We're all here to discuss, what if you could live to 150? Just to set this up briefly, scientific advances have made it possible for people born today to live to 150. We're going to discuss whether or not that's really true. And of course, that raises some questions. What will a meaningful life look like? What stresses does this create for our existing systems and institutions? And how will business and society at large handle those stresses? This is a very hypothetical conversation. We're going to start by exploring the science just to lay the groundwork. And then we will talk a lot about the implications. Let me start by introducing our panelists and asking them to talk about their specific interests in this topic, why they're here with us. I'm going to start with Simone Schurle, who sits in the middle. She's an assistant professor for responsive biomedical systems. Well, I guess I just got that wrong, didn't I? The responsive biomedical systems laboratory, the Institute of Translational Medicine, and you're a Bronco Weiss fellow at ETC Zurich, and you're also one of the forum's young scientists. Will you tell us why you're here on this panel? Thank you, Amy. Yeah, so my research is on responsive biomedical systems. So in my lab, we design micro and nanoscale systems that we can apply in biomedicine basically for diagnostics and therapy. And so it's kind of supporting a shift of medicine to become more proactive and personalized and that, of course, directly will impact how long we live, how healthy we live. And so that's why that's, of course, its impact on longevity and why I'm here on the panel. Great. And next to you on the far side is Bob Kane, the CEO and founder of Luna DNA. Sorry, Bob. And you're also one of the technology pioneers. You're a technology pioneer for the forum. So why are you here on the panel today? So I have to say, I'm not exactly an expert on aging, but I have a unique perspective and a lot of experience. It's a topic that I've thought about, especially when we think about quality of life for many years. And that's important because as we live longer, we don't want to add years really to the end of our lives. We want to add years to the middle of our lives. We want to ensure that we get those years when we're more vibrant and active, and possibly we'll have to be working during those years to support the number of people, the populations at the time. But additionally, I've spent 30 years in genomics, 15 of those years at Illumina, and started a company after I left Illumina called Luna DNA where the idea is to bring together health, genomic, social determinant data in order to drive discoveries that help us understand how to improve our quality of life and how to live longer. And lastly, I'd like to say that I started a rock climbing gym business while I was at Illumina. And really, that was around quality of life because we need to stay active. And rock climbing allows you to be flexible. It brings in your core. It helps you with problem solving. And the way we set it up, there's a community there. And so when we think about that business, we think a lot about improving our quality of life and maintaining a long quality of life as we get older. Good points. And finally, next to me is Jerry Mueller, a professor of history at the Catholic University of America. Jerry, why are you here on this panel? Well, I've written a number of books on the history of capitalism. And I've taught a number of courses over the years on the interactions between the family and the market and the way in which changes in the capitalist market have changed the shape of the family and the way in which what goes on in the family affects people's achievement and so on in the market. And one of the projects I'm currently working on is a book length project on thinking trans-generationally in a personal sense. It's called Planned Grandparenthood. And I think that's the set of interests that brought me here. Terrific. And I should actually introduce myself. I'm Amy Bernstein and I'm the editor of Harvard Business Review. And of all the panelists, I know the least about this topic and I have tremendous interest. So I'm looking forward to this conversation. Let's start with the science. And I'm looking at you, Simone. Tell us what is going on. What do we know? What's happening that will enable us to live to 150? Well, so we know that aging is the primary risk factor to the major human pathologies, including diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular, and degenerative diseases. And we are the state in science where we basically try to tackle these death-leading diseases from, I would say, three directions. So there's the basic science and basically of a healthy living, of more knowledge and healthy nutrition that make us live longer. We know exercise is good for you. Sleep well, eat well, and exercise. Then there's another strand that's going to have a stronger impact in terms of how much does it really increase our life expectancy. And this is where new technology is coming in in medicine, which I'm also working on. So new ways of monitoring our health status to basically shift medicine to be more proactive, as I mentioned, to kind of be able to. And so to give an example with nanosensor technology I'm working on, basically, an obstructive systems that can roam through the body to detect if there's already an onset of a disease early on. So we can basically interact before you have symptoms and before a disease actually develops. So this is kind of a shift of more preventing and keeping us healthy. And then there's a whole strand of basic error of research that's really on aging itself. Because aging is the root of the source of all these causes of, as I said, a primary risk factor for developing these diseases. So instead of working on the diseases, working on actually controlling aging. And what we do know now is that at least the rate of aging, it's basically controlled through genetic pathways. This is what we know, as well as through biochemical processes. And there was a huge increase, basically, in the knowledge, thanks also to advances in genetic engineering with CRISPR, as we can now modify organisms to basically study these effects, for example, in genetic pathways. So a model organism that is commonly used in aging research is worms, the elegans. There are also other, like fruit. You can work us with fruit flies or yeast. Basically short-living organisms. Because then you can do the research a bit faster. And so with that, we can basically test all these hypotheses on genetic pathways, knock out a gene, and then see how it impacts actually the life of that organism you're looking at. Yeah. So I guess my question is, can the people in this room live to be 150? Right now, the people here, from my perspective and the knowledge I think we have right now, no. But I mean, if you look at, for the past century, we basically managed to double the life expectancy. So for the US population, in 1900, life expectancy was around 47, and it's now around 80 right now. And so I think this showed us just, and this was because we managed infectious diseases. And now we did huge leaps in cancer, which was then the next kind of big disease to treat. Of course, still lots to tackle here. But I think this just shows us how much has happened already in a century. And as we know that science and progress is just accelerating, of course, the forecast looks even more promising what we can achieve. Current forecasts, again, for the US population, some statistics of predicting by 2050, it's going to be reaching 95. But I think it's hard to predict because a lot of the aging research where we know more about the genetic path, where we learn more about genetic pathways, there can come some surprises, unexpected big jumps that we could make. OK, Bob, so you're an expert in genetics. What do you have to add? I expect that someday we'll have people who reach 150. I don't expect to reach that age. Because I'm 912 right now. I try. The way I think about it, though, is biology is very complicated and additional. I think that our decisions we make in our environment play a bigger role today for many of us than our biology, whether it's our microbiome or a genome. So for instance, smoking and lung cancer used to be the biggest cause of mortality 30 or 40 years ago. Today, it's probably diabetes in the United States. And so the decisions we make, as was mentioned earlier, around our diet and exercise, are going to have the biggest impact for most people. Additionally, what I know in terms of genomics is there are certain genes that have an impact on aging. Also, there's a chemical. I can get into one specific area that I know of. There's a chemical called NAD that's made in the nucleus of the cells. And it was found that that chemical is made less and less as we get older, as we get past 30. And that chemical relates to inflammation and cell repair. And so there's a lot of work going on trying to increase the NAD in our cells. It's not as easy as we think, because it's in the nucleus and you can't simply take NAD. It won't get to the nucleus. But there are many promising efforts going on to try to work within the biological pathway to increase the NAD. And there's a lot of great experimentation that's occurred that shows that with increased NAD levels, we actually have some reverses in aging. All right. I just want to shift directions a little bit and ask a fundamental question. Why is this idea of extending life even desirable, Bob? I'm not Bob. I'm sorry, Jerry. I'm looking at Jerry and saying Bob. So I think in many ways, the idea of living to 120 or 130 or 150 seems to me to be highly undesirable. Indeed, a kind of nightmare scenario in terms of how people think about their lives and the things in their lives that give meaning and purpose to their lives. The late German sociologist, Rolf Darendorf, talked about the fact that in a healthy society, people have a balance between opportunities and linkages. So choice, opportunities to pursue professional careers, social mobility, and so on, but also linkages. That is, what are the bonds that connect us to others and that for most people actually give the most meaning to their lives? And although some people do leave their mark in the world through various forms of creativity, be it entrepreneurial creativity or scientific innovation or artistic creativity, for most people, they leave their mark in the world by have one of the main ways, at least in which they make their mark in the world, is by having children and nurturing them. And if all goes well, having descendants after that, that is becoming grandparents. So if you conceive of your life as not just a segment that begins with your life and ends at death, but as part of a larger narrative that you're descended from someone and you are going to produce descendants in the future, that creates a way of thinking about the whole shape of your life and about the possibility of human renewal across generations. So the notion of extending our lives to 150 seems to be based on the tacit assumption that more is always better. And the death is a kind of defeat, but it's not. And if you think about your death as something that is going to happen, it helps you to think about what shape you want your life to have. So you don't have to live longer and longer to do more and more. There's certain periods of life when you're preparing for adult tasks.  