Live from Oxford via remote-controlled robot, David Deutsch explains how our ability to attain knowledge could take us across galaxies. He speaks at TED2019: Bigger Than Us on April 16, 2019 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED)
Session 3 featured a dazzling celebration of intelligence — from the knowledge coded in our DNA (and a new way we could rewrite it) to one of the most astonishing tech demos ever seen at TED. Let’s jump right in.
The event: Talks and performances from TED2019, Session 3: Intelligence, hosted by TED’s Chris Anderson.
When and where: Tuesday, April 16, 2019, 11:15am, at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, BC.
Speakers: David Deutsch, David R. Liu, Brittany Packnett, Roger Hanlon, Derren Brown and Doug Roble
The talks in brief:
Physicist, author, Oxford professor and father of quantum computing David Deutsch, who delivered his talk via a remote-controlled robot
David R. Liu, chemist, biologist, pioneer of genome editing
Confidence invites us to perform with certainty, to operate differently when we’re sure we can win. Brittany Packnett lays out the three things you need to grow your confidence as she speaks at TED2019: Bigger Than Us on April 16, 2019 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Bret Hartman / TED)
Brittany Packnett, educator and activist
Roger Hanlon, marine biologist and expert on camouflaged deep-sea creatures
Derren Brown, illusionist and mentalist
Doug Roble debuts his team’s breakthrough motion capture tech, which renders a 3D likeness in real time — down to Roble’s facial expressions, pores and wrinkles. He speaks at TED2019: Bigger Than Us on April 16, 2019 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Bret Hartman / TED)
Doug Roble, senior director of software R&D at Digital Domain, the Academy Award–winning visual effects studio in Los Angeles, California
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Head of TED Chris Anderson and TED current affairs curator Whitney Pennington Rodgers talk with Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, about the future of one of the world’s most important messaging platforms. They speak at TED2019: Bigger Than Us, April 16, 2019 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Bret Hartman / TED)
Here’s what happened on Tuesday of TED2019. A few news-making highlights first:
Jack Dorsey proposed a new way Twitter could work — by following topics and not individual people and brands. Hmm. Also, fun fact: If he had it to do over again, he would not have built the Like button. Watch for Jack Dorsey’s Q&A with Chris Anderson and Whitney Pennington Rodgers on TED.com today.
Digital Domain’s Doug Roble showed, for the first time outside his studio, a jaw-dropping digital animation tool mapped to a live human actor. This avatar-creating wonder tool could revolutionize filmmaking … and also your next video chat.
The Audacious Project unveiled eight ambitious projects to change the world — from a data-backed approach to fighting racist activity, to a sweeping global drive to breed plants that are better for the planet. Between them — and thanks to a good old-fashioned fund drive last night — they raised a collective $283 million, and each project now has enough seed funding to launch. But they’re only halfway to a collective goal of — wait for it — $567m.
And some larger themes emerged …
Changing, fast and slow: In Chris’s indelible image, Twitter is a ship, Jack Dorsey is the captain, and a few of the passengers have come up from steerage to ask if Dorsey might consider, perhaps, turning away from the path of the iceberg. As Chris says: “You’re showing this extraordinary calm, but we’re all standing outside saying, Jack, turn the f*cking wheel.” Jack’s response: “Quickness will not get this job done.” He’s looking for deeper, systemic change (including a few suggested moves that some Twitter users did not love). Rafael Casal had the same question — “How fast should change happen?” — after he touched off a Twitter firestorm around an issue of racial unfairness. He made one brief point on the platform; it gained traction over a weekend; and it got ugly real fast. Now, he asks: Is social media just too quick on the trigger to allow for nuanced discussion of social change? Working at another timescale altogether, Safeena Husain spoke about a deep investment in the far future — by educating young girls today, starting with the 1.4 million girls in India who never go to school. Investing now, today, in the potential of these girls could have a material effect on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, aimed at creating a better world by 2030. Why not start now?
Playing with personas: As Doug Roble demos his jaw-dropping tool to create detailed, real-time digital renderings of a person — in this case, Doug himself, plus an alternate personality named Elbor — a thought arises: Will this next-gen avatar lead to more deepfakes, more fraudulent online personalities? (The likely answer: Yes, but honestly, what won’t?) Meanwhile, from the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Roger Hanlon told us about shape-shifting cephalopods who change their skin color and texture in a blink, to hide, to mate, to blow human minds. Hanlon suggests their smart skin, and their ability to deploy it in sophisticated ways and in a flash, is an alternative form of intelligence, driven by their strange and wonderful and very, very large brains.
