When is seeing not believing? A couple years ago, my friend sent me this photo from Ürümqi, which is the capital of Xinjiang province in northwest China. On this particular day, she couldn’t believe her eyes. Checking the quality of the air outside using this app on her iPad, the numbers were telling her the air quality was good, one on a scale of 500. But when she looked outside, she saw something much different. Yes, those are buildings in the background.

(Laughter)

But the data were simply not telling the truth of what people were seeing and breathing, and it’s because they were failing to measure PM2.5, or fine particulate pollution. When PM2.5 levels went off the charts in 2012, or “crazy bad,” as the US Embassy once described it in a tweet, Chinese denizens took to social media and they started to question why it was that they were seeing this disconnect between official air quality statistics and what they were seeing and breathing for themselves.

Now, this questioning has led to an environmental awakening of sorts in China, forcing China’s government to tackle its pollution problems. Now China has the opportunity to become a global environmental leader. But the picture that I’ll paint for you today is one that’s mixed. There are some signs that are very promising, and there are other trends that are more troubling that warrant closer attention. But now let’s go back to the story at hand.

I started to witness the beginnings of China’s green evolution when I was a PhD student conducting fieldwork in China in 2011. I traveled all across the country seeking answers to the question that I often got myself from the skeptical outsider: What, you mean China is doing something on the environment? They have environmental policies? What policies? At that time, PM2.5 data was considered too politically sensitive and so the government was keeping it secret, but citizens were becoming aware of its harmful human health effects, and they were demanding greater transparency on the part of the government. I actually started to see some of this growing evolution and awareness myself cropping up all over China. Department stores, for example, started to market these air purifiers that could filter out harmful PM2.5. Citizens were also adopting PM2.5 as the title of musical festivals.

(Laughter)

And then I went to a golf course in Shenzhen, which is in southern China, and you can see from this banner, they’re advertising a retreat from PM2.5. Golf sub-par, but don’t breathe sub-par air. And then Shanghai’s Environmental Protection Bureau decided to create a mascot named after the air quality index to better communicate the air quality data to its people. I call her AQI Girl, and her expression and hair color changes depending on the quality of air outside. Five years later and she’s still the mostly smiling face of Shanghai’s air quality.

And then in 2015, former CCTV reporter Chai Jing created this documentary called “Under the Dome.” It would be likened to Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring.” And much like Rachel Carson brought to attention the fact that pesticides were harming human health, “Under the Dome” stamped into the popular consciousness that air pollution was leading to one million premature deaths every year in China alone. This video garnered more than a hundred million views in a single weekend before China’s government, fearing that it might incite some type of social unrest, pulled it from the internet. But the damage had already been done.

Public outcry over air pollution galvanized China’s government, perhaps in an act of self-preservation, to think big and decisively about how it could tackle the root of its air pollution and many of its other environmental problems: its energy system. For you see, in China, about two thirds of its electricity comes from coal. China has more coal-fired power plants than any other country in the world, about 40 percent of the global total, and it’s because of this fact that China’s government has decided since 2014 to wage a war on coal, shutting down small coal mines, setting limits on coal consumption, even canceling an Australia’s worth of coal-fired power plants. They’ve also been making enormous investments when it comes to clean and renewable energy, like hydropower, wind and solar, and the pace and the scale of this transformation has been absolutely mind-blowing. Let me give you a couple of statistics to show you what I mean. China leads the world when it comes to hydropower, with a third of total capacity. There’s enough for every Chinese citizen to power two homes in a single year from hydropower alone. You may have heard of the Three Gorges Dam, pictured here, which is the largest power station in the world, and it’s powered by water. In terms of wind power, China has a third of the global capacity. This makes it the number one leader by far. When we look at solar, China’s also leading. In fact, they crushed their 2020 target of installing 105 gigawatts of solar power. This is after the government already revised upwards several times its solar energy target between 2009 and 2015. Last year, in seven months alone, China was able to install a whopping 35 gigawatts of solar power. This is more than half of what the US has combined in total and China did this in just seven months alone. We can verify this remarkable growth in solar power from space, like the startup SpaceKnow has done in this slide. By 2020, China is on track to generate Germany’s entire electricity consumption from just wind and solar power alone. It’s pretty darn remarkable.

And we see some evidence now that China’s efforts on clean energy is actually having an effect, not just on air pollution reduction, but also on global climate change, where China has the world’s largest carbon footprint. If we look at some of the data, we can see that China’s coal consumption may have already reached a peak as early as 2013. This is a major reason why China’s government announced that actually they’ve already achieved their 2020 carbon reduction pledge ahead of schedule. This reduction in coal consumption is also directly driving improvements in air quality across the country, as I’ve shown here in blue. In most major Chinese cities, air pollution has fallen by as much as 30 percent. And this reduction in air pollution is actually leading people to live longer lives in China, on average two and a half years more than they would have in 2013. In yellow, we can see the cities that have experienced the greatest improvements in air quality.

But of course, as I mentioned at the beginning of this talk, we have to temper some of this optimism with a healthy dose of caution, and that’s largely because the data are still being determined. At the end of last year, after roughly three years of pretty steady global carbon emissions, scientific projections suggest that global emissions may be on the rise again and that could be due to increases in China’s fossil fuel consumptions, so they may not have reached that peak that I showed earlier. But of course, the statistics and the data are still murky and that’s because China regularly revises its coal statistics after the fact. Actually, it’s funny, since I’ve been here I’ve been having a debate on Twitter with other climate modelers, trying to figure out whether China’s carbon emissions have gone up, gone down or whether they’re staying relatively stable. And of course, China is still a rapidly developing country. It’s still experimenting with a range of policies, like dockless bike sharing, which has been hailed as a possible sustainable transport solution. But then we have images of this bicycle graveyard that tell a more cautionary tale. Sometimes, solutions can move too fast and outpace demand. And of course, coal is still king in China, at least for now.

So why should we care about what China is doing on the environment? Well, what China does at home on the environment can have global implications for the rest of us. To borrow a line from Chai Jing, we’re all under the same dome, and air pollution that originates in China can travel beyond its borders and affect populations as far away as those in North America. China’s not only exporting air pollution, but they’re also exporting aid, infrastructure, technology abroad. President Xi Jinping in 2013 announced the One Belt, One Road Initiative, a massive, one-trillion-US-dollar infrastructure investment project in more than 60 other countries. And historically, when we’ve seen that China has made these infrastructure investments abroad, they haven’t always been clean. The Global Environment Institute, a Chinese civil society group, found that in the last 15 years, China has invested in more than 240 coal-fired power plants in more than 68 countries affiliated with the One Belt, One Road Initiative. That’s more than a quarter of China’s own domestic coal-fired capacity that is exported abroad.

