The speaker, who initially prepared to discuss the equation of happiness from an engineer's perspective, shifted focus after being inspired by another speaker. He introduces his personal journey with his son Ali, whose wisdom and belief in embracing happiness inspired him to create a model of happiness, "Solve for Happy." Despite personal tragedy, he channels his grief into a mission to share Ali's insights and reach millions globally, with the initial goal of making 10 million people happy, which quickly expanded to 1 billion 'happy.'

By examining the rapid advancements in technology today, the speaker emphasizes the importance of prioritizing happiness as machines become increasingly intelligent. He draws parallels between evolving artificial intelligence and human values, positing that as AI learns from human behavior, demonstrating happiness and compassion becomes critical. The speaker stresses the urgency for humanity to adapt its value systems to foster collaboration with emerging technologies, using examples like how humans now pair with machines in chess.

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. engineer [ˈɛn.dʒɪˌnɪər] - (noun) - A professional trained in design, construction, and use of engines or machines. - Synonyms: (mechanic, technician, inventor)

I was going to explain to you in 15 minutes the equation of happiness and how you can find happiness from an engineer's point of view.

2. emerging markets [ɪˈmɝː.dʒɪŋ ˈmɑr.kɪts] - (noun) - Financial markets in developing economies that are progressing toward becoming advanced. - Synonyms: (developing nations, growth markets, evolving economies)

I started our businesses in emerging markets.

3. moonshot [ˈmuːnˌʃɒt] - (noun) - An ambitious exploratory project with uncertain outcome. - Synonyms: (expedition, leap of faith, exploration)

X is the moonshot factory that develops technologies like self driving cars and others.

4. intuitive [ɪnˈtuː.ɪ.tɪv] - (adjective) - Understanding instinctively without the need for conscious reasoning. - Synonyms: (instinctive, innate, natural)

He thought about it or felt it intuitively.

5. doomsday scenarios [ˈduːmzˌdeɪ səˈnɛr.iˌoʊz] - (noun) - Theoretical projections assuming a catastrophic or negative future outcome. - Synonyms: (catastrophe, apocalypse, disaster projection)

Most of them are doomsday scenarios.

6. companion cube [kəmˈpæn.jən kjub] - (noun) - An in-game object in video games that aids players in puzzle-solving. - Synonyms: (assistance object, game tool, partner item)

This item here is the companion cube.

7. superior [suːˈpɪr.i.ər] - (adjective) - Higher in rank, quality, or function; better or above the average. - Synonyms: (better, advanced, higher)

If we actually try to solve global warming with intelligence that's superior to ours.

8. exponential [ˌɛks.poʊˈnɛn.ʃəl] - (adjective) - Increasingly rapid, represented by a mathematical exponent. - Synonyms: (accelerating, escalating, expanding)

All we really need is an exponential curve.

9. targeted mind [ˈtɑːrɡɪtɪd maɪnd] - (noun) - A focused mindset aimed at achieving specific objectives. - Synonyms: (goal-oriented, focused, directed approach)

gave myself a target. A target to make 10 million people happy. In my engineers businessman targeted mind.

10. shift in mindset [ʃɪft ɪn ˈmaɪnd.sɛt] - (noun) - A change in the way of thinking or attitude towards a particular subject. - Synonyms: (change, transformation, reorientation)

We need that shift in value system. We need that shift in mindset.

The Equation of Happiness: A Mission for 1 Billion Happy

Okay, so I'm about to do the dumbest thing a person can do in an event like this ever. So I had 25 slides prepared for you. I was going to explain to you in 15 minutes the equation of happiness and how you can find happiness from an engineer's point of view. And I know this is the UK and you're a very disciplined society, but I changed my mind. Okay. So when I heard Nigel speaking, I actually decided to address the elephant in the room. You will not regret it, trust me. My speech that I was going to give you in 15 minutes is available online everywhere. In 30 minutes. It's done better in 30 minutes. So please, Google, Google Mogaudet, and you'll find it.

I want to talk to you about something else, and I am chief business officer of Google X. I have been at Google since 2007. I started our businesses in emerging markets. I did that for around seven years, where I started close to half of Google's offices worldwide. I joined X in 2013. X is known, so you don't need an introduction for that. It's the moonshot factory that develops technologies like self-driving cars and others. The part that you may not know about I'm going to use one slide of my presentation to tell you about this is solve for happy.

So up there, this handsome young man is Ali, my son. 17 days after Ali died, I sat down to write. And I wrote about happiness, which was the most unexpected topic you can ever think about when a parent loses a child. There were two reasons why I did that. One is, Ali truly was my son and my son. He was the light in my life. He was my son, my best friend. He was my coach for many, many years. And I know you may find that strange, but when Ali started to be a teenager, he was so wise. By age 16, I started to tell my friends, when I grow old, I want to be like Ali. He was so wise that I stopped going to others and I would go to him for coaching.

