How Technology Shapes Humans - with Ainissa Ramirez

[Music] you know as i was preparing this talk i was starting to think a little bit about how i'm going to sound a little funny to you why well i'm being broadcast from the united states to the uk i have an american accent that's certainly going to sound funny to you and for those of you who are familiar with american accents well i'm going to sound funny to you because i have a new jersey accent but what isn't funny is how i use language the way that i use language was shaped by technology and this is one of the things i'm going to talk about today i want to tell you a little bit about my new book the alchemy of us how humans and matter transform one another but before i get started i really want to tell you a little bit about the book's origin story how it came to be where did i get this idea and then i want to also share with you my advantage what was the lens that i took in looking at technology and then i want to take a deep dive and talk about different ways that technology shaped us and i want to share with you how there are sometimes surprises how sometimes there are unintended consequences and how sometimes technology goes awry i really can't wait to share that with you okay so let me just start with what's my advantage well i'm a material scientist i'm pausing because i know most of you don't know what that is that's okay i liken material science to my home state of new jersey because both material science and new jersey are wedged between two more familiar entities for new jersey that's new york and philadelphia and for material science that's chemistry and physics see material science is interested in how atoms bond and so that's the chemistry part and then it's also interested in how materials behave when we put it in different situations and so that's the physics part now to be honest the first time i heard about material science i wasn't even interested i never even heard of it and and when i first time i was like this is not going to be good why well because it was a prerequisite course back in my college days and i had taken a series of prerequisite courses all of them being pretty dry so i didn't really anticipate much from this course however on the first day my professor said something that completely blew me away he said the reason why we don't fall through the floor and the reason why my sweater is blue and the reason why the lights work all has to do with the interaction of atoms and if you can understand how they do that you can get them to do new things now i stopped listening to him which i don't recommend you should always listen to your professor but i stopped listening to him momentarily because i had a new set of eyes as i was looking around the classroom he was right my shoes my shoes were comfortable because the molecules are kind of shaped like springs which brought a comfort to my feet and the pencil in my hand was able to make a mark because carbon atoms slip past each other and my glasses my glasses allowed my eyes to see because they bent light to my distant retinas it was all atoms just like he said it was that moment that i said you know i think i'm going to check out this material science thing now i knew i had wanted to be a scientist since i was very young i was one of those little girls that took things apart didn't always put things back together but took things apart because i really wanted to know what was inside i had a lot of questions wanted to know why the sky was blue why grass was green the thing that put me on the path to becoming a scientist actually was television now i had favorite television shows back then in the 70s and 80s like the bionic woman the six million dollar man there was star trek which i loved i love spock but a show that really put me on the path to becoming a scientist was this production low production show on public television called three two one contact and on it it was a repeating segment of kids that were solving problems and there was one particular person who resonated with me because it was an african-american girl solving problems and when i saw her i saw my reflection it was that moment that i said i think i'm going to be a scientist and it was years later that i decided that i wanted to be a material scientist now material science and i we've been together for a long time i've been a material scientist for i'm not going to say for quite a bit of time and just like any relationship things were just getting a little stale now i was enjoying my research i was doing nanotechnology and i was looking at smart materials but i really felt like i was learning a lot in my brain but i really didn't have a lot of knowledge in my hands i didn't really feel like i had the craft and so i wanted to feel a little bit more uniform and so i decided to sign up for some glassblowing classes little did i know that this was actually going to put me on the path to writing the book now when i signed up for these glassblowing classes i went to go visit just to check it out and the instructor was he was wonderful he was busy but he stopped what he was doing and he did a demonstration what he did is he got some glass he pulled it out of the furnace he pulled on it a couple of times with with some very very long tongs and what he created was a galloping horse like the feet weren't all on the ground and not only that it had a mame flowing in the air like a shampoo commercial i said this guy's amazing i want to be next to him now as we're walking around the studio he's warning me he says look if you see any glass on the floor even if you think it's cool don't step on it because it might be hot and if it's hot it'll burn a hole in your shoe i said burn a hole in my sh what kind of operation is this no okay all right well i won't tell anybody but this doesn't sound completely safe now i signed up for these classes because i was excited but i have to say i was also a little scared because well i knew that i had to be careful why not just because of the warning that he gave but because i come from a long line of people who were slightly on the clumsy side so i knew that the chances of getting hurt were very high for me so i just needed to be very aware of my surroundings so when i signed up for these classes i took a very very cautious approach so when it was my turn to work with the glass i would get my pipe and i would stick it into the vat of hot molten glass and i would just take out a very little amount and then i would blow a very very small