But the notion of pushing life longer and longer and focusing our attention. So purely on health and fitness means you're sort of governed by Fitbit. And I don't think that notion is a very healthy one. In addition to that, I think there's other negative implications of this in terms of human creativity and so on. But by and large, I think I'm all in favor of medicine and I'm all in favor of public health and the things that have helped us to live longer. But the notion that we should devote so much of our resources and so much of our attention to living indefinitely seems to me to be perhaps misplaced. So Bob, you've given a lot of thought about what makes life meaningful. So talk a little about that. Yeah, so generally, I agree, but I don't think the problems are inherent in aging. I think they're problems we just have not faced historically. And coming from genetics and genomics, maybe I can think of it in a different way. I look at Darwinian evolution and we have evolved as a species to deal with different stresses in our life, stressors, whether they're physical, emotional, spiritual, or intellectual. And if you take those away, we start to deteriorate. And so talking about sort of your physicality is a good example, but it also has to do with emotional and spiritual. If we don't have a purpose in life, sometimes life loses its meaning. And so we need to now develop new purposes in life. As we age longer, we need to find things we're passionate about, for instance, and be able to rise up, accept challenges, and go after those challenges, and hopefully create value, and do it in a way that brings meaning and purpose to our life. We need to have intellectual challenges in our life. And so I think that there's this idea if you don't use it, you lose it. And I think that's a challenge we just don't know how to address as a civilization. And it's a challenge that does cause a lot of issues today in terms of mental health, for instance, and in other areas. But I think it's a challenge that we can address. And I think it does bring into question about how we raise our next generation of children to be prepared to address these challenges and others. So Simone, you have some thoughts. Yeah, I think I want to resist a little bit in the notion of, A, so why would our purpose, why do we have less, or so you think that the purpose is not enough for 150 years, the purpose we have now, or why does that change if we live longer? We all have now a purpose, and it would be just we have more time for that purpose to unfold. And then I think it's a lot depending on, so I would be excited to live until I'm 150, under good conditions. And that's why I'm excited about my research, and it keeps me pushing to basically enable us to live and to maintain a good health until late age. And I think it's almost an intrinsic desire of humankind. I think the imagination of longevity and the Alexia of eternal youth has been in history for, and I can refer to you, Jerry, forever with us, this kind of idea of it and fascination. So how do you make this, what is the meaning? Go ahead, Joe, you have something to say and I have a question for you. Well, so here's where I disagree, Simone. There are trade-offs in life and across lives. And resources that are going to be devoted to keeping me alive to 150 are resources of time and money and energy, and to some degree natural resources as well, that are not going to be devoted to having children, having grandchildren, perhaps great-grandchildren. So there are real trade-offs in terms, as I say, of resources. And so it seems to me that, in a sense, the desire to live to 150 is kind of narcissistic. That is to say, it places too much emphasis on us as individuals and less as us as part of some larger ongoing process, including the familial process. But not confined to the familial process. What if you don't have kids? Right, right. So as I say, other people make connections in the world, make linkages in the world through modes other than having children, obviously, and clearly. But for most people in the world, that is one of the most important ways of forming such bonds and linkages that give meaning and significance and emotional warmth and so on to their lives. And that entails transferring resources to them, including your time to take care of your children, or maybe even your grandchildren to some degree, and also economic resources. So I think there are real trade-offs. But I think, on the other hand, we can have a discussion of whether we want to live longer or not. I think it's anyways happening. I mean, it's already happening. So this is just the other side, maybe. Sorry, and we anyways have to get prepared now for how we deal with it, whether it's going to be 150 and how many decades from now. But it's the situation. We are experiencing the fastest rates of age increase since 1960, as we're having right now. So maybe we can also shift. Because I guess we all have different aspects on an idea of whether it's desirable. But it's happening. It's happening. Yes, it's happening. And it's not going to slow down. It's just going to speed up. Well, OK. So Bob, you have some interesting thinking about the implications for child rearing. But we have to think about how we bring up our kids differently. I think traditional education, for one thing, it's a bit outdated. The education system doesn't evolve that quickly. And then if we look at the exponential technologies that are introduced to our world today, the education system doesn't necessarily address how to be comfortable in a world with these technologies moving forward exponentially. And people are uncomfortable in this world as a result. Then if we add on to this the fact that we're going to live longer, have multiple careers, and have to specialize in different things, and be lifelong learners, then that adds more complexity. And so I guess I'll just quickly break it down into four aspects. And one is really wisdom. It has to do with the traditional foundation in education. Another one is well-being. We have to help our kids understand how to maintain their emotional and spiritual well-being and develop resilience in their lives. Another is service. I think that we need a local and global perspective installed in our children. And a belief in something greater than themselves, and because that can help them with meaning and purpose in their life. And finally, communication and relationships. So our ability to communicate with each other, to connect with each other, and to work on teams to get things done is going to be critical for success in the future. Right. OK. So you mentioned, we'll think about education, careers. Jerry, you have some thoughts about the implications for women and their careers if we live much longer. Right. So actually, the kinds of considerations that I have in mind are already highly relevant, because as Simone rightly said, on average, we're living a lot longer than in the past. Longevity has been going up to some degree since about 1800 and more since 1900, in part due to improvements in nutrition and public health. And actually, medicine has less to do with it than those larger things, but now medicine too. And now, life expectation already in advanced industrial societies is into the mid-80s and is certainly going to extend somewhat longer in the time to come. And I think in many ways, we haven't caught up with that in its relationship to the other most important thing that's been going on in the last 50 or 60 years, which is the movement of women into full-time work. And the increasing pattern in most societies of what we sometimes call assortative marriage, that is people tending to marry someone of roughly the same economic level, educational level, and so on. And it's created a life pattern where that in some ways is not conducive to human happiness if you think that having a family is an important part of human happiness for many people. Because if both a husband and wife have to get an education and then get higher education, I mean, get advanced education, get professionally established, then they're well into their 30s. They start looking around for a partner. They find a partner maybe. Then they're into their later 30s. Then they're into a period of declining fertility. So this has ramifications not just for women, but for men. And I think so many of our major institutions are structured on an outdated premise. That is, there's gonna be a kind of gendered division of labor where the husband is going to be in the workforce full-time and the wife is going to be the homekeeper. That was the case for a while from about 1800 to 1950, but it's often not the case any longer. And to prove yourself in almost all professional fields in law, in science, in scholarship, and so on, you have to do it mostly in your 20s and your early 30s, which is precisely the period when women are most capable of having children and when the men who also want to have children and who are married to them would be able to have children. So we have a situation now where there's a gap in most advanced industrial societies between the desired level of fertility among educated people and the attained level of fertility. That is, they have fewer children than they would like and sometimes no children at all. And I think we have to think about restructuring. There's no, since we're living longer and longer and lots of us are going to be working 20 or 30 years from now well into our 70s and maybe beyond. There's no reason why people have to start the most active part of their professional life when they're 22 or 25. They could start when they're 35 and then they still have 35 or 40 years of work and sort of human capital formation before them. So I think with the longevity that's already occurred and the increasing longevity that to some degree is certainly going to occur, we need to think more broadly about how institutions ought to adapt in terms of people's personal happiness, in terms of sort of wasted opportunities in business for making use of a female intelligence from labor power and in terms of public policy. I mean in China and in many other industrial societies, as you know, the level of fertility is way below replacement. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but when it gets as low as it is in places like Japan and Korea and some degree Germany and so on, then you have problems arising, not just in terms of active workers supporting pensioners, but a society that becomes older and older is in some ways less innovative and creative and there are other problems involved too. So all of this then has public policy implications as well as implications for businesses and people's personal happiness. But let's go back to what you're saying about the implications for women and I wanna ask someone how that hit her. I think that's a very important point and you're absolutely right in this. I do believe that if we are with the effects on longevity that also probably the fertility might, so we might be able to basically also have kids later so that also shifts then with that. If we are actively really changing or controlling aging rate, if you come to that point that we actively doing this on a cellular level. But I think in terms of the shifting basically, the infrastructure, kind of the societal conditions we are now in and then I support absolutely the idea we have to make changes in education as well in the work system of how basically what becomes accepted or what becomes possible or what we also kind of promote. So I think that's an importance that we already should take now. As I mean, I can only say in academia it is we have not, it's particular in the STEM field. We're not so many women and the problem is to this career or basically having family while being a faculty is still under current conditions, how to combine. And so we need different environment where we can basically accommodate the needs of women for that. I wonder if living longer will bring opportunity to address this challenge. And so the way I think about it is if we have a society that's living to 150, there's gonna be more than 100 years that individuals will have to spend in their career. Which means that taking time off to take long vacations, taking time off to raise a family is gonna be a smaller and smaller proportion of our career and I think it brings opportunity. Mm-hmm, Jerry, you're