Saying you hear a lot of predictions at TED is like saying you hear a lot of predictions on The Weather Channel.
Some of these predictions fill you with wonder (alien life is out there). Some wrack you with despair (climate change). But the one glimpse of the future I had at TED this year that felt absolutely inevitable to me didn't come during a talk. It came when I had a Galaxy Note strapped to my face and I was flying.
Compared to all the fancy corporate booths set up on TED's main concourse, the setup for the VR demo was ad hoc. It was really just a table and a few Samsung Gear VR headsets: basically an oversized pair of ski googles with a phablet slotted in the front and headphones.
But the headsets were never really on the table. That's because they were always on the heads of one TED attendee or another. It's a funny sight: very important members of the techno-elite with clunky contraptions strapped to their faces, cocking their heads around like little birds. But it also illustrates an important point: These are the people supposedly inventing the future, and they couldn't stay away.
Now, I realize saying virtual reality is the future is a pretty banal observation. WIRED, for one, has been saying so for 20 years. But I assure you, the prediction doesn't mean as much until you have the VR experience for yourself. When you do, you can physically feel its inevitability.
In my case, that feeling came after the steam train heading straight toward me exploded into a flock of birds and I suddenly found myself airborne. I looked down, saw the "ground" receding into the distance, and reflexively grabbed for something, anything, to keep me from floating away. I felt a twinge of vertigo and an impulse to rip the goggles off my face. I won't give away any more spoilers in case you get a chance to see this particular "movie" for yourself. But even after just four minutes, coming back into the real world felt like a startling re-entry.
Along with the sheer power of the experience, I was also deeply struck by how it had all taken place on equipment that was merely consumer grade. The headphones were just headphones, the smartphone just a smartphone. The software running the system came from Facebook-owned Oculus. I can only imagine what the experience of Oculus' own dedicated VR rig must feel like.
But more than anything, my experience of VR moved me as a parent. When you have little kids, or even medium-sized ones, the advent of new technology takes on an added dimension. For someone my age, a PC is a technology I will always take for granted—I don't know a world that doesn't have them. By that same standard, a smartphone will always be a kind of novelty, no matter how used to them I get. For a lot of elementary school-aged kids today, a smartphone is to them like a PC is to me. And VR could soon join the list of tech that melts my brain but to them just feels normal.
And I don't know how to feel about that. If the tech is this good already, imagine how utterly, compellingly immersive it will be by the time they're adults. All the kids I know spend too much time glued to screens already. With VR like this, why would they ever want to leave?
Then again. The movie I saw (experienced? felt?) was made by Chris Milk, who spoke at TED this year. He has also made a documentary, Clouds Over Sidra, a virtual immersion in a Syrian refugee camp. Its subject is a 12-year-old girl named Sidra. "You are not watching through a screen or window, you’re with her. When you look down, you’re sitting on the ground she’s sitting on,” Milk said. As Milk described it, virtual reality doesn't just have to be a tool for escape. It can be a tool for empathy. Future adults might use VR to disconnect from the world entirely. Or they might use it to connect more deeply than ever before.
Before I arrived, I called TED a pageant of optimism. That didn't turn out to be the case this year. I can't say I'm leaving TED more optimistic about the future than when I arrived. But I'm also not willing to default to the assumption that optimism equals oversimplification. Optimism is sometimes about denying the hard realities on the ground. But sometimes it's the more nuanced view.
"Please don’t underestimate for one minute the courage it takes to give this talk," TED organizer Chris Anderson said. Then Monica Lewinsky took the stage. And before she said a word, you knew he was right.
It was 17 years ago, in a different century, when the world turned Lewinsky into an icon of embarrassment. For a few years afterward, she floundered in the spotlight, awkwardly trying to reinvent herself through the same avenues of media exploitation that had fueled her public shaming. Then she withdrew.
But now here she was today, the latest of a few select public appearances she's made in recent months. She hadn't come to deflect attention from the scandal that defined her life, but to claim it as a way to lend unique power to her voice. Online harassment, shaming, and bullying have become an epidemic, she said. And she was, she said, "patient zero."