So we can see that even though China is cleaning up at home, it’s exporting some of that pollution to other countries, and greenhouse gas emissions simply don’t have a passport. So when we’re trying to evaluate this question of whether or not China is actually leading, we can see it’s still very much an open debate.

But time is running out. I’ve studied the climate models, and the outlook is not good. We still have a gap between current policies and what needs to happen if we want to avoid dangerous climate change. Leadership is what we desperately need, but it’s not coming from the US, for example. The US administration last June announced its intent to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, so now people are looking towards China to fill that leadership void.

So China is very much in the driver’s seat determining our global environmental future. What they do on carbon trading, on clean energy, on air pollution, we can learn many lessons. One of those lessons is that clean energy is not just good for the environment, it can save lives by reducing air pollution. It’s also good for the economy. We can see that last year, China was responsible for 30 percent of the global growth in green jobs. The US? Only six.

So the picture that I just painted for you hopefully seems much different from those murky, foggy air quality statistics to a much clearer picture of China’s clean energy. And even though China is headed in the right direction, we know that there’s still a very long road ahead.

So let me ask you once more: Is seeing believing? Can we trust the data and the statistics that show that China’s air quality is coming down and that its war on coal is actually having an effect? Well, let’s take a look at some of the latest satellite images of China’s solar power installations. I want you to look very closely at this image. Can you see? The proof may just be in the pandas.

Thank you so much.

(Applause)

Welcome to “Five Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Children Do.” I don’t have children. I borrow my friends’ children, so —

(Laughter)

take all this advice with a grain of salt. I’m Gever Tulley. I’m a contract computer scientist by trade, but I’m the founder of something called the Tinkering School. It’s a summer program which aims to help kids learn how to build the things that they think of. So we build a lot of things, and I do put power tools into the hands of second-graders. So if you’re thinking about sending your kid to Tinkering School, they do come back bruised, scraped and bloody.

(Laughter)

You know, we live in a world that’s subjected to ever more stringent child safety regulations. There doesn’t seem to be any limit on how crazy child safety regulations can get. We put suffocation warnings on every piece of plastic film manufactured in the United States, or for sale with an item in the United States. We put warnings on coffee cups to tell us that the contents may be hot. And we seem to think that any item sharper than a golf ball is too sharp for children under the age of 10.

So where does this trend stop? When we round every corner and eliminate every sharp object, every pokey bit in the world, then the first time that kids come in contact with anything sharp, or not made out of round plastic, they’ll hurt themselves with it. So, as the boundaries of what we determine as the safety zone grow ever smaller, we cut off our children from valuable opportunities to learn how to interact with the world around them. And despite all of our best efforts and intentions, kids are always going to figure out how to do the most dangerous thing they can, in whatever environment they can.

(Laughter)

So despite the provocative title, this presentation is really about safety, and about some simple things that we can do to raise our kids to be creative, confident and in control of the environment around them. And what I now present to you is an excerpt from a book in progress. The book is called “50 Dangerous Things.” This is “Five Dangerous Things.”

Thing number one: Play with fire. Learning to control one of the most elemental forces in nature is a pivotal moment in any child’s personal history. Whether we remember it or not, it’s the first time we really get control of one of these mysterious things. These mysteries are only revealed to those who get the opportunity to play with it. So, playing with fire. This is like one of the great things we ever discovered, fire. From playing with it, they learn some basic principles about fire, about intake, combustion, exhaust. These are the three working elements of fire that you have to have for a good, controlled fire. And you can think of the open-pit fire as a laboratory. You don’t know what they’re going to learn from playing with it. Let them fool around with it on their own terms and trust me, they’re going to learn things that you can’t get out of playing with Dora the Explorer toys.

(Laughter)

Number two: Own a pocketknife. Pocketknives are kind of drifting out of our cultural consciousness, which I think is a terrible thing.

(Laughter)

Your first pocketknife is like the first universal tool that you’re given. You know, it’s a spatula, it’s a pry bar, it’s a screwdriver and it’s a blade, yeah. And it’s a powerful and empowering tool. And in a lot of cultures they give knives — like, as soon as they’re toddlers, they have knives. These are Inuit children cutting whale blubber. I first saw this in a Canadian Film Board film when I was 10, and it left a lasting impression, to see babies playing with knives. And it shows that kids can develop an extended sense of self through a tool at a very young age. You lay down a couple of very simple rules — always cut away from your body, keep the blade sharp, never force it — and these are things kids can understand and practice with. And yeah, they’re going to cut themselves. I have some terrible scars on my legs from where I stabbed myself. But you know, they’re young. They heal fast.

(Laughter)

Number three: Throw a spear. It turns out that our brains are actually wired for throwing things, and like muscles, if you don’t use parts of your brain, they tend to atrophy over time. But when you exercise them, any given muscle adds strength to the whole system, and that applies to your brain, too. So practicing throwing things has been shown to stimulate the frontal and parietal lobes, which have to do with visual acuity, 3D understanding, and structural problem solving, so it helps develop their visualization skills and their predictive ability. And throwing is a combination of analytical and physical skill, so it’s very good for that kind of whole-body training. These kinds of target-based practices also help kids develop attention and concentration skills, so those are great.

Number [four]: Deconstruct appliances. There is a world of interesting things inside your dishwasher. Next time you’re about to throw out an appliance, don’t throw it out. Take it apart with your kid, or send him to my school, and we’ll take it apart with them. Even if you don’t know what the parts are, puzzling out what they might be for is a really good practice for the kids to get sort of the sense that they can take things apart, and no matter how complex they are, they can understand parts of them. And that means that eventually, they can understand all of them. It’s a sense of knowability, that something is knowable. So these black boxes that we live with and take for granted are actually complex things made by other people, and you can understand them.

