to address it. He and WWF have identified 30 key parts of the world where we need to protect biodiversity, and 15 major commodities that threaten biodiversity. Do we address this by changing the behavior of 6.9 billion consumers? It’s way too hard. 300-500 companies control 70% of these key commodities. And 100 companies control 25% of all this trade. And Clay argues that, if we chance their behavior, we can change 40-50% of production.

Now there are agreements with 40 of these companies, and negotiations underway with another 40. The plan is to use those 80 to twist arms of the remaining 20. One of the involved companies is Cargill, which not has plans to double palm oil production by planting only on degraded land. Mars has made a commitment to buy only sustainable seafood for its pet food. And they’re sequencing the cocoa genome and releasing it into the public domain so people can come up with better ways to grow the product sustainably, so Mars can always make chocolates.

The price of food as a share of household income keeps going down. But in part this is because consumers aren’t paying the true cost of food. If we bring in the externalities – particularly water – we’d see a massive shift in costs.

Clay closes by telling us, “Whatever was sustainable in a planet of six billion will not be in a planet of nine.”

Ecologist Johan Rockström begins by reminding us modern humans have just experienced “10,000 years of grace,” an interglacial period capable of supporting human development. He tells us we’re currently putting the planet into a “quadruple squeeze” through pressures of human growth and inequality (80% of climate impact from 20% of people), climate change (whether we end up at 350/450/550ppm of CO2), ecosystem loss (loss of 60% of species), and the problem of surprise – rapid tipping points.

Rockström tells us that may be at a point where humans are the main pressure on the planet. It’s not just CO2 that maps a hockey stick – methane, nitrous oxide, loss of species, ozone depletion all have a distinctive, rapidly rising curve. There was a massive acceleration on those curves in the 1950s. And it’s possible that we currently face the most challenging decade in human history, a decade where we have to “bend the curves”.

Natural systems have stable states and thresholds. Think of a ball rolling on a curved surface. One measure of resilience is the depth of the cup. But when the ball reaches a local maximum, it can quickly tip into another state (as he says this, he steps off the stage, lands on his feet after a few foot fall, and continues his talk without breaking stride.)

Systems can collapse very quickly. Coral reef systems can turn from thriving ecosystems to systems that have lost diversity very quickly. We may have just seen a possible threshhold in the arctic – we rapidly lost 30% of reflective ice cover. This is the largest red flag warning for humanity, he tells us.

Nine factors, and their interactions, serve as “planetary boundaries”: climate change, ozone depletion, aerosol loading, ocean acidification, freshwater use, chemical poluuion, land system change, rate of biodiversity loss, biogeochemical loading, and global nitrogen and phosphorous cycles. Rockström tells us that we’ve crossed the boundary on three of these factors – nitrogen flow, biodiversity loss, and climate change.

Is sustainable development utopia? No – we can fix this – there’s evidence we can. In Latin America, collapsed farmland was recovered through zero-till, mulch-based farming. The Great Barrier Reed, which was beginning to collapse, has now been revived due to a new governance strategy, and there’s a new focus on putting redundancies and diversity in the natural system. In Sweden, swamplands that were considered worthless flood zones are now being reincoporated into urban planning.

We face the largest transformative development since industrialization. But he argues that can manage it if we build resilient systems.

Sugata Mitra tells us that there are places on Earth, in every country where, for various reasons, good schools cannot be built and good teachers cannot or do not want to go. And those places, as it turns out, is often where trouble comes from.

In 1999, Mitra embedded a computer in a wall in a slum in New Dehli, connected it to high speed internet and left it there – the Hole in the Wall Experiment. He repeated this experiment in other parts of India and discovered that children learn what they want to do. We see a Rajastani village where children were recording music and playing it back for each other, only four hours from seeing the computer for the first time. His conclusion – children could learn to use computers by themselves.

An experiment in Hyderabad asked children who spoke English with a strong Telugu accent to use a voice recognition system on a computer. Two months later, their accents had changed and were closer to the neutral British accent of the speech synthesizer.

Mitra had a conversation with the late Arthur C. Clarke where Clarke said, “If a teacher can be replaced with a machine, he should be.” And Clarke told him that student interest is the most important thing in education.

As children begin to Google their homework, teachers in India are reporting that their English is improving… and they’re becoming surprisingly deeper thinkers. Mitra believes that this might be a shift from memorization to exploring information online.

How difficult a task can students take on. In Kalikuppam, a small village, Mitra decided to see if Tamil speaking children could learn about biotech in English on their own. After two months, the students sheepishly told him they’d learned nothing. He asked whether they’d learned nothing at all, and a twelve year old girl told him, “Apart from the fact that improper copying of genetic molecules could cause disease, we’ve learned nothing.”

Students took biotechnology exams and scored a 30, while they’d scored a 0 before… “an educational impossibility.” He asked one of the best students to teach the others and improve their schools. She asked how she could possibly teach them, and Mitra suggested “the grandmother method” – stand behind, admire, act fascinated and praise. After two months, the class score was up to 50.