I admit to feeling snarky when I first saw Lewinsky on the TED schedule. I followed the whole White House imbroglio like everyone else in the late `90s, but never thought about her much afterward. When you heard her name, it was typically as a punchline. As far as she was in my consciousness at all, she was more meme than person.
That changes when you see someone on stage, unshielded and unfiltered. She was there in all her personhood, and she was calling to account the online culture that had made her into that punchline, a culture that has since metastasized into something far more grotesque.
The public intrusion into her life starting in 1998 wasn't just intense, it was intense in a new way, Lewinsky said. Around that time, the web was just breaking wide open as a mainstream venue for public discourse. And like a lot of big crowds seeking a sense of identity, the web needed someone to pillory. Monica Lewinsky became that someone.
"This scandal was brought to you by the digital revolution," Lewinsky said. "It was the first time the traditional media was usurped by the internet on a major story."
Through Lewinsky, the internet not only learned how to inflict shame but how to monetize it. Scandal draws attention, and attention is online currency.
"The more shame, the more clicks," Lewinsky said. She called out the hacks of Snapchat user images and nude celebrity photos from iCloud as examples not just of harassment but of profit-seeking. "Someone is making money off the back of someone else’s suffering."
Lewinsky pointed out that her own shaming came before the advent of social media, which now powers the harassment of any private individual the way she was as a public figure. She recounted the story of Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers University student who leapt from the George Washington Bridge after his roommate secretly used a webcam to broadcast footage of Clementi kissing another man. She asked for support of the anti-bullying foundation started in his name, which advocates for "upstanding," for not standing quietly by while someone is harassed and humiliated, online or off.
And "upstanding" was what Lewinsky was doing here today. It's a powerful gesture for anyone to make, but a different kind of compelling coming from her. I can only imagine if I were Monica Lewinsky, I would probably be happy if no one ever said my name again. Instead, she has decided to, as she put it, reclaim her narrative. She's taking back her story from the forces that snatched it away by fighting back on behalf of everyone who has suffered the same.
I don't know how you beat the trolls. Nor does Lewinsky nor the world's richest internet companies. But cultivating empathy is part of it, she said. And empathy couldn't have a better ambassador. As much as anyone since the rise of the internet, Monica Lewinsky knows how it feels.
On Wednesdays at TED, you reach a saturation point. The big ideas have come so fast and thick that they all kind of gel together into one Big Idea, more like a Big Idea-ness. On the one hand, you get swept up in it. On the one hand, the future is a vast ocean of possibility. On the other hand, the future is a well of Important Things to Think About so deep that if you peer over the edge, you could topple in and never reach the bottom.
I think TED seeks to overwhelm. It's a conference of ideas, but what it's really about emotion more than intellect. Just consider how this feels:
You're in a custom-built amphitheater erected from the ground up inside a vast hall of this convention center by the downtown Vancouver waterfront. And I know what you're thinking: convention center? What could be more banal? But I'm telling you, this convention center is the shit. Its roof is basically a terraced meadow where you expect to see elk grazing. Endless glass opens onto views of towering mountains across the water as sea planes glide in for a landing. The setting alone makes you feel like something epic must be about to happen.
And then the people. The main journalistic soul-selling you do to get a press pass to TED is agree to its ground rules, which prohibit writing about specific attendees without their permission. Everything off-stage is off the record, a rule that applies not just to reporters but everyone there. I get this, from TED's perspective: some people here are VIPs whose every utterance makes news. If they felt like they always had to watch what they said, they probably just wouldn't come.
But it sucks for me, because I can't dish on the super-important tech CEO I saw wandering past the bookstore, or the super-big-deal co-founder chilling in the lounge. I can't name the unlikely Hollywood celebrity whose presence at TED might make you giggle a little if I could. There are venture capitalists who startup entrepreneurs dream of pitching. Design gurus. Celebrity engineers. Oh, and there goes Neil Gaiman walking by.
