The TED conference took place this past week and some of the talks have already been released. While most of the year the TED social channels repackage and release talks from past events, this is the one moment when you can actually watch talks close to when they were first presented live. Going through the site and watching some of the talks, here were three that stood out as important to watch along with some of my thoughts:
How would a robot butler actually work? In this fascinating live presentation, roboticist and founder of 1X Bernt Børnich introduces NEO, a humanoid robot designed to help you out around the house. As he talks about the possibilities, you see NEO doing household tasks. Børnich’s main insight is that if robots are going to gain more intelligence, it will not come from doing limited tasks in a factory setting. Instead, we will need to test them in the home, and this is an example of what happens when you do that.
Perhaps the most shared talk from TED already is this urgent talk from investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr who breaks down the “broligarchy” and the real costs of allowing technology companies to dismantle democracy. Most importantly, she shares some actionable ways to take the power back by protecting your data, pushing back on surveillance and giving money and support to those that are protecting the things that matter such as journalists and platforms like the Wayback Machine.
Clearly this conversation between TED founder Chris Anderson and OpenAI founder Sam Altman was going to be a blockbuster … a fact that the TED team likely knew since this was available to watch live. In the talk, Anderson asks Altman tough questions about IP theft, future plans, ethical issues and all the things you would want to know about. Altman largely sticks to the script, offering a utopian take on all the ways things could go right while generally avoiding any thought or suggestion that perhaps things could go awry. I’m not sure you’ll get much new from this interview, but as Anderson concluded, “Sam, I think over the next few years you’re going to have some of the biggest opportunities, some of the biggest moral challenges, some of the biggest decisions to make of perhaps any human in history. We are all cheering you on to make the right decisions.” Yikes.