having a thought. So we're already in a situation where people who are not that old, who are in their 60s, say, or 70s depend on not just not only their children but their grandchildren to work the devices that they need for day-to-day life. What about when you're 130, who are you going to call upon? Your great-great-grandchild doesn't sound like a very pleasant scenario. Yeah, so there's an assumption running through a lot of what we're talking about today that old age is going to move higher, it's gonna sort of move out as we get older. How's that gonna happen? How are we gonna have those, how are the middle years, are the years from, say, 40 to 90 or 40 to 110 going to be healthy, productive years? Bob, I'm looking at you. Well, I think it's a combination of science, it's a combination of understanding how our decisions affect our lives. So, I'm almost 60 and I don't see myself slowing down at all. And I'm hoping that with one day, somebody else in my position 50 years from now will have science to help them, too. Oh, we have to talk, Bob. But, I don't necessarily have science today, CRISPR technology or ability to increase NAD levels, but there are other resources at our hands that depend on the decisions we make and diet and exercise, family structures, things like that and creating the right challenges in our life so that we can thrive. And so, the way I look at it is, I don't think we're gonna get to be 90 years old and in a nursing home and live another 40 years. I think what's gonna happen is we're going to be in our 40s and a little wiser and a little bit more along in our career and then we're gonna change careers and we're gonna have another 30 years in a career and maybe change careers again and we're gonna get an opportunity to have maybe multiple lives in that middle portion of our life. All right, I'm gonna ask one more question and then I'm gonna open the floor to your questions. So, you talk about multiple careers, but the fact of the matter is that we live in a culture that is infatuated with youth. How are we gonna continue to create more opportunities for people as they get older? Because it is, if you are out of work and you're 55 in the United States at least, finding your next job is, it takes a miracle. So, I'm wondering how we're going to shift values and attitudes. Yes, Simone? Well, I think I could envision or I envision a model of where we, coming back to the lifelong learning where we could basically have a system where we have an educational part, you work, you have another educational part, you work. So, you're always, because right now it's then at 50, it says, oh, well, what that person learned 30 years back is now not, it's outdated. So, you basically keep updating continuously and to that extent it just becomes normal that we shift careers that is this kind of just completely different model. I find it right now incredible that we kind of, I mean, we have education, different systems, some actually go leave high school and have had lost education at 16 and then there's no connection back to that and you keep on working until retirement and that's just, these models will not be, I think this will just not be sustainable at all and I think it will help on many levels our society to keep on education as we live to handle actually technological progresses and be capable ourselves and not asking our grandchildren how to deal with the technology but basically to continuously keep updating the knowledge. And I think this isn't only a challenge of growing older, there are exponential technologies out today that are obsolete jobs faster and faster and at an accelerated pace and so you could go to school for a certain position and within a few years of leaving school that type of job may no longer exist and so we as a society have to understand how to retrain ourselves and how to become lifelong learners in order to keep up with this pace of exponential technology and I know a lot of people in different parts of the world want to slow down technology because it makes them more comfortable but again, it's not something we have control of, the technology will move faster and that's completely separate from aging is gonna cause us to have to understand how to retrain and adapt a new career. All right, I have so many questions but I wanna see what the audience has to say. Yes, I think I see a question in the back. Is someone, yes, back there. There's a microphone walking over to you. Hi, I'm Inz Ryan from Editer and Chief of Hospitals Japan. I have a question for Professor Miller. How does extending life affect inequality in the world because if someone gets rich, will they stay rich for 100 years or 200 years? Will we be able to build a system that can for us to have second or third chances? How does life extensly affect inequality? So look, very broadly speaking, in the history of capitalism, here's what happens. You already find this in Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Things that begin, new innovations begin as luxuries. That is, they're expensive, they're available to a relative few. As time goes on, there's money to be made in making those luxuries cheaper and available to a larger and larger percentage of the population so that they become what are considered to be necessities. And Smith in The Wealth of Nations already makes the point in 1776, what many English people at this time considered to be day-to-day necessities were luxuries some generations ago. So think of, if you have, perhaps one or two of you have a cell phone. 50 years ago, I think one or two, a few people in each country, the head of state perhaps, had a portable phone and it was this big, and a phone that, a device that had the computing power that is in your current cell phone, took up about the size of this stage at least, right? And cost over a million dollars. So this is one of many more recent examples of what starts as luxuries becoming available to more and more of the population. So I think that's going to be true inevitably with a lot of these improvements in health too. They're going to, the richer people are going to have access to them first, richer societies are going to have access to them first, but over time, they will become cheaper and more widely available. Next question. Yes, I see a hand back there, yes. Thank you, I'm Timothy Ma from Hong Kong. My mom is now aging 100 years old. And I'm worrying that I'm also having the same life as her. Why? Because I think internally, we are not well prepared for aging. And externally, the whole global world is also not preparing for the aging. So my question is how we can really prepare for the age friendly society, not only on employment, further education, job opportunities, physical health, and even the finance model as well. So maybe our expertise can give us some advice. How we can be well prepared for the age friendly global world to come. I think that, that's a tough question. I think that over time, we'll have to start to change how we educate our children to prepare our children. But for us ourselves, I think we're going to have to realize that we have to make decisions differently. We have to move outside of our comfort zone and do things differently. And I guess the way I think about it is, so we all look at our lives in two different ways. We all have this narrative about our life and how we would like it to be. And then we all have decisions we make on the experiences in front of us, the experiential self. And I think in order to prepare for aging, this sort of long term narrative self that talks about preparing for aging is going to have to more and more really control our decisions if we want to be prepared. And we have to give up some things, whether it's desserts or whether it's taking five minutes every hour to walk around, things like that. And so I think that's part of it. I don't want to minimize the medical impacts of aging today because they do exist and there are certain things we can't address and there are certain things that many years will go by before we can improve on. But I do think we still can make a lot of decisions in our daily life if we really want to prepare for being more fit and having a better sort of mental, physical, emotional quality of life when we're older, but we have to be willing to put aside sort of the experiential self a little bit in the daily decisions in order to have the discipline to prepare ourselves. Any other thoughts from our panelists? I think that there's also from a technology side, there is really a lot in development going on basically for example supporting elderly, living independently through basically smart housing. I think in all that there's also just this development coming on top of it too which will help us to basically have a better life when we're getting old to still be independent and can live at a home wage system, basically digital supervision in a way. And I think there's just from several directions improvements going on and again I cannot say it often enough. These models are also latest so keep on learning and there are lots of open lectures or basically courses that the retired population can take at university to basically keep on training yourself. And I think this outlook is more positive. So I have two very disparate thoughts. From a technological point of view, the thing that would improve aging the most right now is finding some kind of a cure for Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia because as our life has extended as our lifespan has extended, as you know a higher and higher percentage of people get these diseases that come with aging and that are in many ways the most sort of debilitating and negative aspects of aging. I know a lot of people have been working on that but it's quite striking that from what I've read and so on there's actually been very little tangible progress on finding a cure or alleviation of what is really in many ways the great health problem right now I think involved with aging. Second comment is entirely different. I think you should think about the problem of aging when you're 20 and 22 and one of the things you should think about is do I wanna have a robot taking care of me or do I want to have people in my life who I have a close ongoing connection to possibly because I've given birth to them and I've given birth to somebody who in turn has given birth to them and who therefore have a sense of attachment to me and how am I gonna get there as opposed to living with the robot which is not quite the same thing. And let me just add that I agree, I didn't address one the societal challenges and economic challenges of aging because I don't really have an answer for that so I guess I moved on to other issues and in terms of the mental health I think a third of us are predicted to have a mental health, whether it's Alzheimer's or dementia as we get older and that's a major issue and in fact I'm not talking about it today because I'm not promoting LUNA DNA but the company that I'm involved with is really focused on trying to work with people to gather the genomic, the health, the data about their lifestyle in order to try to unravel these problems and so there's a lot of effort going into dealing with these very, very complex problems and I'm hopeful that we'll start to make inroads in the next decade. Yeah, I wanna make one more point that I think we should really not only think about the expansion of life expectancy, there's also an index for the healthy life expectancy and that keeps increasing as well and we have a whole, it complete, so I recommend to read a book of Joe Coughlin from the MIT Aging Lab who describes the longevity economy and kind of what we're experiencing because also of this healthy life expectancy increase that we shouldn't think only about, yes, we're gonna get older and it's gonna be terrible because we're gonna all be sick, we're all working, there's