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What Tech Should Be Seen At TED?
J0sh writes "I've been lucky enough to be asked to do tech spotting for the TED conference, one of the biggest and most exclusive technology, entertainment, and design conferences in the US. Many of the folks there are superstars in their field (like Craig Venter and Stephen Hawking), and most of them have the opportunity to take action on the technology that they see there. The problem is that I'm only one guy trying to find the most mind-blowing technology on the planet in order to inform the few people who can make an immediate impact with it. I figured if there's one place to find those kinds of advances, it's here. What unknown tech is about to completely change the world that these people need to know about? Let me know."
even more round.
What unknown tech is about to completely change the world that these people need to know about?
You came to slashdot to ask that?
What unknown tech is about to completely change the world that these people need to know about?
Um... if someone knew, it wouldn't be unknown.
This startup: https://www.liberateip.com/
Other than Google Video and Youtube, the TED talks have one of the best video players on the web.. except that you can't full screen the video for some reason. I can't understand why you might not have thought this was a useful feature at the time when TED talks were first being put on the web, but surely you use Youtube and have noticed the utility of full screen playback.. add the feature.. I'm sure it's one line of code.
How we know is more important than what we know.
It is unlikely to be both the biggest, and the most exclusive, unless it is the only one. Which it may be, since how many conferences are there that focus on Technology and Entertainment, and Design.
Open source art that has been curated onto MoMA.org and was chosen as the graphical identity for the whole siggraph conference this year:
Dreams in High Fidelity
as recently featured on makezine.
Scott Draves
But this is cool if it works:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.03/bemore.html
http://www.gizmag.com/go/7214/
There was an article on [url="http://offsystem.sourceforge.net/"]this[/url] not too long ago right here on Slashdot, and it could quite possibly be the biggest innovation to file sharing and distribution since BitTorrent.
Forget about TED. I want someone to bring back Comdex. That used to be the ultimate new technology show. Maybe one day we'll have shows about trade shows of the future.
A venue with the kind of visibility and recognition as TED shouldn't send out "spotters" who need to ask Slashdot, it should follow some established protocols for finding and evaluating work. And I think the haphazard selection processs is reflected in the quality of the program.
I'd rather they ask Slashdot than Microsoft, Google or Yahoo. However, it would probably be just as useful to ask on I Can Has Cheezburger or Cute Overload. (OMG, Ponies!!!)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
http://slashdot.jp/
Things that are going to change the world I think don't need to be super high tech or invented 5 years ago. Personally I predict that it will be the mundane tech deployed in just the right places is what will change the world in the next few decades. Things like commodity telecommunications to the other 90% of the planet who currently don't own a PC (OLPC I feel lacks the velocity and momentum to make a difference, but is on the right trajectory) and recycled cellphones sent to Kenya and Uganda to provide affordable communication capacity for populations there. Projects like this are the cutting edge of this millennium.
We as humans have invented everything that we need to make this world a wonderful place to live, we just need to learn how to distribute it fairly and use it sustainably.
Not that I think there is no place for research into new pharmaceuticals and microchips and superconductors etc, but they will bring, at this stage in our history, incremental gains to welfare, and only for the rich. The giant leaps of living standards now will be made by advances in our capacity to deal equitably with each other.
I hate printers.
* firefox (for revolutionizing the web)
* petrol from algae tech ( great potential there )
* photonic switch ( see http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/communications/soa/Sydney-Uni-hero-chip-breaks-light-speed-record/0,130061791,339290492,00.htm )
regards
I think trueknowledge is very cool.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IONdWQwcmxA
Perhaps you could tell them about this thing called the "internet" which seems to appreciate more data, faster. You know, rather than "exclusive" or "let's post a video a week arbitrarily out of our archive".
Don't get me wrong, I've seen a quite a few of the videos hosted by TED (because new ideas are only worth spreading if they've got a sponsor such as BMW), but seriously, for the rest of us, that might not be able to afford the cost of entry, how about you share the idea of "ideas worth sharing" to an audience ready to hear just a bit more?
If a talk is worth watching fullscreen I usually download it.
PS: You can make the ted window quite big by clicking the arrow thingy in the top-right corner.
No sig today...
If I had my mod points I mod this up.
That technology is amazing! and seems almost trivial at the same time. With the results that were posted, I would predict that this would enter mainstreem usage asap.