I think I can mention him because he's on the program. And his wife, Amanda Palmer, who gave one of the most popular TED talks of recent years. They've been hosting a nightly "speakeasy"—a hotel lounge done up in harlequin gothic—to showcase, among other things, science fiction writers debuting stories on TED's near-future theme. Last night I saw Nnedi Okorafor read a new story about flying on a transparent jetliner to Nigeria, where a Siri-like AI the plane uploads to her phone gets a little too sentient.
I don't drop all these (non) names to sound important; I mention them just to show that the important-ness doesn't rest. You don't come out of the TED theater back into the mundane world. The world just beyond the doors is super-charged with potential, significance, serendipity. In a way, it's radically energizing. In another way, it's exhausting. You can't possibly absorb it all, which can create a feeling of perpetual missed opportunity.
So the ideas themselves? A semi-random sample: the Google vice-president who went up to the stratosphere dangling from a balloon and free-fell back to earth. Multiple plantologists on the overwhelming possibility that life is out there. The head of Google's self-driving car project, who wants to see the cars take over the roads within five years—that is, by the time his oldest kid can drive.
Just while writing this, I saw Nest co-founder and iPod designer Tony Faddell complain about the tiny stickers on fruit. Designer Elora Hardy got a standing ovation for her work building and furnishing bespoke homes in Bali out of bamboo. Then we saw a stunning collaboration between virtuostic young cellist Joshua Roman, virtuostic young singer Somi, and legendary choreographer Bill T. Jones. It gave me chills.
And then it was on the next thing, a fascinating dive into the history of the tree as a metaphor for data visualization by Manuel Lima. I'm a fan, so I had to watch that. And so on. You get the idea.
This morning I got up and went for a run. Not out among the redwoods in Stanley Park. In the hotel gym. On the treadmill. It was boring—so, so boring. And oh so sweet.
TED organizers are fond of reminding us that it foresaw the touchscreen revolution. In a popular TED talk in 2006—the year before Steve Jobs announced the iPhone—computer scientist Jeff Han showed off the multi-touch interface he had developed as an alternative to then-ubiquitous mice.
"After years of research on touch-driven computer displays," TED said at the time, "Jeff Han has created a simple, multi-touch, multi-user screen interface that just might herald the end of the point-and-click era."
Well, Han's specific tech might not have ended up in everyone's pocket (he eventually sold his company to Microsoft). But the touchscreen has obviously come to dominate mobile devices, which are themselves the now-dominant form of personal computing.
And TED has a problem with that.
In frequent warnings up to and during the conference, posted on much bigger screens and voiced by head TEDster Chris Anderson himself, attendees are warned during talks to put their screens away.
"This is an attention game here," Anderson said. If you're on your screen, you're missing the talk, which is the point of being at TED, he said. And others in the audience distracted by your screen might be missing it, too. "We all have to agree it is okay to be obnoxious to the person who is using their phone," he said.
The ironies run thick in TED's anti-screen screed. TED is an event awash in screens. Three massive screens loom over TED speakers, projecting their faces and slides. Outside the main theater, screens are placed everywhere to make sure everyone else can see and hear the talks. Even more importantly, the spread of screens are responsible for the spread of TED. TED talks spread via tweets and Facebook status updates. They're watched on YouTube on laptops, phones, and tablets. The TED conference is the anchor of the TED brand, but it's only because of screens that its brand has gone viral.
Not that I think TED is wrong to ban screens from the main theater (except for the back row, where journalists and anyone else are still free to bask in the pale LED glow). And the point of TED is to immerse yourself in its live, real-time authenticity, not Meerkat yourself watching a TED talk, right? Right?
Or maybe TED should just give in to the hall of mirrors, the meta-narrative of its own meaning. I mean, one of the most popular things to talk about at TED is TED. What if TED just went all-screen, all the time? Maybe all those screens would cancel out each others' significance to the point that it's like there are no screens—just one voice, talking for 18 minutes. I don't know—sounds like a good topic for a TED talk.