bubble and i would make a small vase and i had lots and lots of these small vases i had so many that i would give them to friends and they were so gracious because they would accept them even though i knew that they weren't symmetric or they were tilted or they had the wrong color i don't even know how the color got in there sometimes but there was one friend who was very kind to me and she said anisa you know you should make something bigger i said oh no i'm never making anything bigger do you understand how hard it is to make that and not get burned i'm going to stick to small vases well my friends i have to say that there was one particular day when i went to my glassblowing class that i didn't care to be so safe that morning there were lots of layoffs people were let go and so there was lots of hugging lots of crying and as you can imagine by the end of the day i was very very raw so when it was my turn to work with the glass i took a different approach this time i got my pipe and i stuck it deep into that vat and i took out a lot of glass maxing out my muscles and then i blew hard on that glass because i was very very angry and then i did things i hadn't done before i swung the glass and when i did that that made it longer and then i twirled the glass and when i did that it made it wider now when i came back to myself i realized that this glass piece was probably one of the best glass pieces in anissa ramirez history and i wasn't the only one who recognized that because some of my friends in my glass class came up to me and they're like anissa large vase you and i said yeah i can't believe it either and i was we were both vibing on how wonderful this piece was now i had one more step before i finished all i needed to do is put the glass piece which was on the end of my pipe into the furnace for a short amount of time just a flash of heat and then i could take it off my pipe and then put it over to the area where it cooled but as i'm talking to my friend i slide it into the furnace i'm still having a conversation i lose track of time when i pull it out my glass piece is now incandescent orange it is extremely hot not only that what was hanging off my pipe like this level to my pipe is now hanging off my pipe about to fall off i'm in trouble well i had a little bit of knowledge i had a little bit of knowledge i said well all i know all i need to do is i just need to rotate my pipe 180 degrees and if i do that well what will happen is that this will gravity will happen and it will level this thing and all will be fine but because my piece was so hot it went down to its new lower side oh dear so i rationalized okay some time has passed this piece is now a little cooler so all i have to do is rotate this once again and what will happen is gravity will make it level again and all will be fine but again it was still too hot and it went down to its new lower side i was in a dance with the glass where i would rotate it and it would go to its new lower side i would rotate it it would go to its new lower side i was getting to the point was actually pleading with the glass like okay glass please cool please stop i really don't know what to do the glass was uninterested in my please or my lack of knowledge and so on on one turn when i rotated it rotated right off the piece right off my pipe boom landed right on the floor there's my glass piece no longer beautiful now my instructor had been witnessing what was going on and he rushed over he had heat resistant gloves he reattached the piece to my pipe he put it into the furnace he flattened the side the head he sorry rounded the side that had been flattened he also opened up the sealed lips which had collapsed onto itself he gave it to me i did things that were mostly symbolic this was beyond my skill but i finally did what i should have done which is put that into the furnace for that flash of heat so i can remove it off my pipe and put it over to the area where it cooled now as that piece is cooling and as i am calming down i'm having deep thoughts i'm having very deep thoughts i'm saying to myself you know what i was shaping the glass class and he said this is a glassblowing class is what you do you shade glass no hear me out hear me out i'm really happy to be alive the glass and i we were in a dance we shaped each other i wonder how materials and humans have been shaping each other over the last few centuries good question that was the birth of the now book order to do this work of exploring how materials and humans have been in this dance of transforming one another i had to take a very different approach to how i did material science see i worked in a laboratory for a long time i would be in clean rooms and wear a special clean room seat suits and be in very high tech environments looking in microscopes on the hunt for something new i liken my work to being a periscope where i was pointing in the direction that we were going and i could see five ten years ahead but now in order to explore how technology got us to this point i had to change locations that periscope needed to be turned back so i can look at innovations in the past see how they made us made us where we are today i also had to go to different locations no longer was i in high tech environments but now i was in libraries in archives i wasn't looking at new things but i was looking at very old things in fact some of these things were crumbling in my hands let me share with you what an excellent day looks like at the archives i'm not going to share with you what an average day looks like or an ordinary day looks like because they kind of look the same but i want to share with you what an extraordinary day looks like now i was working on looking at how timepieces changed society and i had already identified the materials the key materials were crucible steel made possible by benjamin huntsman up in sheffield and also warren marison who was a bell lab scientist in new jersey those were the materials that were used to make the oscillators the things that create the ticks and talks so i could check that off was very pleased with that because i didn't know anything about that and then i started to look about look into how these technologies shaped us and i found things that i had seen in other books about how our desire for punctuality increased and how we had a desire to be on time and how time was one of the most popular terms in the english language i learned about those things that was very that was very cool but i also found something that i