Founded in 1980, The MIT Media Lab (MIT) is an interdisciplinary laboratory dedicated to the convergence of technology, media, science, art, and design, with a mission to "create a better future." The "Media Lab" has nothing to do with "media", it specializes in interdisciplinary projects related to the future of humanity, and it never restricts the research direction of professors. As a result, many of the inventions in this lab are fanciful and unrealistic, such as helium airships that study fish-like behavior, stereoscopic images suspended in the air, computers that can talk, and programmed Lego bricks...... Anyway, there's a buzz of innovation everywhere, beating the pulse of the digital age.
And it is such a world's top interdisciplinary laboratory, when choosing the director of the laboratory, it is even more eclectic, choosing a non-academic person who has dropped out of school twice, worked as a DJ in a nightclub, and has no academic degree to take on this important task. This person is Koichi Ito.
Speaking of Koichi Ito, he is really a legendary figure. Bill Gates once dropped out of college to start a business, but he dropped out of college twice in a row.
Ito spent his life in Tokyo, Japan, in 1966 and then immigrated to Canada with his family. Later, when he was a child, he moved with his family to Detroit, Michigan, USA. At the age of 14, Ito returned to Japan with his family. Later, Ito returned to the United States and studied computer science Xi at Tufts University, but he soon realized that "studying computer Xi at university was a stupid thing" and he dropped out. After dropping out of school for a short time, Ito enrolled in the University of Chicago to study Xi physics, but he was dissatisfied with the curriculum, so he decided to drop out and start his own business. What's even more shocking is that after dropping out of school, he went to a nightclub to work as a DJ!
really responded to that sentence: A strong life really doesn't need to be explained......
Koichi Ito once did something particularly good. In March 2011, an earthquake occurred in Japan due to the movement of the Great Pacific Plate, and the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan leaked. Tens of thousands of people fled their homes, and panic spread. The government has tried to provide relief efforts, but manpower and resources are limited, and even the official pollution figures are wrong. The government has relocated some of the victims, but it has been discovered that the new resettlement sites designated by the government are even more polluted than where the victims were previously living. People have to save themselves, but now no one even knows where it is safe.
At the time, Ito was overseas, and he sent an e-mail to several of his colleagues, calling on tech-savvy people to do something about the relief. As a result of the discussions, it was necessary to quickly secure a batch of environmental monitoring equipment, which had been too sought-after since the disaster to be readily available. A few people started and created an online community, and more people participated, and everyone simply decided to build it themselves: a start-up designed a new device that was easier to use, a crowdsourcing website helped raise money, a local company completed production, and a large group of volunteers strapped monitoring equipment to their cars and walked the streets, and they soon collected more than 50 million data points and put them on a knowledge-sharing website for people to readily access...... The problems that the Japanese government could not solve were solved by Ito Koichi, netizens, and the public.
Ito is an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, social activist, academic, columnist, best-selling author, star TV presenter, nightclub owner, and board member of Sony, The New York Times, MacArthur Foundation, and others. Most notably, he served as director of the MIT Media Lab from 2011 to 2019.
Many people are curious and even wonder how this non-academic who has dropped out of school and DJed can achieve this achievement? His secret is self-driven Xi.
According to Ito, traditional education is a one-way, top-down mode of knowledge transfer, and the process of receiving knowledge taught by others. And a person learns best when they relate their Xi to their interests, personal relationships, and opportunities they may pursue. This is the embodiment of a kind of "pull" in life, and it is also a principle advocated by Ito Koichi in "Burst".
Burst, a book co-authored by Koichi Ito and Jeff Howe, is a collection of extraordinary case studies and cutting-edge research and philosophies from the MIT Media Lab. Nine principles of survival for the future society are proposed, namely, emergence is better than authority, pull is better than thrust, compass is better than map, risk is better than safety, disobedience is better than obedience, practice is better than theory, diversity is better than ability, resilience is better than strength, and system is better than individual.
Science fiction writer William Gibson once said: The future is here, but it hasn't caught on yet. With the rapid development of computer technology, the world has entered the digital age, and the changes are getting faster and faster, while the human mind is always in a state of disconnection. In the face of this new system full of asymmetry, complexity, and uncertainty, I hope that the book "Burst" can help our thinking to update and iterate and better meet the challenges.
1. Rebellion and tolerance of rebellion are the first elements of success in Silicon Valley.
2. Our nodding acquaintances are our biggest source of new ideas and information.
3. Accidental luck is not a fluke, but a comprehensive product of some conditions. First, it is necessary to create an environment with a network of people and a wide range of weak connections, second, to be perceptive, and third, to attract and encourage interaction.
4. A person decides to abandon the map in favor of a compass because he realizes that in a rapidly changing world, a detailed map may lead you deep into the jungle and bring unnecessarily high costs, while a good compass can always take you where you want to go.
5. It's not just technology that's developing at exponential speed, it's also changing itself at exponential speed.
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