so much effort in basically making these years as being healthy so reducing the cost overall, of course it's costly for us to get there but then in the end there will be less, the idea is to have less healthcare burden because we're preventing the sickness and right now kind of in what we see a lot in what's going on in the six, when you're age 60, 65, people are fit, people are excited to explore, they travel, there's a huge market that's kind of not as considered as it should, it's actually a time where you don't have to work anymore currently, I mean that will need to change to finance and support that but it's the time where all of a sudden, yeah, even new hobbies get explored, my mom started to golf recently, she never did that so this is now the time and kind of, I think this is just also a really a more positive outlook we should have on this topic. Okay. More questions, yes. Oh well, should we give someone else a chance? I just want to give a supplementary information, there will be a half section on 10, 45 about aged tech, that's what Professor is talking about, robotic for elderly people. Okay. Hub E, yes. Hub E, okay. And there's someone down here who has a question, down here, someone coming, okay. So you've, hello, can you hear me? Yes, yes. So you have talked a lot about the middle years trying to increase the quality of life during those middle years, from a hard science perspective, how much of the science that's helping us to prolong our lives is also trying to understand how to preserve, I guess, the relative youth of our bodies. So yeah, that's exactly that kind of research where we are now understanding more of, basically we can take control over the rate of aging, which would then allow us to basically slow down the process, which would then, if you take on early on, if there will be medications, I mean, currently aging is not defined as a disease, but the WHO actually declared just end of last year that aging is a condition that is treatable. And as soon, and there's a huge kind of push from scientists in the aging research to define aging as a disease that is treatable. And when we come to that medication will be, so then the FDA can come in to basically go into medication approval because then it's a disease we can treat. But, and then moving to that, it will be basically, and there are any NAD trials going on, and there's kind of some opinions going in the direction that NAD would then be something to take as a statin at an age, you know, 40, 50, when kind of the degeneration is kicking in more heavily to then work against that. Yes, Jerry. Yes. I think this is really a perverse way of thinking about things. Aging is not a disease. It may be useful in terms of getting government grants to define it as a disease, but if you actually think about aging as a disease, I think you have a real misconception of the nature of life. Aging, the aging of our bodies in the aging of our minds is a natural process, and the question is how we come to terms with it and how we shape our lives accordingly. So I can assure you that I have less mental capacity now than I did when I was Simone's age. And that, and my children have greater mental capacity now than I do. And that's fine. I have less active intelligence, less fluid intelligence, but I do have some more accumulated wisdom and knowledge. These things balance themselves out over time, but the notion that we should, that aging is a disease, either our mental aging or our physical aging, I think leads one really to misconceive the shape of one's own life and the shape transgenerationally. I mean, I see my grandchildren who are three and who are six months old and three years old, they have amazing mental capacity, the amount of stuff they're learning all the time. And it's a fantastic thing to see, but I appreciate that. I have gratitude for that. I have a certain awe for that in part because I'm not thinking all the time of Jerry, how much slower are you in terms of thinking than you were when you were 35? I would add to that though, that the pace of our understanding and the pace of technology is moving faster than evolution can keep up with. And so if we look at where evolution really is, it's back in the days where we would have children in a village maybe, and once we had our children, our role in society was to take care of our grandchildren maybe, as basically the middle generation went out and did the hunting and gathering. And in that sense, we didn't need a lot of the facilities that we need today. And evolutionarily, a lot of our capabilities start to shut down so that we require less energy and we start to wither away and make room for future generations. And I think there's a good argument that that was a product of evolution and we have moved past that. And in order for us to really allow evolution to catch up, we have to force the changes ourselves. And so I don't think any of these areas where we lose capability are inherent. And I can go back to NAD as an example, as one example where evolutionarily, we start to produce less and less of that. And interestingly enough, people with more NAD have a better ability to repair cells, for instance, to repair broken bones. It has to do with being sort of nearsighted and using reading glasses. And it's shown that increasing NAD can reverse some of these effects. And one last thought is interestingly enough, you can increase NAD through diet, fasting and caloric restriction and through exercise. And so supplements aren't really required, but supplements can also be a big benefit, the right ones, and we don't have those today. Jerry. Yeah, so I think that this idea that there's this greater and greater gap between our natural biological capabilities and the role of technology is in many ways is often sort of the opposite of the case. So I'm 65, I'm not as good as I was when I was 35 or 45 at remembering the names of books, right? And I'm an academic, so it's important for me to be able to cite the names of books. But there's this technological development called Google. If I can remember some of the words in the title or one of the words, one of the names of the authors, I put it in there and the technology compensates for my biological diminution. Yes, let's see. Yes, I see a question in the third row at the end, I think, second row. My question is, I'm from, my name is Shivram, I'm from Bangalore. I wanted to know what is the probability of figuring out a cure for aging in next 25 years? And if you want to do it, how much resources do you need? Like in the sense of money, like is it one billion dollars, 10 billion, one trillion? How much do you need and what is the probability of reaching there in the next 25 years? I think that's a very hard question to answer. And I would rather like to refer you actually to a newly founded Academy of Healthy Life and Longevity because there is so much, you can also use now Google to look for answers and you will find a lot that is just wrong, I'm sorry, because there's a huge interest in public in longevity and there's, of course, but there's also so much misconception and it's hard to differentiate between actually clear scientific evidence and just claims that have no foundation. And so we rely also on basically centers where we know when you go there and what you look up there is actually correct. So in that sense, I would rather refer you to some of the leading researchers in the aging science that is really related to genetic reprogramming, NAD trials that are ongoing and kind of all under genetic and biochemical processes where we're just at the beginning of understanding how we can influence aging to find the answers. And I would add that if we do use disease as a model for aging, then what we call aging is really just a clinical bucket that a lot of different symptoms are lumped into and it's really not one thing, it's many, many, many complex things. And so when we talk about a cure for aging, I think we'll start to check them off and we are already, that's why we're living longer and I don't think there's a sort of a panacea out there that's gonna allow everybody to live longer. I think that we'll continue to check them off and some findings and discoveries will be more beneficial than others. Jerry, you have, oh, I'm sorry. No, I just wanted to add to that. I mean, we are now at a state where we kind of identified some of the major hallmarks of aging, but the complexity of the interplay of these different hallmarks. So we have also, of course, a bit genetic changes on yourself because of your environment, but there are then intrinsic genetic changes and so on, so there's just a lot that still needs to be unlocked and to be seen. I just wanna say, if you meet somebody who can answer your question about how much it will cost to solve the problem of aging and how long it will take, hold on to your wallet. So I'm just seeing if we have one more, yes, I see one more question right there and this will be our last question. Thank you. So this needs to be a bit of a split in the panel I'm detecting between Jerry and you other guys and one of the things that seems to split is the idea of aging being a natural process, right? And I'm interested in the idea, it may be natural, but does that mean it's desirable? And it was natural in 1900 to die at 47, is that good? So I'm interested in whether that idea, and also it's similar, Jerry, you were talking about family it being the center of everything, it seemed to be a strong thing you were commenting on. There are other ways to derive value and other linkages, right? So there may be, when we age 150, maybe the linkages will be different and so I'm just interested on the opinion of the panel of that, you know. Any thoughts? Well, I just wanna say, your fundamental premise is correct that not everything that's natural is desirable. The question is whether there's something morally desirable in to some degree living one's life in keeping with certain natural processes or whether we want to really live unnatural lives. So why shouldn't we all be cyborgs, right? And there are of course people around to advocate this. And so I think there's some, I think you're right that not everything that's natural is desirable, but one can go too far the other way and I think the trick is to find some sort of middle ground. Just also what does it mean when we say it's natural? I think it deals also with this, we don't know yet why this is happening, but at the moment we understand and we get control and we can't get control of it, why would we not change? Because if the desire, and I would like to, maybe who doesn't wanna live at 250 if you would have a high quality of life, you would look younger or you would keep on looking young for a longer time and overall be still active and know basically good brain capacity or cognitive capacity who wouldn't wanna live until 150. I feel we even have the thought of afterlife because we don't wanna give up the idea of not living anymore or some have the idea of afterlife. I mean it's, so I just feel it's interesting that we're not, that there's so much opponent or that's not moral to think of if we can do it why shouldn't we live longer at good conditions? Well, I'm afraid we're gonna have to draw it closed and I think that's a great question to set our minds thinking. What I'm taking away from this is that we need to think about how we think about aging. Is it a disease? Is it a natural process that we need to embrace? What needs to happen in our world in terms of not just science but government policy in terms of business and all the other functions and institutions of our world to enable these healthy long lives? And then one question I'd have that I don't think we can answer tonight or today. Is what we're talking about going to be a rich world phenomenon. So with that, I'm gonna draw this to a close and thank you all and thank our panelists. Thank you.