I don't know if this is what they are looking for at this kind of "Conference".
Wow!
Meatplow
http://www.meatplow.com/
If one technology could really change the world, it would be coal liquefaction. It's an 80 year old, proven, technology - that no one has ever heard of.
What is it? It solves the gasoline crunch by converting coal (which is crazy abundant, especially in America) into gasoline. It throws off energy as a byproduct (which helps solve our energy grid needs) as well as CO2 -- which sounds bad, but can be trapped easily since it is in a closed loop.
Cleanly converting coal to gas is more expensive than the normal FT process, but still produces gas at around the $2 a gallon level, which would be enough to kickstart our economy, rescue the airlines, save energy costs for poor people (as much wealthy environmentalists hate to admit it, poor people are the ones that get fucked by sky-high gas and energy costs), and produce CO2, which is needed for, aha!, Craig Venter's latest pet project, which involves custom bacteria that consume large amounts of C02, and which he's publicly stated he needs a large supply thereof.
Best of all, it's a mature technology. It was used to power the entire Nazi war machine in WWII, and South Africans under apartheid. Not because evil countries have an affinity for it, but because they were cut off from the world's oil supplies.
And yet when Coal Liquefaction was debated in congress, retarded children like our very own Senator Feinstein claimed that it was an immature technology, and voted it down.
There have been many breakthroughs in neural networks recently, which allow us to train "deep architectures" (with many hidden layers). This was not feasible with traditional backpropagation. This work by Hinton/LeCun/Bengio has led to a resurgence in the field of ANNs, with some experts now believing general AI to be attainable within the next decade.
Anyone interested should have a look at Geoff Hinton's Google Tech talk on the matter. A very interesting talk for anyone in machine learning. He does a way better job of explaining it then I could. Fast forward to 21:30 for the live demo.
A million monkeys and this is the best sig they could come up with...
First, the inflatable satellite dish. Second, the six stroke engine.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
They are becoming cheap, and are being put everywhere.
I think it's worth imagining amazing things with these toys
G
You know, like, cold fusion, quantum computers, immersive VR. Stuff like that. I read somewhere all that and more is coming in the next five to twenty years. Oh, and that 110 MPG Mustang that goes from 0-60 MPH in 3 seconds flat. Should be a crowd pleaser.
Caveat Utilitor
The TinEye image search engine should be up there - http://www.tineye.com/ - one of the most mindboggling things I've seen in a hell of a long time.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
My opinion, based on the skyrocketing ticket cost and viewing conference videos:
The problem with past TED conferences is that the attendees - and the speakers - simply believe that they are better than 99.999% of the human population.
They are the *thinkers*, the *titans of industry*. But they don't *do* anything. They just talk about it and make big, feel-good hand-waving gestures about their patented, locked-up ideas.
I'd like to see this corrected. Either through picking presentations that are somewhat realistic - or using the presentations as a focal point to bring the right people together to get these ideas moving.
They are just so cool ! http://lifeboat.com/ex/10.futuristic.materials
802.11s or like wireless, software radio, and maybe unlicensed (and uncontrollable) whitespace radio use. Something a lot like OLPC's mesh.
Combine that with good open portable machine, handheld-sized.
Make cheap and distribute.
Route around damage by censors in the most fundamental way, by routing around the physical structure of the internet.
Repressive regimes lose all control of information, and as a bonus, ISPs, telco backbones, and hosting companies become obsolete! Whee!
Could be a long way off... But it's the stuff of my dreams. I'd put a sticker that says "This machine kills fascists" on mine.
2008, the year of the Linux desktop
Let's get it out of the way:
I'd like to see a beowulf cluster of Linux servers running Duke Nukem Forever on virtualised copies of Vista, whilst at the same time running a grid/distributed computing program that's testing proteins for possible AIDs/MRSA cures in spare GPU cycles - the whole lot powered by solar cells using a revolutionary optical coating, with the standby generator powered by algae-derived biofuel. The whole system to be owned by the former Soviet Union and housed in a hybrid solar/hydrogen-powered car, driven by Natalie Portman, with room in the back for three Senior citizens from North Korea to sit confortably while playing aforementioned game.
Oh, and the whole lot has to be available 'within the next 5 years' - as confirmed by NetCraft.
I'm sure I've missed something - help me out here guys.
