TED Kicks Off With TED U and Lots of Rain

Behind the scenes at TED2010. February 9-13, 2010, Long Beach, CA. Credit: TED / Marla Aufmuth

TED begins before you even realize it. I’m checking into my TED experience at the airport in San Francisco. TED bags from past years are everywhere, and the morning flight to Long Beach is filled with TEDsters. "Are you going to TED?” I ask my seat neighbor, although it might as well be written on his forehead (he is reading The New Yorker on his Kindle). After looking at the list of attendees in the TED face book that you somewhat discretely study, you feel very, very under-accomplished, and you just want to hide in your room for the next four days. TED is the Who‘s Who of the Who’s Who. TED’s online social networking tool is helpful but also begs questions of etiquette: Is it appropriate to contact Glenn Close just because she’s on your top 10 matches list? And what is your “conversational approach?"

It has become a tradition to start off TED with the TED University (TED U), a smaller stage pre-conference program that features speakers with shorter talks. TEDsters appreciate them for their more intimate atmosphere, and they are almost always riveting. In the first TED U session in Long Beach, the onus was on wellness and health. Among others, speakers included barefoot runner Felix Kramer, Stanford researcher Daniel Kraft, who gave a tour de force though the future of medicine (just to give you an idea: 3D organ printing, geo-medicine, etc.), and surgeon Kevin Stone, who proposed biologic  solutions (in the form of animal derivatives) as the future of joint replacements. The other big theme at TED U was micro. Jessica Green made the invisible world of microbes more visible (“there are millions of organisms in this room right now”). Jonathan Drori explored “the astonishing world of pollen.” Frederick Balagadde presented micro-diagnostics as a new approach to affordable medical solutions in Africa. Phil Zimbardo, who appeared in the May 2009 issue of design mind, made a case for “heroic imagination“ becoming bigger than evil (“every one of us is a hero-in-waiting“). Finally, Cindy Gallop showed us how to translate big intentions into micro-actions propelled by game mechanics. It’s a small world, after all, and little things, especially when they’re playful, can have a huge impact.

Speaking of small worlds, here’s the most interesting fact of the TED U program: We spend 90 percent of our lives indoors. Obviously, we never really left the cave.

The main conference is kicking off today. The key themes for this year include, How can social media drive social change? How much information is too much? Is there still such thing as privacy? How will the new social power of constituents transform organizations? How can we overcome the divides between different faiths (and non-faiths), and how do we bridge the gap between science and political power? How can we re-design our big social systems such as education and health care, and re-invent government and energy? Is there hope after hope, in other words, for the global community of thinkers, artists, scientists, entrepreneurs, and business leaders to regain the optimism that was salient last year after Obama’s election?

That’s “What the World Needs Now.” What Long Beach needs now is a little bit of sunshine — pronto. Please! The dark clouds and massive rainfalls over Southern California do not fit well with the positive Californian spirit that TED stands for and is celebrated by the more than 1,600 attendees.

In This Will Change Everything, a compilation of essays edited by the venerable John Brockman (Edge.org), Brian Eno provides a compelling ex negativo argument for why TED is needed so much. He wonders what would happen if “the feeling that things get worse” prevails over our naive belief in progress: “Humans fragment into tighter, more selfish bands. Big institutions, because they operate on long timescales and require structures of social trust, don’t cohere; there isn‘t time for them. Long-term projects are abandoned; their pay-offs are too remote. Global projects are abandoned — not enough trust to make them work. Resources that are already scarce will be rapidly exhausted, as everybody tries to grab the last precious bits. Any kind of social or global mobility is seen as a threat and harshly resisted. Freeloaders and brigands and pirates and cheats take control. Survivalism rules. Might makes right.” Eno concludes by writing, “If our world becomes gripped by this particular feeling [of things getting worse], everything it presupposes could soon become true.”