The first session I attended today was run by David Kelley, founder and chairman of IDEO, titled “Creative Confidence: Cultivating The Mindset of Today’s Innovators.” There were a number of takeaways in the session, but I wanted to focus on one in particular: the notion that some of us are creative and others are not.

David describes this phenomenon as creativity confidence. At a very young age, kids jump from one thing to the next with ease. They draw, paint, color, learn, and play without bounds. We can be Superman flying above the clouds. We can be an amazing dancer or artist. We allow our imaginations to run freely and without any walls or limitations.

At some point however, many kids simply, in David’s words, “opt out of being creative.” Some of this is probably due to the way that children are taught in schools and raised in the home. Suddenly we find ourselves “good” at some things and “not so good” at others. (more…)

Liaquat Ahamed’s talk at the Aspen Ideas Festival began with a tour of some colorful characters of the early 20th Century world of banking, but quickly morphed into an insightful comparison of the 1929 stock market crash with more recent woes.  The two bubbles show many similarities (e.g., overly easy credit leading to overborrowing) and some differences (an imminent sense of doom in the 1920s, versus financial hubris in the run up to 2008-2009).

But the main contrast is between how the US government handled the banking crisis once the bubble burst.  In the aftermath of 1929, banks were allowed to fail, budget deficits were avoided, and interest rates were allowed to rise.  Say what you like about Paulson, Geithner and Bernanke, but they did not repeat the mistakes of the 1930s.  The stock market may have fallen a comparable 50% or so, but the recent crash was not accompanied by 25% unemployment.  Ahamed attributes the avoidance of this outcome to the well-known bank bailouts, stimulus packages and interest rates controls, and it’s hard to disagree.

Longer term, he is also cautiously optimistic about internationalism and globalization: ‘The dog that has not barked is protectionism.’  Avoiding trade and currency wars seems only wise, and the existence of institutions such as G8 and G20 has helped build consensus and cooperation this time around.  More controversial was his view that the world risks losing the US as a ‘leader of the global economy’, while other players (such as China) are not yet ready to assume that role.

At the end of question time, Ahamed introduced the sobering idea that we are about to enter a ‘lost decade.’  In other words, growth and stability will have to give way to significant changes in both our economic and social arrangements.  If found it easy to believe that this is so, and that the 2010s could join the 1930s and the 1970s in history as a time of more or less painful adjustment.

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“If it’s a problem and money can solve it, it’s not a problem.”

- Kristina Johnson, Chairman & CEO of Enduring Energy

 

 

 

 

“Let’s start treating museums as the R&D departments of society.”

- Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, Museum of Modern Art, New York

 

 

 

 

Jonathan Zittrain explored the light and dark sides of innovation with equal aplomb at the Belly Up in Aspen on Monday night. His unique position as a professor of both law and computer science at Harvard was much in evidence as he took us through the intricacies of crowdsourcing and the labyrinth of human motivation. The talk was a tour de force that covered many positive developments, but also uncovered some unsettling possibilities.

At the top of the innovation pyramid are big ticket challenges, such as the X Prizes, which offer large sums of money for the solution to really hard problems, such as sending a robot to the moon. At the bottom are microtasks for which people are paid pennies for exercising simple human skills, such as labeling images or reading handwriting. These are all seemingly harmless with an employment upside for many workers but, as with the Internet itself, crowdsourcing technology enables bad actors as well as good.

The downside ranges from simple scams to the abolition of privacy. Simple scams include paying Mechanical Turks to ‘like’ products they’ve never owned and give them favorable reviews. The more serious stuff involves encouraging citizens to monitor surveillance cameras, record events of interest to intelligence agencies or identify political demonstrators. The scope creep from neighborliness to patriotism to voyeurism to spying for a fee takes us progressively along a very uncomfortable spectrum of human behaviors and outcomes.

(In a fascinating aside, Zittrain noted that it should be possible to identify a single Iranian demonstrator from a photograph by crowdsourcing the comparison of the photograph with the ID cards of 72 million Iranians four photos at a time. He estimated that the total cost would be about $14,000 using Mechanical Turks, and that American schoolchildren could be given this task as a game, which they might even play for free.)

In spite of the dark side, this was a very amusing talk in which we were all invited to marvel at the ways in which folks will spend their time on the Internet. Whether tending virtual farms or playing games for worthless points, it’s clear that many people have hours to kill each day that can be harnessed for good or ill. There were several after-talk queries about how to encourage the upside and regulate the downside, some of which the speaker wisely side-stepped. One suspects that easy answers are nowhere to be found, but at least we can now ask the right questions.

