Top 12 Things I Learned at TED 2016

I just returned from the TED Conference in Vancouver, and I met many great people and learned hundreds of new things.  I have tried to pick out twelve interesting things from everything I saw and heard to share with you here.  Enjoy, and I would love your feedback and thoughts.

1. From Astro Teller, I learned about Google’s philosophy on Moonshot projects. He believes that since they are trying many bold things which might not be possible, they go in early with an attitude of “How are we going to kill our project today?” To encourage that attitude, people don’t get fired when projects get killed for good reasons, they get celebrated, or even promoted.  He shared the great news about their Project Loon, which is trying to bring Internet connectivity via high-altitude balloons to parts of the planet with no access.  He also shared two projects they recently killed, a vertical farming project and a lighter-than-air variable-buoyancy transport craft.  Both of those were exciting projects that reached early endpoints because they prioritized the most difficult parts of the project – the parts that were most likely to kill it.  Below is one Project Loon being launched.

2. From Riccardo Sabatini, I learned about the amazing potential from our recent understanding of the entire human genome. He wheeled out on stage 175 huge books with 262,000 pages of information, each page filled with A, G, T and Cs, containing the entire DNA of Craig Venter. 

 He turned to a page shown below, and read a sequence of 8 letters that represent Venter’s eye color – blue. 

And then he turned to another page, where if just two letters were in the wrong order, it would mean he has cystic fibrosis.  Using machine learning, he is now able to predict things like height, eye color, skin color, and even facial structure based on a person’s genome.

3. I learned that pretty much everyone procrastinates, and that pretty much everyone does not feel they have enough time to finish the things they start. This great quote from Leonard Bernstein was shared,” "Two things are necessary for great achievement: A plan, and not quite enough time.”  I learned that Leonardo DaVinci toiled for 16 years on the Mona Lisa.  I learned that while procrastination can be a vice to productivity, it can be a boon to creativity.

4. I learned from the co-founder of AirBnb, Joe Gebbia, their formation story, including him showing the email he sent to Brian showing their desperation to get money to pay the rent. He also said that the sharing economy really isn’t just about sharing.  It’s about commerce.  But it’s about commerce with the promise of human connection.

 I also saw a great recreation of Van Gogh’s bedroom (famous painting of his) that was then put on AirBnb for rent.  This is the room for rent below.

5. I learned that at 93 years old, Norman Lear was the oldest TED speaker ever. But he was one of the most lucid, and funny.

When asked, “How old do you feel,” he said, without skipping a beat, “I feel I am the peer of whomever I am speaking to.”  He also shared an amazing story about learning what kind of unknown impact his shows and work had on American culture.  He met someone at the Emmy’s last year who said, “when I saw George Jefferson on the TV show The Jeffersons write a check, I never knew that a black man could WRITE a check.  That really inspired me.” That person was Russell Simmons.

6. I learned how incredibly removed we are from how serious the problem is in Syria and for refugees in general. Alexander Betts showed the devastating damage to Homs in the image below and the video taken by a drone over Syria.

More importantly, he proposed real solutions to problems that seem insurmountable.

7. I learned about the hidden power of prosecutors from Adam Foss. I learned that it costs $109,000 to lock up a teenager for a year, with a more than 60% chance the teenager will return to jail, and what a terrible return there is on that investment.  He told us how a prosecutor has the power to change lives instead of ruin them, and that he feels as a prosecutor, he has kept more people out of jail than he could have as a defender.

8. I learned about a new type of photography called day-to-night, perfected by Stephen Wilkes. He goes to a location, gets up on a crane, and takes hundreds of pictures all day long, and then stitches them together, not into a time lapse, but into a single photographic composite of all the interesting things that happened all day long at that location.  The images are stunning.  This first one below is of Notre Dame in Paris and it combines the morning rowers on the right and the night-time river tours on the left.

This next one is animals gathering around a watering hole in the Serengeti.

He has many more great images at his website here:

https://www.stephenwilkes.com/fine-art/day-to-night/5408defb-b7c0-4d9c-b89d-25740a627753

9. I learned from Kang Lee about lying – how it develops in children, and how to detect it. I learned that lying is part of development, and kids often start to lie as young as 2 years old.  Here’s a graph he showed about how it increases with age.

And here’s a funny story he shared about kids starting to lie, but not fully understanding all the aspects of it yet.

10. I learned from Tom Hulme about “desire paths” and design. He argues that if you don’t offer “low friction” in your designs, someone else will.  He gave a great example of a college campus that let people walk where they want – their “desire paths” – and then used that to smartly pave those locations that were the “low friction” routes that people wanted to take.  He used this as a metaphor for product design as well, that you should live like your customer, observe them in the real world, and then learn from what they actually do.

11. Not from the TED stage, but from David Pakman, I learned a lot about AI and Deep Learning, and how it’s poised to shake up the world. In particular, I learned about George Hotz, who made a self-driving car in a month using Deep Learning.

Here is an article about it:

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self-driving-car/

Here is what is amazing about it: It was trained just by driving. In other words, it was never told specifically what a stop sign was, or what a pedestrian was, it just observed in a month of driving what happened when those things were seen.  Deep Learning is now being phased in for the Google Search algorithm, replacing what was formerly done with rules.  I think both Facebook and Google are betting their companies on Deep Learning, and I think the potential uses over time will be staggering.

12. And finally, I learned a lot more about the promise of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). Here, Microsoft showed their Hololens augmented reality headset. It precisely maps the room, and projects objects that you can interact with directly and seamlessly into your environment.

My mind was blown looking at the possibility below of imagining a future where you can walk around on the moon with Neil Armstong. Look how amazingly realistic the surface is, and how close you can get to the experience.

I feel this is going to have dramatic entertainment, educational, and productivity applications beyond anything we can easily imagine today.

I can't wait to see what kinds of impact these ideas have in the future.