Service and meaning: Matt Cutts worked at Google for almost 17 years, and he took what he thought would be a six-month break to join the US government’s digital service. Three-plus years later, he’s still in government, finding deep meaning and satisfaction in solving problems that affect real people’s lives. At TED Unplugged, he makes the case to his fellow technologists that if you want to really make an impact, you should leave Silicon Valley, wave goodbye to those crazy perks and free meals, and enter a world where office furniture isn’t a given — but the impact is. Julius Maada Bio, the president of Sierra Leone, offered his own take on the meaning of service. He first took power in a military coup, but his goal, he says, was always to return the country to democratic rule. His other major goal: “Sierra Leone must be a secure, peaceful and just society where every person can thrive and contribute.” Over the past decades, he’s moved steadily toward that objective. Plant biologist Joanne Chory is committed to an equally large and far-seeing goal: developing plants that capture carbon better and for longer than common crops do now which will help mitigate our planet’s creeping carbon levels. Her vision, her sense of mission and her nothing-can-stop-me persistence are genuinely inspiring.
Curiosity makes us human: Educator Brittany Packnett meditates on confidence, the hidden skill that powers many of our other skills. Confidence is what helps you put plans into action, and what helps you keep moving even after you fail. What builds confidence? One key factor, she says, is curiosity, the desire to push beyond who you are and what you know. Mentalist Derren Brown taps into the curiosity of the audience by guessing our innermost questions (and even one guy’s password). How did he do it? He’ll never tell. Appearing via robot, David Deutsch meditates on another force that moves us: the drive for new “explanatory knowledge.” As humans, we desire to understand things and explain them and change them and make them new. As he says: “From the human perspective, the only alternative to that living hell of static societies is continual creation of new ideas, behaviors, new kinds of objects.”
Watch the first TED Talk released from TED2019: Carole Cadwalladr.
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Investor Roger McNamee sits in conversation with TED’s Chris Anderson during TED2019: Bigger Than Us, April 17, 2019, Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Bret Hartman / TED)
Nine days before the 2016 US presidential election, Roger McNamee went to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg — whom he’d introduced, back in 2007 — and told them they had a problem. He’d seen a Facebook group, associated notionally with the Bernie Sanders campaign, distributing misogynistic, viral memes in a way that looked like someone was paying for them to spread. And a corporation had recently been expelled from the platform for selling data on people who had expressed an interest in Black Lives Matter — selling that data to police departments.
Their response: “These are isolated things.”
Then the election happened. In the shadow of Brexit. And Facebook did the opposite of what McNamee, a venture capitalist and early investor in Facebook, prescribed: which was to embrace the victims and tell them exactly what political ads they had seen, when they saw them and who paid for them. And even after an internal investigation showed them the scope of Russian interference in the election — and how they had targeted a specific group of 126 million people in the last gasp of the election — Facebook was slow to act and opaque with their users.
“I don’t want to re-litigate 2016. What I’m worried about is that now anybody can do that,” McNamee says, speaking to Head of TED Chris Anderson during a live taping of the TED Interview podcast at TED2019. Their conversation covered Silicon Valley’s pursuit of attention and profit, monopolies, outrage, filter bubbles, surveillance and more.
“We live in a time where there are no rules and there’s no enforcement, and there are really smart people [using] all this unclaimed data and all this unclaimed opportunity,” McNamee says. “At the beginning, it seemed to throw off nothing but goodness. By the time the bad stuff hit, we were so deep into it that it was really hard to reverse field.”
The effect of bad actors online has spilled offline, McNamee says. “You did not need to be on Facebook in Myanmar to be dead. You just needed to be a Rohingya,” he says. “You did not need to be on Facebook or YouTube in Christchurch, New Zealand, to be dead. You just need to be in one of those mosques. This stuff is affecting people who are not on these platforms in ways we cannot recover from.”
And it’s not just Facebook, and there are things that are less serious than dead that are still serious and affecting people’s lives. “Do you know how [Google Maps and Waze] get route timing for all the different routes?” McNamee asks. “Some percentage of the people have to drive inferior routes in order for them to know what the timing is … That’s behavioral manipulation.”
So is there a fix to get us around the problems caused by the unchecked power of these tech giants — to put a check on the greed and cutthroat race for attention?