Peter Jackson is chief scientist and vice president of Thomson Reuters, where he’s been since 1995. He has built a group of 40 research staff with expertise in the areas of document search, text and data mining, and machine learning. Jackson is also responsible for university collaboration with respect to joint research projects. His most recent book, Natural Language Processing for Online Applications, came out in a second edition in 2007. From 1992 to 1995, Jackson taught post-graduate classes in artificial intelligence and parallel computing at Clarkson University in New York and was a visiting professor at Singapore Polytechnic. In 1988, he moved to the US and became a principal scientist at McDonnell Douglas Research Laboratories. Before coming to the US, he taught in the Department of Artificial Intelligence at Edinburgh University from 1983 to 1988 and wrote the textbook Introduction to Expert Systems.

In an evening session at the Aspen Ideas Festival titled “Minds for Sale,” Jonathan Zittrain, author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, explored some provocative questions: What does human computing look like? How can you harness the good will of strangers at a distance? And, what are the societal implications of this trend?

The idea of “human computing” relies on aligning tasks and skills with participation and crowdsourcing.  (One example: Amazon Mechanical Turk.) It’s all about connecting the “seekers” with the “solvers” and recognition and reward. Everything from editing to tagging to other tasks can be accomplished through crowd sourcing and a system of micro-payments of pennies per transaction. But enough of micro-payments! How do you get people to work for FREE? The simple answer: Turn the tasks into games. Examples: Chore Wars and ESP games. People love points!

If you can take the work of individuals who are performing these tasks and create a platform to make what they’re doing all the same — to gather the sum total of their actions, you get to the heart of human computing, says Zittrain. But what are the societal implications of trend? What are the dangers and risks? (more…)

Things got underway at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Aspen, CO today. Justin Smith, president of The Atlantic Media Company, which partners with the Aspen Institute to present the Festival.

The opening session featured big ideas from more than a dozen of the Festival’s speakers, and Smith got the ball rolling.

“One hundred forty characters is OK if you’re verbose,” quipped Smith, who proceeded to rattle off his six big ideas in only 17 syllables each:

“Chinese bloom or frost? / Which will the Red groundhog see? / Ni hao, Mr. Xi.”

“Downturn or bubble? / Economy: confusing / As a CDO”

“Institutions fail! / Global systems under strain. / And no DSK…”

“Unreliable / And soon unavoidable. / See the future: cloud.”

“Poor warming globe! / Prevention time now  long past. / Cry, adapt or flee.”

“US Politics In 8 words / jobs jobs jobs / Jobs jobs jobs jobs jobs”

 

 

Smith wrapped up his opening comments by urging participants to “put forth your ideas and smash them together.”

Aspen Institute president and CEO Walter Issacson then welcomed participants, saying “Festival comes from the word feast, and sometimes we need a feast of ideas … to give us joy.”  He also pointed out that historically festivals are “an opportunity to bring different tribes together.”

Several of the speakers then shared their big ideas in less than three minutes each. Ideas focused on topics ranging from higher ed to race, the debt ceiling, addressing the societal effects of the Great Recession, impact investing, mom-ism and many more.

Watch some of the opening session and hear some of the big ideas here.

Jen McClure is the senior director of social media strategy for Thomson Reuters.

Imagine some of the world’s most inspired and provocative thinkers, writers, artists, business people, educators, and other leaders all gathered together in the beautiful Colorado Rockies for one week to exchange knowledge and ideas. That’s the Aspen Ideas Festival, and I can’t wait to participate for the first time.

We’re very excited to be partnering with the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic again on this year’s Festival, which begins later today.

Whether or not you’re attending the event, you can participate in the discussion and exchange of ideas. We’ll be providing daily coverage, commentary and insights from the sessions here on the Thomson Reuters Knowledge Effect blog, as well as via Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

In addition, Thomson Reuters will participate both onsite and online all around the Festival. Our Reuters News organization will have an onsite studio, broadcasting exclusive interviews with participants and speakers throughout the event.

We’ll also be featuring commentary here on the blog throughout the week — from our chief scientist Peter Jackson; Michael Moore, senior vice president and global head of internal and online communications; David Schlesinger, chairman of Thomson Reuters China; and Robert Schukai, global head of mobile technology.

The theme of this year’s Festival is “Exchanging Ideas That Matter.” The event tracks will explore everything from global economics to education, art and design, the environment, social media, mobile media, food, music, the meaning of happiness, and more. Several of our executives will be participating in nearly a dozen conference sessions and panels:

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The Views on America’s Economy: At Home and Abroad panel with Dr. Alan Greenspan, David Rubenstein, and David Hale, all moderated by Maria Bartiromo lived up to its billing. It was standing-room only, even after additional seating were added in the adjacent lobby. I came away from the panel wilth interesting insights about the state of our economy and our prospects moving forward. Some of the insights came from the times when the panel had a consensus, and some from the divergence of opinion.

