TED@SXSWi
JP Rangaswami: Information is food
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How do we consume data? At TED@SXSWi, technologist JP Rangaswami muses on our relationship to information, and offers a surprising and sharp insight: we treat it like food.
JP Rangaswami - Technologist
JP Rangaswami thinks deeply (and hilariously) about disruptive data. Full bio
JP Rangaswami thinks deeply (and hilariously) about disruptive data. Full bio
Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.
00:16
I love my food.
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And I love information.
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My children usually tell me
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that one of those passions is a little more apparent than the other.
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(Laughter)
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But what I want to do in the next eight minutes or so
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is to take you through how those passions developed,
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the point in my life when the two passions merged,
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the journey of learning that took place from that point.
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And one idea I want to leave you with today
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is what would would happen differently in your life
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if you saw information the way you saw food?
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I was born in Calcutta --
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a family where my father and his father before him
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were journalists,
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and they wrote magazines in the English language.
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That was the family business.
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And as a result of that,
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I grew up with books everywhere around the house.
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And I mean books everywhere around the house.
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And that's actually a shop in Calcutta,
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but it's a place where we like our books.
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In fact, I've got 38,000 of them now
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and no Kindle in sight.
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But growing up as a child with the books around everywhere,
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with people to talk to about those books,
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this wasn't a sort of slightly learned thing.
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By the time I was 18, I had a deep passion for books.
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It wasn't the only passion I had.
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I was a South Indian
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brought up in Bengal.
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And two of the things about Bengal:
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they like their savory dishes
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and they like their sweets.
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So by the time I grew up,
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again, I had a well-established passion for food.
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Now I was growing up in the late '60s and early '70s,
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and there were a number of other passions I was also interested in,
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but these two were the ones that differentiated me.
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(Laughter)
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And then life was fine, dandy.
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Everything was okay,
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until I got to about the age of 26,
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and I went to a movie called "Short Circuit."
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Oh, some of you have seen it.
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And apparently it's being remade right now
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and it's going to be coming out next year.
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It's the story of this experimental robot
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which got electrocuted and found a life.
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And as it ran, this thing was saying, "Give me input. Give me input."
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And I suddenly realized that for a robot
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both information as well as food
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were the same thing.
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Energy came to it in some form or shape,
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data came to it in some form or shape.
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And I began to think,
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I wonder what it would be like
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to start imagining myself
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as if energy and information were the two things I had as input --
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as if food and information were similar in some form or shape.
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I started doing some research then, and this was the 25-year journey,
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and started finding out
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that actually human beings as primates
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have far smaller stomachs
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than should be the size for our body weight
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and far larger brains.
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And as I went to research that even further,
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I got to a point where I discovered something
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called the expensive tissue hypothesis.
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That actually for a given body mass of a primate
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the metabolic rate was static.
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What changed was the balance of the tissues available.
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And two of the most expensive tissues in our human body
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are nervous tissue and digestive tissue.
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And what transpired was that people had put forward a hypothesis
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that was apparently coming up with some fabulous results by about 1995.
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It's a lady named Leslie Aiello.
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And the paper then suggested that you traded one for the other.
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If you wanted your brain for a particular body mass to be large,
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you had to live with a smaller gut.
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That then set me off completely
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to say, Okay, these two are connected.
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So I looked at the cultivation of information as if it were food
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and said, So we were hunter-gathers of information.
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We moved from that to becoming farmers and cultivators of information.
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Does that really explain what we're seeing
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with the intellectual property battles nowadays?
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Because those people who were hunter-gatherers in origin
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wanted to be free and roam and pick up information as they wanted,
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and those that were in the business of farming information
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wanted to build fences around it,
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create ownership and wealth and structure and settlement.
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So there was always going to be a tension within that.
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And everything I saw in the cultivation
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said there were huge fights amongst the foodies
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between the cultivators and the hunter-gatherers.
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And this is happening here.
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When I moved to preparation, this same thing was true,
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expect that there were two schools.
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One group of people said you can distill your information,
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you can extract value, separate it and serve it up,
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while another group turned around
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and said no, no you can ferment it.
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You bring it all together and mash it up
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and the value emerges that way.
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The same is again true with information.
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But consumption was where it started getting really enjoyable.
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Because what I began to see then
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was there were so many different ways people would consume this.
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They'd buy it from the shop as raw ingredients.
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Do you cook it? Do you have it served to you?
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Do you go to a restaurant?
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The same is true every time as I started thinking about information.
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The analogies were getting crazy --
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that information had sell-by dates,
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that people had misused information that wasn't dated properly
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and could really make an effect on the stock market,
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on corporate values, etc.
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And by this time I was hooked.
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And this is about 23 years into this process.
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And I began to start thinking of myself
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as we start having mash-ups of fact and fiction,
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docu-dramas, mockumentaries, whatever you call it.
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Are we going to reach the stage
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where information has a percentage for fact associated with it?
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We start labeling information for the fact percentage?
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Are we going to start looking at what happens
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when your information source is turned off, as a famine?
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Which brings me to the final element of this.
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Clay Shirky once stated that there is no such animal as information overload,
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there is only filter failure.
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I put it to you that information,
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if viewed from the point of food,
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is never a production issue; you never speak of food overload.
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Fundamentally it's a consumption issue.
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And we have to start thinking
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about how we create diets within ourselves, exercise within ourselves,
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to have the faculties to be able to deal with information,
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to have the labeling to be able to do it responsibly.
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In fact, when I saw "Supersize Me," I starting thinking of saying,
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What would happen
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if an individual had 31 days nonstop Fox News?
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(Laughter)
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Would there be time to be able to work with it?
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So you start really understanding
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that you can have diseases, toxins, a need to balance your diet,
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and once you start looking, and from that point on,
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everything I have done in terms of the consumption of information,
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the production of information, the preparation of information,
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I've looked at from the viewpoint of food.
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It has probably not helped my waistline any
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because I like practicing on both sides.
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But I'd like to leave you with just that question:
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If you began to think of all the information that you consume
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the way you think of food,
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what would you do differently?
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Thank you very much for your time.
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(Applause)
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
JP Rangaswami - TechnologistJP Rangaswami thinks deeply (and hilariously) about disruptive data.
Why you should listen
With a background in economics and journalism, JP Rangaswami has been a technology innovator and chief information officer for many leading financial firms. As an advocate for open source and disruptive technologies, Rangaswami has been a leading force in the success of multiple startups, including School of Everything, Salesforce.com and Ribbit. He blogs (unmissably) at Confused of Calcutta.
JP Rangaswami | Speaker | TED.com