Name: An argument for basic income. | Jim Provost | TEDxKanata
Uploaded: 2018-09-05T14:41:13.000Z
Duration: 16 min 35 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Translator: Michele Gianella Reviewer: Alessandra Tadiotto

As a data scientist, I literally spend my day predicting the future.

and I use really cool tools, like artificial intelligence or blockchain

to help understand what makes humans tick.

And what I found most fascinating from the past few years of my experience

and what's also been the most frustrating

is that all those expressions and all those clichés are true.

The fact that the journey is more important than the destination.

The fact that to go further and look further,

That those who don't understand what history was

In "The Tempest," William Shakespeare wrote that "What's past is prologue."

I think a lot of people recognize this expression

to mean that everything that happened before was exposition,

that to live in the present is what's important.

is that the future can be based on a barometer of the past

and understand the trends, signals, and patterns of where we've been

can show us what we've done before, and where we're going to go.

This presentation is an argument for basic income.

I start in 1696 in Britain, as part of the glass tax.

the British Parliament created a prohibitive tax

It meant that glass and windows were so expensive

that, literally, lords and ladies would take glass out of their houses

and bring them up to their summer castles for fear of theft or breaking.

If you were just a person living in the city,

you lived most of your internal life in darkness.

It affected things that people had never considered before

your dining room didn't have a table in the middle,

People had a bench by the side of the room

When it was time to have a meeting or have a meal together,

they would take the benches, sit everyone down,

That's where they had their meeting. That's where they had a discussion.

That's where we got the term "board meeting."

Not only that, that guy at the end, that guy in the chair,

To me, it is fascinating how arbitrary choices from the past

in ways people can't understand or think about at all.

And we are coming to one of those critical junctures

I'm going to skip ahead a couple of decades

The Church of England, in an attempt to reorganize themselves,

split up the country into various plots and created parsonages.

Each one of these sections had a reverend.

His job was to help guide the flock and all the things that reverends do.

These people were given a strong education.

to understand where their next meal was coming from,

This was arguably one of the first times a society had a class of people

who were academic, well read, and didn't really have that much to do.

The Reverend Edmund Cartwright created the power loom

and brought up part of the Industrial Revolution as we know it today.

Automation, improving in process, happened because of that.

was the father of modern aerial photography.

He showed us the first pictures of cities from above,

revolutionized urban planning and city design.

wrote the essay on the principle of population.

You know this already what he learned back then.

Cities only grow when there's an excess of food

more than is needed to sustain the population.

The Reverend William Greenwald was the father of modern archaeology.

Before him, people would just go to dig sites

and grab stuff because it looked cool and brought it home.

He was one of the first people to suggest

that we apply proper scientific rigor and scientific method,

and revolutionized the field of archaeology.

it was their families, their children, their spouses.

When people knew there was a roof over their head

and a meal coming to not worry about, their creativity flourished.

I bet you know at least half a dozen names on this list of people

who were either children or spouses of these reverends -

Hook, Wren, Bronte, Tennyson, Carroll, Jane Austen.

in their ability to push arts and science further

that even centuries later, we still consume their art

and the ways it affects us that have never been considered before.

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An argument for basic income. | Jim Provost | TEDxKanata

literally

stuff

recognize

opportunity