[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR2E9i3g0po&w=560&h=315%5D Predictions are a mug’s game. If they come true, you likely didn’t push your thinking hard enough. If they don’t come true, you risk looking like an idiot. Nonetheless, many speakers at the annual TED conference have taken the plunge and proffered thoughts of what the future might look like. The video above […]
by Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Google How will our minds be blown in the next 30 years? Well, that’s quite a long time, given the acceleration in history. Still, I’ll be brave and make six hypotheses. 1. Machine Intelligence I think that just as the Internet has been such a great driver of change across […]
One of the installations at TED this year challenged attendees to vote on ten potential drivers of change in the next 30 years. The crowd had their say via that enormously sophisticated piece of technology, the sticky note. As we could likely have predicted, there wasn’t much consensus among those in Vancouver, but the range […]
by Nilofer Merchant In the next 30 years, the full Star Trek story will actually come true. Already, we’ve seen many of the show’s far-fetched ideas come to fruition. Everyone now carries a communicator, aka the smart phone. We have medical devices that test for diseases with light, not by drawing blood (like new tests for anemia […]
by Andrew Blau, Deloitte Technology advances over the last 30 years mean that we have crossed an invisible threshold: for the first time in human history, we now live on a legible planet. What will blow our minds in the next 30 years is what it will mean when almost anyone can read and understand the world […]
Ed Boyden is the head of the Synthetic Neurobiology group at the MIT Media Lab, where he works on tools to map, control, record — and maybe even someday build — the brain. Boyden has worked on optogenetics, a technique which deploys light-sensitive molecules to the brain and then applies light to them to “turn […]
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_lk4Q-2x8I&w=560&h=315%5D This video features the work of TED Fellow Nina Tandon and Sarindr Bhumiratana, her colleague at Columbia University’s Laboratory for Stem Cells and Tissue Engineering and partner-in-new-business-crime. Together with a group of fellow bio-engineers, the pair recently founded the company, Epibone, which they describe as “a revolutionary bone reconstruction company that allows patients […]
A persistent sight in David Sengeh‘s childhood, growing up in Sierra Leone: amputees. Losing a limb was an all-too-common fact in the civil-war-torn region. But as if the loss of a limb weren’t enough, the aftermath was almost worse, Sengeh saw, as he watched family members and friends struggle with ill-fitting, uncomfortable prosthetics that hurt […]
Think parents should be able to select their children’s talents and personalities? Or want to run and hide in the woods at the thought of it? Whatever your opinion, it is precisely the kind of question that Julian Savulescu wants you to take seriously. Professor of practical ethics at the University of Oxford, Savulescu thinks […]
Last year, MIT neuroscientists Xu Liu and Steve Ramirez manipulated the memory of a mouse. In a fascinating and mildly troubling breakthrough caused by a laser and the protein channelrhodopsin, they “activated” fear memories in a mouse. The impetus, says Ramirez, was the awful feeling of a break-up, the desire, Eternal Sunshine-style, to erase the […]
Biomaterials are substances — synthetic or natural — that can be used to improve health, minimize suffering and improve or correct the way the body works. A suture? That’s a biomaterial. The pacemaker? Indeed. Contact lenses? Yeah, you get the idea. As technology and science have advanced, so too have the sophistication of such biomaterials […]
“Borrowing” as a concept is de rigeur in the creative industries and beyond. What’s that too-often quoted aphorism? “Good artists copy; great artists steal”? Plenty of people have trotted that out as justification for acts they want us to believe are far superior to and way different from plagiarism. In this nuanced conversation, biologist and […]
Strange as it may seem, archaeologists often look to the sky to discover sites buried deep beneath the earth. Space archaeology, as it’s called, refers to the use of high-resolution satellite imaging and lasers to map and model everything from hidden Mayan ruins in Central America to specific features on the ancient Silk Road trade […]
What might our clothes look like in 50 years? When textile designer Suzanne Lee was researching her book, Fashioning the Future, she found the most interesting answers to that question when she looked beyond the traditional borders of fashion design. Beyond cut, color and cloth, our style in 50 years will be driven by new materials from […]
By Jessie Scanlon In January 2011, Fred Villagomez, the head mechanical technician at a Mountain View-based satellite imaging startup, drove east, looping down and around the San Francisco Bay toward Fremont. His destination: an auto plant called NUMMI, a failed joint venture between General Motors and Toyota, whose assets were about to be auctioned off. […]
By Seth Godin Please don’t steal my car. If you drive away with it, I won’t have it any more, which is a real hassle. Please don’t steal my identity or my reputation either. Neither travels well, and all the time you’re using it, you’re degrading something that belongs to me. But my ideas? Sure, […]