Hello and welcome to the session. In this session we will discuss the following question which says A scholarship of $21,000 per alum in perpetuity starting from end of six years from now is to be started by an institution It pays in four equal installments starting at the end of present year If the rate of interest is 7% find the amount of each installment it pays The present value per petrol annuity is given by A upon I also in case of immediate annuity The first payment will start at the end of the first period And so the first installment would be equal to A into 1 plus I to the power of n minus 1 That is the first installment will earn interest for n minus 1 periods In the same way the second installment will amount to A into 1 plus I This will to the power of n minus 2 And the second installment is paid at the end of the second year And it earns interest for n minus 2 periods and so on that is in similar way the other installment could be found This is the key idea that we use in this question Let's now proceed with the solution In the question we are given that a scholarship of $21,000 per alum in perpetuity is to be started by an institution Such that the scholarship starts from the end of the sixth year And the institution pays in four equal installments starting at the end of the present year It's also given that the rate of interest is 7% We have to find the amount of each installment it pays Now the scholarship isn't perpetuity that means it is forever Suppose four equal installments of A are paid by the institution Starting at the end of the present year Now it's given that the scholarship would be starting from the end of the sixth year from now So this is our present year Now from this present year our sixth year is this So at the end of the sixth year the scholarship is started That is from here the scholarship of $21,000 is started And that is given in perpetuity Now we will have to find the amount that is required at the end of fifth year To give the scholarship from the end of the sixth year So to give the scholarship $21,000 from the end of onwards in perpetuity The amount required would be given by Using this formula that is the present value of perpetual annuity which is given by A upon I This would be equal to $21,000 upon I I is equal to R upon 100 Which would be equal to 7 upon 100 R upon 100 is equal to 0.07 So we write here 21,000 upon 0.07 We remove the decimal and now 7 3,000 times is 21,000 And so this is equal to $300,000 Now we can find out the four installments that the institution would pay And these would be found out by this formula The first installment would be equal to A Which is to be found out into 1 plus I That is 0.07 to the power of n minus 1 In this case would be 5 Installments are being made And these are being made at the end of these years So this is the case of immediate annuity And n would be considered as 5 So 5 minus 1 is 4 So we put here 4 So this is equal to A into 1.07 to the power of 4 Now in the same way The second installment would be equal to A into 1.07 to the power of n minus 2 That is 5 minus 2 which is 3 Now the third installment would be equal to A into 1.07 to the power of 5 minus 3 That is 2 In the same way The fourth installment is equal to A into 1.07 to the power of 1 Now these installments That is A into 1.07 to the power of 4 Plus A into 1.07 to the power of 3 Plus A into 1.07 to the power of 2 Plus A into 1.07 Would be equal to this amount That is 300,000 dollars Now taking A into 1.07 common This into 1.07 to the power of 3 Plus 1.07 to the power of 2 Plus 1.07 plus 1 The whole is equal to 300,000 So this is further Equal to A into 1.07 This whole into Now 1.07 the whole cube is 1.2250 Plus 1.07 whole square is 1.1449 Plus 1.07 plus 1 The whole is equal to 300,000 So we now have A into 1.07 into 4.4399 The whole is equal to 300,000 This gives us A into 4.7507 A is equal to 300,000 And from here we get A is equal to 300,000 upon 4.7507 So further we have A is equal to 63148.59 So we can say Hence the amount of installment Which needs to be deposited by the institution Is equal to 63149.00 Rounded off 10.00 This is our final answer This completes the question Hope you understood the solution of this question


You are going to have all sorts of different responses But they will mean the same thing. No, anyway, the point being a response class is a Behavior a class of a series of behaviors that have different topography, but all have the same functional effect on the world, right? There's a I can do videos in very staunchy ways. I could talk to you like this I could tell you the actual core definition of a response class We're gonna have a little bit of fun with it I could talk with accents, which I'm not going to do right now I could sing it, which I'm also not going to do right now. Those are all different topographies of behavior I could probably fart it, which is a genuinely different topography of response.  It's all a matters response class


So, welcome back to the Kaos Sony TV stage. The next talk is about software architectures and software architectures are one of the things young programmers should learn in their early years, maybe. I hope they do so. They are the solution for problems seen by more experienced programmers when they have to fix code, which in some shady path found its way from the first feasibility prototype by a tinkerer to production code in the field. Our speaker is Big Alex. He studied informatics in Dresden, took the usual way of dissertation apprenticeship industry job and from there came to be trainer and consultant. He gives seminars for project management and software architecture and he intends to talk about when and why software architecture is important for us as hackers and makers. He gave us very, very basic introduction and he condensed some weeks of details in the 40 minutes of video stream. He did his very best. And software architectures found in that case maybe a non-commented spaghetti code, I know, and one of the well-known big ball of mud. Maybe Big Alex can give us better examples and alternatives in the next 40 minutes and the stage is yours. Nice introduction and don't get me started out about prototypes and prototypes becoming production software and something like this. And I'm still a little bit scared about this call and I still wonder what came over me to think that anything even remotely resembling a meaningful introduction to software architecture could somehow be compressed into a 40-minute talk, but I try to do my best to have some meaningful talk for you and I really, really should have known better as Knob's already announced me.  But what made me do this talk is that there are some things that I wish that I would have known when I started taking on complex projects and more, more bigger long-term software projects and I want to give to you a short introduction what is software architecture really about and what you should consider it to be. The problem I have with this talk is a bit what makes me even more scared is the audience of this talk because every one of you for sure has his or her scar tissue and campfire horror stories about software architecture and software architects and usually as hackers or makers we have to deal with the results of bad software architecture, which plays in our hands a bit and some of us even consider architects to be people who do not or cannot code anymore or want not code anymore and everyone also have already met in his or her professional life those people that Joe Sposky called architecture astronauts. So he says there is a really, really great rant about those type of architects and he says they're so high up in abstraction and think on such a removed level that what they create is basically useless. They create high level abstractions, high level ideas about our system and but they're good and fine there well but they are not of any use to someone who wants to implement the system. We definitely want to avoid this and the other horror stories most of us possibly had what sometimes is called conference driven architecture that there are some big hype topics in your company or community where you have to go yes we have to use microservices and the customer wants blockchain and you know it's a big steaming pile of whatever garbage but this is what the customer wants or what others see as important and or what lead architect seem to be important. It comes from marketing slides and it really, really hurts developers if this is done without proper reasons and intention. I don't say that all of these technologies are bad or horrible. Microservices can totally make sense but there has to be a reason for this and not just because someone told your project manager while golfing that you need to do microservice architecture and you will become the next Netflix or Google have to do it that has to be a reason for this. So what I want to do in this talk we can only cover really, really the absolute basics of software architecture. So at first I want to start out with when might architecture, software architecture be relevant for you, be relevant for hackers or makers or this community? Why do I think this might be important for you? The next thing is what it is really about, what is meant by software architecture. This is the thing that I wished someone would have told me at the very beginning before diving into this topic and then why it matters and then I will give a very, very brief introduction what you can do to come out with what we call a good architecture or what can be a good architecture, whatever this we will talk about this later on. So let's start with some assumptions about you, why should architecture be relevant for you and why should you care about it. So what I have in mind about the people in my chaos community in Carl Stoner and C3D2, the hackers, why should they care about architecture? What they usually do is completely opposite to architecture. They just want to have fun with technology and find new creative uses. But if you really want to use a system in another way that is intended, it helps very much to know some common structures or design rules or typical limitations of the system that is under scrutiny by you. So typically every class of system has its trade-offs. It's dark alleys where someone did possibly cut corners to make life easy for the development team or to bring it faster to the market and something like this and software architecture possibly could tell you something about this. For the maker community, this is also not quite that obvious why we would want to use architecture. If you want just to think of a technology and play around and create new fans and stuff, that's totally fine. You might very well live without architecture. But the thing is, at the moment you want to create some sustainable software solutions, some projects, some library or framework or some Arduino application that you want to use for a longer amount of time or you want to build a community of developers or users around it. Then you simply can't live without knowledge of software architecture because it's an important success factor to make this thing fly. Without software architecture, you might run into trouble. The last people of our community, beside all the software professionals, they have to deal with architecture every day here. Social political actors, those people working in net politics, those people wanting to make sure that we get better software in our daily life from government projects and so on. The thing of software architecture is not only about technical decisions. When a project fails or a big government project runs astray, this is not necessarily because there are bad software developers and bad software architects at this project. There are a lot of other drivers for projects or for IT systems that have sometimes a much, much bigger impact than technology on the system. So there are political reasons. This is context of the systems. Why do people watch software projects fail and do nothing in big corporations or organizations? In this year, some cases of big software projects which had a great architecture and were not that hyped and successful, like commercial projects which had not so good architecture. So if you are a political