Every innovation carries within it the seed of annihilation. I don’t mean this in the Christensenian sense of disruption, in which agile newcomers unseat sclerotic incumbents who probably had it coming. I mean that often the very kernel of invention is inseparable from the urge toward destruction. Manifest destiny. The Manhattan Project. Eros and thanatos. The wish to create the world anew is just a rephrasing of the wish to destroy the world as it is.
Such was my thinking as I entered the Gift Cave. Like most TED attendees, I made the Cave my first stop when I entered the Vancouver Convention Centre. As you likely already know, TED is an exclusive and expensive proposition—guests must fill out an incredibly detailed application for the right to pay $8,500 to attend. If you are the kind of person who can navigate this screening process, there are many companies that would dearly love to reach you, and so you are presented with a passel of free goods and services from a variety of sponsors (including, it so happens, WIRED).
I have been told the Gift Cave can be a bit of a madhouse—especially early in the conference, as guests scurry to collect their bounty before the good stuff is gone. And so I showed up early on Tuesday morning to ensure I could beat the rush. This year, the Gift Cave is run a bit differently. Instead of simply giving you a bag of swag, the organizers walk you through several stations and encourage you to choose the gifts you find most desirable. The first table was covered in books, from which I could pick three. For my first selection, I chose something called Infinite Progress: How the Internet and Technology Will End Ignorance, Disease, Poverty, Hunger, and War . It seemed in keeping with the TED spirit. I also grabbed a copy of Rosie Revere, Engineer for my son, and The Essential Scratch & Sniff Guide To Becoming a Wine Expert . At the next station, I forewent the headphones and iPhone microphone in favor of two tickets to An American in Paris on Broadway, which I presumed would mollify my wife, who always gets annoyed when I travel for work. The last table contained a collection of suede shoes. They looked very nice, but the prospect of picking a style and color, waiting for the attendant, asking her to fetch the appropriate pairs, and then trying them on was simply too much. I didn’t feel worthy of the shoes, to say nothing of the effort that would go into obtaining them, and so after picking up a couple of shoes and dutifully holding them up to the light, I left the Gift Cave and headed into the auditorium.
Part of the Problem
By this point in our cultural history, TED is not a conference but a signifier. Depending on whom you ask, it is a symbol of forward-thinking rectitude, creative inspiration, technocratic utopianism, or cloistered megalomania. A recent piece in The New York Times compared TED to an evangelical tent revival—one that flattered its listeners into believing they could overcome the world’s injustices, that “simply showing up to listen makes you part of the solution.”
To be sure, there have been moments that inspired an almost spiritual response. Fred Jansen’s tale of landing the Rosetta probe on a spinning, craggy comet was a stirring testament to human ingenuity. Neuroscientist David Eagleman unveiled a vest that pulsed against the wearer’s skin in response to data, allowing him to expand his sensory perception of the world around him. And Stanford’s Fei-Fei Li showed how neural networks could identify objects in photographs—and describe them in full sentences—at about the level of a three-year-old child.
And yet, sitting through the first two days of presentations, I have not felt like part of the solution. If anything, I feel powerless in the face of forces, cavalierly unleashed, that have grown beyond our control. The official theme this year is “Truth Or Dare,” which sounds optimistic but actually carries a vague undercurrent of menace. Nick Bostrom, the author of Superintelligence , delivered a grim vision of a future in which humanity is dominated by a machine intelligence it can no longer contain. In her terrifying discussion of antibiotic resistance, Superbug author Maryn McKenna predicted that our wanton overuse of antibiotics would lead to 50 million annual deaths by 2050. “We did it to ourselves,” she said, “by squandering antibiotics with a heedlessness that is almost shocking.” The True American author Anand Giridharadas argued that American inequality had created an empathy gap that prevented the privileged—including the entire TED audience—from knowing or much caring about the struggles of the vanishing middle class. “If you live near a Whole Foods; if no relative of yours serves in the military; if you’re paid by the year, not the hour; if no one you know uses meth,” he said, “if any or all of these things describe you, then accept the possibility that you may not know what’s going on. And that you may be part of the problem.”