hadn't known about time keeping it ends up that before the industrial revolution we used to sleep differently yeah we did we would sleep in two different doses we would go to sleep for three and a half we'd go to sleep around nine or ten o'clock sleep for about three and a half hours then wake up on purpose for about an hour or so and do things around the house like sew clean read go visit our neighbors because they're up to and then after that hour had passed we'd go back to sleep for another three and a half hours those doses of sleep were called first and second sleep and everybody slept that way in fact you can go look at old books don quixote jane eyre you'll see the terms first and second sleep this is what they meant by that so we used to sleep that way why don't we sleep that way anymore well it was a one-two punch in terms of technology one it was artificial light artificial light allowed us to go to bed later because it was able to push back the darkness so that we can turn in later so one of those segments of sleep became shorter what was the other factor well it was a clock we had to get up earlier to go to the factory so that second segment of sleep became shorter soon it didn't make sense to go to bed for a short amount of time wake up in the middle of the night and then go to bed for another short amount of time so it became consolidated and it kind of looks like how we sleep today in fact there's some historians who believe actually the natural way to sleep is actually in the segmented sleep so when you wake up in the middle of the night maybe that's just an echo to an ancient form of sleeping but i had found this and i never knew that we slept in two different segments so i was very pleased to show how timekeeping shaped our sleeping patterns but i was still on the hunt to really show how timekeeping became really important to society and i i wasn't having much luck i really wanted to explore this and really show readers how important this was because we lived in a world where we weren't so beholden to time so here i am in a library with a thick stack of books and i'm reading them one by one each are about time keeping and its impact on culture and i'm writing some notes this is not going to make a hollywood movie so i won't go into that but there was one book in particular that i read it was about halfway through this very very thick book about halfway through the page i see one sentence knocks my socks off it says in the 19th century there was a woman in england who sold time i said what and i said it loudly like that and i'm in a library i'm in a very posh library and everyone raises their heads to see who's made that noise and because i don't want them to know it's me i mimic the same behavior and i also make a decision to amplify that be quiet and when it when people settle down and put their heads back down i get back to that sentence and i look at that sentence again and i say what what does this mean yeah there was a woman who sold time in the late 19th century and in the early 20th century ruth belleville sold time she would wake up early in her home in maidenhead make her way over to london then make her way over to the to greenwich and then walk up that extremely steep hill to the royal observatory and be greeted by the attendant when she got to the royal observatory what she would do is she would open up her handbag and she'd open up a pocket watch like this which he had nicknamed arnold and then arnold would be compared to the observatory's master clock and then the attendant would note the difference between arnold and the master clock and then give arnold back to uh to ruth and then she'd make her way down the hill and then cross the thames by ferry to her first set of customers her first customers were at the london docks ships merchants sailors navigators they needed to know the precise time they needed to know this so that they can determine longitude not knowing longitude well was was deadly because you might not end up where you need to be so she would give them the time and they would look at their walk look at her watch and set their watches accordingly accordingly and then she would go to factories they needed to know the time and newspapers and train stations you go to clock bakers and jewelers they needed to know the time she would go to pubs pubs needed to know the time because she couldn't sell alcohol after certain hours so they needed to make sure they had the precise time she even went to the home to a few millionaires because they relished having the precise time in their homes for this unusual line of business she would she was called the greenwich time lady and her family had been in this business of selling time for nearly 100 years her father started this business he had about 200 customers her mother was in this business she had about 100 customers and ruth at the end of her career had about 40 customers now when i discovered ruth i said this is amazing a lady who sold time i told everybody did you know there was a lady who did you know there was a lady who sold time and eventually my friends would say yes you told us the last time we talked to you i was very excited about that and as a writer she was a fantastic device because it was a great way to show how important timekeeping keeping was so much so that a person had a business selling it that's great if i told you today i was selling time you would say well that's a big bad business anisa because everybody knows the time but in roots day it made sense so that was very exciting so i was so glad to discover ruth but i have to say that i also had another set of emotions that surprised me i was sad and then i got a little mad how is it that a woman who is so fascinating how is it that she's reduced to one sentence in a very thick and might i say dry book about time keeping that didn't seem right to me and just like that glassblowing accident put me on the path to explore how technology shaped us ruth changed the book too she told me that i needed to highlight little-known contributors to science and technology which is what i do in in the alchemy of us okay so we know a little bit about the origin story of the book and we know a little bit about my advantage for the book what i can't wait to share with you is how technology shaped us and what i want to do is i want to share with you three case studies of how there are surprises how there are unintended consequences and how technology can go awry okay let's start with a surprise a good case study