AT&ROFLMAO
Many TED talks start with a 10 minute introduction before they get to the point. This means that I have to watch for 10 minutes before I discover its the talk is really worth watching. This format works well for a conference where people cannot leave the room, but it doesn't work well on internets sites like Youtube where people have a fairly short attention span.
I personally find that around half of the TED-talks are worth watching, so it is a big investment for me to spend 10 minutes before I get to hear what the talk is about. I think you would get more internet attention if you advised speakers to keep their introductions shorter.
What I'd like to see is if there's any research being done about the effect that all these technological and medical advancements have on humans as a species.
Let's assume mankind will make it another 100 years and fix all social and environmental issues of our time, the next "big thing" will be having to counter the effects introduced by our humanitarian efforts.
Natural selection among humans has completely stopped. In general, this is certainly a good thing.
But it does have a huge downside. Due to our medicine, mankind is becoming more and more prone to illness. Bad eyes, bad ears, bad immune systems... they're no factor anymore and are propagating.
Social nets make it possible that the, let's say, "not so smart" people are breeding exponentially faster than the "smarter" ones. While intelligence isn't solely a "gene-thing" it seems to be suggested that the "potential" is limited by genes.
Technology empowers the less intelligent, the less skillful, the less creative to be just as successful as the rest of the population.
Now, again. I don't want it to appear that I'm against medicine, social behavior or technology... but due to those three evolution seems to be currently working against us and it's admittedly a very scary thought to me.
This whole issue seems to be a big taboo. Most likely due to the terrible and misguided ways that were employed in our past to solve this.
I'd be interested to see if there's research being done on these issues and to get to know if there's anything that can be done to address them.
"Entrepreneurial mycologist Paul Stamets seeks to rescue the study of mushrooms from forest gourmets and psychedelic warlords. The focus of Stamets' research is the Northwest's native fungal genome, mycelium, but along the way he has filed 22 patents for mushroom-related technologies, including pesticidal fungi that trick insects into eating them, and mushrooms that can break down the neurotoxins used in nerve gas. There are cosmic implications as well. Stamets believes we could terraform other worlds in our galaxy by sowing a mix of fungal spores and other seeds to create an ecological footprint on a new planet." http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/paul_stamets_on_6_ways_mushrooms_can_save_the_world.html
Maybe we'll finally find a useful application to all these $$$ spend in R&D for building artificial intelligence systems (I mean, something else than japanese pet robots) ? May I suggest this game ? If that doesn't work, I'll just be happy with tons more stupid domain names. Hands off, "www.my.ass" is mine.
I wasn't really aware of datamining until a lecture not too long ago, given by a handful of enthousiasts and I was sold; just possible implementations and new approuches to the way we approach data is just mindblowing and is just so freaking cool.
The subject seems soo specific yet its implemenation in our large databases becomes more important and relevant.
SQLServer datamining
Datamining blog
XMLA
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
Presently existing home built kits for producing hydrogen gas for car fuel supplements is a good stepping stone to eventual fully water powered cars. See: http://www.hydrogengarage.com/ Nanotube technologies have just scratched the surface. Once more cheaply produced these will assist in space exploration; personal protection; harnessing power (wave power) and a large number of other areas where super strong, light materials can be leveraged.
I hear somewhere a conference is working on a buzzword/B.S. filter that filters out pretentious "superstars" and focuses on real technology produced by mere mortals :)
Hydrogen on demand vehicles. Storing hydrogen in tanks is utter crap, the signature of corporate fascism and naysayers.
A HHO hydrogen on demand vehicle would change the world.
How are we supposed to inform you about unknown tech? It wouldn't be unknown then...
This is a MUST SEE TED issue -
Jeff Hawkins - Founder - Numenta
Jeff is the inventor of the Palm & Handspring. He has gone on to start up a phenomenal research company that has figured out how the brain learns, and has adapted it to solve the problem of artificial intelligence. He is close to solving the problem of having computers being able to actually SEE.
From showing a computer a line drawing of a sail boat, the computer can crawl Google images and pick out actual pictures (clip art) and photos of sailboats from any orientation, from the top, side, rear, bottom, just as a human could.
http://snipurl.com/rsa2008
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
I think Mid-Tech items will lead to transformations, where the scientific & engineering leaps get commercialized without consumers being aware of the technology...unless they watch TED, read Slashdot and scientific and engineering journals.