Will there be a double dip recession?
There seemed to be a high degree of confidence that we will not have a second dip. At the same time, none of the panelists described the near-term growth prospects as very rosy. Our recovery will look gradual compared to other recessions.

What is constraining growth?
The continued deleveraging of the American consumer and the lingering impact of the housing collapse will constrain economic growth. At the same time, the aftereffects of the recession on state and municipal tax receipts is driving continued downward pressure on the associated employment with roughly 300,000 jobs at risk. These forces are sufficiently strong to offset most of the beneficial impact from the recent increases in business investment and the accelerated growth of exports. That said, both the business investment and export growth should continue.

Is there any way to shift to a faster recovery?
Relative to other countries, American companies cut payrolls much faster. This reduced payroll results in higher output per worker (or in other words productivity) measurements. As businesses grow, they should need to add workers at a pretty healthy rate. It will take a while to replace the roughly 8,000,000 lost jobs. Further, capital to fund the job expansion should be plentiful. At the end of the first quarter corporations had more the $1,800,000,000 in capital on their balance sheets. In addition, banks had deposited another $1,000,000,000 with the Fed. These Fed deposits are currently earning 0.25%, much less than the 2-3% they could get from low-risk, short-term corporate loans. Collectively, this $2.8 trillion dollars could be a far more stimulative impact on the economy than government action.

But, the money is not being deployed. Businesses and banks have a very high degree of risk aversion. When business leaders see risk, they minimize their exposure to the risk and, hence, they are waiting for “the skies to clear”.

What can government do to get this business-driven stimulation to occur?
Now we enter the world of politics and the consensus disappeared quickly. David Hale thought a string of legislative accomplishments (i.e., healthcare reform followed by financial reform and capped by a new energy bill) would bring clarity to the future regulatory and tax environment for businesses. The clarity would reduce risk aversion and the $2.8 trillion would be begin to be deployed. David

Rubenstein felt that the financial reform bill contained so many ambiguities which would be defined over time that passage and enacting the legislation would have limited impact on business risk aversion. Dr. Greenspan seemed to agree.

All agreed that the current political climate made additional government-supplied stimulus unlikely and Dr. Greenspan seemed to think the stimulus would have minimum benefit.

Is America likely to go the way of Greece?
David Hale described our risk of becoming another Greece as 5 to 10 years away, at a minimum. Our government debt is lower, while our spending, particularly on entitlements is not yet as problematic. In some ways, the trouble in other countries, particularly parts of Europe, have made the dollar relatively less risky. As a result, we can finance our current deficit spending with subsidized interest rates.

Dr Greenspan expressed the concern that this situation could change as people find gold the least risky source of money and our debt is no longer subsidized. David Hale described the large potential purchases China may make as  they build a gold inventory consistent with the scale of the economy (using their accumulated reserve of dollars). At the same time, consumers can now purchase gold as easily as stocks through ETFs. Gold could easily double or even triple in price (no, this is not a commercial as you see on TV).

Fundamental to the long-term answer is our approach to the projected and sustained $1 trillion a year deficits. Again politics entered into the conversation and the panelists diverged. At the end of the day, there are a handful of really big issues to address:

• How do we restructure entitlements to more sustainable models? Entitlement growth is crowding out all other spending and cannot remain on its current course. Clearly, the necessary changes are painful and something politicians, in particular, are very reluctant to do. David Rubenstein asked the audience some questions about what changes the audience members were willing to accept. Interestingly, a clear majority were open to higher retirement ages, means testing, and even outright benefit cuts to Social Security.
• How much will taxes be raised and what is the structure of those increases? The panel spent time discussing whether Obama’s $250 thousand income line would be crossed (i.e., would people making less than that amount face increased taxes?). David Hale pointed out that America is the only major industrialized country without a VAT tax. There wasn’t much commentary on the idea, but neither David Rubenstein nor Dr. Greenspan seemed too keen on the idea of a VAT tax. Further, the murmurings in the audience seemed to indicate a lack of popularity there as well.
• How do we make these changes? Our political system is gridlocked and will probably remain that way. These changes are not popular and it is tough for politicians to vote for such legislation. David Rubenstein saw the Base Realignment And Closing Commission as an interesting approach (i.e., have an independent body recommend the changes and Congress votes up/down on the basket of changes). Dr. Greenspan thought the current issues are more complex and touch more people so David’s approach would have troubles. David Hale thought the lame duck session of Congress following the elections in November might be able to enact some of the changes.

All in all, a very informative session!

After his AIF presentation on ‘The 21st Century Army,” US Army Chief of Staff George Casey spent a few minutes with Stephen Adler discussing the transformation of the modern Army to provide a steady flow of trained and ready forces for full spectrum modern warfare and operations.