Something huge is coming, and it sounds like an ad for a bag of potato chips. CRISPR, which makes gene editing so cheap and easy a talented high schooler could do it, is the latest technology that promises to radically change the world. But what exactly can it do, and what are the potential dangers? […]
“I was excited to be a part of the ‘Dream’ theme,” says Al Gore as he walks onto the TED2016 stage. “But then I found out I was leading off the nightmare section.” He admits that what we’ve doing to our world is a nightmare, and that the consequences we’re seeing are quite scary: “Every […]
At the annual TED conference, the audience is as packed with big ideas as our speaker program. TED University is a chance for audience members to give short talks about both big ideas and personal experiences. Recaps of the talks at TED University, in chronological order. Travel points are currency. Brian Kelly is known for his site The Points […]
It wouldn’t be a conference about dreams without an ode to John Lennon. In this session, we take a cue from his iconic lyric and imagine a world without borders. Get ready for talks on mega-cities and online museums, as well as on the global movement to end poverty, Islamophobia and climate change. Recaps of the talks in […]
In 2009, six months after a spectacularly failed climate change summit in Copenhagen, Costa Rican diplomat Christiana Figueres was appointed executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Her job: Leading the next round of international climate change negotiations. At that time, no one believed that we could ever get a global climate change agreement. “In fact,” Figueres says, […]
So much of our world is determined by code — be it the code of life or a string of 1s and 0s. In this session, “Code Power,” we hear from Linus Torvalds, who changed how code is written, and from Girls Who Code founder Reshma Saujani, who wants to open up the field dramatically. And after examining the particular code […]
I am not a visionary. I’m an engineer. [As a kid] I was into computers, I was into math, I was into physics. I don’t think I was particularly exceptional. My sister said my biggest exceptional quality was that I would not let go. Q. During the development of Linux itself, that stubbornness brought you […]
At age 33, Reshma Saujani had a moment of bravery: Against all odds of winning, she ran for Congress. It was a serious long shot: People called her crazy, and said there was no way that she would win. And, well, she didn’t. But through her recklessness, the founder of Girls who Code learned an […]
Today at TED2016 in Vancouver, Peter Diamandis of the X Prize joined Dave Kenny of IBM Watson to announce a thrilling new prize in cognitive computing: The IBM Watson AI X Prize presented by TED, a $5 million competition to develop and demonstrate a powerful collaboration between human and artificial intelligence. The winner of this competition […]
The second day of TED2016 brought wisdom for within and discoveries from without. Below, highlights for you following at home. Procrastination works … for some. Session 4 speakers Tim Urban and Adam Grant take two positions on procrastination: The former thinks it can be a huge, crippling problem; the latter realized his “pre-crastination” was getting […]
Session 5 starts with a talk from a 93-year-old television icon. But it goes back so much further in time than that. As astronomer shares the mystery of a star’s light that dimmed 1,500 years ago. A paleontologist walks us back more than 66 millions. And capping it off: the reveal of this year’s TED prize wish, from […]
Exploring space generates tons of data — so much data that most of it is studied using algorithms, not human eyes. But algorithms are not very good at being creative. What happens when we let humans look at data? Sometimes, even amateurs find things that are surprising, remarkable and weird. Astronomer Tabetha Boyajian came to TED2016 with a story about one of those weird things. The story […]
Sarah Parcak is a space archaeologist, and has located multiple lost ancient sites. Still, she says, it’s easy to pick her greatest discovery: her husband, Greg Mumford, who she met on her very first dig in Egypt. He was her first lesson in “finding unexpected wonderful things,” she says, and a second lesson followed quickly. On that […]
Onstage at TED this evening, Danny Hillis spoke a few words to remember his friend, the artificial intelligence researcher, cognitive scientist and longtime TEDster Marvin Minsky, who died in late January of this year. As Hillis looked out into the audience, he wondered “how many of you he challenged or irritated or made laugh…” Once Minsky’s student, Hillis recalled: […]
Pay attention. The talks in Session 4 offer takeaways you’ll find yourself using in everyday life — from a new way to end an argument, to how to talk about gravitational waves at a party, to the hidden benefits of learning a foreign language. Recaps of the talks in Session 4, “Life Hacks,” in chronological order. What […]
Brian Little is one of those professors everyone adores. Students sit starry-eyed in his class, hanging on his every word, and they line up at his door during office hours. But on the TED stage, he shares a secret: “I am as extreme an introvert as you could possibly imagine.” After interacting with students, he […]