TED 2010

When I first started going to the annual TED Conference in 1993, people were already saying I should have been to the previous one. While it’s true that none of them are to be missed, the different years of TED are like vintages of a fine wine. Each one has its own special qualities while the winemaker’s craft continues to improve.

This year was no exception as Chris Anderson and his team pushed the conference to a new level. If the TED of lore was like a dinner party, going to TED today is like being in the studio audience of a television show. TED is no longer just a cult that gathers once a year at an annual meeting but is a world-wide phenomenon streamed live to over 900 paying sites and available afterwards as TED Talks free on the Internet and viewed over 200 million times. While there may have been fears at the beginning that making the talks available for free would cut into the conference attendance, the opposite has happened as people return annually to the source. The conversations in the hallways and over meals can be as interesting as the talks – grab pretty much any TEDster and you are bound to learn something new.

The talks themselves adhere to a long-tested format. Every speaker, whether a Nobel laureate, titan of industry, or movie star has no more than 18 minutes, with no sales pitches and minimum of PowerPoint bullets. The speakers are sometimes famous (James Cameron, Bill Gates) but are often, as CNN put it, “fascinating people you’ve never heard of,” at least if they are outside of your specialized area of expertise.

The first speaker was Daniel Kahneman, who pioneered behavioral economics and spoke, appropriately enough, on the difference between how we experience events and how we remember them. He cited an experiment that compared levels of pain over time in a medical procedure. The memories of the subjects turned out to be more influenced by the level of pain at the end of the procedure than the severity at the beginning or the overall level of pain. It turned out that the same principal applies to pleasurable activities, such as vacations and TED conferences.

Over the next three days, we were treated to a wide range of talks, including:

• Skeptic Michael Shermer talking about patternicity – the human tendency to see patterns even in random data
• Game designer Jane McGonigal telling us that humankind has collectively invested 5.93 million years playing World of Warcraft
• Inventor Nathan Myhrvold showing off his computer-guided laser-powered bug zapper
• Stephen Wolfram demonstrating Wolfram Alpha but allowing that as a scientist he has “no idea” of how successful it will be commercially
• Sergey Brin describing the recent cyber attacks from China and later giving everyone in attendance a Nexus One phone
• John Underkoffler demonstrating a 3D gesture interface that started with Minority Report.
• Bill Gates calling for some new energy “miracles” since all the world’s batteries can only store 10 minutes of its power needs
• Mark Roth describing how hydrogen sulfide can induce suspended animation
• Temple Grandin describing how she turned her autism to advantage in learning about animal behavior (and lauding the recent HBO movie for accurately portraying how she thinks.)
• Ken Robinson, like Temple Grandin, calling for an educational system that accommodates student’s unique talents, pointing out that Eric Clapton and he both received guitars at the same time, with wildly different outcomes
• James Cameron admitting that he made Titanic so he could get the studio to finance an expedition to find the wreck.

Cameron delivered a fitting closer to the event with his advice that nothing of value was accomplished without risk, upending the old NASA philosophy by saying that “Failure is an option, but Fear is not.”