actor, you might want to know what is behind of this. So before we continue, let's first clarify the terms of the architecture because we will use it a lot. Of course, when I talk about software architecture, one thing it could mean is engineering science. So the other uses of the terms of the architecture are usually what you want to end up with. There is also definition about this and this is quite to the point. This is software architecture is about the fundamental concepts or properties of the system which is embodied in its element, how it's decomposed into components and building blocks, how they relate to each other, how they relate to the environment. Then this is a prospective, still a programmer as well. But then the second part is important. That is the principle of its design and evolution. What are the rules? What are the constraints you use to decompose your building blocks? What are the rules you apply to communication and relationship to those building blocks? The other meaning of software architecture is of course what you really ended with. So on what's said, software architecture is a set of design decisions which have made incorrectly may cause your project to be canceled. So at the end of the day, when we talk about software architecture, software architecture is just a property of your IT system. Your system just has an architecture. It's not a description of its intended design and it's not, probably, should not be some treated that way but it should not be some upfront design by some enterprise architect or someone who tells you how to write code, how to write software. This is not what architecture is about, it's just a property of a system. So the problem is you can choose to ignore it. But that's totally fine. If you have reasons to ignore it, you can choose but you cannot have no architecture. You always have an architecture and if you don't care about the architecture of the system you create, it takes a course of it own. If you don't actively shape it, you have to deal with the results of just your design decisions. Then it takes just any form and you have to deal with it and this can become very, very nasty at the end. The longer the project goes, you all notice at the beginning of each project everything is easy, everything is beautiful. You have a green field to build things but the more releases you have, the more difficult becomes change and this is a real problem if you don't care about your architecture. Your architecture should help you with this. So let's take a super, super oversimplified examples for this. You want to make, light up your Hexpress. You want to have more more shining lights and so on. And if this is just a fun project, if this is something cheap you throw away after several months or after the party is over you, or if you just want to learn Arduino IDE and programming, architecture might not be that relevant for you. Just go loot the scrapbox, just take away, start your Arduino IDE or choose any of the existing open source projects that can light up LEDs and Bob's your uncle. You can be totally fine with this. But what happens if this project escalates into something bigger? Let's imagine you want to light up the whole building or you want to light up the assembly at the next camp or something like this where you have not one LED stripe but 100 or more or if it turns into something like an open source project that is for dealing with those LED stripes like VLED from air cookie or something like this which is a really, really nice project. So if you just want to have lights you don't have to hack it yourself anymore, you just can install it on your ESP here. If that what you do, that what you build turns into something like such a project which evolves over years, which is cared for by a community of developers and which should run with different kind of LEDs with different user extensions and so on, then it's time to think about architecture. So as we have already said, you just have an architecture, your system just exhibits an architecture, it is just there and what you want to do is you want to give it a shape, you give it a form, you want to give it tools, you want it to be a good architecture whatever this means now and also a good architecture in one year or in two years that helps you cope with change and so on. The problem you have at hand, each hacking project traces this right now when you develop stuff you have to make some design decisions and those design decisions can be very, very fundamental. For instance, programming paradigm or what programming language to choose, use the Arduino IDE or use a platform IO, what technology to use or should it run on a Raspberry Pi or on ESP or should it run on an older Arduino or something like this. And the next choices you have to make are even more difficult and complicated. You have to decompose your system into manageable isolated building blocks. You have to give it a structure, you have to find in which component to divide it and how those components should depend on each other. The thing is what you work with right now is a set of requirements that is far from complete. You only know some of the requirements, you for instance want to say yes, we have one tool have at least five different LED stripes and with each 100 LEDs and we should have nice fading effects and you know some of the quality requirements but not all of the system. This is what every take your own project, think about your own project. This is what every project starts off with. A very abstract, very malleable idea of requirements and constraints. There are some industries out there where all the requirements are there at the beginning but for most of our project usually not the case and it's definitely not the case if you do just a hacking project or a making project. So the next thing is you have to work with some assumptions about the future. You have to make decisions based on things you don't know yet and what it makes even more complicated when it is a long-term project. You do not only have to think about your IT system itself, those requirements but also about the process of developing it. This is something that can spend months or years and usually large IT projects and company develop over 10 or 15 years of lifespan. This is a lot of time and this development process puts additional constraints on the development of your IT system that are in many, many cases not technical. You are not allowed to choose the best engineering solution. You are a good engineer and you want to build the best LED light out there but you do not have any time to do it or you do not have the resources to do it or you do not have the skills. You just have to learn C++ or something like this. You just start learning to work with the Arduino IDE and your development team, the other people, hackers and makers that contribute to your project, you do not know what they are good at and how they are available and if they will commit to the project for the next coming months or years, especially an open source project, commitment is a difficult thing that requires to onboard people just because they like to do it. This is completely different from how a company works. The next problem is this is a moving target. All this changes over time. The time spent for your project over several years, a lot of things can change, people change, requirements and constraints change, the technologies change over time. All this changes independently and you somehow want to manage this and still want to come out with a good architecture and this is the real difficult part in such projects. This leads us to a major question, what really is a good architecture or at least the architecture that is good enough for your needs. The second question is how can we make design decisions that result in a good architecture for the project to build and doing this without big upfront design because you do not know the future. If you don't know the future and can foresee it, you just have to cope with change somehow. You have no major crystal balls that tells you what your requirements will be in several months or years. So let's go to the first question, what really is a good architecture? And then you hear the answer that every software architect will tell you and nobody really like it depends. It depends is always a good answer for software architect because it really depends and a really good software architect will tell you what it depends on and it depends on your goals and objectives. So is it just a fun project or do you want to really light up the next fusion with it and want to use it over the next years and so on. And there is no good or bad architecture without taking the context into account. And by context, I do not only mean the requirements on your system. By context also mean your development process. What skillset do you have? How much time do you have? How much money do you have? How skilled your developers is? What your experience with such systems is and so on. And only if you take this context into account, you can come up with an architecture that really fits your need. If you talk about a good architecture in general, they showed one thing what it should provide you is to help you minimize the resources to build your system and to maintain your system. The second part people often forget they only think about building the system as fast and cheap as possible.  And this is also the part we don't know about. This is something that will happen in the future. We don't know if the certain libraries you choose to work with are still available in two years. Or if something bad happens like with log4j that it turns out to be a major issue and you have to update your system. So then the next thing a good architecture should do is help humans to understand the system. That is probably one of the biggest issue in systems design and systems engineering that our systems became increasingly complex. The Great Race Hopper once said before World War II everything was easy. After that we had systems. And the complexity of our IT systems are now so big that it's really a limiting factor for humans to understand how they work and how to change them or how to implement new features or how to adapt them to changing requirements. This is why your architecture should help you in this process. It means at least you have a meaningful division in separable components to contain complexity and you want to have some means of abstraction. You don't want to think about every and each detail of every and each subsystem if you want to change something. You want to decouple these things. And of course you want to do it because your architecture should help you to cope with changes which also happen in the future and provide your guidelines for your design decisions. And the problem we have with this design decisions is they are not necessarily rational design decisions. A rational decision is something where you can weigh all your options, find out everything you need and then choose the best options you have. And this does not happen very, very often with architecture design decisions. They are so-called bounded rational decisions because you have limited information available. You only know some of the things. There are a lot of what we call ikkivises. I know it when I see it. If you ask someone how the system should be, they say, I don't really know or just build it and I will tell you if it's right. I know it when I see it as the usual thing we have to do it. But you also have limited time to make this decision because if you do not make it within the next days or so on, you lose a lot of time in your project. And you have a limited cognitive capability to do this multi-dimensional optimization. So how do we come up? What is a good thing to come up with good design decisions that lead us to a good architecture? So how to come up with a good architecture? And step number one should always try to be sure about your requirements and your system context. If you don't know what drives you, what drives your decisions, what is important for you, then you cannot do really good design decisions because your design decisions are always a tradeoff where you have to sacrifice something for something else.  