Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Tech-talk at Google


On the 12th February, Bo Ekman was invited to Google to give a ”Tech-Talk”.

Google is located in Mountain View, adjacent to Palo Alto and Stanford. It’s beautiful campus radiates intensity and creativity. A beautiful sculpture garden welcomes the visitor to the main entrances. Just outside the main entrance were this day parked a fleet of the driverless cars that Google has created and produced. It was quite awesome to see them take off and mix effortlessly into the traffic streams.

Google is an extremely creative company, venturing into the futures of artificial intelligence, robotics and complex systems. I was invited by the outfit that scans the horizons for new ideas in the context of biological, genetic, social and technological evolution. The person who took care of me, Paul Nichols, had his post-graduate training from Harvard Divinity School. That tells about the breadth and depth of knowledge supplied at Google. His boss, Nicklas Lundblad, told me that it is now more difficult to enter Google than to enter Harvard or MIT!

I chose to talk about how the Tällberg Foundation has evolved over 30 years without any formal, strategic objectives or plans. Our evolution has been guided by the questions that we have been able to formulate together with thousands of participants that have come our way. I also chose to show Nora Bateson’s wonderful film about her father, Gregory Bateson, “An Ecology of Mind”. That film is a wonderful illustration of human and biological evolution of which also the Tällberg Foundation is a part.

After the talk, I took off to visit an old friend whose new project comes out of both his worry about environmental degradation and his hopefulness that the avalange of new technologies will help us correct mistakes and side-stepping. His project is to revive lost species.