for that is the telegraph and i'm going to focus on the american version of the telegraph now if you look at textbooks or books about the telegraph the american inventor that you're going to see is samuel f b morse and if you read on you'll also see that he was a painter now being a painter doesn't seem like the best position to create such an important technology but what you might not know is that the telegraph was actually born from tragedy yeah see samuel fb morse was a painter and he had one of the biggest commissions of his life he was asked to paint the portrait of a very famous french commander while he was visiting in washington dc and uh and morris lived in new haven connecticut which was several hundred miles away so he went down to washington dc to spend some time to create this portrait and he's having he's going to be there for a little bit of time and he's he's celebrating while he's there because this french commander is getting there all kinds of banquets for him and and morse is going to various different parties and he's writing about this to his family his wife and kids back at home telling him about all the great things he's getting to do i got to see the president i got to do this those kinds of letters now there's one letter that he signs off to his wife i long to hear from you now when he mails that letter he knows that it's going to take a couple of days because the fastest way to communicate at that time was by stage codes so you put your mail in the post it's going to take a couple of days to get to new haven and then it's going to take a couple of days for someone to write and then it'll take a couple of days for the message to get back to you so on a good day at minimum it's going to take two weeks because before you hear back but more likely it's going to be about three weeks so he sends that letter now a few days later he gets a letter from new haven it's from his father now what he knows is that the letter that he sent has nothing to do with the letter that he's receiving he also knows that his father is very stern so when he opens up the letter and it starts with my affectionately beloved son he's like what's up his spidey senses are going off when he reads the letter a little bit further he sees that his wife had died yeah yeah the day that he wrote a letter to his wife saying i longed to hear from you she had already passed and so morris rushes back to new haven and that's going to take him a couple of days because he has to get there by stagecoach and when he reaches new haven his wife had already been buried so you see while a painter may not seem like the best candidate or the most developed character to develop a telepho a telegraph a heartbroken man certainly is a heartbroken man would have certainly loved to have had a device to say goodbye to his wife just rapidly communicate and so this is what morse did he went and created his telegraph now morris morse's version of the telegraph was a little different than what cook and wheat stone had done in in the uk his morse's approach was a single wire where long and short dashes or long and short pulses of electricity which were equal to dashes and dots were became part of a code it was what we call morse code today and while he was developing this morse code and his telegraph he was working with his assistant alfred now sometimes they were in the same room and sometimes they were in different rooms or some separated from each other uh by a couple of blocks and they would send correspondences to each other as they're testing the line and their correspondences would be something like okay when i tried this did that make sense and i think you should do this and this doesn't make sense and let's make this and let's tweet this accordingly that's how their correspondences were now over time those letters are getting a little shorter and also uh morris is actually getting a little more angry moore's had a little bit of an a a little bit of a temper in one letter he writes to vale condense your language more that's my interpretation anyway now why was he saying that well both morris and vale were of the long tradition of writing letters by longhand and then what they would do is they we would translate each letter of a word into dots and dashes and then they would tap those things out and then the person on the other side would receive those dots and dashes and they would write those out and then translate that into letters of the alphabet to spell out the word now morse was getting frustrated because this was very onerous and he was tired of situations where he would translate something like dash four dots one two three four and then following another dot dot and then he'd look at his wonderful morse code and he see okay that's t okay that's h okay that's e wait the all that work for the the word the he was getting mad at veil because he's like don't send me words that don't contribute to the meaning of the message if you need to use the just use the letter t and if you need to use b e b just use the letter b and if you need to use understand do not write out understand just use u n and if you want to write yes just i i two dots followed by two dots they started creating their own shorthand just like we have with twitter and text messages today and they did it just because it was so onerous to translate those dots and dashes now the telegraph took off it became very popular it was located in every major city in the united states and anybody could send a message to any corner of the united states if they wanted to just first on a fee now but there was one rule that they had to follow on the wall it would say be brief now why was that well as fantastic as the telegraph was in its ability to send messages rapidly it had a shortcoming it couldn't send a lot of messages initially the first telegraph could send one message in one direction and one message in another direction and when edison came along it could send four directions in one direction and four directions in another but if you have a lot of people at the telegraph office who want to send messages one way to mitigate that is to tell them that they have to be brief and so the offices had these signs that said debrief and not only that they had a pricing structure where a message of 10 words was a flat fee and any additional word was one-tenth that feet and most messages were about 12 words or less now telegraphs not only became popular in cities but they actually became popular newsrooms and editors would tell