A necessary rebellion

Talk by Joi at Poptech, "A necessary rebellion"

Some quotes from the talk:

"Question authority and think for yourself: You don't get Nobel prize for doing what you are told- you get Nobel prize for questioning authority and thinking for yourself. But somehow, we made this education system that requires you to have the right answer, to be obedient and to do things the way everybody else does them because it's the way you're supposed to do it."

"Fragile is a something that breaks under stress, and not robust against chaos. But robustness and resilience is not the opposite of fragile, because robustness and resiliency survives chaos. "Antifragile" are things that gets stronger when there's stress or are attacked. For example immune system gets smarter and stronger when they get attacked. Network security is another one. Think about "Antifragile" applied to all the systems including governments, education... the world is complex, stressful, and if you try to eliminate all rebellion and all the stress, you come up with a relatively fragile system."

"Learning over education: Education is something people do to you, learning is what you do to yourself. We need creative learning: In the old days, mass production, post industrial, pre-robot, pre-AI ages, you needed people who are obedient, could do repetitive task, weren't rebellious. But now, people should be more creative, because creative things are what the computers can't do. All the repetitive jobs are going to be taken over by computers."

"4Ps of Creative Learning = Projects, Peers, Passion and Play. Learning out of context doesn't work- learning through doing something you can learn, hence projects are important. Peers: teaching each other is a great way to learn. Passion is important. Play: if you put pressure on somebody and give financial rewards, they will do simple tasks more efficiently but it will take longer to do creative tasks. We're used to pressure people to be on time and be obedient that we have stamped out creativity on the kids. Unless we can transform our children, education system and workforce to a more rebellious and robust system, we will lose our jobs to computers and robots, and it's the only way we can survive."

Japan is a country that grew lots of people who are obedient, can't say no, and aren't allowed to say no in schools and workplaces. "Too tall a pile is hit on the top."

On the other hand, Japan is the country that is full of high quality amateur creativity in the fields of music, art, illustration and cartoons, animations, novels, software, hardware and many more fields in art. The amount of creativity that you see in places like Comic Market and Maker Faire Tokyo are just amazing. Of course many commercial products are exported out of the country, but the layers and layers of amateur creativity flourishing in places that are not mass production. I feel a lot of potential and hope for those creativity to lead to next generation industries.... from the awesome Japanese "rebellions" :)

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employer. -Fumi Yamazaki