The Future Will Be Shaped by Optimists | Kevin Kelly | TED

I want to try and persuade you

that there are reasons why we should be optimistic in general.

And that’s a very difficult thing to do today

because we are confronting tremendous problems in this world.

Things like global climate change,

which seem almost impossible to solve,

or social inequality,

which seems endemic and difficult to eliminate.

The scale of these problems though

is even more reason why we should be optimistic.

Because what we know is that in the past,

every great and difficult thing that has been accomplished,

every breakthrough,

has in fact required

a very strong sense of optimism

that it was possible.

Think of the first airplanes.

It’s hard enough

to create something good and great deliberately and with intention.

And it’s no guarantee,

just because we believe something will happen that it will happen,

but we do know that unless we believe that something can happen,

it’s not going to happen inadvertently by itself.

And so it becomes really important

that we imagine a world that we want,

that we imagine solutions we want

and believe that we can make them happen.

And that belief in making something impossible happen

is what has shaped our future so far.

So our own history has been basically shaped by optimists,

and if we want to shape the future,

we need to be optimistic.

That world that we’re shaping is not a world that’s perfect.

It’s not perfection,

there’s no lack of problems,

there’s no absence of bad things.

It is totally not utopia.

It’s what I would call pro-topia:

a world in which things are a little bit better.

And that sense of optimism is a perspective

where we expect the world to yield a little bit more good than bad,

to have a few more reasons to hope than to fear.

And optimism definitely is not just a sunny temperament,

a kind of a blindness to the realities of the world's problems

or some kind of Pollyanna self-delusion.

Instead, optimism is based on the fact of historical progress,

that if we transcend anecdote

and look at data in a scientific, rational way,

that we can see that the evidence says

that on average,

on a global scale over time,

over the last 500 years,

there has been incremental improvement over time.

If it’s real then why don’t we see more of it?

Why are so many people pessimistic?

And I think there are three reasons why.

One is that most of what progress is about is about what does not happen.

It’s about all the things that could have happened that didn’t happen today.

It’s about the two-year-old child who did not die of smallpox.

It’s about the family farmers

whose year of surplus food was not stolen by raiders.

They don't make the headlines.

And the second reason is that bad things happen faster than good things.

Good things take time.

When we are compressing our news cycle to the last five minutes

and the next five minutes,

all the things that have changed in the last five minutes

are kind of bad stuff

because good stuff takes longer.

If we were to make newspapers and websites

to be updated every 100 years,

we’d have a very different set of headlines.

The third reason is that because societies that are capable of creating

just a few percent more good than they destroy every year,

if you have a society that’s capable

of making just a few percent more than it destroys,

then over time,

that few percent is compounded.

And that is what civilization is.

So that one percent, few percent, is almost invisible

in the noise of the 49-percent crap and destruction around it.

So we don’t see it

unless we turn around and look back into the past.

So it’s possible that after 500 years of progress,

it could stop tomorrow.

But it’s unlikely

and very, very probable that that long-term trend will continue,

at least for the rest of your lives.

So this optimism makes us realists

in aligning ourselves with this long history

of historical progress.

And that’s the first reason we should be optimistic.

And the second reason is that civilization is a mechanism

to make these improvements

that relies on the fact that we’re optimistically trusting others.

We have total strangers that we can collaborate,

and that collaboration allows us to make things beyond ourselves

that are bigger than just what we can do.

That requires trust,

and trust is a type of optimism.

But in addition to kind of cooperating

with the eight billion total strangers on this planet accomplishing great things,

we can also trust future generations.

The billions of people yet unborn into the future.

Right now, today, we are benefiting from the work of previous generations

who undergone to create infrastructure --

roads canals, skyscrapers, telephone networks --

that we are now enjoying.

In fact, we may be enjoying more benefits than they have back in the past

when they began.

So they have been acting as good ancestors for us,

and sometimes even sacrificing

what could have been immediate yields and benefits

and postponing them until future generations.

We also want to be good ancestors,

and being good ancestors trying to move benefits to the future generations

is an act of optimism.

One, because we believe that there will be future generations,

and two, because we are willing to sacrifice immediate gains

in order to postpone --

have more gains into the future --

that investment.

Being a good ancestor enables us to actually accomplish things

not just beyond what we can do individually in the present,

but what we can do over time.

So when we trust the future,

one of the things that we are understanding

is that future generations not only have better living standards

because of progress,

but they also have more capability to solve problems

because there’s more knowledge

and because they have better tools.

And so we can trust that.

We can trust the fact that in the future,

future generations will be able to solve problems

that we cannot solve ourselves.

So that means that we should be optimistic

not because we believe that our problems are smaller than we thought.

We should be optimistic because we believe

that our capacity to solve problems is greater than we thought.

So that’s a second reason to be optimistic.

The third one has to do with problems

which are really disguised as opportunities.

OK, so optimists don’t shun problems.

Optimism is about embracing problems,

because it’s problems that make solutions

and solutions that make problems.

So I believe that most of the problems we have today

are generated by the solutions of the past.

And the great one is this climate change.

The solution in the past was artificial power --

“Where do we get it?”

“OK, here it is.”

But now it makes the problem now.

That means that today,

most of the solutions that we have

will be generating the problems of the future.

And there will be more problems

because new solutions create many more problems.

In the same way, when science answers a question,

that answer will generate two or three new questions --

things that we didn’t even know we didn’t know.

And so, in a peculiar way,

science is expanding our ignorance faster than our knowledge.

So we have an unlimited pool of questions and problems.

But problems don’t impede progress.

Problems are the conduit of progress.

No problems, no progress.

That is why I reject utopia,

because there are no problems there.

So even bad things that happen are basically possibilities

that yield new solutions and better opportunities.

So in that way, problems are unlimited.

There is no limit for improvement.

So we can improve ourselves in all directions.

So we have a choice about optimism.

It’s not a temperament.

No matter what your temperament is you can still choose to be optimistic.

And gigantic problems require gigantic optimism.

We have a moral obligation to be optimistic,

because when we’re optimistic,

we can shape the future,

we can become better ancestors,

we can expand our reach --

create things bigger than ourselves.

And we can be a realist in aligning ourselves with this long arc of history

and embracing problems as opportunities.

With optimism,

we can use it as a power to kind of create the future that we want.

This is the way.

Thank you.

(Applause)