Number five: Two-parter. Break the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

(Laughter)

There are laws beyond safety regulations that attempt to limit how we can interact with the things that we own — in this case, digital media. It’s a very simple exercise: Buy a song on iTunes, write it to a CD, then rip the CD to an MP3, and play it on your very same computer. You’ve just broken a law. Technically, the RIAA could come and prosecute you. It’s an important lesson for kids to understand, that some of these laws get broken by accident, and that laws have to be interpreted. That’s something we often talk about with the kids when we’re fooling around with things and breaking them open, and taking them apart and using them for other things. And also when we go out and drive a car. Driving a car is a really empowering act for a young child, so this is the alternate —

(Laughter)

For those of you who aren’t comfortable actually breaking the law, you can drive a car with your child. This is a great stage for a kid. This happens about the same time that they get latched onto things like dinosaurs, these big things in the outside world, that they’re trying to get a grip on. A car is a similar object, and they can get in a car and drive it. And that really gives them a handle on a world in a way that they don’t often have access to. And it’s perfectly legal. Find a big empty lot, make sure there’s nothing in it, and that it’s on private property, and let them drive your car. It’s very safe actually. And it’s fun for the whole family.

(Laughter)

Let’s see, I think that’s it. That’s number five and a half. OK.

This is really a two-hour presentation I give to high school students, cut down to three minutes. And it all started one day on a plane, on my way to TED, seven years ago. And in the seat next to me was a high school student, a teenager, and she came from a really poor family. And she wanted to make something of her life, and she asked me a simple little question. She said, “What leads to success?” And I felt really badly, because I couldn’t give her a good answer.

So I get off the plane, and I come to TED. And I think, jeez, I’m in the middle of a room of successful people! So why don’t I ask them what helped them succeed, and pass it on to kids? So here we are, seven years, 500 interviews later, and I’m going to tell you what really leads to success and makes TEDsters tick.

And the first thing is passion. Freeman Thomas says, “I’m driven by my passion.” TEDsters do it for love; they don’t do it for money.

Carol Coletta says, “I would pay someone to do what I do.” And the interesting thing is: if you do it for love, the money comes anyway.

Work! Rupert Murdoch said to me, “It’s all hard work. Nothing comes easily. But I have a lot of fun.” Did he say fun? Rupert? Yes!

(Laughter)

TEDsters do have fun working. And they work hard. I figured, they’re not workaholics. They’re workafrolics.

(Laughter)

Good!

(Applause)

Alex Garden says, “To be successful, put your nose down in something and get damn good at it.” There’s no magic; it’s practice, practice, practice.

And it’s focus. Norman Jewison said to me, “I think it all has to do with focusing yourself on one thing.”

And push! David Gallo says, “Push yourself. Physically, mentally, you’ve got to push, push, push.” You’ve got to push through shyness and self-doubt.

Goldie Hawn says, “I always had self-doubts. I wasn’t good enough; I wasn’t smart enough. I didn’t think I’d make it.”

Now it’s not always easy to push yourself, and that’s why they invented mothers.

(Laughter)

(Applause) Frank Gehry said to me, “My mother pushed me.”

(Laughter)

Serve! Sherwin Nuland says, “It was a privilege to serve as a doctor.”

A lot of kids want to be millionaires. The first thing I say is: “OK, well you can’t serve yourself; you’ve got to serve others something of value. Because that’s the way people really get rich.”

Ideas! TEDster Bill Gates says, “I had an idea: founding the first micro-computer software company.” I’d say it was a pretty good idea. And there’s no magic to creativity in coming up with ideas — it’s just doing some very simple things. And I give lots of evidence.

Persist! Joe Kraus says, “Persistence is the number one reason for our success.” You’ve got to persist through failure. You’ve got to persist through crap! Which of course means “Criticism, Rejection, Assholes and Pressure.”

(Laughter)

So, the answer to this question is simple: Pay 4,000 bucks and come to TED.

(Laughter)

Or failing that, do the eight things — and trust me, these are the big eight things that lead to success.

Thank you TEDsters for all your interviews!

(Applause)

It’s an inspiring talk from an afric woman,we can at least learn one thing from this speech: never be afraid of being the first one to do something, if you do that, others will follow you, or you will be the one fllowing others.

Now let’s enjoy the talk.

There’s a group of people in Kenya. People cross oceans to go see them. These people are tall. They jump high. They wear red. And they kill lions. You might be wondering, who are these people? These are the Maasais. And you know what’s cool? I’m actually one of them.

The Maasais, the boys are brought up to be warriors. The girls are brought up to be mothers. When I was five years old, I found out that I was engaged to be married as soon as I reached puberty. My mother, my grandmother, my aunties, they constantly reminded me that your husband just passed by. (Laughter) Cool, yeah? And everything I had to do from that moment was to prepare me to be a perfect woman at age 12. My day started at 5 in the morning, milking the cows, sweeping the house, cooking for my siblings, collecting water, firewood. I did everything that I needed to do to become a perfect wife.

I went to school not because the Maasais’ women or girls were going to school. It’s because my mother was denied an education, and she constantly reminded me and my siblings that she never wanted us to live the life she was living. Why did she say that? My father worked as a policeman in the city. He came home once a year. We didn’t see him for sometimes even two years. And whenever he came home, it was a different case. My mother worked hard in the farm to grow crops so that we can eat. She reared the cows and the goats so that she can care for us. But when my father came, he would sell the cows, he would sell the products we had, and he went and drank with his friends in the bars. Because my mother was a woman, she was not allowed to own any property, and by default, everything in my family anyway belongs to my father, so he had the right. And if my mother ever questioned him, he beat her, abused her, and really it was difficult.

When I went to school, I had a dream. I wanted to become a teacher. Teachers looked nice. They wear nice dresses, high-heeled shoes. I found out later that they are uncomfortable, but I admired it. (Laughter) But most of all, the teacher was just writing on the board — not hard work, that’s what I thought, compared to what I was doing in the farm. So I wanted to become a teacher.

I worked hard in school, but when I was in eighth grade, it was a determining factor. In our tradition, there is a ceremony that girls have to undergo to become women, and it’s a rite of passage to womanhood. And then I was just finishing my eighth grade, and that was a transition for me to go to high school. This was the crossroad. Once I go through this tradition, I was going to become a wife. Well, my dream of becoming a teacher will not come to pass. So I talked — I had to come up with a plan to figure these things out. I talked to my father. I did something that most girls have never done. I told my father, “I will only go through this ceremony if you let me go back to school.” The reason why, if I ran away, my father will have a stigma, people will be calling him the father of that girl who didn’t go through the ceremony. It was a shameful thing for him to carry the rest of his life. So he figured out. “Well,” he said, “okay, you’ll go to school after the ceremony.”