reporters be brief be succinct why well similarly that they couldn't get a lot of messages to go across the telegraph and they really wanted the the important news to be transmitted as quickly as possible so editors told reporters to keep their their sentences very very short and they had a newspaper style that just told them how to write remove flowery language nothing that doesn't add to the meaning of the message just like morse used to said say now there was one particular reporter who really loved this this style of short declarative sentences and he actually decided that when he was going to write books he became an author and used that style that he got from the from the telegraph that he got from the newspaper his name was ernest hemingway now here in the united states all students are told at one point to write lake hemingway hemingway has a quintessential american style and what i what we know now is that that actually harkens back to the shortcoming of the telegraph so here's a surprise language was shaped by the telegraph now there were other factors of course that shaped american english one of them being that the united states wanted wanted to individuate itself from the uk we both spoke the same mother tongue and so we decided to take different approaches to it so on one side of the pond you you touch wood on this side of the pond we knock on wood on one side of the pond you say tomato on this side of the pond we say tomato these were cultural decisions that were taken to individuate ourselves but another shaper of american english was the telegraph so here's a surprise here's a surprise of how technology can have impact on culture okay so we've explored a surprise let's look at an unintended consequence now a good case study for an unintended consequence is actually the lipo yeah now i'm going to focus on the american version of the light bulb now if you read books about the light bulb particularly in the united states you're going to see the name thomas edison look we're all friends we know that thomas edison was not the first no joseph swan certainly predates his work and there are actually other inventors that prove both of their both of their uh their development of light bulbs so let's just get that clear also uh whenever you see movies about edison or read books about him he's always portrayed as this genius who is a spark of inspiration that's not how it happened either with the with the light bulb not at all in fact edison wasn't even thinking about working on the light bulb it wasn't until he heard about a little-known inventor in insonia kinetic in sonia connecticut who had worked on a form of electric light edison had heard about this guy this guy's his name was william wallace and he his family owned a huge factory for manufacturing copper and brass parts his family had emigrated to the united states from manchester but deep in walls heart he was a man of science in fact the top floor of his house was a was a chemistry lab and this is where edison came to see his invention now wallace had created an early american version of the arc lamp which consisted of two carbon blocks that were separated by short distance uh they were in a circuit that circuit was connected to a generator and when the generator was turned on a small bolt of electricity bridged those two uh pieces of carbon which created this very very bright light now arc lamps were very very old in the early 1800s humphrey davy came up with the earliest arc lamp and he actually demonstrated at the royal institution so here we are part of history and he would do these demonstrations but davey didn't really think that this was a practical form of light so it just kind of remained as a parlor trick now a few decades later arc lights bubbled up in history again the city of lights paris was lit by arc lamps all over it was just a few years later that wallace created the first version of the of the arc lamp in the united states which is what edison came to see now when edison saw that arklam he was so enamored by it he made all these calculations about how wonderful it was this was fantastic because it was a clean form of light it was better than candles and and lamps because they were very and dirty and something smelly this was a clean form of light this was great but edison was also impressed with what he didn't see see wallace created something great but it was just too bright to be in the house you could turn it on and you really couldn't see anybody it was just it was like being in a searchlight it couldn't be subdivided as edison would say meaning that it couldn't be dimmed and so when edison saw this he made notes okay okay i'm gonna do electric lights but i'm definitely gonna take a different approach so he returned back to menlo park back to new jersey my home state to work on his version of the light which was the incandescent bulb now the incandescent bulb is based on a material glowing so you can imagine a small wire that's connected to electricity put under a glass bulb you apply the electricity the wire heats up and glows and this was the approach that edison wanted to take and he tried many different materials to find that filament material and he eventually converged on platinum now as a material scientist that was a good choice that was a very good choice why well if you have electricity going through a wire it's going to heat up and you want to make sure that the material has a very very high melting point so when it heats up it doesn't melt platinum has a very high melting point so that was a good choice so good job and platinum was also a good choice because platinum kind of keeps to itself electrically and and chemically so if you heat something up under a glass bulb and although edison sucked a lot of the air out of the glass bulb there was still some oxygen in there so there's going to be a reaction and if there's a reaction a soot is going to a switch is going to form on the filament wire which is going to dim the light but platinum doesn't do that so that was good that was a good choice too so edison made lots of these platinum base bulbs but he had a problem he couldn't get platinum to glow brightly he tried a lot of different things if you look at his notebooks they're very very clever but he just couldn't get platinum to work and that's because he forgot one other thing about platinum platinum is conductive and what edison needed was a material that was resistive think of it this way imagine that i have a wire and then i have a pipe now if water