What follows is a highly selective and personal list of my top talks from TED2010. There are more that moved, inspired, delighted and amazed me than I’ll recount here. Eventually, they will all be posted at ted.com, and it’s well worth your visit there to watch them. Wonderfully, the TED formula constrains people to 18 minutes. Watching these talks, you realize it’s more than enough time to say something incredibly meaningful (Corporate Powerpoint presenters PLEASE take note.)
When I was a child, I used to think about the amazing year in the future when the millenium would turn, the magical year 2000. I would be 47, an unimaginable age. And the forty years until then, an unfathomable duration of time beyond my comprehension.
In what was I think the most important talk at TED2010, Bill Gates talks about a roadmap to 2050 — 40 years into our collective future — by which we need to reduce CO2 emissions to Zero. The issue of climate change is at heart an issue of energy consumption and production. And we need to make as wholesale a shift in how we obtain our energy, as the shift brought about by the industrial revolution from burning wood to burning coal and oil. Bill’s talk is concise, pragmatic and unmistakably clear. And the roadmap he lays out is simple, even if fulfilling its wish is challenging and requires the miraculous: 20 years to innovate the technologies to produce electricity in ways that don’t emit CO2, and 20 years to deploy them. It’s that simple; it’s that daunting.
If reducing CO2 emissions to Zero is the most important task to ensuring the future quality of life for everyone on our planet, Sam Harris talks about what he believes is the greatest threat to life as we know it — religion. Sam is a prominent neuroscientist, defender of secular values, and best-selling author of two books — The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation.
This was the talk which struck the loudest personal chord for me. On my Facebook profile, in the field labelled “Religious beliefs,” I wrote “are dangerous to have.” I am deeply and profoundly (and apparently redundantly) anti-religious, believing that more evil is done in the name of religious beliefs than from anything else on earth. And that evil far outweighs any good that is done — good that the natural impulse for human kindness, generosity and empathy brings about anyway, without the trappings of religion.
For me, his most compelling (and perhaps most controversial) stance is this: we have arrived at a point in the development of our globalized civilization that we can and should make moral judgements on even an entire culture, if its beliefs contribute to an increase in human suffering or repression. There’s a very powerful moment when he ask the audience to let a thought “detonate in your head for just a moment” about a particularly egregious belief — that the rape of your daughter brings so much shame on your family that you should kill her. He lets that thought detonate in his own head, the head of man who clearly has a daughter whom he deeply loves. It’s a very poignant moment.
The talk is not yet posted on ted.com, but will be. I encourage you to return to the site to catch it. And in the meantime, you might want to read Letter to a Christian Nation which will lay out Sam’s arguments in a little over an hour’s read.
One of the most moving talks was given by Kevin Bales, who is an anti-slavery activist. He states there are 27 million slaves in the world today, mostly in Southeast Asia and Africa, who are forced to work without pay under threat of violence and unable to walk away. There are more people in slavery now than at any time in our history; yet the smallest percentage of the world’s population is enslaved today, compared to any other time in history. There is no country in the world where slavery is legal, and the “cost” to free all the world’s slaves (not purchasing people from their slaveholders, but helping them escape and funding their re-introduction into normal life) is less than the cost of the Big Dig, a major urban highway project, in Boston.
One of the goals of Kevin’s efforts to free the world’s slaves is “No Botched Emancipations.” As these words hung on the screen behind him, he pointed out that today in the United States,we are still paying the price for one of the largest botched emancipations in history, the freeing of 4 million plus slaves in 1866 with no support for their entry into normal society. It was perhaps the most striking moment of clarity of the entire conference. I will link to the talk when it’s posted. In the meantime, a link to Kevin’s organization.
http://www.freetheslaves.net/Page.aspx?pid=183
Elizabeth Pisani is another activist, an epidemiologist combating the spread of HIV. She’s written a book, The Wisdom of Whores, that points out the flaws in public health policies and programs, stemming from a refusal to understand and accept the emotional logic of the groups of people those policies and programs are trying to influence. Example: some policies suggest the best way to stop the spread of HIV among sex workers in Malaysia is to get them jobs in the many textile factories there, so they don’t have to engage in sex work for their income. Reality: definition of poverty = living on <$1/day; average salary of a Malaysian textile factory worker = $2/day; average income of a Malaysian sex worker = $10/day. Clearly, fucking for pay trumps sewing any day.
One of my favorite moments in this talk is right before Elizabeth shows a video clip of a conversation with a transgendered Malaysian sex worker, and she says “that’s a chick with a dick.” I will add the video of the talk as soon as it’s posted.