I did. The ceremony happened. It’s a whole week long of excitement. It’s a ceremony. People are enjoying it. And the day before the actual ceremony happens, we were dancing, having excitement, and through all the night we did not sleep. The actual day came, and we walked out of the house that we were dancing in. Yes, we danced and danced. We walked out to the courtyard, and there were a bunch of people waiting. They were all in a circle. And as we danced and danced, and we approached this circle of women, men, women, children, everybody was there. There was a woman sitting in the middle of it, and this woman was waiting to hold us. I was the first. There were my sisters and a couple of other girls, and as I approached her, she looked at me, and I sat down. And I sat down, and I opened my legs. As I opened my leg, another woman came, and this woman was carrying a knife. And as she carried the knife, she walked toward me and she held the clitoris, and she cut it off.

As you can imagine, I bled. I bled. After bleeding for a while, I fainted thereafter. It’s something that so many girls — I’m lucky, I never died — but many die. It’s practiced, it’s no anesthesia, it’s a rusty old knife, and it was difficult. I was lucky because one, also, my mom did something that most women don’t do. Three days later, after everybody has left the home, my mom went and brought a nurse. We were taken care of. Three weeks later, I was healed, and I was back in high school. I was so determined to be a teacher now so that I could make a difference in my family.

Well, while I was in high school, something happened. I met a young gentleman from our village who had been to the University of Oregon. This man was wearing a white t-shirt, jeans, camera, white sneakers — and I’m talking about white sneakers. There is something about clothes, I think, and shoes. They were sneakers, and this is in a village that doesn’t even have paved roads. It was quite attractive.

I told him, “Well, I want to go to where you are,” because this man looked very happy, and I admired that.

And he told me, “Well, what do you mean, you want to go? Don’t you have a husband waiting for you?”

And I told him, “Don’t worry about that part. Just tell me how to get there.”

This gentleman, he helped me. While I was in high school also, my dad was sick. He got a stroke, and he was really, really sick, so he really couldn’t tell me what to do next. But the problem is, my father is not the only father I have. Everybody who is my dad’s age, male in the community, is my father by default — my uncles, all of them — and they dictate what my future is.

So the news came, I applied to school and I was accepted to Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia, and I couldn’t come without the support of the village, because I needed to raise money to buy the air ticket. I got a scholarship but I needed to get myself here. But I needed the support of the village, and here again, when the men heard, and the people heard that a woman had gotten an opportunity to go to school, they said, “What a lost opportunity. This should have been given to a boy. We can’t do this.”

So I went back and I had to go back to the tradition. There’s a belief among our people that morning brings good news. So I had to come up with something to do with the morning, because there’s good news in the morning. And in the village also, there is one chief, an elder, who if he says yes, everybody will follow him. So I went to him very early in the morning, as the sun rose. The first thing he sees when he opens his door is, it’s me.

“My child, what are you doing here?”

“Well, Dad, I need help. Can you support me to go to America?” I promised him that I would be the best girl, I will come back, anything they wanted after that, I will do it for them.

He said, “Well, but I can’t do it alone.” He gave me a list of another 15 men that I went — 16 more men — every single morning I went and visited them. They all came together. The village, the women, the men, everybody came together to support me to come to get an education.

I arrived in America. As you can imagine, what did I find? I found snow! I found Wal-Marts, vacuum cleaners, and lots of food in the cafeteria. I was in a land of plenty.

I enjoyed myself, but during that moment while I was here, I discovered a lot of things. I learned that that ceremony that I went through when I was 13 years old, it was called female genital mutilation. I learned that it was against the law in Kenya. I learned that I did not have to trade part of my body to get an education. I had a right. And as we speak right now, three million girls in Africa are at risk of going through this mutilation. I learned that my mom had a right to own property. I learned that she did not have to be abused because she is a woman. Those things made me angry. I wanted to do something. As I went back, every time I went, I found that my neighbors’ girls were getting married. They were getting mutilated, and here, after I graduated from here, I worked at the U.N., I went back to school to get my graduate work, the constant cry of these girls was in my face. I had to do something.

As I went back, I started talking to the men, to the village, and mothers, and I said, “I want to give back the way I had promised you that I would come back and help you. What do you need?”

As I spoke to the women, they told me, “You know what we need? We really need a school for girls.” Because there had not been any school for girls. And the reason they wanted the school for girls is because when a girl is raped when she’s walking to school, the mother is blamed for that. If she got pregnant before she got married, the mother is blamed for that, and she’s punished. She’s beaten. They said, “We wanted to put our girls in a safe place.”

As we moved, and I went to talk to the fathers, the fathers, of course, you can imagine what they said: “We want a school for boys.”

And I said, “Well, there are a couple of men from my village who have been out and they have gotten an education. Why can’t they build a school for boys, and I’ll build a school for girls?” That made sense. And they agreed. And I told them, I wanted them to show me a sign of commitment. And they did. They donated land where we built the girls’ school. We have.

I want you to meet one of the girls in that school. Angeline came to apply for the school, and she did not meet any criteria that we had. She’s an orphan. Yes, we could have taken her for that. But she was older. She was 12 years old, and we were taking girls who were in fourth grade. Angeline had been moving from one place — because she’s an orphan, she has no mother, she has no father — moving from one grandmother’s house to another one, from aunties to aunties. She had no stability in her life. And I looked at her, I remember that day, and I saw something beyond what I was seeing in Angeline. And yes, she was older to be in fourth grade. We gave her the opportunity to come to the class. Five months later, that is Angeline. A transformation had begun in her life. Angeline wants to be a pilot so she can fly around the world and make a difference. She was not the top student when we took her. Now she’s the best student, not just in our school, but in the entire division that we are in. That’s Sharon. That’s five years later. That’s Evelyn. Five months later, that is the difference that we are making.

As a new dawn is happening in my school, a new beginning is happening. As we speak right now, 125 girls will never be mutilated. One hundred twenty-five girls will not be married when they’re 12 years old. One hundred twenty-five girls are creating and achieving their dreams. This is the thing that we are doing, giving them opportunities where they can rise. As we speak right now, women are not being beaten because of the revolutions we’ve started in our community.