can go through that pipe very easily that's conductive similarly if the electricity can go through a wire very easily that's conducted now if i put in that pipe marbles and water has a tougher time getting through it might even heat up along the along the way that's a resistive uh pipe well similarly what we needed was a wire that was resistive that made it difficult for electricity to to pass through it the electrons would bump into atoms and into grain boundaries and into surfaces and in the process heat up the material and cause it to glow platinum didn't do that platinum was conductive so as much electricity that he as he forced into there platinum was just not going to heat up enough to to glow brightly so eventually edison had to change gears he had to switch over to another material over to carbon and when he made various bulbs made out of carbon lamps he tried them in for different iterations different things that he was changing about each there was one lamp that was doing particularly well on one night it glowed for an hour and they said oh that's great and then it glowed for two hours and then it glowed for three hours and then everybody started to gather and then this bulb implode for 40 hours until it went in and that was the birth of the american light bulb okay so we have this light bulb and the alchemy of us talks about origin stories like this and we focus more about william wallace the man who didn't get his due the man who inspired edison but what is also key is to explore how these inventions shaped us so let's explore that now in order to explore how intervention shaped us we actually have to go back just a few decades not all way time all the way back to edison's time but just just a handful of decades to my backyard in the summer when i was a kid now if you've ever come to the east coast which i recommend come during the summer time because there's a little tradition that children do that most people don't know about as the sun sets so i'm in my backyard and i'm waiting for something as the sun is setting what am i waiting for i'm waiting for little sparks of light as soon as i see those sparks of light i run into the house i grab a jar that i've already prepared it has holes in the top and i try and capture one of those sparks of light those sparks of light my friend are fireflies and i absolutely love them now i have fireflies in my backyard here in connecticut um and they're wonderful i don't capture them but i certainly do admire them and they make me think about times long long time ago but what i've noticed is that actually the number of fireflies in my backyard has decreased from year to year that seems strange so i asked an expert about that because well that's what i do and she said yeah the number is decreasing i said well why i love fireflies why are they decreasing a number and she said it has to do with the lights i said well please explain well this is what she shared with me first she let me know that those little sparks of light that i was seeing in my backyard they weren't so innocent it's best for me to just show you what's going on in my backyard okay we have a female firefly on a blade of grass and then the male firefly who's flying about waist high and he's announcing himself i'm a male i'm a photonics green eye i'm a male i'm a photonic screen when the female firefly looks up and if she likes what she sees which is about 50 of the time she'll flash back i like you the male firefly will drop like a rock make his way over to her and i'll just say future fireflies so that's what's going on in my backyard so let's change this scenario now let's have these fireflies but now let's add another feature of that streetlight so the female fireflies on a blade of brass the male firefly is flying about waist high and he's announcing himself again i'm a male i'm a photonic green eye i'm a male i'm a photonics green eye the female firefly she's on that blade of grass she looks up she doesn't see anything why because that street light is completely masking masking so she doesn't flash back he doesn't get the green light to go over to where she is no future fireflies that's pretty sad let's do this scenario one more time female firefly on a blade of grass male firefly flying about waist high and then we have that street light the male's announcing himself i'm a male i'm a photonics green eye i'm a male i'm a photonics green eye female firefly she looks up she can see him yay oh oh oh she doesn't like what she sees oh it's not good no see female fireflies like male fireflies with bright lanterns his lantern's not looking so bright with that street light behind him she doesn't flash back no future fireflies my friends we humans have messed up life for fireflies fireflies are not the only species that are being impacted by lights actually we are yeah see i talked to a number of signs about this and one scientist told me to think of it this way he said we humans are actually two species i said all right hold it right there i think you've just explained a friend of mine but i don't think that's what you meant to do so please continue he says look humans have a daytime mode and we have a nighttime mode in our daytime mode we have increased temperature increased metabolism and more growth hormone going through our bodies in our nighttime mode all those numbers decrease and you can kind of think of it as a rest mode how our bodies know which mode to be in daytime night time night time daytime has to do the light do with the lights that's that's what's signaling it now in order to understand how the body knows what mode to be in daytime or nighttime we actually have to think a little bit about our eye now for those of you who may have sat through biology classes you don't even need to go through a biology class it's very simple in terms of how the eye sees light goes through the lens it hits the retina and that information goes down the optic nerve to the brain where it's reassembled as what we know is vision and that's pretty much my lecture on the eye now we thought there was ev everything there was to know about the eye was known for the last 150 years there's that's what we thought but it ends up that the eye had a little secret yep we just found this out in the last few decades the eye had something that nobody knew about yep it's true it ends up that on the retina is a special photoreceptor and it doesn't contribute to vision not at all you can think of it as a detector and it's on the hunt for blue light when it senses