Elizabeth was a delightful presenter. Several other talks make my list for pure delight.
Temple Grandin talks about the autistic mind (hers being one of them) and how we need to develop minds based on an understanding of the different ways that different minds work. (Her life is the subject of an HBO film Temple Grandin starring Claire Danes.) Temple describes how she sees the world in pictures. And how that orientation helped her understand how animals view the world, which enabled her to design more humane systems for cattle-handling facilities.
She is brilliant, outspoken, a total character, and utterly delightful. And wins my award hands-down for best TED presenter’s outfit.
Raghava KK is an Indian artist whose talk describes the different phases of his artistic output as his “avatars.” His delight in life is infectious; his caring is moving; and his creativity the sum and whole of how he lives his life.
Mark Roth is a biochemist and cell biologist, who gives a surprisingly delightful and entertaining talk about something that seems to belong in the realm of science fiction — suspended animation — the temporary suspension of life in a human being who is subsequently revived with no adverse effects. His inquiry into suspended animation was inspired by cases of people found exposed to extreme cold, who appeared to be dead, but who were revived with no apparent negative effect. He describes the biochemistry that produces the miracle, his successful experiments with it on mice, and the potential application for treating patients with severely traumatic injuries. Talk to be posted.
Mark Roth (Photo credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson)
For charm, I recommend Dan Barber’s talk on his love affair with two fishes. He’s a celebrity chef, who discovers a fish farm in Spain that creates its own self-sustaining ecosystem.
For amazement, LXD, the Legion of Extraordinary Dancers. No words can describe their fantastic movement.
And Jake Shimabukuro, who’s first set playing the ukulele included flamenco, Ave Maria and Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. When once in London for work, I was taken to see The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, whose most memorable song was their cover of The Theme Song from Shaft. Jake is a match for them in terms of musicianship and inventiveness.
Jake Shimabukuro (Photo credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson)
Lastly, Andrew Bird performed several times. He creates sounds and loops them as backdrop to his performance, sings, whistles, plays violin and basically sounds like an angel descended to Earth. Original, unusual, haunting, and adorable.
Here’s a taste of Andrew from a live concert until his TED performance is posted.
Since I’ve posted my best of TED2010, I probably should mention my “Worst” and spare you viewing them.
People loved Jane McGonigal, a video game designer, who talked about an entire generation of young people, growing up playing hours of video games, who as a consequence have developed very specific skills. She painted a fascinating picture of a gamer and gave me some insight into them I’d never had before. She lost me completely, however, when she claimed that we could take people who played 20 hours a week of World of Warcraft online and transfer that passion to a video game that teaches about climate change. Somehow, I don’t think they’d get quite the same payoff, Jane.
Denis Dutton had some really interesting stuff to say about beauty, one of my favorite obsessions. Specifically, despite its renowned “in the eye of the beholder” quality, there are concepts of beauty that are universal to the human species. He mentions one of my favorite facts: that human beings, when asked to describe their ideal landscape, will inevitably (despite where they live or what they have or have not seen) describe a landscape that closely resembles the African savannah from which as a species we supposedly emerged and spread out into the world. That he could discuss beauty with not one single visual to support his talk, and that he read it word for word from a document, even stopping once and re-reading a paragraph that he’d stumbled over, as he said, ”for the editing of the video,” as if we in the audience were not even there, was a bit beyond the pale.
And lastly, Natalie Merchant sang some songs she’d written to poetry, an endeavor she’d spent the last six years on. I’ve always found her to be self-indulgent. And her TED performance was more of the same in my opinion. But she jumped the shark on egotism, when she sang her last song, a rousing number entitled something like “I Just Want to Thank You.” At one point, the audience, inspired by the song, begins to clap in time to the music. But Natalie stops them, tells them to curb their enthusiasm, that it’s her 18 minutes, and later instructs them how to clap the right way to her song. Self-indulgence is a really boring quality in a person, but self-indulgence coupled with a controlling nature is just fucking deadly. As a TED buddy said to me as we were getting on a bus to one of the evening parties after I expressed my opinion about Natalie’s performance, “I enjoyed it. But now that you point that out, I realize you’re absolutely right, and you’ve ruined it for me.”
As a footnote to my TED2010 experience, my application to TED2011 has been approved, but this time to the main conference in Long Beach, not the simulcast in Palm Springs. As my TED girlfriend Danielle said, who was accepted to the main conference next year as well, “We’ll go, and if we don’t like it, at least we’ll have each other. And we can go back to TEDActive in 2012.”
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