Dan Grigsby

A bit more than a month ago I received an email from Mpls St. Paul Magazine asking for answers to a series of questions on “brains,” “smarts” and the prospects for the future.

I sat on the questions for a few days because I wanted to answer modulo my worries about the current state of the word.

I know modulo sound (at best) nerdy and (at worst) smug, but it’s the best word to express what I’m after:

I wanted a view that had enough perspective to see past the turmoil that dominates any view whose granularity is finer than (I suppose) about a year.

When I wrote up my response a few days later I surprised myself with the optimism present in my answers — which were largely about solving curable disease and helping education in the third world, and electricity production. In short, a lot of the world needs help at the warm/clothed/educated/fed level and there’s reason to be optimistic here.

The questions and my answers follow:

Q: Over the next 10 years what will have the most profound impact on human life?

A: The most profound impact on human life over the next ten years will come from the work being done by the technologists-turned-humanitarians and social entrepreneurs.

Q: Name three person you regard as smarter than yourself
Q: Who today or in history would you call a genius

A: My answer are the same for both questions:

Bill Gates, in his role as chairman of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Fixing disease in the Third World is often less about cutting-edge technology than it is about simpler things like hygiene and logistics. The genius of what Gates has done comes not from the oft-discussed “balance sheet” approach to deciding where to investment will have the largest impact. Instead, it’s from what Anil Dash describes as “imposing a tax on every corporation in the developed world, collecting $100 per white-collar worker per year, and then directing one-third of the proceeds to curing AIDS and malaria.”

Saul Griffith is solving the energy production equation at both the micro and macro level. He founded Potenco whose pull-cord power generators provide a power source for safe electric lighting [in the third world]. Saul’s latest venture, Makai Power, is pioneering tethered, high-altitude wind power generation and is supported by the Google Foundation.

Nicholas Negroponte, chairman emeritus for MIT’s Media Lab and [founder of] the One Laptop Per Child education project [that is] at the heart of a mission to raise the bar in education in the Third World.

Q: If you could take a pill that boosted your IQ fifty points, would you take it?

A: In a heartbeat, but only if everyone else could too. Giving yourself a fifty-point boost is selfish; raising the planet’s collective intelligence is good for the species.

Q: Would you rather be street smart? Book smart? Business smart, or people smart? (Choose one)?

A: Street smart is synonymous with problem-solving, which is at the heart of anything interesting.

–

Thanks to Robert Stephens for suggesting me to the publishers.

Byte Club just posted the 5 minute episode of their show that they filmed at RubyFringe.

Includes a brief appearance by me.

By request, please find a PDF of the slides I used in my talk today the MIMA Summit on Alternate Reality Games here:

http://www.unpossible.com/misc/MIMA-ARG.pdf

When I speak I do very little in the way of “reading my slides,” so these will probably only be useful to you if you attended and wanted to follow some of the threads back to their sources. MIMA tells me they’ll post the video of the talk; when they do I’ll link to it from here.

Big thanks to Jury Hahn and Dan Albritton of Mega Phone for setting up one of their phone-digital signage games for use in my talk, and to Elan Lee for sharing his ETech talk materials for me to incorporate in this talk.