>> So the parrot actually chipped that piece of wood off.
>> Yeah. >> That's very clever.
Yeah, and then he's going to figure
out how to get that little nibble of something that he likes.
>> So he actually thought about the whole tongue doesn't go in therefore.
>> Yeah, I mean,
essentially you're trying to understand how much of a causal thinking?
How much of a sense of time?
These are the big questions.
But the thing I find fascinating even on a more simple level is that You can
learn this and then you can teach this to another bird just by showing it to them.
And this isn't exclusive to this case.
This is in an experimental setting but I know, for example, crows in Japan
are teaching each other how to use roads to kill certain kind of animals so
they can pick them up from the street kind of thing.
So this kind of idea of them training each other,
learning from each other is actually a common thing.
And so the point being is that tool use is very fundamental even simple or
simpler than saying animals are take advantage of it.
And so I think that basically to use really does shape
a lot of who you are especially in terms of solving some kind of problems.
So this is her, she's learned from the other one and she's made the tool,
it's not quite as elegant as the other tool.
But it's still good enough to get that kind of bit of corn.
The point is, I think,
in virtual reality there are opportunities here to create virtual tools that change
the way we think in a way that we haven't been able to do before.
And we can test them very quickly because virtual reality is very quick to try
these things.
And so I make these little drawings where, imagine you have the real world and
you have a little screwdriver.
And then you imagine you have a virtual reality screwdriver and
okay you could test that.
But then imagine, here on the bottom, your hand is an automatic screwdriver and
you could very quickly put together a whole device and
maybe your other fingers have different devices.
It may be even better, you're kind of, your hands are made of some kind of a Lego
and you can attach what you want to your side depending on the problem.
And so you're able to maybe transform yourself into
something that solves a problem.
And I think this kind of space is, I think,
a very broad space in terms of being able to have to use the way you think
in a natural way to solve problems by changing who you are in sense.
I think at the core of what I'm proposing is that there is the idea of that you
have to map a problem from a complex problem in the real world into VR and
you have to kind of design different tools.
But the also very key aspect of it is the social aspect of it,
that we're able, in VR to work together on a problem.
And understand how each other's tools work in an intuitive way so
that we can solve this.
So I was thinking, I tried a few times,
I present this problem to different groups and we just brainstorm kind of solutions.
And I'll bring up a couple that I've heard in the past that are kind of interesting.
There's this idea, that people have spoken about in England actually in the 19th
century of the tragedy of the commons.
And the idea was the commons were these shared parks that people could access.
And the tragedy of the commons was a hypothetical example that what if you let
people do whatever they want?
Let them put however many sheep, or goats, or whatever they want on these fields.
Wouldn't they overexploit them and then nothing would be left.
And that's the kind of idea.
It's a symbolic problem to some of the ecological problems we have,
like overfishing and some of these other kind of problems, pollution, etc.
Because you have a limited resource that everybody shares and
you have to somehow figure out a way of everybody
regulating themselves to not overfish it or overuse it kind of thing.
So in VR, my kind of question to groups of people who have come and
I've given talks to, is imagine you have a field.
And your job is to design a game activity
where you are changing the tools that people have to try to
make the solution of this kind of puzzle obvious.
So the first level of the game might be that everybody has something that allows
you to put a goat down and that's very simple kind of thing.
But then what happens is people would just create as many as they want and
the goats will eat up all the grass.
And then you will be left with a problem.
So it's been quite fun.
I like doing this, we brainstorm different ideas.
And I've had, one idea was and
it's actually a very powerful one was, okay,, the tool that you
have in your hand is a fenced area with a goat in the middle of it so
that when you put it down that fenced area is just the right size for that goat.
And that means that they'll cover that area but
they wont over, it won't lead to a clash.
And the thesis I see is imagine we have this very simple game and imagine we were
all shepherds somewhere and maybe we don't even know much about who we are.
I get the feeling that, actually, we would be able to come to an agreement in terms
of okay, I will just use this land, you use that land much more easier
by using a tool like this then if we had to, kind of, discuss it otherwise.
Because it's so direct and intuitive.
And other ideas that people came up with that were quite interesting were,
one was very funny of the idea of maybe you can genetically engineer the goat so
that as they get older, they grow too tall to be able to reach the grass.
So that their legs get long so that they have self limit kind of thing which is
kind of strange but I thought it was quite funny.
Someone had the idea of what if instead of talking about individual goats,
what if you become a farm, or something that as a whole depends on the resource.
So your existence is dependent on whether these things are there or not.
>> So it matters to you >> Yeah, it matters to you.
>> You really think about it more, what you do, your actions.
>> So all these kinds of ideas, and
there's many more very different ones that are very interesting.
For me, it like really made me feel intrigued about
trying to go down this route.
And in the talk I also say, okay, this is a very simplified problem but
you could then look at, okay, what if disease strikes every so often?
Then maybe you need to keep groups of goats separate, or
what if there's a big earthquake.
So different kind of challenges that might occur will require different tools.
And so you'll kind of be able to perfect
these tools in this space by having this abstract to kind of model.
Yeah, and that's basically the core of it.
I have some references here, we went through, and
I jumped around between different kind of books about user experience design and
books about economics and that kind of thing but, yeah.
And that's basically it.
>> Okay, thank you.
>> Thank you very much.
Okay, cheers.
>> [MUSIC]
