TEDx Talk: Are we Making the Most of Human Potential?

-- This is a transcript of the TEDx Talk made by Navid Nathoo on February 9th, 2019 at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, Canada. --

[Start TEDx Talk]

[I pull out a bill] This is a one-hundred dollar bill. I can use it to buy food for the hungry, or textbooks for students. But, [rip bill]... now all I can use it for is fire.

Everything has an opportunity cost, so we need to be intentional about using our resources effectively. The world’s most valuable resource is not money, gold, or oil - it’s people. But the way we’re mining human potential, is like using a pickaxe to mine for gold.

When I was in university, I spent a summer working at Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. While I was living in a small village, I visited a school.

Even though you see me smiling in this picture, I remember feeling an overwhelming sadness. I was sad because I realized that even though these students were not much different biologically and genetically than I was, their ability to make a significant positive impact on millions of people was much lower than mine. And I thought the only reason was because of their lack of access to resources.

When I returned to Canada, I visited a well-off school. During that visit I remember asking myself, “what are the chances that these students make a significant positive impact on millions of people?” That’s when it hit me, the answer was still low. How could that be? These students have access to the best resources in the world, but their probability of impacting millions is still low, why?

The reality is - people are not being trained to use their resources in the most optimal way. And it’s because we don’t know how. We need a plan. We need a human blueprint. If we can use a blueprint to build bridges, why can’t we use a similar method to build people?

If we think of a blueprint for a bridge, it has 2 parts:

1. It has a purpose - getting people from Point A, to Point B.

2. It has a plan on how to achieve that purpose.

We need a human blueprint - one that has a purpose of getting us from point A to B, and a plan on how to get there. When we think about how we’re formally developing people, we can look to our schools.

Schools aren’t just a place to learn subjects like math and geography. It’s where people spend most of their adolescent life growing up. The knowledge, skills and values we build during that time shape who we become. Here’s the problem - schools aren’t optimized for this. We train students to be like a Google search - question in, answer out. What about training students on kindness and honesty? We have a history class, but why don’t we have a future class?

As a result, we don’t have a shared value system that was formally taught to us, and we don’t have a clear vision for the future we can all agree on working towards.

To be clear, I’m not implying that everyone should be the same. Rather, we should identify what are our shared values and knowledge that would holistically be beneficial for society. How we can do this is by building a human blueprint.

So how can we start to create a human blueprint that we can all agree on?

Just like how we build bridges to get things from Point A to B, how do we get people from Point A, to Point B? More importantly, what is Point B?

To answer this, we should ask ourselves, “what do we want the future to look like in 100 years?” Then, we can work backwards to build a plan - in our case, the knowledge, skills, and values needed to get there.

In 100 years, I’d think about 3 things:

1. How do we want people to interact and treat each other?
2. What tools and technologies might we have to solve our biggest problems?
3. What skills will people need to contribute to society?

For the first question, I would want people to treat others with kindness and respect. I would want people to be healthy and have authentic relationships with each other. And, I’d want people to be happy.

For the second question, I could foresee us using technologies like quantum computing to simulate molecules to discover new drugs. And I can imagine we would be using lab-grown meat to replace animal meat, saving us a massive amount of water, energy and land.

And for the third question, I can see people building strong communication skills to collaborate with each other, and building problem solving skills to solve difficult problems like colonizing Mars and developing humans into an interplanetary species.

I think most people would agree with me on many of these beliefs, but if we agree, what are we doing about it? How are we training people to be happy and kind? How are we training people to leverage new technologies like quantum computers to solve our hardest problems? And how are we developing people to have exceptional skills in areas like communication and problem solving?

The reality is, we’re not. We’re just crossing our fingers hoping for the next Elon Musk to solve the world’s biggest problems. We should be intentionally building these people!

For the past 3 years I’ve been developing my own human blueprint. Here’s how I’ve been thinking about how we should develop people:

• Mindset, this includes things like empathy and adaptability.
• Wisdom, which includes learning from history's greatest philosophers like Socrates and Marcus Aurelius, as well as modern thinkings like Naval Ravikant and Yuval Noah Harari.
• Self-Understanding, which is a key to internal happiness.
• How The World Works, so we can understand the real-world and not be trapped in our small bubbles. Our personal experience make up maybe 0.00001% of the world, yet we use them to shape 80% of how we think about it.
• Fundamental skills, like communication and problem solving.
• And lastly, Exponential Technologies, like quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology.

By working with young people at The Knowledge Society, it’s clear that humans have much more potential than we think. We just need to give them the right guidance.

To the left is Zaynah, she’s 15 years old working on technologies like artificial intelligence, blockchain, and more recently, brain-computer interfaces - connecting your brain to real-world objects. In the middle is Ben, who’s working on developing advanced methods to measure blood glucose levels non-invasively - no needles! Or Hannah, who’s working to cure diseases using new gene editing techniques.

My message to you is this: let’s be more intentional about how we’re using our most important resource. You wouldn’t burn a hundred dollar bill, so why would we continue to burn away our children’s potential?

[End TEDx Talk]