Small & micro sensors and imagers integrated into new devices in unique ways & often operating wirelessly and autonomously use "HIGH TECH" but are easy to miss. They put an incredible amount of knowledge on top of the micro-sized sensing, letting even common devices do what would be almost unthinkable 10 years back.
As noted above, "Not that I think there is no place for research into new pharmaceuticals and microchips and superconductors etc, but they will bring, at this stage in our history, incremental gains to welfare, and only for the rich.", I think history has shown that technology has increased the birth rate in the world dramatically, along with the lifespan of people in almost all countries. Whether that is "good" or not depends on how you define "good".
Birth rate leads to other "problems" though, until better food production is developed, & then the final issue when countries can't figure out what to do with unemployed youth that begin to dominate their country. That occurs when about 40% of the population of Iran is 15-29, and unemployment of men is very high because those countries can't generate jobs fast enough. Unemployed youth in underdeveloped countries = war and insurrection.
Right now European & Japanese cultures are committing self-genocide with birth rates that have collapsed. Population bulges of youth in Africa & the Mid-East are "an issue".
Maybe the biggest technology surprise will be whatever allows developing countries to put their underemployed youth to work productively? But then maybe that just leads to, well, another population boom of larger proportions. Then again, they could become wealthier and drop their birth rate like "modern westernized" countries.
Dean Kamen's converting sewage (or absolutely *any* contaminated water) into pure clean water at fraction of the cost has the potential to change the world on a huge scale. Especially Africa.
He has has spoken at TED before. He is a pure legend.
http://gizmodo.com/370698/colbert-first-vid-of-dean-kamens-miracle-water-distiller
OK he invented it a few years ago, but hopefully its ready for rollout.
It is going to change the world alright...
Definitely cover on-demand manufacturing. Then again, I'm prejudiced.
Your design to a real part online: Big Blue Saw
Haptic Radar seems like an interesting tech demo for TED. On one hand it could be useful to the visually impaired, on the other, it gives some insight into how people go about perceiving the world.
Wow, that's the most oxymoronic thing I've heard all year.
Educate and empower the women. Most women don't want to have 8 or more kids, and wouldn't if they weren't being forcefully kept "barefoot and pregnant".
Most of the human brainpower on the planet is wasted. Advances that change that will have more profound effects than anything else. Could be anything from education for all and stopping brain-stunting malnourishment to miracle drugs that make people smarter (smart pills?), and curb addictive behavior including compulsions to watch too much TV or play too much WoW.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
The oil price has more than doubled in the last year, and quadrupled in the last three years. There has never before been such an extreme, sustained increase in the oil price. This will cause severe inflation, and the economic consequences will be severe.
This is what's causing all the fuss. The economies of the world are in the early stages of heading into a very severe inflationary recession. Some people go further and anticipate economic collapse, others fear something similar to The Great Depression. The technical term for it is stagflation. Investors look for ways out of trouble, but the consensus is that there is no easy way out of this one. Some investors have therefore panicked. Panic is dangerous because it fuels itself, making the panic worse.
You are not going to see the same impact in Finland because Finland has much higher fuel taxes than in the USA, so the price increase of retail fuels has been much smaller in Finland than in the USA. But recession in the USA, which is the world's largest economy, will be felt in other countries, including Finland.
Why oil price increase equals economic trouble (Score: Interesti
Power isn't a "technology" as such but it is possibly the fundamental property determining who does what in this world. All the TED attendees are people with substantial personal power, and they are in a unique position to appreciate the power relations at play in the world today.
The most interesting thing I heard from Obama's campaign was the "Google for Government" initiative, which allows the public to use search technology to track how tax dollars are spent. Offering this kind of transparency through technology is a great example of cutting-edge use of a not-so-cutting-edge technology, and if implemented well, substantially changes the power relations at play in the US.
I haven't got any ideas of other people doing similar work but if we are serious about steering the planet on it's optimal course we have to give exposure to people who want to use technology to break down long-held power structures. An example is the WITNESS initiative that places camcorders into the hands of people under oppression. TED gave this a platform back in 2006 here.
Should we consider the airlines worth rescuing? (Again?) And why do you think lower fuel costs will do this?
Check out the airlines in Europe and Asia. Sure, a lot of them are nationalized. But not all. And most are in much better shape than airlines in the U.S.A. That's with higher fuel costs than their U.S. counterparts. Of course, they don't have to deal as much with security theatre, but U.S. companies are not directly burdened with most of those costs themselves.