(Applause)

I want to challenge you today. You are listening to me because you are here, very optimistic. You are somebody who is so passionate. You are somebody who wants to see a better world. You are somebody who wants to see that war ends, no poverty. You are somebody who wants to make a difference. You are somebody who wants to make our tomorrow better. I want to challenge you today that to be the first, because people will follow you. Be the first. People will follow you. Be bold. Stand up. Be fearless. Be confident. Move out, because as you change your world, as you change your community, as we believe that we are impacting one girl, one family, one village, one country at a time. We are making a difference, so if you change your world, you are going to change your community, you are going to change your country, and think about that. If you do that, and I do that, aren’t we going to create a better future for our children, for your children, for our grandchildren? And we will live in a very peaceful world. Thank you very much.

I’m going to talk about how AI and mankind can coexist, but first, we have to rethink about our human values. So let me first make a confession about my errors in my values.

It was 11 o’clock, December 16, 1991. I was about to become a father for the first time. My wife, Shen-Ling, lay in the hospital bed going through a very difficult 12-hour labor. I sat by her bedside but looked anxiously at my watch, and I knew something that she didn’t. I knew that if in one hour, our child didn’t come, I was going to leave her there and go back to work and make a presentation about AI to my boss, Apple’s CEO. Fortunately, my daughter was born at 11:30 —

(Laughter)

(Applause)

sparing me from doing the unthinkable, and to this day, I am so sorry for letting my work ethic take precedence over love for my family.

(Applause)

My AI talk, however, went off brilliantly.

(Laughter)

Apple loved my work and decided to announce it at TED1992, 26 years ago on this very stage. I thought I had made one of the biggest, most important discoveries in AI, and so did the “Wall Street Journal” on the following day.

But as far as discoveries went, it turned out, I didn’t discover India, or America. Perhaps I discovered a little island off of Portugal. But the AI era of discovery continued, and more scientists poured their souls into it. About 10 years ago, the grand AI discovery was made by three North American scientists, and it’s known as deep learning.

Deep learning is a technology that can take a huge amount of data within one single domain and learn to predict or decide at superhuman accuracy. For example, if we show the deep learning network a massive number of food photos, it can recognize food such as hot dog or no hot dog.

(Applause)

Or if we show it many pictures and videos and sensor data from driving on the highway, it can actually drive a car as well as a human being on the highway. And what if we showed this deep learning network all the speeches made by President Trump? Then this artificially intelligent President Trump, actually the network —

(Laughter)

can —

(Applause)

You like double oxymorons, huh?

(Laughter)

(Applause)

So this network, if given the request to make a speech about AI, he, or it, might say —

(Recording) Donald Trump: It’s a great thing to build a better world with artificial intelligence.

Kai-Fu Lee: And maybe in another language?

DT: (Speaking Chinese)

(Laughter)

KFL: You didn’t know he knew Chinese, did you?

So deep learning has become the core in the era of AI discovery, and that’s led by the US. But we’re now in the era of implementation, where what really matters is execution, product quality, speed and data. And that’s where China comes in. Chinese entrepreneurs, who I fund as a venture capitalist, are incredible workers, amazing work ethic. My example in the delivery room is nothing compared to how hard people work in China. As an example, one startup tried to claim work-life balance: “Come work for us because we are 996.” And what does that mean? It means the work hours of 9am to 9pm, six days a week. That’s contrasted with other startups that do 997.

And the Chinese product quality has consistently gone up in the past decade, and that’s because of a fiercely competitive environment. In Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs compete in a very gentlemanly fashion, sort of like in old wars in which each side took turns to fire at each other.

(Laughter)

But in the Chinese environment, it’s truly a gladiatorial fight to the death. In such a brutal environment, entrepreneurs learn to grow very rapidly, they learn to make their products better at lightning speed, and they learn to hone their business models until they’re impregnable. As a result, great Chinese products like WeChat and Weibo are arguably better than the equivalent American products from Facebook and Twitter.

And the Chinese market embraces this change and accelerated change and paradigm shifts. As an example, if any of you go to China, you will see it’s almost cashless and credit card-less, because that thing that we all talk about, mobile payment, has become the reality in China. In the last year, 18.8 trillion US dollars were transacted on mobile internet, and that’s because of very robust technologies built behind it. It’s even bigger than the China GDP. And this technology, you can say, how can it be bigger than the GDP? Because it includes all transactions: wholesale, channels, retail, online, offline, going into a shopping mall or going into a farmers market like this. The technology is used by 700 million people to pay each other, not just merchants, so it’s peer to peer, and it’s almost transaction-fee-free. And it’s instantaneous, and it’s used everywhere. And finally, the China market is enormous. This market is large, which helps give entrepreneurs more users, more revenue, more investment, but most importantly, it gives the entrepreneurs a chance to collect a huge amount of data which becomes rocket fuel for the AI engine. So as a result, the Chinese AI companies have leaped ahead so that today, the most valuable companies in computer vision, speech recognition, speech synthesis, machine translation and drones are all Chinese companies.

So with the US leading the era of discovery and China leading the era of implementation, we are now in an amazing age where the dual engine of the two superpowers are working together to drive the fastest revolution in technology that we have ever seen as humans. And this will bring tremendous wealth, unprecedented wealth: 16 trillion dollars, according to PwC, in terms of added GDP to the worldwide GDP by 2030. It will also bring immense challenges in terms of potential job replacements. Whereas in the Industrial Age it created more jobs because craftsman jobs were being decomposed into jobs in the assembly line, so more jobs were created. But AI completely replaces the individual jobs in the assembly line with robots. And it’s not just in factories, but truckers, drivers and even jobs like telesales, customer service and hematologists as well as radiologists over the next 15 years are going to be gradually replaced by artificial intelligence. And only the creative jobs —

(Laughter)

I have to make myself safe, right? Really, the creative jobs are the ones that are protected, because AI can optimize but not create.