“It has to start with the people who use the products,” McNamee says. “At the end of the day, we’ve been willing to accept a deal that we do not understand. The actual thing that’s going on inside these companies is not that we’re giving a little bit of personal data and they’re getting better ad targeting. There is way more going on here than that. And the stuff that’s going beyond that is having an impact on people’s lives broadly.”
McNamee doesn’t believe that the people in charge of the tech giants are inherently bad. “[Mark Zuckerberg] is one good night’s sleep away from the epiphany where he wakes up and realizes he can do more good by fixing the business model of Facebook than he can with a thousand Chan Zuckerberg Initiatives.”
“I’m not talking about intent, I’m talking about action,” he continues. “What winds up happening, because of the way the incentives of the business model work, you wind up getting creepy outcomes … You can have unintended bad consequences for which you are are still responsible,” McNamee says.
Opening the conversation up to include the audience, journalist Carole Cadwalladr, Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie, Sun Microsystems founder Bill Joy and many others had a chance to share their thoughts on the problems — and some solutions.
McNamee ends on an optimistic note — emboldened, he says, by recent events like teacher labor actions that have worked, the air traffic controllers whose partial sick-out helped end the government shutdown and Elizabeth Warren’s introduction of an antitrust policy that had Republicans feeling jealous:
“What I find is that everybody I meet — whether they’re on Fox or MSNBC, whether they’re on conservative talk radio or NPR, whether I’m in Nashville, Austin, Atlanta, or I’m in San Francisco or New York — everybody sits there and goes: ‘I get it. There’s something wrong. And we all have a role to play in this.'”
This interview was presented by Klick Health, sponsors of the TED Interview podcast, now heading into its second season.
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In a powerful personal talk, illustrator, author and screenwriter Jonny Sun shares how social media can be an antidote to loneliness. He speaks at TED2019: Bigger Than Us, on April 17, 2019 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Bret Hartman / TED)
Day 3 of TED2019 featured three sessions of talks, a live podcast taping — and some world-changing ideas.
First, some news:
You could give the next best TED Talk. If you have an idea the world needs to hear, put your name forward to speak at next year’s TED conference! We’ve just opened applications in our TED2020 Idea Search, a worldwide hunt for the next great idea.
Can Twitter be saved? Jack Dorsey’s interview with TED’s Chris Anderson and Whitney Pennington Rodgers is live on TED.com. Hear from Jack about what worries him most about the messaging platform, which has taken a serious chunk of the blame for the divisiveness seen around the world, both online and off.
Inside the black hole image that made history. Also just published on TED.com: astrophysicist Sheperd Doeleman, head of the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, speaks on the iconic, first-ever image of a black hole — and the epic, worldwide effort involved in capturing it.
Some larger themes that emerged from the day:
The spread of misinformation online is the great challenge of our time. We, the everyday users of the internet, might have to do what major tech companies and governments can’t: fight the misinformation we see every day in our feeds. Claire Wardle suggests we band together to accelerate a solution: for example, by “donating” our social data (instead of unwittingly handing it over to the tech giants), we could help researchers understand the scope of the problem. Could we build a new infrastructure for quality information, following the model of Wikipedia? In a special recording of The TED Interview, venture capitalist turned activist Roger McNamee picked up on the threat of misinformation, tracing the contours of Silicon Valley’s role in the 2016 US presidential election, Brexit and much more. After their conversation, Chris and Roger held a robust discussion with the audience, taking questions from Carole Cadwalladr, Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie and Sun Microsystems founder Bill Joy, among others.
But social media can also be a force for good. In a powerful personal talk, illustrator, author and screenwriter Jonny Sun shares how social media is his antidote to loneliness. By sending jokes and endearing, misspelled, illustrated observations on the human condition “out to the void” of social media, he’s found that the void is often willing to talk back — reminding us of our shared human-ness, even if only for a moment.
The new pursuit of happiness. Researcher Rick Doblin studies the use of psychedelics as medicine, including treatments that show promise against PTSD and depression. Used medically, he says, psychedelic drugs can heighten a patient’s emotional awareness and sense of unity — even create a spiritual connection. Psychologist Elizabeth Dunn studies how we can create more happiness by being more altruistic. The secret? You have to see the effects of your giving, and feel a true connection to the people you’re helping.