The reality is, the U.S. airlines are in the situation they are in mostly due to the regulatory situation and inefficient management. And when we see that a company like Southwest does just fine, we have to wonder how much is really due to regulation. Dropping the price of energy won't actually solve what's really wrong with these airlines. And we shouldn't prop up inefficient companies, in effect bailing out private investors for their poor choices of managers and penalizing the investors who chose to invest in the companies that are making it work.
My vote is cold fusion lenr/canr (cold fusion)
Here is an excellent discussion from Brian D. Josephson about state of research. Skeptics please read.
summary
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/JosephsonBabstractfo.pdf
full article
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/JosephsonBpathologic.pdf
"They never debunked excess heat claims but they did have errors in nuclear measurements" so they threw the baby out with the bathwater.
There are many processes not fully described by current theory, like Superconductivity yet we deployed a commercial power line in manhattan.
Still waiting for Kuhn "paradigm shift".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn
"As anomalous results build up, science reaches a crisis, at which point a new paradigm, which subsumes the old results along with the anomalous results into one framework, is accepted. This is termed revolutionary science."
How about the cheap solar dish that MIT students came up with recently:
http://www.dailytech.com/MIT+Students+Develop+Revolutionary+Solar+Dish+That+is+Hot+Enough+to+Melt+Steel/article12153.htm
Google has more.
MilkMiruku
In some outdoor cafes in buggy coastal areas, they have these little "mosquito traps" that silently trap and kill mosquitoes. They have a gas tank that looks like what you'd attach to a gas grill, and I believe they somehow emit CO2 to attract the pests.
My wife and I recently gave some money to a missionary group going to Uganda so that they could buy and distribute mosquito nets for people there. Devices like this, which kill mosquitoes without spraying chemicals that could be harmful to humans, might help slow the spread of disease. That would be a really beneficial technology.
Most of the human brainpower on the planet is wasted.
So let's gather all that wasted brainpower into a grid, or, ....Matrix..., and use it!
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Calvin Coolidge, who grew up on a farm, was against farm subsidies because "farmers have never made much money" (and shouldn't expect to). Then the Depression hit and the government couldn't resist the notion that having most of the farms go out of business could be a bad idea. So is the problem our farm subsidies, or the failure of the third world to enact their own tariffs and subsidies to protect their own agricultural base? With the current price of transport, countries which have maintained local production, rather than increased dependency on foreign trade for foodstuffs, are far better positioned.
What free trade also does for third world farmers is encourage them to grow for export rather than for the local markets. There are countries with plenty of farms, but starving populations, because the farmers are growing fancy stuff for us rather than staples for their neighbors.
There's a strong argument that agricultural trade should be severely limited, with people becoming "localvores." I write this as I'm drinking some Sumatran coffee, so I haven't totally bought the argument. Still, based on the cost of oil-based transport, the plain fact is the world needs to transition quickly back to local agricultural economies. What technological developments can help speed that?
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/solarcells-0710.html
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
Yes, but solar panels can be supplied by aid organizations. They make this sort of power use possible because they don't require any infrastructure.
I agree with you that we should drop the farm subsidies. Before that happens, stuff like this could help. Would you rather they wait around for the subsidies to go away without whatever hand-up help we could give them?
I found the absorption heater that you can power by putting it into a fire interesting. The fact that we can use this to distribute vaccines strikes me as a good thing.
How about the Steorn free energy device?
there are a number of calendar reforms that would have a far more significant impact on human relations than any number of high tech gadgets.
It ain't cheap, it ain't easy, but it's what they need most of all
No amazing doohickey we could give them is ever going to improve their lives if there are gangs, militants and warlords controlling and threatening their stability. If all the life changing technology we donate is stolen and sold off to fund pointless tribal warfare and organized crime, then these countries will never get out of the stone age.
When energy is talked about renewables are rightly a star item, but ultimately efficiency is the real winner. Efficiency can generate a negawatt for an order of magnature less cost then new energy sources can generate a megawatt. Payback for low hanging efficiency is on the order a 0 to 3 years. And there is no greener megawatt than the megawatt you don't generate.
i think TED should do a talk on how communities can organize local production of energy and food.
Vertical farming, waste to energy conversion, local grids, etc.