But what’s more serious than the loss of jobs is the loss of meaning, because the work ethic in the Industrial Age has brainwashed us into thinking that work is the reason we exist, that work defined the meaning of our lives. And I was a prime and willing victim to that type of workaholic thinking. I worked incredibly hard. That’s why I almost left my wife in the delivery room, that’s why I worked 996 alongside my entrepreneurs. And that obsession that I had with work ended abruptly a few years ago when I was diagnosed with fourth stage lymphoma. The PET scan here shows over 20 malignant tumors jumping out like fireballs, melting away my ambition. But more importantly, it helped me reexamine my life. Knowing that I may only have a few months to live caused me to see how foolish it was for me to base my entire self-worth on how hard I worked and the accomplishments from hard work. My priorities were completely out of order. I neglected my family. My father had passed away, and I never had a chance to tell him I loved him. My mother had dementia and no longer recognized me, and my children had grown up.

During my chemotherapy, I read a book by Bronnie Ware who talked about dying wishes and regrets of the people in the deathbed. She found that facing death, nobody regretted that they didn’t work hard enough in this life. They only regretted that they didn’t spend enough time with their loved ones and that they didn’t spread their love.

So I am fortunately today in remission.

(Applause)

So I can be back at TED again to share with you that I have changed my ways. I now only work 965 — occasionally 996, but usually 965. I moved closer to my mother, my wife usually travels with me, and when my kids have vacation, if they don’t come home, I go to them. So it’s a new form of life that helped me recognize how important it is that love is for me, and facing death helped me change my life, but it also helped me see a new way of how AI should impact mankind and work and coexist with mankind, that really, AI is taking away a lot of routine jobs, but routine jobs are not what we’re about.

Why we exist is love. When we hold our newborn baby, love at first sight, or when we help someone in need, humans are uniquely able to give and receive love, and that’s what differentiates us from AI.

Despite what science fiction may portray, I can responsibly tell you that AI has no love. When AlphaGo defeated the world champion Ke Jie, while Ke Jie was crying and loving the game of go, AlphaGo felt no happiness from winning and certainly no desire to hug a loved one.

So how do we differentiate ourselves as humans in the age of AI? We talked about the axis of creativity, and certainly that is one possibility, and now we introduce a new axis that we can call compassion, love, or empathy. Those are things that AI cannot do. So as AI takes away the routine jobs, I like to think we can, we should and we must create jobs of compassion. You might ask how many of those there are, but I would ask you: Do you not think that we are going to need a lot of social workers to help us make this transition? Do you not think we need a lot of compassionate caregivers to give more medical care to more people? Do you not think we’re going to need 10 times more teachers to help our children find their way to survive and thrive in this brave new world? And with all the newfound wealth, should we not also make labors of love into careers and let elderly accompaniment or homeschooling become careers also?

(Applause)

This graph is surely not perfect, but it points at four ways that we can work with AI. AI will come and take away the routine jobs and in due time, we will be thankful. AI will become great tools for the creatives so that scientists, artists, musicians and writers can be even more creative. AI will work with humans as analytical tools that humans can wrap their warmth around for the high-compassion jobs. And we can always differentiate ourselves with the uniquely capable jobs that are both compassionate and creative, using and leveraging our irreplaceable brains and hearts. So there you have it: a blueprint of coexistence for humans and AI.

AI is serendipity. It is here to liberate us from routine jobs, and it is here to remind us what it is that makes us human. So let us choose to embrace AI and to love one another.

Thank you.

When I was six years old, I received my gifts. My first grade teacher had this brilliant idea. She wanted us to experience receiving gifts but also learning the virtue of complimenting each other. So she had all of us come to the front of the classroom, and she bought all of us gifts and stacked them in the corner. And she said, “Why don’t we just stand here and compliment each other? If you hear your name called, go and pick up your gift and sit down.” What a wonderful idea, right? What could go wrong?

(Laughter)

Well, there were 40 of us to start with, and every time I heard someone’s name called, I would give out the heartiest cheer. And then there were 20 people left, and 10 people left, and five left … and three left. And I was one of them. And the compliments stopped. Well, at that moment, I was crying. And the teacher was freaking out. She was like, “Hey, would anyone say anything nice about these people?”

(Laughter)

“No one? OK, why don’t you go get your gift and sit down. So behave next year — someone might say something nice about you.”

(Laughter)

Well, as I’m describing this you, you probably know I remember this really well.

(Laughter)

But I don’t know who felt worse that day. Was it me or the teacher? She must have realized that she turned a team-building event into a public roast for three six-year-olds. And without the humor. You know, when you see people get roasted on TV, it was funny. There was nothing funny about that day.

So that was one version of me, and I would die to avoid being in that situation again — to get rejected in public again. That’s one version. Then fast-forward eight years. Bill Gates came to my hometown — Beijing, China — to speak, and I saw his message. I fell in love with that guy. I thought, wow, I know what I want to do now. That night I wrote a letter to my family telling them: “By age 25, I will build the biggest company in the world, and that company will buy Microsoft.”

(Laughter)

I totally embraced this idea of conquering the world — domination, right? And I didn’t make this up, I did write that letter. And here it is —

(Laughter)

You don’t have to read this through —

(Laughter)

This is also bad handwriting, but I did highlight some key words. You get the idea.

(Laughter)

So … that was another version of me: one who will conquer the world.

Well, then two years later, I was presented with the opportunity to come to the United States. I jumped on it, because that was where Bill Gates lived, right?

(Laughter)

I thought that was the start of my entrepreneur journey. Then, fast-forward another 14 years. I was 30. Nope, I didn’t build that company. I didn’t even start. I was actually a marketing manager for a Fortune 500 company. And I felt I was stuck; I was stagnant. Why is that? Where is that 14-year-old who wrote that letter? It’s not because he didn’t try. It’s because every time I had a new idea, every time I wanted to try something new, even at work — I wanted to make a proposal, I wanted to speak up in front of people in a group — I felt there was this constant battle between the 14-year-old and the six-year-old. One wanted to conquer the world — make a difference — another was afraid of rejection. And every time that six-year-old won.

And this fear even persisted after I started my own company. I mean, I started my own company when I was 30 — if you want to be Bill Gates, you’ve got to start sooner or later, right? When I was an entrepreneur, I was presented with an investment opportunity, and then I was turned down. And that rejection hurt me. It hurt me so bad that I wanted to quit right there. But then I thought, hey, would Bill Gates quit after a simple investment rejection? Would any successful entrepreneur quit like that? No way. And this is where it clicked for me. OK, I can build a better company. I can build a better team or better product, but one thing for sure: I’ve got to be a better leader. I’ve got to be a better person. I cannot let that six-year-old keep dictating my life anymore. I have to put him back in his place.