A ticket to TED costs $8,500. This puts a lot of pressure on speakers to deliver, and on TED organizers to make sure they do. The best TED talks—the ones on which TED has built itself up not just as an event but a brand—come loaded with a shot of brain-bending wonder that makes you think we might get those jetpacks we were promised after all.
Neuroscientist David Eagleman's 18 minutes this morning made the best bid so far for the price of admission. But instead of a jetpack, he promised a vest.
Eagleman started by pointing out the seductive fallacy that leads humans to believe the world we sense somehow corresponds with "objective reality." In fact, he said, "we're trapped on this very thin slice of perception." He pointed out that, at the moment he was speaking, thousands of cell phone conversations we can't perceive were coursing through our bodies at that moment in the form of radio waves.
But our limited field of perception isn't somehow hardwired into our brains, Eagleman argued. Quite the opposite: the brain is just waiting to be rewired, he said. All we need are different sensors.
To illustrate his point, he called out examples from the animal kingdom. Heat-sensing pits in the heads of snakes. Magnetite that allows birds to navigate via internal compasses. Bloodhound noses that can sniff a cat 100 yards away. The world living things can sense—their 'umwelt,' as Eagleman put it—is vast. But the brains that process those signals into information organisms can use aren't all that different from one another. They're basically just computers in a dark room inside our heads, he said, that process whatever data they're fed.
"Your brain doesn't know and it doesn't care where it gets the data from," he said. "Whatever information comes in it just figures out what to do with it."
As such, it doesn't matter so much where that data comes from. Eagleman described "sensory substitution" experiments dating back to the 1960s that show, for example, you can help blind people to "see" through patterns of tactile and audio feedback. Over time, the brain deciphers those patterns and uses them to make sense of the surrounding world.
Eagleman then took off his shirt to reveal a vest built by his lab at Baylor College of Medicine that amps up the complexity of sensory substitution. A mechanism in the back of the vest vibrates in complicated patterns based on audio fed through a smartphone. The patterns are too intricate to translate consciously. But over the course of a few months, he said the brain adapts. He showed a video in which a person Eagleman said was deaf since birth was wearing the vest as a person next to him spoke single words. The vest pulsed, and the man who supposedly couldn't hear wrote the words on a white board.
Now, I've done enough science journalism and been around enough science journalists to know I'm not supposed to take anecdotal evidence like this as gospel. Scientific debates about the structure and function of the brain rage, about how perception works and even what it means to perceive. But I also know it was pretty effing cool to see work like this moving from the theoretical toward the practical.
Maybe a little less practical is what Eagleman sees for the future of this work: not just sensory substitution, but "sensory addition." Could we, for example, stream the internet straight to our brains via the same patterns that help the deaf to hear? In one experiment, Eagleman streamed real-time stock market data in the form of vibrations to the back of a test subject. Eagleman himself revealed that at that moment, he was having a sentiment analysis of tweets with the TED hashtag streamed to his back to see if he could tell how much we all liked what he was saying.
If he's right and his vest works as promised, Eagleman sees a future when pilots have don't look at their gauges but feel them. "We'll be able to define our own peripherals," he said.
It's the kind of gee-whiz vision of a future maybe a little more plausible than you thought that TED packages so well. The details are still going to take a while to work out. But the cozy confines of the TED auditorium are designed to make you feel like we'll get there. In the meantime, let's just be okay with feeling a little bit psyched.
A posture of optimism can be tough to keep up after a long day of idea-imbibing. (Yeah, yeah, and after a long day of everyone opening doors for you and an endless parade of sushi platters and Kind bars and cold brew coffee from a keg.) Fortunately for the optimism-challenged, TED's opening ceremony—its "Opening Gambit"—wasn't exactly glistening with hope.
Consider this line-up, the first six official TED Talks. A former prime minister of Australia on rising friction between the US and China. The editor of Foreign Policy on a federal government so dysfunctional that any real conversation on science and technology policy has become impossible. A new approach to 3-D printing inspired by Terminator 2. A new way of extracting sound from micro-vibrations captured on video that seems like it would make it really easy to eavesdrop on anyone anywhere. A performance artist best known for pieces about extreme bodily endurance and pain.