If every small home owners association were to set aside some land in their community for a vertical farm which doubled as waste treatment / energy conversion and of course solar collection... a lot of standard utility expenses could be offset by large margins.
imagine if your AC bill was subsidized by the solar array / generator down the street and you could walk over to the vertical farm and pick up organic produce every night for dinner and it was all powered by your waste + solar power?
Communities could be a lot smarter and as it is for only the local residents it can be tailored to their needs / wants much more easily than some large national utility / supplier.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Agent Based Modeling tools such as Repast, SWARM, and NetLogo are changing how social research is being done.
I enjoy the videos TED has to offer on their website. One in particular that impressed me discussed many benefits fungus has to offer, such as greatly speed up decomposition and lowering the levels of toxic substances in garbage/waste. I hope it takes off on a large scale as some cities are over-flowing with trash across the globe.
Maybe not now, but eventually GNU Radio...
3. ????
4. Profit !!1!
JWall: GUI client for IPTables
* The hand-painted wooden ball in a cup - Toss the ball, catch it in the cup, dump it out of the cup, toss it and catch it in the cup again. The ball is on a string and attached to the cup, so there's no worry if you don't catch the ball in a cup. And clean up is as easy as catching a ball in a cup.
An update on the progress of Bussard's Polywell fusion reactor by the folks at EMC2 fusion would be a GREAT topic. The tough part would be condensing the back story to fit into the tight time constraints for a TED Talk. This is assuming that they aren't working under a complete news blackout situation.
Absolutely the most profound change is coming via MIT's fabrication laboratory ("fab lab") and its variants, allowing you to make just about anything in 2D or 3D. The cost used to be in millions. It's now $25,000, "mini-computer" pricing, something like Apple's Lisa was. When the price comes down to PC prices, we will have a technology revolution. See http://fab.cba.mit.edu/about/about2.php.
Just a little while ago, a high-school kid from Canada showed that two strains of bacteria can be used to "digest" plastic bags...
Bio-Remediation could be used to clean up our planet (plastic bags, nuclear waste, etc) and innovative combination of microbes and algae can be used to provide us with fuel as well.
Just something you don't hear too much about - maybe TED can help.
Few others have done as much for society as Ralph Nader. He is not a techie, but I bet he has a few good ideas left in him.
Fluid concepts cognitive architectures. I'm betting my life on those.
Cheap energy is the answer to most problems, be it solar, wind (indirect solar), geo-thermal, tidal, or biofuel (indirect solar). Also anything dealing with water purification on both the small and large scale.
Those are the two issues to deal with if we are to keep life as we know it moving forward; with relative peace. (Today is a world of peace compared to wars over things like energy, food, or water.)
Think Deeply.
This project about using plants that can detect landmines and change color accordingly isn't all that new but still ongoing and very interesting.
This will sound snarky, but seriously:
tap water
I think the best TED talks have been Steven Levitt talking about crack dealer business, and Paul Collier on the Bottom Billion.
All the technology in the world isn't going to fix developing countries where the laws, regulations, and corruption will keep the economies from growing to the point where the technology can be used efficiently. Once those barriers are gone, it isn't like people are stupid, they'll immediately use the appropriate needed technologies.
I suggest:
Michael Walker talking about his work on the Economic Freedom of the World index, and how economic freedom correlates with GDP, life expectancy, and other variables.
Karol Boudreaux from GMU's Mercatus Center talking about African governments bear much responsibility for driving formal-sector entrepreneurs out of the housing market and for driving their citizens into slums.
Robert Anderson on his book Just Get Out of the Way: How Government Can Help Business in Poor Countries.
Tyler Cowen form GMU on almost anything in economics: the future of culture in a globalized world, How to Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist, and much more.
Don Boudreaux from GMU about the issues he has interviewed people for on Econtalk: car salesmen, signaling through educational diplomas, whether the gold standard is a good idea, challenges in health care, and much more.
Arnold Kling on Crisis of Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay for Health Care
Or a Nicholas Stern versus William Nordhaus debate on global warming costs versus benefits and their viewpoints on appropriate discount rates for the calculation?
We're pretty adaptable as a species, but we're creating an environment that evolution probably didn't prepare us for. Some very interesting things are going to happen in the near future - and some of them should be predictable.