So this is where I went online and looked for help. Google was my friend.

(Laughter)

I searched, “How do I overcome the fear of rejection?” I came up with a bunch of psychology articles about where the fear and pain are coming from. Then I came up with a bunch of “rah-rah” inspirational articles about “Don’t take it personally, just overcome it.” Who doesn’t know that?

(Laughter)

But why was I still so scared? Then I found this website by luck. It’s called rejectiontherapy.com.

(Laughter)

“Rejection Therapy” was this game invented by this Canadian entrepreneur. His name is Jason Comely. And basically the idea is for 30 days you go out and look for rejection, and every day get rejected at something, and then by the end, you desensitize yourself from the pain. And I loved that idea.

(Laughter)

I said, “You know what? I’m going to do this. And I’ll feel myself getting rejected 100 days.” And I came up with my own rejection ideas, and I made a video blog out of it.

And so here’s what I did. This is what the blog looked like. Day One …

(Laughter)

Borrow 100 dollars from a stranger. So this is where I went to where I was working. I came downstairs and I saw this big guy sitting behind a desk. He looked like a security guard. So I just approached him. And I was just walking and that was the longest walk of my life — hair on the back of my neck standing up, I was sweating and my heart was pounding. And I got there and said, “Hey, sir, can I borrow 100 dollars from you?”

(Laughter)

And he looked up, he’s like, “No.” “Why?”

And I just said, “No? I’m sorry.” Then I turned around, and I just ran.

(Laughter)

I felt so embarrassed. But because I filmed myself — so that night I was watching myself getting rejected, I just saw how scared I was. I looked like this kid in “The Sixth Sense.” I saw dead people.

(Laughter)

But then I saw this guy. You know, he wasn’t that menacing. He was a chubby, loveable guy, and he even asked me, “Why?” In fact, he invited me to explain myself. And I could’ve said many things. I could’ve explained, I could’ve negotiated. I didn’t do any of that. All I did was run. I felt, wow, this is like a microcosm of my life. Every time I felt the slightest rejection, I would just run as fast as I could. And you know what? The next day, no matter what happens, I’m not going to run. I’ll stay engaged.

Day Two: Request a “burger refill.”

(Laughter)

It’s when I went to a burger joint, I finished lunch, and I went to the cashier and said, “Hi, can I get a burger refill?”

(Laughter)

He was all confused, like, “What’s a burger refill?”

(Laughter)

I said, “Well, it’s just like a drink refill but with a burger.” And he said, “Sorry, we don’t do burger refill, man.”

(Laughter)

So this is where rejection happened and I could have run, but I stayed. I said, “Well, I love your burgers, I love your joint, and if you guys do a burger refill, I will love you guys more.”

(Laughter)

And he said, “Well, OK, I’ll tell my manager about it, and maybe we’ll do it, but sorry, we can’t do this today.” Then I left. And by the way, I don’t think they’ve ever done burger refill.

(Laughter)

I think they’re still there. But the life and death feeling I was feeling the first time was no longer there, just because I stayed engaged — because I didn’t run. I said, “Wow, great, I’m already learning things. Great.”

And then Day Three: Getting Olympic Doughnuts. This is where my life was turned upside down. I went to a Krispy Kreme. It’s a doughnut shop in mainly the Southeastern part of the United States. I’m sure they have some here, too. And I went in, I said, “Can you make me doughnuts that look like Olympic symbols? Basically, you interlink five doughnuts together … ” I mean there’s no way they could say yes, right? The doughnut maker took me so seriously.

(Laughter)

So she put out paper, started jotting down the colors and the rings, and is like, “How can I make this?” And then 15 minutes later, she came out with a box that looked like Olympic rings. And I was so touched. I just couldn’t believe it. And that video got over five million views on Youtube. The world couldn’t believe that either.

(Laughter)

You know, because of that I was in newspapers, in talk shows, in everything. And I became famous. A lot of people started writing emails to me and saying, “What you’re doing is awesome.” But you know, fame and notoriety did not do anything to me. What I really wanted to do was learn, and to change myself. So I turned the rest of my 100 days of rejection into this playground — into this research project. I wanted to see what I could learn.

And then I learned a lot of things. I discovered so many secrets. For example, I found if I just don’t run, if I got rejected, I could actually turn a “no” into a “yes,” and the magic word is, “why.”

So one day I went to a stranger’s house, I had this flower in my hand, knocked on the door and said, “Hey, can I plant this flower in your backyard?”

(Laughter)

And he said, “No.” But before he could leave I said, “Hey, can I know why?” And he said, “Well, I have this dog that would dig up anything I put in the backyard. I don’t want to waste your flower. If you want to do this, go across the street and talk to Connie. She loves flowers.” So that’s what I did. I went across and knocked on Connie’s door. And she was so happy to see me.

(Laughter)

And then half an hour later, there was this flower in Connie’s backyard. I’m sure it looks better now.

(Laughter)

But had I left after the initial rejection, I would’ve thought, well, it’s because the guy didn’t trust me, it’s because I was crazy, because I didn’t dress up well, I didn’t look good. It was none of those. It was because what I offered did not fit what he wanted. And he trusted me enough to offer me a referral, using a sales term. I converted a referral.

Then one day — and I also learned that I can actually say certain things and maximize my chance to get a yes. So for example, one day I went to a Starbucks, and asked the manager, “Hey, can I be a Starbucks greeter?” He was like, “What’s a Starbucks greeter?” I said, “Do you know those Walmart greeters? You know, those people who say ‘hi’ to you before you walk in the store, and make sure you don’t steal stuff, basically? I want to give a Walmart experience to Starbucks customers.”

(Laughter)

Well, I’m not sure that’s a good thing, actually — Actually, I’m pretty sure it’s a bad thing. And he was like, “Oh” — yeah, this is how he looked, his name is Eric — and he was like, “I’m not sure.” This is how he was hearing me. “Not sure.” Then I ask him, “Is that weird?” He’s like, “Yeah, it’s really weird, man.” But as soon as he said that, his whole demeanor changed. It’s as if he’s putting all the doubt on the floor. And he said, “Yeah, you can do this, just don’t get too weird.”