Mitra is now conducting experiments in the UK, with students at Gateshead school. Students work in groups of four, using one computers, and can change between groups. One group started solving GSCE questions within 20 minutes – the least successful group took 45 minutes. They were using Google, Ask Jeeves and other sources. Teachers asked, “Is this deep learning?” Mitra sees evidence that test scores rise over time with groups like these, and believes that students have almost near photographic recall because children discuss what they’ve learned together.

He’s got a great new idea – the granny cloud. He’s recruited hundreds of British grandmothers who donate their time over online video connections and answer questions for children. In both India and the UK, he’s teaching children using groups, Google and the granny cloud.

Maybe the most amazing experiment comes from Turin, where Mitra went to a primary school and started writing questions on the white board in English for students who speak only Italian. Using Google translate, students were answering questions like “Who was Pythagoras and what did he do?” in a few minutes.

Mitra tells us that he future of education is self-organized learning environments. They let students learn together, use resources and people they can access online and explore on their own, and he plans on testing this going forward.

Sebastian Seung asks the room at TEDGlobal whether they are more than their genes. After all, genes seem like they have awesome power. They control our appearance and our vulnerability to diseases. But we think we’re more than our genes. He urges us to cheer “I am more than my genes”.

Okay, so what are we. He offers, “I am my connectome”.

We’ve only produced one connectome – that of the nematode C. elegans. It took twelve years to painstakingly map 7000 connections between a couple hundred neurons. The human connectome – a map of every connection between every neuron – contains more than a million times as much info as the human genome.

It’s possible that our memories are stored in the connectome, and possible that our personalit and intellect is as well. We don’t know if we are our connectomes because we don’t have the technology to test it.

How do you make a connectome? Take thin slices of a mouse brain, assemble them into a 3D models to see a neuronal structure and begin coloring them, so each neuron is a different color. You can start to see the intersection of two neurons – a synapse – where neurons can transfer neurotransmitters. Basically, this process is turning a stack of neurons into a giant coloring book.

Seung shows us a silly self-help book titled, “Guys are waffles, Girls are spaghetti.” Whether or not the thesis of the book – that men’s emotions are compartmentalized, while women’s are connected to all aspects of life – he tells us that “everyone’s brains are like spaghetti. Actually, finely branching capellini.” Everything touches everything else – not quite, but enough to make the problem of mapping the connectome deeply overwhelming.

The hope is that with microscopes and huge supercomputers, we can assemble and explore a vast human connectome. But this would be one of the greatest technological challenges of all time. For now, scientists are hoping just to find partial connectomes of tiny chunks of mouse brains.

The brain is constantly changing, Seung tells us. Synapses can be created and eliminated, and can grow larger and smaller. To a certain extent, they’re programmed by your genes. But neural activity can also cause connections to change – your experiences change your connectome. Each connectome is unique – it’s where nature meets nurture, how identical twins can end up very different people.

Neural activity is constantly changing – it’s like the water of a stream. The connections of the neural network are like the streambed, determining where it flows. But over timestreambed is changed, by the flow of the water, just as the structure of the brain could be changed by thought.

Seung offers a challenge to “prophets” who promise us immortality through cryonics, spending $100,000 to have your brain stored in liquid nitrogen. Should we laugh at these guys? “I don’t know,” he tells us, “let’s test scienticially.” Let’s get a frozen brain and try to obtain the connectome. If we cannot get it, we might resurrect the body, but we cannot ressurect the mind.

Botanist Stefano Mancuso sees something moving from the biblical story of the ark. “Where are the plants?” There’s a deep bias in human history that tells us that plants aren’t living creatures.

We tend to say that the blue whale is the biggest living creature – it’s not. The great sequoia is far larger. Do we discriminate because plants don’t move? They do – watch the venus fly trap capture a snail. And this isn’t just a special case – plants move when they blossom, and they reposition and reorient to capture the sun, though you need to use time lapse to see this.

He shows us plants at play, immature sprouts learning how to track the sun. And he shows us plants sleeping, in less active states as they’re in darkness. He posits, “Perhaps we should study sleeping problems in plants, not just in animals.” The experimental and ethical issues, he suggests, are less serious. And we can think of plant reproduction – the movement of pollen via animals – as another form of movement.

It took a scientist no less than Darwin to get us to take seriously he power of movement in plants. He and a student wrote a 500 page monograph – “The Power of Movement in Plants”. Near the end, he makes reference to plant intelligence being “like the brain of the lower animals.”

We can see very interesting activity at the root apex, a very small region at the top of a root. We can track action potentials, signals that appear very similar to neurons in the brain.

A rye plant has roughly 11 million root apexes, and these are linked together by a structure that looks surprisingly similar to a network. He suggests we think of roots as being like the internet, linking together small computer machines. Why is there intelligence in the roots of plans? It allows them to seek opportunity and avoid danger.

So why don’t we have plant robots? It’s smart to emulate birds if we want to fly, but if we wanted to explore soil, plants are the masters.

Mancuso doesn’t mean this just as a provocation – he’s building robots that are controlled by
unicellular algae, leaves of plants, and roots. Wow.