And as Joao was saying, I was deeply depressed in my early thirties. And Ali was a tiny little Zen monk. He was always peaceful and always happy. And so he taught me what I call my model of happiness. I thought about it as an engineer. He thought about it or felt it intuitively. And together we built the model of soul for happy. I wrote soul for happy for another reason, which is interesting. Ali died because of an unexpected medical error. He was diagnosed with an appendix inflammation, which is a very simple operation. And it went wrong and it was a surprise to us. But to him, I feel that he knew he was going.

Many, many signs told me that he did. Two days before he died, he sat me down and he said, papa, I know that you've been trying really hard to make the world a better place. My work at Google has made the world a better place, believe it or not. But he said, I want you to never stop trying. But I want you to start counting on your heart a little more often. So the day he died, I actually knew that what he was telling me was to write down our model and share it with the world. So, like a businessman, I gave myself a target. A target to make 10 million people happy. In my engineer's businessman-targeted mind, I was thinking that if I could honor my son by sharing his happiness model with 10 million people and having him remembered, sending him a happy wish, then I've done well. Better than not. At least it wouldn't bring him back, but better than not.

So some of you, because it's the UK, some of you may have seen some of my videos. Somehow the universe has been conspiring to help me make this mission happen. Within around two and a half weeks after my book was released, my videos started to go viral online. Many of them were viewed millions and millions of times. Some of them were viewed more than 100 million times. And by the definition of what my mission was, I wanted people to understand that happiness is a choice. That if they actually put their minds to it, they can achieve their happiness. And I wanted them to share their happiness forward, to have the compassion to tell people that they love how to find their happiness, too. And by those measures, my current estimate is that we're at 23 million happy. And so the target has been overachieved. But that doesn't mean that we should stop.

And so, around a month and a half ago in the Netherlands, we announced that we're going to take the target a little bit higher. 1 billion happy and 1 billion happy. Believe it or not, for a Google executive, is not a big target. Okay. I know we can achieve this. I really do. And I know we can achieve it, especially if you're on my side. And so, before I start to talk to you about the rest of my story, I want you to promise me that if you believe in what I'm going to tell you right now, you're going to first make a choice to make yourself happy. And then you're going to have the compassion to share it forward and make others happy. Because it really, really matters. Not only for you, not only for the ones you love, but for our society as humans going forward. And I'll share with you why in a few minutes. Promise? Promise. Good. Thank you. If you don't believe it, you have no obligation.

So let's do this. To help you understand where I'm going, I need to talk about technology a little bit. This is why Nigel's presentation completely changed my approach to today. And remember, I'm talking. I'm on sabbatical from Google, so I'm talking on my own personal capacity, not as a Google executive. So think about it this way. Think about everything you've interacted with today since the morning. If you had told your grandmother 70 years ago that this was going to be your life, she would have thought you're absolutely mad. Most of what you hold in your hand today, whether it's your mobile handset, whether you know, the Netflix and video on demand and your gym, the car that speaks to you, self driving cars driving around you, all of that stuff, which is very, very real. We would have considered science fiction 25 years ago, right?

We take it for granted for some very interesting reason, and we sometimes complain when WhatsApp doesn't work for 15 minutes, right? But the reality is we truly are living in a science fiction world, okay? We truly are going from science fiction to science fiction to more and more science fiction. As a matter of fact, I doubt very much that anything you've ever seen in a science fiction movie growing up is not going to happen in your lifetime, including things like time travel and being a superhero, which could be happening easily in a virtual reality world that will feel very real. Now, with that in mind, one of the most interesting societal impacts of that is what machine learning and robotics are going to do.

Okay? For you to understand how far we've come, please look back. And again, don't take it for granted. Think about how far we've come with machine learning. The world's jeopardy. Champion is Watson, an IBM computer. The world go champion is DeepMind. The world chess champion has been a computer for a very long time, and so many tasks. Nigel was talking about face recognition, word recognition. Computers are becoming smarter than us in so many ways, in very specific tasks, okay? They are going to continue to become smarter than us. And anyone who understands how this is going, it is not unlikely that within ten to 25 years from now that computers are going to outsmart human intelligence. There is really no doubt about it.

Now, I want you to understand that this raises a million questions. Most of them are doomsday scenarios. That's not at all my position at all. I don't want to scare you at all. As a matter of fact, I'm very optimistic about this, because you know why? Most of the big problems that we face as humanity today, when solved by a better intelligence than ours in 25 years time, are going to be solved much, much quicker and much, much easier. If we actually try to solve global warming with intelligence that's superior to ours, we're probably going to do a better job than what we do today.