Exploring the unexplored. Science has a “geography problem,” says paleoanthropologist (and stand-up comedian) Ella Al-Shamahi. We’re not doing frontline scientific exploration in a massive chunk of the world, which governments have deemed too unstable — places that have played a big role in the human journey, like Africa and the Middle East. She takes us to Socotra, an island off Yemen known as the Galápagos of the Indian Ocean, where she joined the area’s first frontline exploration since 1999. Ninety percent of the reptiles and 30 percent of the plants there exist only, well, there. Al-Shamahi is hoping to return to Socotra and, with the help of local collaborators, continue to explore this alien land. A little further offshore, undersea explorer Victor Vescovo joins us fresh from an expedition to the bottom of the Indian Ocean — the fifth ocean bottom he’s seen. In conversation with TED science curator David Biello, Vescovo shares the technology powering his new submersible, designed to explore the deepest parts of the world’s oceans. He describes his project as “kind of the SpaceX of ocean exploration, but I pilot my own vehicles.”
Architecture doesn’t need to be permanent. When it comes to cities, we’re obsessed with permanence and predictability. But by studying impermanent settlements, we can learn to build cities that are more adaptable, efficient and sustainable, says architect Rahul Mehtrota. He takes us to the confluence of India’s Yamuna and Ganges rivers — where, every 12 years, a megacity springs up to house the seven million pilgrims who live there for the 55-day duration of the Kumbh Mela religious festival. The city is fully functional yet impermanent and reversible — built in ten weeks and completely disassembled after the festival. Studying the Kumbh Mela helped Mehrotra realize that our preoccupation with permanence is shortsighted. “We need to make a shift in our imagination about cities,” he says. “We need to change urban design cultures to think of the temporal, the reversible, the disassemblable.” And architect Bjarke Ingels takes us on a worldwide tour of his work — from much-needed flood-protection improvements around lower Manhattan (scheduled to break ground this year) to a toxin-free power plant in Copenhagen (with a rooftop you can ski on!) to a proposed floating ocean city (powered completely by solar energy — which could serve as a model for living on Mars.) We need to imagine vibrantly flexible habitats, he says — and, in doing so, we can forge a sustainable future for all.
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TED returns with the second season of The TED Interview, a long-form podcast series that features Chris Anderson, head of TED, in conversation with leading thinkers. The podcast is an opportunity to reconnect with renowned speakers and dive deeper into their ideas within a different global climate. This season’s guests include Bill Gates, Monica Lewinsky, Tim Ferriss, Susan Cain, Yuval Noah Harari, David Brooks, Amanda Palmer, Kai-Fu Lee, Sylvia Earle, Andrew McAfee and Johann Hari. Plus, a bonus episode with Roger McNamee that was recorded live at TED2019.
Listen to the first episode with Bill Gates now on Apple Podcasts.
In its first season, The TED Interview played host to extraordinary conversations — such as the writer Elizabeth Gilbert on the death of her partner, Rayya Elias; Sir Ken Robinson on the education revolution; and Ray Kurzweil on what the future holds for humanity.
Season two builds on this success with new ideas from some of TED’s most compelling speakers. Listeners can look forward to hearing from Bill Gates on the future of technology and philanthropy; musician Amanda Palmer on how the future of creativity means asking for what you want; Susan Cain on introversion and other notable past speakers.
“Ideas are not static — they don’t land perfectly formed in an unchanging world,” said Chris Anderson. “As times change, opinions shift and new research is published, ideas must be iterated on. The TED Interview is a remarkable platform where past speakers can further explain, amplify, illuminate and, in some cases, defend their thinking. Season two listeners can expect a front-row seat as we continue to explore the theory behind some of TED’s most well-known talks.”
The TED Interview launches today and releases new episodes every Wednesday. It is available on Apple Podcasts, the TED Android app or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. Season 2 features 12 episodes, each being roughly an hour long. Collectively the Season Two speakers have garnered over 100 million views through their TED Talks.
The TED Interview is proudly sponsored by Klick Health, the world’s largest independent health agency. They use data, technology and creativity to help patients and healthcare professionals learn about and access life-changing therapies.
TED’s content programming extends beyond its signature TED Talk format with six original podcasts. Overall TED’s podcasts were downloaded over 420 million times in 2018 and have been growing 44% year-over-year since 2016. Among others, The TED Interview joins notable series like Sincerely, X, where powerful ideas are shared anonymously, which recently launched its second season exclusively on the Luminary podcast app.
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