TED has unveiled its ambitious speaker lineup for the April conference, themed “Bigger than us.” Why? As Head of TED Chris Anderson puts it: “The theme ‘Bigger than us’ can mean so many things. AI. The arc of history. Ideas and things at a giant scale. Cosmology. Grand ambition. An antidote to narcissism. Moral purpose….”
The lineup includes path-breaking scientists and technologists (like soil scientist Asmeret Asefaw Berhe and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey), smart entertainers (like Joseph Gordon-Levitt and America Ferrera and Derren Brown and director Jon M. Chu), artists and activists (like Brittany Packnett and Jonny Sun and Sarah Sze and Judith Jamison), and the thinkers and visionaries (like Hannah Gadsby and Edward Tenner) who can help us pull it all together.
Because, as our positioning statement has it, the political and technological turmoil of the past few years is causing us to ask bigger, deeper, more challenging questions. Like … where is this heading? what really matters? is there more I should be doing?
Together, we’ll be exploring technologies that evoke wonder and tantalize with superhuman powers, mind-bending science that will drive the future as significantly as any politician, the design of cities and other powerful human systems that shape our lives, awe-inspiring, mind-expanding creativity and, most of all, the inspiring possibilities that happen when we ask what ideas are truly worth fighting for, worth living for.