You cannot make a good design decision. And the other thing is about requirements and constraints and context as they often have the best buy date. If you do not fulfill the requirement of connecting all the maps in the RC3 world at least today, then your requirement becomes pointless. So you have to know how your requirements change and how stable it is. If you ask someone if you or she really needs it, then it can say, yeah, someone told me I really need this feature and I want to have it. But it turns out it's not a thing or she's really interested in or makes money with or it just he or she has just been told that everyone needs this. So you should know what are your goals, what are your influencing factors to your architecture, how important they are and how stable they are, how they will at least make an assumption about how they change over time. And one specially nest kind of requirements are quality requirements, because if functional requirements change, this is something we can cope with in our everyday life. This is normal somehow more or less. If a quality requirements of your system changes, for instance, your LEDs should now provide a PVM frequency of 1000 Hertz and not only of 200 Hertz for some reason, this can be a major problem because this might change the whole system and you might have to redesign your system completely. So you should really watch out that you have the most important quality requirements on your radar and find out how good your system should do things, how stable it should be, how maintainable, how changeable, because all the change in one of those quality requirements can mean that your system design becomes obsolete and you have to come up with a whole new architecture to cover for it. And to not let this happen one good thing is to work incrementally. Do not try to fix everything at once at the start of your project with a big upfront design, this usually doesn't work. You don't know everything in the beginning. Use iterations, use small steps to improve your architecture. So it's okay. You should have some course idea how your architecture should look like some guidance. If you don't have some guidance, you cannot do design decisions, but you have to prepare for it to change. And what your architecture should enable you is somehow to cope with those changes. And one important thing that you are able to do is that you know your tradeoffs. This is, I think Mark Richards coined the term everything in architecture is a tradeoff. So and also the corollary to this is if you as an architect have found something that is not a tradeoff, you just haven't discovered the tradeoff behind it. So to make good design decisions, you have to find out which components of your system are somehow connected, how they are coupled to each other. And if I change one component or the requirements for one component, how does it impact the other components, this component is coupled to it. Even if we take such a simple example like our LED lights, there are already such a lot of tradeoffs and real big project at this even worse. For instance, you could decide that you have to design this version to use software PVM to support a lot of LED stripes or to use hardware PVM, which has a lower load. The thing is if you so you cannot have some features, you have less stripes or you want to have a higher PWM frequency to don't have those Perl effect. Then you move your eyes, but the higher your PWM frequency, the more electronics problem you get and the lower is your dynamic range. You cannot have very, very low steps between the brightness of your stripes. And don't let's get started about such optimations between frame rates. And then you want to have a very high frame rate to have smooth animations. You have a very high load on the systems. You might have dropouts. You might not be able to synchronize it. For instance, if you want to light a stage with it and then switch the light and you want all the lights to switch at one. And this is sometimes this is absolutely a tradeoff to have a high frame rate to have it really synchronized. And don't let's get started about features and about quality attributes. For instance, do you want to have some nice over the air update to have it maintainable to not having to go to each of these lights to change your firmware? But this has a lot of security implications. Do you want to have something in your network like this? So it also you lose a lot of memory to enable over the air update and so on. And everything in your design decision is a tradeoff. And what you should do is identify what you traded against what are the quality of feature or attribute of your system. This is something you should bring out in the open, make them visible. And the good thing to do is, for instance, using architecture decision backwards. You should make your tradeoffs open because these tradeoffs are not visible in the code you write. They are just usually just in your documentation. So next thing is you have to cope with change and to be able to cope with change very well. You have to identify the things that are really, really hard to change. And those what those are depend on your specific project or system. But usually hard to change things like programming paradigms if you choose functional or imperative programming or your programming language, it's difficult to change it later in the project. You have to rewrite everything or the platform you choose or the middle there or some of the libraries you choose. Sometimes it's very, very difficult to change them. Or if your system provides a public API to others that a lot of other components, a lot of other users will use, then other systems will use then those things changing those things always comes quite at a cost. You can decouple from those changes. This is totally possible. But even decoupling brings to additional complexity in your system.  So how would you do it? What do I do when things that are hard to change change anyway? Unix has a quite cool strategy for it. It basically has a set of small tools that do exactly one thing well. And they communicate with standard protocol. So they are very, very nice decoupled, which means every of your small Unix tools can be changed really bit by bit, no pun intended. So we already talked a bit about coupling and we use this a lot and it's an important concept to have. So what is this coupling? Coupling means there is some kind of dependency between your components. When you change one component, it might probably have implications to other components. So as a programmer, you know about coupling a lot. If I ask in trainings about coupling, usually people come up with coupling by call. If you want to call another component, a function or a method of an object, you are coupled to this. You are coupled by data structures and method signatures and so on. If you use a common database field, for instance, or common data type and one of this is changed, then you have to look out to other components who also use this if they can cope with the change. This is something most programming languages or a lot of modern programming languages take care for you with type safety and so on, but not all programming languages do. So you might want to watch out for this. You could hand over data as text or as JSON with all the JSON schema and then one component changes what's in this JSON file and suddenly your application crash. This is a sign that you are coupled via data. Also what programmers usually know they are coupled by inheritance. Inheritance between glasses is a very, very strong kind of coupling, but there are a lot of other modes of coupling and this list is by far not completely not complete, but of course we might be coupled by the fact that the components have to run on the same system or on the same virtual machines. Some components have to create other components. There's also some kind of coupling or you have a coupling via time that you rely on something happening before you can do something. And this is something that is usually not visible in your code. Modern programming languages provide constructs for this to make it easier to handle some of these things, but you cannot handle all of these things. And there might also be things you are coupled by which don't have any representation in your code at all. Like for instance, all your components need to be deployed at the same time because you are a layered monolith, you have strong dependencies and you have to implement fixed release dates so that everyone can merge his or her changes into your project so that you can make a new deployment. So and you can decouple or you short decouple as good as it gets. What you really want is not to have that much coupling between your components because it makes changing your system difficult and it makes thinking about your system difficult. And you have a lot of ripple effects when you change something, but even lose coupling as a trade-off. If you couple something loosely, it usually adds more complexity to your system, it adds overhead to your system. So and you should really know when to decouple. So and you have to have to have coupling in your system, you cannot get rid of, you have to structure it somehow.  And software architecture provides you with a lot of design principles that help you do this.  Most modern programming languages provide one or the other means of information hiding or separation of concerns is something you should definitely choose. Those people from object-oriented programming know it as single responsibility principle, which is not quite the same, but basically the same.  You have less relationships between this component. There are a lot of other things, design principles, software architecture has on its leaf. I could make an own talk or own session about them. So if you want to have a follow up on this talk, the next thing will for sure only be about design principles, you should definitely look into them. But one thing you should notice is you do not strive for the perfect adherence to this design principle. You should strive, look if you can violate them because the thing is some of these design principles are really a trade-off in their own. For instance, every programmer knows they should adhere to the dry principle. Don't repeat yourself because the opposite of dry or sweat waste everyone's time. But not adhering to the dry principle, have duplicate code in your system can be very well for you because you can independently develop this code. You have decoupled the development. You can give it to different teams. So basically if you think about microservices, microservices violate dry all the time because you do not want to have inter-service communication because it's so expensive. That's why it's a good reason to violate dry because if you stick to dry, it may increase your coupling because if you do provide an abstraction for something you had when you used dry before and you provide an abstraction, you are suddenly coupled to this abstraction. So everything is a trade-off here. I think you get it. We are running a bit out of time. That's why I don't want to talk that much about pattern. Patterns are a very, very important concept of software architecture. You don't have to invent everything yourselves. Patterns provide you with reusable solutions for your problem that probably someone else already had. And also they provide something to talk about, to give you a structure and terminology. There are a lot of good sources for pattern. Don't invent your own pattern. Patterns are not invented. Patterns are discovered, but look out what patterns you might use. And there is also a lot more than just architectural design which we have covered now for software architecture. The most important thing is write stuff down. Nobody likes documentation. Everyone knows documentation saves time later on, but it might not be your time that is saved. This is a problem with documentation. But make it easy for others to provide documentation. For instance, use a template-based documentation. And if you do architecting, you are suddenly in marketing and politics. You have to train others. You have to convince others about your solutions, talk to other stakeholders, and make it work for them. So if it doesn't work, then you