blue light that signal goes down the optic nerve to the brain to another part of the brain which stops secreting the hormone melatonin melatonin is an old chemical compound that tells all the cells in our bodies that it is nighttime mode tells it to go to sleep time to rest now when the body sees blue light that melatonin gets shut off and so we enter into daytime mode so in some blue light daytime mode now long ago when our ancestors were alive they live by sunlight then the sun would set and then they lived by candlelight blue light the sun has a lot of blue light in it so they were in daytime mode and as the sun set they left daytime mode and they started into go into nighttime mode because lights from candles and gas lamps and just the hearth is a redder light that allows us to enter into uh date at nighttime on but you and i we live mostly by artificial light most of the time we stay all the way we stay under artificial light until we go to sleep most artificial light is very strong in the blue so we're in growth mode or daytime mode until we go to sleep now there's some health repercussions for that if our body is awash in growth hormones our cells are going to respond they are going to respond and they have it ends up that we are slightly taller than our ancestors now there's many contributing factors to that of course better nutrition better water cleaner water better medicines less war but another factor is the artificial light so there's that but there's other negative negative factors that happen by being having our bodies awash with growth hormone all the time in fact researchers have done studies on animals and they've subjected them to various types of artificial light and they saw that those that were subjected to the artificial light had an increase in risk for cardiovascular disease obesity and some forms of cancer now we cannot do those kinds of experiments on humans we don't do that that's that's not good but what we can do is we can look at what people do where they live where they work and make correlations and that's what epidemiologists have done and they have found that there's a population of people that have an increase in risk for certain ailments including some forms of cancer and it has to do with when they work they work at night underneath the artificial light so nurses security guards surgeons all working that night shift that is times other than nine to five have a higher risk for these kinds of diseases so there's that so edison swann all these other inventors that were working on electric lights they had a pure intention which was to push back the darkness and lengthen our day this was great we didn't like living in the dark i i don't like i don't like the dark now so this was good but now we have an unintended result because of light because none of them knew that there was this connection between our bodies and the light so you may be asking because this was the question i asked how do you live in a healthy way underneath the electric lights i know i'm not going to go back to sunlight and candlelight i'm not interested i don't want to live in a cave that's not going to happen well it ends up that all we need to do is emulate what our ancestors used to do that is start off with blue in the course of the day and have redder light at night so when you wake up in the morning go for a walk let that sun hit your eye and put you into that wonderful daytime growth mode if you can't make it outside well the other option is to get some blue leds or compact fluorescent bulbs because they're very rich in the blue that will put you into daytime mode now as the sun is setting it's time for you to change your lights it's time to dim all those blue lights and switch over to a redder light now you can use an incandescent bulb although they're not very they're not not very efficient or you can use a red led that'll allow you to be in nighttime mode even though the sun is still up this will allow your body to be in rest or repair mode now that's not the only things that we need to change we actually need to look at our cell phones our cell phones or our mobiles they generate a lot of blue light and so we need to put them into nighttime mode have less blue so that we can go into nighttime mode similarly our computers our computers they generate a lot of blue light so we need to put them at their nighttime settings now television screens also generate a lot of blue light and a few of the fancier ones are able to change the setting but most do not so here's where you may consider changing your glasses and adding some blue blocking features now there are fancy glasses expensive glasses that do that but there are also some inexpensive options at the hardware store that'll allow you to have good light healthy health hygiene so so here's how we can live healthy underneath the lights and here's how we can mitigate that unintended consequence of that very simple device that we took for granted that was beaming over our heads and that we completely ignored the light bulb okay so we spent some time looking at surprises we've looked at an unintended consequence let's look at how technology can go awry and how a technology that we love can go awry a good case study for that is actually photography now personally i love photography i've had cameras forever from film cameras to digital cameras i have way too many of these cameras i have to admit it and one of my favorite cameras well my father had a lot of cameras my grandfather had a lot of cameras and and he actually has the favor my most favorite camera out of them all and what he had was a polaroid camera that created instant images of film and i have many of my childhood memories captured in that white iconic frame from the loss of my first tooth first day of school first communion all in that wonderful white free now what i found out while writing my book the alchemy of us is that while i was standing in front of my grandfather's camera smiling and sometimes missing a tooth there were some people who were on the other side of the planet who were standing in front of a polaroid camera who weren't too happy about that let me introduce you to someone i think you should know and that's caroline hunter in 1970 caroline hunter was an african-american woman who was a 20-something-year-old chemist working at the most beloved company in the united states and that was the polaroid corporation not only that she was working on the it product the product that everyone wanted for their christmas for