Considering these difficult issues now may very well prevent us from rushing headlong into bad choices. Consider one probable near future development: small, generally available computers with human-equivalent (or better) processing and storage capability. So how would we put these to work? Who would control them - the owner / user, or some other entity? What would their legal status be?
By asking now we can have workable answers ready when they're needed. And they will be needed; if you've got "Spock's Brain" managing your stock portfolio then how could it enter into a contract or initiate a trade? What would it use for money? Who would be responsible for any mistakes it makes? And who does the proceeds of that business venture belong to?
Sounds simple at first, but finding workable answers to these (and the related) questions that don't incidentally devalue humanity will be quite tricky. This is just the tip of the iceberg - what if it's an actual human mind running on that machine; a copy of yours, maybe. Now, could you just pull the plug without murdering it?
Weird times coming, it's just around the corner...
Cars and airplanes are dead ends.
I'd like to see what sort of work is being done with trains and other multi-passenger transportation to take the place of cars and airplanes.
BioBricks? Synthetic biology has already produced results - now all we need is an economically viable production model :-/
YOh, and that 110 MPG Mustang that goes from 0-60 MPH in 3 seconds flat.
Finally my pony!
(Advantages, by the way, seem to include reducing the size of the entry hole for most procedures, thereby reducing the amount of scarring & recovery time. There may also be procedures that only robotic surgery machines can perform.)
It would be good to have a quick (ie, TED-style) survey of the world's high-end Robot Surgery systems (just if some of them aren't so expensive anymore).
One point that I recall her making was that - compared to some other group(s), elsewhere, her group had very stable team memberships, and it was observed that keeping a stable team working together (whenever possible) seemed to increase the system's success rate.
This observation/rumor should provide seeds for important research, even if the topic doesn't make it to TED.
Are similar machines coming down in price, eg, so that they might go where costly surgeons are not, as a rule, being sent today (eg, smaller indigenous communities, disaster scenes, etc.)?
Perhaps some Freakonomics research is needed, eg, to compare the cost of evacuation vs near-site surgery in a mobile, flown-in, robot surgery system, for some of the world's larger, remote incidents.
BTW, if any such research is already complete & results are available to read, we'd appreciate a URL or other citation to it. TIA.
they tend to round up a couple interesting things on the far horizon, written at a level that could help you sell those topics/people to the ultimate decision makers (assuming you're not one of them).
plus, the $6k conference crowd probably has a fair number of semi-regular readers in attendance, so they might have already had their interest piqued.
more here...you can probably order the last couple either as reprints for ~$15.
I thought the question was : "what upcoming tech will shake the world in its foundations?" and not, what will make the world better for third world countries ... cos to that i can say only this : - > schools, knowledge, fight against superstition, religious fanaticism AND .... (yes, very harsh) .... birth control ....
i have spoken ... now you can hate me :p
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
You should get some of the guys from HP's research facility to come and talk about why the memristor is such a huge deal.
http://www.gizmowatch.com/entry/10-tech-innovations-to-make-you-nearly-invincible/
RepRap is an OpenSourced/OpenHardware rapid prototyping/manufacturing tool that can produce any small plastic object you can imagine - including most of the parts to make a RepRap of your own.
http://www.reprap.org
Typical rapid prototyping machines cost tens of thousands of dollars - but because RepRaps make their own parts - you can build one now for $400 - and should eventually be able to put one together for around $100.
90% of the stuff on WalMart shelves could be made by a machine descended from this one. Economic/social impact if these were widespread would be incalculable.
Marijuana
There's some really cool stuff happening at the MIT Media Lab. For example, Ed Boyden is working on curing Parkinson's and schizophrenia by modifying neurons so they fire in the presence of yellow light. He has some really interesting thoughts on creativity, expectation and placebo.
The personal robots group is also doing some pretty amazing things with teddy bears and some other cool platforms. Some of their prototypes are really freaky but awesome at the same time. (Depending on your opinion of scary toys taking over the world..)
The smart cities group is working on a new form of car where the wheels contain all the drive and steering equipment. You can essentially snap them onto anything and use it. They've got plans for a car that will fold up and stack while charging, and they're working on deploying a similar scooter based system in Paris.
Here's some cool links:
http://cities.media.mit.edu/
http://www.media.mit.edu/research/
http://neuro.media.mit.edu/
http://robotic.media.mit.edu/
***Disclaimer: I work there. I think its freaking awesome.