This TED Talk features physicist and author David Deutsch, recorded live at TED 2019.

In this talk, David speaks live from Oxford, England, via a telepresence robot, which appears on the TED stage in Vancouver.

I'm thrilled to be talking to you by this high-tech method.

Of all humans who've ever lived, the overwhelming majority would have found what we're doing here

incomprehensible, unbelievable.

Because for thousands of centuries in the dark time before the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, people had

low expectations for their lives, for their descendants' lives. Typically, they expected nothing

significantly new or better to be achieved ever. This pessimism famously appears in the Bible, in one of the few biblical passages with a named

author. It's called Kohelet. He's an enigmatic chap. He wrote, what has been is what will be,

and what has been done is what will be done there is nothing new under the sun

is there something of which it is said look this is new now that thing was already done in the ages that came before us

the cahelet was describing a world without novelty. By novelty,

I mean something new in Kohelet's sense, not merely something that's changed, but a significant

change with lasting effects, where people really would say, look, this is new and preferably good.

So, purely random changes aren't novelty.

Okay, Heraclitus did say

a man can't step in the same river twice

because it's not the same river, he's not the same man.

But if the river is changing randomly,

it really is the same river. In contrast, if an idea in a mind spreads to other minds and changes

lives for generations, that is novelty.

Human life without novelty is life without creativity, without progress.

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