TED

Peter Diamandis on TED: Abundance is Our Future

by

Peter Diamandis & Socrates at SU

Onstage at TED, Peter Diamandis makes a case for optimism — that we’ll invent, innovate and create ways to solve the challenges that loom over us:

“I’m not saying we don’t have our set of problems; we surely do. But ultimately, we knock them down.”

Peter Diamandis is a self-admitted nine-year-old child-space-enthusiast and a visionary who dreams big and has the resume to prove that the best way to predict the future is to create it yourself. Just some of his resume highlights include: the Founder and Chairman of the X PRIZE Foundation; co-Founder and Managing Director of Space Adventures; the CEO and co-founder of Zero Gravity Corporation; and, most recently, the Rocket Racing League; the International Space University and the Singularity University.

Related articles

Kevin Kelly At TED: What Technology Wants

by

Kevin Kelly just published a new book called What Technology Wants. I have been planning to buy it ever since I heard he was writing another book but after Seth Godin called it The Book Of The Year and said that “if there’s justice it will win the Pulitzer prize,” I just couldn’t wait and ordered it online.

In the meantime, I decided to watch and post some of the most interesting TED videos that Kelly did during the last several years. The 3 videos bellow were shot in 2 year intervals (from 2006 to 2010) and represent a chronological progression of Kevin’s quest to answer the titular question of his book. I recommend you watch them in order or, if you really don’t have the time, skip to the very last one.

Kevin Kelly’s Profile on TED:

Perhaps there is no one better to contemplate the meaning of cultural change — bad? good? too slow? too bold? — than Kevin Kelly, whose life story reads like a treatise on the value of technology. Whether by renouncing all material things save his bicycle (which he then rode 3,000 miles), founding an organization (the All-Species Foundation) to catalog all life on earth, or by touting new gadgets in WIRED, Kelly hasn’t stopped exploring the phenomena of technical and biological creation.

In articles for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, among others, he has celebrated scientific breakthroughs, and at the Long Now Foundation, where he serves on the board, he champions projects that look 10,000 years into the future. One such project is the Rosetta Project, which will catalogue more than 1,000 languages on a disks to be placed nearby the 10,000 Year Clock. Kelly’s newest book What Technology Wants asks what appears to be his life’s core question: “How should I think about new technology when it comes along?”

Related articles

Gregory Stock: To Upgrade is Human

by

It has often been argued that the more technology the further away from our “human nature.” Thus to enhance or upgrade our biology is often given as a clear example of denying what is “normal,” “natural” and “human.”

In this 2003 TED talk biophysicist, best-selling author and biotech entrepreneur Gregory Stock looks forward to new and controversial technologies such as designer babies, human enhancement, genetic manipulation etc and argues that upgrading (our biology) is, in fact, a very human thing to do. Thus for him, the question is not if but when and how we are going to take a hold of our evolution and become the true architects of our future.

Enjoy!

So, do you agree that to upgrade is human?

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Stephen Wolfram: Computing Life, the Universe and Everything

by

This is another cool TED video.

Stephen Wolfram, the founder and creator of the Wolfram Alpha search engine, talks about computing the human condition, life, the universe and everything:

As attested by the video below I was under the impression that all this has already been computed:

But seriously, can we really “compute” (and answer) everything?

Or is there more to it all than computation?

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]