However, there are all sorts of questions coming up about how that will impact on our society, and there are all sorts of answers that come from our own limited scope human intelligence. So the technologists will say, hey, we're going to build technology to make sure that those superior machines are going to do what we want them to do. Others control freaks will say, no, no, it's all going to be about regulation. We know how to regulate. We're going to regulate all of this. I want you to ask yourself the question. Even on today's Internet, a smart hacker sometimes outsmarts the system. If those machines are smarter than we are, what do we really want to do so that those machines can work on our side?

As a matter of fact, I've been keeping in me for a very long time. I really need you to think about this for a while. We have all of those intelligent, smart machines that are learning at a rate that is comparable to your infant children today. They're learning unprompted. They're looking at the world outside them with massive amounts of data, and they're developing their own intelligence. How do we expect that we're going to outsmart them and control them? How do we expect that we're going to regulate them and they're going to obey. Now, if you look at machines and how we've cooperated with machines in the past to learn from this. Look at chess as an example. Right? For a while, we competed against the machines to try and beat them in chess. And after a while, we realized we're never going to beat a computer in chess again. They're smarter than we are.

So how do chess competitions work today? They are a pair of a human and a machine playing against a human and a machine, okay? It's a teamwork between a human and a machine working together. That is the model that we want to follow. As a matter of fact, interestingly, I chose to wear this t-shirt that serious video gamers in the room will know this game as Portal. This item here is the companion cube. It's an object that works with the player to help you succeed. Okay? It's not working against me to make me lose the game. It's working with me to win the game. How do we do that? Now, this is not a technology question. This is not a policy question. This is a question and a task and a mission for every single one of us.

This is why 1 billion happy, in my view, is the most important mission our humanity has today. Okay, let me try to explain this to you. If you have a two-year-old infant learning from the information that you present to them, how many of you believe that your children are going to learn to do what you tell them to do? Right? Your children grow to learn to do what you do. They want to grow to be like you. And if they want to grow to be like us today and they go out and scout the Internet, what will they see? They will see us cursing each other. They will see us competing against each other. They will see greed. They will see fear.

They will see so many values that are the values, believe it or not, that propelled our society since the 1950s until we are today and helped us build the civilization that we have. But these values are not going to be good enough for the future, because if our machines learn that the real value is to compete against the other guy, they will compete against us. If our machines learn that the real value is to acquire more and have greed, they will acquire more and leave very little for us. We need to build that teamwork. How do we build that teamwork? It's really straightforward. What do good parents do? They become an example.

So I will tell you that we, with 1 billion happy, with 2 billion happy, if we can, we would absolutely shift the value system. I will tell you, the value system that we've built as humanity until today is not going to propel us in the future. We need to prioritize happiness so that our machines understand that what matters is to make us happy. We need to prioritize compassion. So instead of us posting on Facebook stuff to annoy the other guy and make them think that our life is better than theirs, we might as well start sharing things on Facebook that make people understand that we, too, are humans and that we need love and compassion like they do, and that we try to give them that love and compassion. Okay?

Instead of us sharing on Facebook or on social media or, you know, sending in our media and news and what have you documents about how we dislike Trump. Okay, we might as well start talking about, what is he saying right? What is he saying wrong? In a good way where we all work together to become better. Now you will tell me, oh, you're a dreamer. No, I'm not a dreamer. I'm an engineer with a very mathematical mind. We got to 23 million happy in around eight months. I think I'll get to around 30 million happy by March. That's very easy. All I need is a very simple doubling function.

All we really need is an exponential curve. If every one of you tells two people who promise to tell two people who promise to tell two people, if every one of you takes charge of your own happiness, if every one of you goes and watches the videos and understands that it's doable, if every one of you prioritizes your own happiness and asks the other to prioritize your own happiness, their own happiness, within three and a half years, the whole UK will get the message right. With a simple doubling function, 30 becomes 60, 60 become 100, 2120 become a quarter of a million.

In five years we can get to 1 billion happy. One more doubling, we can become 2 billion happy. The majority of the Internet, right? And you all understand that all of the content we have in the world today is more than doubled every year. We are producing so much more content online. We need that shift in value system. We need that shift in mindset. Okay? And I'm here, I'm not talking to you about technology. I'm here to tell you that for the first time in our history, we are in charge, we are in power. If every one of us starts to say, I'm going to prioritize my happiness over all of that crap that they're putting in my head, the machines will learn that your happiness is important. If we don't, no one is going to change it.

So if you're serious about this, join me on 1 billion happy.org. please do your homework and go and watch the videos. It's really simple. Happiness is really, really simple. If you make it your number one priority, it's like your fitness, you make it your priority, it will happen. With that, I thank you very much and I hope that you are going to be optimistic about the future as I am.

Innovation, Technology, Inspiration, Happiness, Artificial Intelligence, Leadership