(Laughter)

So for the next hour I was the Starbucks greeter. I said “hi” to every customer that walked in, and gave them holiday cheers. By the way, I don’t know what your career trajectory is, don’t be a greeter.

(Laughter)

It was really boring. But then I found I could do this because I mentioned, “Is that weird?” I mentioned the doubt that he was having. And because I mentioned, “Is that weird?”, that means I wasn’t weird. That means I was actually thinking just like him, seeing this as a weird thing. And again, and again, I learned that if I mention some doubt people might have before I ask the question, I gained their trust. People were more likely to say yes to me.

And then I learned I could fulfill my life dream … by asking. You know, I came from four generations of teachers, and my grandma has always told me, “Hey Jia, you can do anything you want, but it’d be great if you became a teacher.”

(Laughter)

But I wanted to be an entrepreneur, so I didn’t. But it has always been my dream to actually teach something. So I said, “What if I just ask and teach a college class?” I lived in Austin at the time, so I went to University of Texas at Austin and knocked on professors’ doors and said, “Can I teach your class?” I didn’t get anywhere the first couple of times. But because I didn’t run — I kept doing it — and on the third try the professor was very impressed. He was like, “No one has done this before.” And I came in prepared with powerpoints and my lesson. He said, “Wow, I can use this. Why don’t you come back in two months? I’ll fit you in my curriculum.” And two months later I was teaching a class.

This is me — you probably can’t see, this is a bad picture. You know, sometimes you get rejected by lighting, you know?

(Laughter)

But wow — when I finished teaching that class, I walked out crying, because I thought I could fulfill my life dream just by simply asking. I used to think I have to accomplish all these things — have to be a great entrepreneur, or get a PhD to teach — but no, I just asked, and I could teach.

And in that picture, which you can’t see, I quoted Martin Luther King, Jr. Why? Because in my research I found that people who really change the world, who change the way we live and the way we think, are the people who were met with initial and often violent rejections. People like Martin Luther King, Jr., like Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, or even Jesus Christ. These people did not let rejection define them. They let their own reaction after rejection define themselves. And they embraced rejection.

And we don’t have to be those people to learn about rejection, and in my case, rejection was my curse, was my boogeyman. It has bothered me my whole life because I was running away from it. Then I started embracing it. I turned that into the biggest gift in my life. I started teaching people how to turn rejections into opportunities. I use my blog, I use my talk, I use the book I just published, and I’m even building technology to help people overcome their fear of rejection.

When you get rejected in life, when you are facing the next obstacle or next failure, consider the possibilities. Don’t run. If you just embrace them, they might become your gifts as well.

Thank you.

The creative process — you know this — from the first idea to the final product, is a long process. It’s super-iterative, lots of refinement, blood, sweat, tears and years. And we’re not saying you’re going to go out for a walk and come back with the Sistine Chapel in your left hand. So what frame of the creative process did we focus on? Just this first part. Just brainstorming, coming up with a new idea. We actually ran four studies with a variety of people. You were either walking indoors or outdoors. And all of these studies found the same conclusion. I’m only going to tell you about one of them today.

One of the tests we used for creativity was alternate uses. In this test, you have four minutes. Your job is to come up with as many other ways to use common everyday objects as you can think of. So, for example, what else would you do with a key, other than to use it for opening up a lock? Clearly, you could use it as a third eyeball for a giraffe, right? Maybe. That’s sort of interesting, kind of new. But is it creative? So people came up with as many ideas as they could, and we had to decide: Is this creative or not?

The definition of creativity that a lot of people go with is “appropriate novelty.” For something to be appropriate, it has to be realistic, so unfortunately, you can’t use a key as an eyeball. Boo! But “novel,” the second thing, is that nobody had to have said it. So for us, it had to be appropriate first, and then for novelty, nobody else in the entire population that we surveyed could have said it. So you might think you could use a key to scratch somebody’s car, but if somebody else said that, you didn’t get credit for it. Neither of you did. However, only one person said this: “If you were dying and it were a murder mystery, and you had to carve the name of the murderer into the ground with your dying words.” One person said this.

(Laughter)

And it’s a creative idea, because it’s appropriate and it’s novel.

You either did this test and came up with ideas while you were seated or while you were walking on a treadmill.

(Laughter)

They did the test twice, with different objects. Three groups: the first group sat first and then sat again for the second test. The second group sat first and then did the second test while walking on a treadmill. The third group — and this is interesting — they walked on the treadmill first, and then they sat. OK, so the two groups that sat together for the first test, they looked pretty similar to each other, and they averaged about 20 creative ideas per person. The group that was walking on the treadmill did almost twice as well. And they were just walking on a treadmill in a windowless room. Remember, they took the test twice. The people who sat twice for that second test didn’t get any better; practice didn’t help. But these same people who were sitting and then went on the treadmill got a boost from walking. Here’s the interesting thing. The people who were walking on the treadmill still had a residue effect of the walking, and they were still creative afterwards. So the implication of this is that you should go for a walk before your next big meeting and just start brainstorming right away.

We have five tips for you that will help make this the best effect possible. First, you want to pick a problem or a topic to brainstorm. So, this is not the shower effect, when you’re in the shower and all of a sudden, a new idea pops out of the shampoo bottle. This is something you’re thinking about ahead of time. They’re intentionally thinking about brainstorming a different perspective on the walk.

Secondly — I get asked this a lot: Is this OK while running? Well, the answer for me is that if I were running, the only new idea I would have would be to stop running, so …

(Laughter)

But if running for you is a comfortable pace, good. It turns out, whatever physical activity is not taking a lot of attention. So just walking at a comfortable pace is a good choice.

Also, you want to come up with as many ideas as you can. One key of creativity is to not lock on that first idea. Keep going. Keep coming up with new ones, until you pick one or two to pursue.

You might worry that you don’t want to write them down, because what if you forget them? So the idea here is to speak them. Everybody was speaking their new ideas. So you can put your headphones on and record through your phone and then just pretend you’re having a creative conversation, right? Because the act of writing your idea down is already a filter. You’re going to be like, “Is this good enough to write down?” And then you write it down. So just speak as many as you can, record them and think about them later.

And finally: don’t do this forever. Right? If you’re on the walk and that idea’s not coming to you, come back to it later at another time.

I think we’re coming up on a break right now, so I have an idea: Why don’t you grab a leash and take your thoughts for a walk?

Thank you.