IN 2020, a presenter will win $5 million for delivering a talk no longer than 18 minutes that tackles “some of the world’s grand challenges” at the annual TED conference—but the speaker won’t be human.
The winner of the IBM Watson AI X Prize can be an artificially intelligent system or an AI-human combination, chosen from three finalists who survive head-to-head competitions at IBM Watson’s annual developer conference over the next three years.
Announced at TED2016 in Vancouver last month, the competition seeks to demonstrate how humans can collaborate with “cognitive technologies” or AI to tackle today’s most pressing problems.
Each team can define its own challenge in AI-human collaboration, but the audacity of that mission—and the quality of the AI talk—will help the audience at TED2020 choose the final winner.
These AI presentations promise to be fascinating—but there’s no need to wait until 2020 to appreciate exciting developments in AI and other technologies. Today, anyone can visit the TED website (www.ted.com/talks) and view for free more than 2,400 talks (as of March 2016) not only about technology and design, but also a broad range of scientific, cultural and academic topics.
TED—short for Technology, Entertainment and Design – is run by the non-profit Sapling Foundation under the slogan “Ideas Worth Spreading.” It began in 1984 as a one-off event, and became an annual conference series in 1990.
Past speakers include Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Elon Musk, Richard Stallman, Bill Gates, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and many Nobel Prize winners.
Each TED talk is no more than 18 minutes—long enough to be serious and short enough to hold people’s attention.
Search filters can help you find the speaker or topic you want. Here in no particular order are 10 technology-related talks I found to be informative, engaging and even inspiring.
Can technology solve our big problems? (Feb. 2013). Jason Pontin, editor and publisher of the MIT Technology Review, observes that technology used to solve the world’s biggest problems and wonders aloud why it hasn’t been brought to bear to cure cancer, feed everyone on the planet or create truly clean energy. “Something happened to our ability to solve big problems. It seems like technologist have diverted us and enriched themselves with trivial toys. With things like iPhones, apps, and social media. These have expanded and enriched our lives but they don’t solve humanity’s big problems,” Pontin says.
New bionics let us run, climb and dance (March 2014). Hugh Herr, director of the Biomechatronics research group at the MIT Media Lab, talks about—and demonstrates–the next generation of bionic limbs, robotic prosthetics inspired by nature’s own designs. Herr, who lost both legs in a climbing accident 30 years ago, shows his incredible technology in an inspiring talk with the help of ballroom dancer Adrianne Haslet-Davis, who lost her left leg in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, and performs again for the first time with a new bionic leg.
How we’re teaching computers to understand pictures (March 2015). Fei-Fei Li, director of Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Lab and Vision Lab, shares how she and her colleagues are working to solve AI’s trickiest problems—including image recognition, learning and language processing. How do we go about emulating on a machine a young child’s ability to view a picture and understand what she is looking at?
How to fool a GPS (February 2012). Todd Humphreys, director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Radionavigation Laboratory, studies global positioning system (GPS), its future, and how we can address some of its biggest security problems. He predicts a future when millimeter-accurate GPS dots will enable us to pinpoint locations and index-search our possessions—or track people without their knowledge. Technology used to counter this invasion of privacy, however, can have unintended consequences in a GPS-dependent society.
The game that can give you 10 extra years of life (June 2012). Game designer Jane McGonigal relates how, after she found herself bedridden and suicidal following a severe concussion, she dove into the scientific research and created the healing game, SuperBetter. McGonigal explains how a game can boost resilience—and promises to add 7.5 minutes to your life (she does the math to show you how).
A delightful way to teach kids about computers (February 2016). Programmer, storyteller and illustrator Linda Liukas gives an infectiously cheerful talk about encouraging kids to see computers not as mechanical, boring and complicated, but as colorful, expressive machines meant to be tinkered with. Her children’s book, Hello Ruby, is the “world’s most whimsical way to learn about technology, computing and coding.”
What can save the rainforest? Your used cell phone (September 2014). Conservationist Topher White talks about his non-government organization uses recycled cell phones to build solar-powered listening devices to monitor and protect remote areas of the rainforest from illegal logging. Chin Wong
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