Oh, and then there was this great band from Brooklyn that has figured out how to make dubstep using just a drum kit and two saxophones. (They were really good!)
So was TED trying to pre-empt me? Just when I'd pledged to open myself to its belief in a "better future," was TED going all pessimist? Nah.
Among the first official acts of Kevin Rudd as prime minister of Australia was to apologize to indigenous Australians for centuries of abuse. "There was a new beginning because we had gone not just to the head but also to the heart," Rudd said. The Americans and Chinese could reach a similar kind of renewal, he said as he wrote Chinese characters with his finger on a tablet. David Rothkopf, the Foreign Policy editor, was much less hopeful about the chances of Washington and Silicon Valley finding a way to talk to each other. But he did have the most bracing observation of the night—not a value judgement, just a statement of likely fact about mobile tech:
"Effectively every single human being on the planet is going to be part of a manmade system for the first time," Rothkopf said.
As for the Terminator reference, it was chemist Joe DeSimone's way of explaining his 3-D printer, which instead of layering one ultra-thin layer on top of another appears to pull objects whole out of a liquid pool of plastic. DeSimone, who founded a company called Carbon3D, claims it's a much faster technique for creating more durable objects than traditional (can we call it that already?) 3-D printing techniques. Killer androids aren't among the predicted, applications, however. Think auto parts on demand and custom stents for heart attack victims made right in the emergency room.
Chris Anderson, the on-stage impresario of TED and not the former editor of WIRED, was himself skeptical of Abe Davis' sound-extracting algorithms. Davis is a computer scientist at MIT whose technology amplifies imperceptible vibrations observed in video to make them audible. Even after extolling Davis' work in his intro as possibly as big a deal as the touchscreen, he pushed him afterward to explain why we shouldn't be worried about our privacy. Davis said we wouldn't like his answer. "If somebody really wants to listen to you, there are already better, more targeted ways," said. In the meantime, it looks like Davis' tech could one day be used to make photo-realistic video games by using the same vibration-amplifying algorithms to simulate how objects in videos might move when pulled, pushed, or shaken.
The last talk, from famed performance artist Marina Abramović, started with us donning black blindfolds while she recounted a harrowing early performance from the `70s. We took off the blindfolds to stark photos of a bloody pentagram scraped across her abdomen. She talked about other pieces, including one where she held the bow while her partner pointed an arrow straight at her heart. But Abramović said her work wasn't about pain; it was about trust and liberation. The platitudes ran a little thick. But then at the end, in a neat parallel with the blindfold at the beginning, she asked us all to turn to the stranger next to us and look into his or her eyes silently for two minutes.
We all did it. Or at least I think we did, because it was dead quiet. I couldn't see what anyone else was doing, however, while I gazed into the eyes of a guy whom I had never seen before. Have you ever tried something like that? I hadn't. It was very moving. Doubt me? Try it. I don't think it's just the good vibes talking.
The first day of TED starts with the opening acts. The TED Fellows are young, typically brilliant scientists, artists, and activists whose work embodies the TED tag line "Ideas worth spreading." Their presentations don't run the full 18 minutes of the iconic TED Talk format. Instead, they act as a warm-up for tonight's main event.
The ideas from the first round of fellows came so thick and fast that they ended up more a wash of intellectual inspiration than real engagement with specific ideas—a microcosm of the whole TED week. A synthetic biologist. A designer who created a nationwide gift economy of artists trading work via bicycle. A photojournalist documenting the war-torn lives of Palestinian farmers in Gaza. A computational biologist crunching DNA patterns in a supercomputer to fight a pest ravaging the cassava crop in East Africa.
The crowd favorite was probably when a guy from Backyard Brains wired up a man and a woman with electrodes, and the electrical impulses from her brain caused his arm to move when hers did. Comedian Negin Farsad opened with the line, "I am an Iranian-American Muslim female, like all of you" (leaving out the implied, obvious "not").