Perhaps at the prodding of TED organizers, even the direst conclusions were counterbalanced by a stab at optimism. Bostrom’s talk was followed by Oren Etzioni of the Allen Institue, who argued that worries about AI superintelligence were vastly overblown. McKenna half-heartedly suggested we might avert the devastation of the coming post-antibiotic age by “changing social norms,” learning to refuse unnecessary antibiotics much as we learned to stop littering or smoking in public.
Nevertheless, for those of us with young children, these flashes of hope didn’t really counteract the doomsaying. The most hopeful prospect probably was the one given voice by technology forecaster Stephen Petranek, who confidently stated that by mid-century we’ll be sending humans by the thousands to colonize Mars. It suggested that future generations will have the opportunity to start over, unsullied by all the damage we’ve caused here on Earth. If Petranek is right, by 2050 we’ll be sending 80,000 people up there every two years. Coincidentally enough, my son will be 40 years old in 2050, precisely the age I am right now.
Forgive Me
Indeed, TED organizer Chris Anderson made unease an explicit leitmotif of the conference. One of the most hotly anticipated talks was to be by Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz, who was expected to reveal the augmented-reality technology his secretive company has spent so many months working on. He pulled out at the last minute without saying why—although Anderson intimated that the VCs in the audience may have some guesses—and so his talk was replaced by a rapid-fire conversation about whether “we are in danger of creating a future we will hate.” (Journalists were reminded that this bit of audience participation was strictly off the record, but it’s probably OK to tell you the verdict was pretty evenly split.)
This is my second year at TED, and over lunch I spoke with a long-time attendee who said the tone has gotten markedly more morose in recent years. In part, he says, that’s because the first generation of TEDsters has grown old and started seriously considering their own mortality and the legacy they will leave behind.
David Isay, the founder of StoryCorps and the winner of this year’s TED Prize, addressed that theme head-on during his acceptance speech. For those unfamiliar, StoryCorps sets up booths around the country, where volunteers help people conduct and record honest and intense conversations with one another. Isay is using his prize money to launch a StoryCorps app, which he hopes will help “create an archive of the wisdom of humanity,” allowing future generations to hear the stories and emotions of their ancestors. In a tear-jerking keynote, Isay played several recordings of people expressing their truest feelings. Sarah Littman and her son Josh discussed his Asperger’s syndrome, and whether he lived up to her expectations. Two elderly New Yorkers shared their undying love for one another. A 34-year-old man spoke with the mother of a boy he shot and killed. Isay impressed upon us author Ira Byock’s four things to tell someone before they die: thank you; I love you; forgive me; I forgive you.
From where I sat, about fifteen rows up, stage center-left, this was TED at its most transcendent—a celebration not of human ingenuity and innovation, but of its frailty, impermanence, and imperfection. After Isay’s talk, we were treated to a performance by Joey Alexander, an 11-year-old jazz pianist from Bali. The boy, wearing a Joy Division t-shirt under a blazer, sat at the keyboard and summoned forth a cascading torrent of emotion, playing renditions of “Over the Rainbow” and “Monk’s Dream” with passion and poise that belied his tiny frame and tender age. Watching him, it was hard to see him as anything other than a vessel, channeling something deep and universal that happened to select him as its outlet.
I thought of my own son, 3,000 miles away, sleeping beneath his robot comforter. After just two days at TED, it is hard not to imagine him, all of us, as shells that enact the technological and historical forces that operate through us. Even so, when I tried to think of my son as a bit player in the overwhelming arc of human history—perhaps one of those 80,000 voyagers to Mars—I couldn’t. We may indeed be creating a future we will come to hate, a future that he will have no choice but to inhabit. If so, I hope he forgives us. For now, though, I miss him and I’m sorry that I’m so far from him.
I hope he likes the book.
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