Alex Pentland - A Nervous System for Humanity: Making Health, Financial, Logistics, and Transportation Networks That Really Work

Most of the functions of our society are based on networks designed during the late 1800s, and use a fixed, centralized architecture that is no longer sufficient for modern society. The recent spread of sensor networks, particularly those contained in mobile telephones, cars, and similar, allow us to reinvent health, finance, logistics, and transportation systems by providing active, real-time control. The key to this transformation is understanding the demand and reaction of the human population, since this drives the loading of these systems. I will show how we can use existing sensor networks to achieve this transformation of society.