But the biggest challenge to an audience steeped in Silicon Valley pieties was astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz. Her work involves looking for what she called "choice alien real estate," searching the cosmos for planets that might be hospitable to life. "The more you look for planets like earth," she said, "the more you appreciate our own planet itself." Among the planets that don't quite measure up is Mars.
Mars might have been inhabited by life once, Walkowicz said. But these days, she said, compared to earth, it's a pretty terrible place to live. She pointed to the fact that humans have so far failed to colonize the least hospitable places of our own planet, such as deserts, which have the advantage of a rich, highly oxygenated atmosphere. Aspirations to colonize Mars, as described by Walkowicz, have an air not of innovative ambition, but of giving up. If we can figure out how to make Mars habitable by humans, she said, we ought to be able figure out how to keep earth habitable for humans, too—an effort at which we are currently failing miserably.
"For anyone to tell you Mars will be there to back up humanity is like the captain of the Titanic telling you that the real party is happening later on the life boats," Walkowicz said. "It is hubris to believe that interplanetary colonization will be enough to save us from ourselves."
TED doesn't give you much chance to ease in. I'm on a flight from San Francisco to Vancouver nursing a migraine, knees wedged against the seat in front of me, worrying about leaving my wife a single parent for a week. Across the aisle, a guy is already in full TED mode, expounding to his seat mate on how mobile technology is going to breed a wave of new Einsteins. "Hundreds of millions of people are going to be entering the community of ideas," he says.
This is what TED sounds like. People actually say things like "entering the community of ideas." TED is a pageant of optimism, a celebration of the belief in a kind of buoyant ingenuity to make the world better. It originated more than 30 years ago out of the same non-conformist West Coast scene that bred much of the tech industry. And like that industry, TED has evolved past its beginnings as a scrappy, DIY counterpoint to the dominant culture. Now it is that dominant culture. TED is where the global elite come to think big thoughts and feel good about themselves for doing so.
But here on the plane on Sunday, I'm feeling like my optimism threshold has been breached. And the conference hasn't even started. As in Silicon Valley, TED doesn't traffic much in irony, and in cynicism not at all. And, speaking from experience, it has a way of making you feel guilty if you possess a shred of either. It's always pushing against your will to criticize.
That's understandable. The people here are people who have proved the power of transformative ideas. The impact of their creations and accomplishments has radiated across the world. Sure, not all those effects have been positive. But the feeling at TED is that, on balance, the world is better than it was, and the human ingenuity exemplified by the people here deserve some of the credit.
TED is not a conference in the traditional keynote-and-breakout-session sense. By design, it's an immersive experience. This makes a tough thing to write about. Like watching the Golden State Warriors play basketball this season, you kind of have to be there. One strategy would be to act as the gadfly in the ointment, to be the snarky counter-narrator. God knows it would be easy.
But I don't think it would be interesting. Snark is its own kind of bad faith, just like true belief—to keep it up, you have to deny the evidence before your eyes. Case in point: Just before I sat down to write this, I paused to eat a Clif bar and found myself talking to Christine Sun Kim, a sound artist who was born deaf. She said she turned to sound art because she wasn't very good at painting. And she said that without technology, she wouldn't be able to do what she does.
In talking to her and checking out her work, Sun Kim is clearly not a techno-utopianist. But technology has enabled her to do this really cool thing. (Side note to app developers: she's still looking for a better smartphone app for talking with people in groups when she's not with a sign-language interpreter.)
So here's the deal. I'm going to give in to TED this week. I'm going to see what happens when you accept the promise as a premise. Not that I'm going to abandon skepticism; I don't have that kind of power over my own psyche. I'm going to open myself to the onslaught of ideas, of charisma, of the neoliberal consens—gaa, must ... resist. The program will hit many of the themes you might expect: neuroscience and artificial intelligence, space travel and genetics. There will be performance art and a pop-up magazine, Bill Gates and Monica Lewinsky. I'll keep a diary of this week to see if TED can make a believer out of me. All I have to lose is this headache.