might have either a serious problem that what you design doesn't fit the needs of your stakeholders or your team or the people you work on this project with, in this case, for a hack space, then you should find out what their needs are and should find out if your design matches the requirement in context. But also a lot of non-technical things can go wrong. For instance, in companies, you have the problem that compliance with hierarchy is very often a big thing. You are not allowed to do architecture because you don't have a certificate or something like this. This inevitable leads to real conflicts. Or you have someone that has just got assigned a title architect and this person becomes a bottleneck because he doesn't do architecting. He doesn't reach a high enough level of abstraction. It's not that you should become an architecture astronaut, but you need some level of abstraction. If you do everything yourself, you cannot do architecture anymore. What usually works best if you want to make your architect fly in a company or in a group of hackers or makers, you should definitely avoid assigning architecture responsibility by hierarchy or title. I think this also will not happen in our community. Our community is quite immune to that. But if you watch it in your company, look out architecture responsibility very often and very well accessed without explicit titles of someone being an architect. Let just people grow into the role. Experienced programmers usually become architects themselves. I don't have to teach them anything anymore. They do it intuitively. This is the same thing that responsibility for architecture comes to those people who really care about the architecture and not who you assign to it. If you don't have an architecture role, it can be shared by a team. This is totally doable in development teams that you can share the role of the architecture between people according to their skills. Just go into a meeting and ask who can tell me something about how we did, for instance, over the air updates on our LED stripes. Look who comes up with answers, who cannot explain it. This is someone who might have an architect role in there. So our time is up. I'm sorry I'm forming late and didn't cover everything really well that I wanted to cover. What we covered so far is only the what about software architecture, why it matters, and a little bit of what is good architecture and very basics of architectural design. There are a lot of more things to talk about like how do I do a good decomposition and components? How do I separate concerns very well? What do I do with cross-cutting concerns, documentation? How do I find my influence and factors and so on? This is all the things that just didn't fit into those four demands. I'm very, very sorry about this, but anyway, we are at the end of this talk and thank you very, very much for your time. Big thank you for your patience and I'm really looking forward for your feedback and for your questions and maybe after the talk, we can also meet in the KAUS SORNER RC3 world, if you have any questions or discussed or if you have questions concerning just your project. I'm very fond of looking in the architectural problems you run into to talk about this to find out what you did or what your problems were there and how do you make it work because being a good architect means always to learn something from people who do architecture right. Thank you very much and I'm looking forward to your questions. So we have a little delay here in the stream, I think. No, I think we're online. Well, here I am. You hear me now? I can hear you now. Great. So we may not have the time for each and every question asked, but let's pick out some of the most important of those we'll get in the time. I will go through the chat later on and I'll give you all the answers after the talk. So software architectures are like knots in seafaring. They help the one who is responsible for opening the knot to be able to open it, as if they are well knotted, he knows how the one who threw the knot did it. So are software architectures known and present in standardization like DIN, SEN, ISO, IC, IEEE, RFC, and you name it? And which one is the standardization organization for software architecture? A standardization IEEE cares about software architecture, but IEEE cares about software architecture in a sense that it treats as a subset of system architecture. If you look at how the ISO and IEEE standard changed over the recent years, there was a few years back, there was still a definition of software architecture. Now there is only a definition of system architecture, which is completely okay because software architecture basically is system architecture for IT systems. So I can't talk about other standardization organizations, how architects are involved. There are organizations which care about the knowledge of software architecture. I don't want to make any recommendations here, but there is a very, very active software architecture community of, in my opinion, very, very clever and very, very excellent people here in Germany or Austria and Switzerland and Europe. And also there are a lot of outstanding individuals in other parts of the world who are good authors and who care about software architecture, but I cannot say anything about their involvement or the way they work together with standardization organizations, the trust, not the thing I know things about. That sounds somehow like the grassroots standardization done by RIPE in the beginnings of the internet, maybe. The problem here with the standardization is that for some terms, we don't even have a standardization. If people talk about the interface, they can talk about the contract between component, they can talk about the implementation artifact, they can talk about interface as a kind of abstraction. So yes, standardization like the Sway-Book or something like this for software engineering would be good. I completely agree with that. Optimal for the next answer, how does software architecture interact with systems architecture you mentioned right now? And how does software architecture reach into adjacent fields like hardware, firmware, licensing, and so on? And how do they communicate in the optimal case? So those are two questions, right? How does software architecture interact with systems architecture? Software architecture is a part of systems architecture. When your system has substantial software parts in it, then your software architecture is a part of the system architecture. It strongly interacts because you have a lot of dependency, because quality and capabilities of the systems you build influence, requirements, and constraints of your architecture. And it's not only interacts with system architecture, it interacts with other architectures as well, like information architecture or the business architecture of your enterprise. It can also interact with hardware architecture. Certain software doesn't work well on a single-credit processor, for instance. So you want to have some architectural separation here. So if you can think about software architecture, then you probably are really, really good about, can also think about system architecture and vice versa. The application domain is a bit different. You have to have more domain knowledge for systems architecture, because you might have to deal with hardware a lot or something like this. So what was the second part of the question, please? How are the involved people to communicate in the optimal case? In the optimal case? Like maybe in requirements, documents or whatever. The thing is, what is your optimal case? If your optimal case is, if everything works right in the end, what is what your optimal case is depends on the resources you have, the distribution of your team and so on. It's probably a good, or in the past, we had a separation of concerns by teams. You had teams that were responsible for hardware. You had teams that were responsible for front-end and people or front-end developers, back-end developers and so on. This usually doesn't work. It can work, but what works better is to have cross-functional. To involve other stakeholders in your decision-making to a certain point. You cannot have them all in your decision, but it also has a bit to do with Congress law, because the structure of the system you built, let's have a look here. The structure of the system you built is also defined by the structure of your development team. This happens inevitably. If you have a strong separation between those teams, then automatically your system develops an interface on the boundary of your team, which is hard to change, which causes a lot of effort to change. So if you want to have optimal communication between, let's say, systems architect and software architect, then point A, they should write a lot of documentation. But before they write a lot of documentation, they should talk with each other and find out what information the other stakeholders needs and what their trade-offs are. Explain their trade-offs to them. So one big Rosa Elephant in the room. Are there common architecture patterns that everybody should know? This is really a big elephant, and this is not a new discussion. Six minutes before that elephant. Humongous elephant. The thing is, what pattern you need depends on the system you build and on what level you operate. You should, as a developer, you should definitely now have the gang of forebook, the design patterns laying around, because it helps with a lot of implementation and design problems and coding. The thing is, architecture patterns really depend on what type of system you build. In the software architecture community, we had a lot of discussion which patterns to include in our curriculum, and what we ended up with was taking out most of the patterns, because every one, we came up with a list of 30 patterns or something, and most of these patterns didn't work for the other people training architecture. So what we captured were, I think, layers, microservices, pipes and filters, and some fourth one. This are the must-know patterns, but must-know only because they are relevant for the training, not because they are really relevant for the person using them in practice. So what I can offer the person who had this question is that we meet later on and find out what kind of systems he or she works on and what patterns might be relevant. The pose literature here is, for instance, distributed into different books, depending on what kind of software you build. For instance, if you have a distributed system, then you usually have other patterns than when you have a monolithic system or when you have a very, very system that is very close to your hardware. Well, maybe we answered that right now. Is there any literature that the developers should read? And I think that's almost our last question. The Internet asks for a next part, maybe next time. Recommending literature is always a bit difficult. If I should only recommend one book, there are a few good books on architecture. If it's a German-speaking person, I would recommend one book by Gernot Starke, for instance. If it's for the English community, the most modern and most comprehensive in the latest time is by Mark Richards and Neil Ford, the fundamentals of software architecture and engineering approach, which is from 2020, which is quite up to date. And if you see talks of Richards and Ford, they always work the time. They really do nice stuff. They also did a new book this year on modern trade-off analysis, which I didn't read, but I went to the workshop they had for this book before it went out. And this is more for those people who build distributed systems, who think about service-oriented architecture, so it might not apply to people coming from embedded systems and so on. But the fundamentals of software architecture book was quite good. Simon Brown has a good book, Software Architecture for Developers. There are Rosenski books, good authors. They are a bit older, like Bas Klemens and Kasman. They are also a bit older, those books, but this should get you covered in the most important one. Sorry to any good author, I didn't mention here. It's really difficult to recommend good books without stepping on anyone's toes.