christmas and that is the instant camera she was working on she was working with other chemists and her uh role was to develop what was officially called goo goo is the chemical chemical content that lives in this packet at the bottom of uh the polaroid film and as a picture is taken the film exits the camera and two rollers squeeze that goo onto the surface which helps the development process so she's working on the it project at the it company she's really got great things going on now there's one day that she decides that she's going to go to lunch and she's going to have lunch with her new friend ken williams now he's over in the art department and he's using polaroid film and showing all the wonderful ways that you can render things with this fantastic new technology now as they're leaving the art studio they see a bulletin board and they see something strange on the bulletin board is a mock-up for an identification card now the person's face they recognize it because it's it's someone who's in the studio but the words are unusual it says department of the minds republic of south africa these two look at each other and ken says to caroline i didn't know that polaroid had any presence in south africa and caroline says the ken all i know is that south africa is a bad place for black people see this is 1970 and apartheid is the the law of the land in south africa which means great oppression for black south africans and when those two saw that this put them on the path to figure out what was polaroid's role in south africa and so after work for the next couple of weeks they would go to the library to learn all they could here's what they found they found that every black south african over the age of 16 had to carry with them a pass book and a pass book told officials where this person could go and where they were allowed to not go anyone could ask this individual for their pass book and if the person didn't have their pass book they would be fined extremely high fines that most people couldn't pay and if they couldn't pay those fines then they would have to do extremely hard labor for over a month at the heart of the past book was a picture made by polaroid ken and caroline they didn't think this was right they didn't think this was right at all see the year before the un said that all companies should cease and desist from operating in south africa so they wanted to know why their company was in south africa and also what their labor their work was doing to help buttress this oppressive system so ken he had a lot of friends at polaroid he went to go talk to management and management at first said oh we don't have a presence in south africa and ken knew that wasn't true because polaroid had been in south africa since the late 1930s and then management said well if we do it's not a very very big presence well ken and caroline had also done the math and they knew that you did need a whole lot of a huge presence in south africa all you need is a few hundred cameras to be able to take the likeness of 15 million black south africans because these cameras could generate lots of film lots of images and they also because they didn't require a dark room they were portable and can go to different cities to capture someone's like this ken and caroline tried to convince management that they really shouldn't do anything they really shouldn't sell their their technology to south africa but their response was lukewarm and it was in that moment that ken and caroline form the polaroid revolutionary workers movement the prwm and what they wanted was for polaroid to stop selling its cameras to south africa and stop buttressing this oppressive regime well how do you let people know about this most beloved companies nefarious use of of camera film this is before facebook this is before twitter well they went old school they got a typewriter and they typed out a newsletter and then they mimeographed it and then they also posted it on bulletin boards in the cafeteria and in captain and also in bathroom stalls also before having facebook friends how do you get information across well they had huge rallies of a couple of hundred people where they let everyone know about how cameras from polaroid were being used in nefarious ways in south africa caroline and ken also wrote students group student groups on campuses and churches to let them know as well as you can imagine ken and caroline were fired but after seven years seven years of work polaroid finally removed its presence from south africa and this was actually the beginning of the dismantling of the south african apartheid system and it was years later that nelson mandela came to visit cambridge and tell the folks at the prwm thank you for stopping the further capturing of black south africans here my friends is how a technology can go awry even a technology that we love everyone loved polaroid and here it was being used for nefarious use see what caroline and ken knew is that you could love something but it should always be used to serve humanity positively and this is what they went to do they went to go and fix that to make sure that polaroid served all of humanity positively now this is one of my favorite stories in the alchemy of us and i'm really glad that i got a chance to share that with you and i hope that in our time together that you have an appreciation that we need to put technology underneath the microscope as we've done today we've looked at a bunch of different technologies and we've seen that clocks have shaped how we sleep the telegraph has had a hand in shaping language we've seen also how photography can be used to buttress nefarious things as well my hope is that in our time together that you look at technology in a new way and you don't just embrace it but you examine it and you ask it the question okay tech now that you're in my life how's my life going to change and be okay with that answer it's important to ask technology these questions simple tech and also the technologies that are on the horizon because as i say in my parting thoughts of the alchemy of us such a thoughtful analysis of the impact of inventions benefits society not just because it's an entertaining cerebral exercise because but because when coupled with action and social change it has the potential to help society transcend its condition and favorably further this alchemy of us thank you so much for your attention and i look forward to all of your questions i hope everyone stays well and safe you

2021-04-09 12:06

Other news