Posted on behalf of Philip Campbell
Those attending a TED conference are guaranteed compelling talks – the organisers select for compulsive listening – and a broadening of horizons. You need to keep your critical faculties alert, because the 18-minute format tends to emphasise grand ideas and images rather than critical analysis and detailed data. As one of my fellow attendees at last week’s TED Global in Oxford said, some of the ideas are half-baked – a fact that is evident to other attendees from the same discipline and indeed probably to the organisers, but isn’t usually flagged to the audience. Still, the ideas and experiences presented are never trivial.
Attendees had two unusual privileges: seeing Annie Lennox sing live, and (some of us) eating cooked maggots. I’ll come to the maggots later, but Annie Lennox was there in an additional capacity – to promote a cause she has championed in recent years: preventing HIV/AIDS in mothers and children in South Africa. “There’s a genocide taking place in South Africa” she said. “1000 deaths a day, the front-line victims being women and children. So I committed to serve this and talk about it, and am using my platform for Mandela’s 46664 campaign.” As she and another campaigner, Mitchell Besser, co-founder of the mothers2mothers campaign described, the biggest weapon in their armoury is to empower women – to help them against the stigma, to help them meet others and turn them from victims into agents against the disease, and where possible to engage their menfolk – not easy.
Those TED talks that emphasised human engagement and hope, rather than scientific and technological progress, were the most compelling. Psychiatrist Inge Missmahl spoke of her experiences with families in Afghanistan – of the violence that erupts within families as a result of dreadful experiences of family members being all too unsuccessfully suppressed for fear of burdening others. “The key is empathy,” said Missmahl. “In effect, someone has to be witness their experience.” She spoke of the revival of mental health counselling as a key component of Afghanistan’s public health system.
Another quietly powerful voice from the Middle East was the Turkish novelist Elif Shafak. Her impact on everybody came as much from her articulacy and the narrative flow of her personal visions and experiences as from her ideas. She spoke of her need to rise above the identity politics of literature. “Women writers from the Muslim world are expected to write as representatives of a culture rather than a creative individual.” Such politics divides rather than connects, she said. No-one listening to her could doubt her commitment to writing about humanity rather than constraining identities. She recalled a sight she witnessed following an earthquake, of a conservative shopkeeper sitting sharing a cigarette with a weeping transvestite. “Prosaic barriers were dissolved,” she said. Her motto as a novelist might, she said, be “I feel therefore I am free”.
Speakers such as Shafak and Missmahl were compelling not only for what they said, but also because they are achievers, in a very personal sense, and who as such command the respect of an audience of achievers, some of them equally ambitious on behalf of others. It’s a reflection of the TED phenomenon organisers that you know of no other way that you might have encountered either the speakers or fellow attendees – TED is unique in the mix of encounters that it allows. (But you have to pay thousands of pounds/dollars to attend if you’re not a journalist.)
TED – an acronym derived from ‘Technology, Entertainment and Design’, was originally founded in California, but is rapidly establishing itself as a truly global phenomenon. As it sets up local clones of its meetings around the world and as its videos are downloaded everywhere, TED would seem to represent the ultimate in cosmopolitanism.
But for even the most digitally connected of us, that cosmopolitanism is imaginary, according to Ethan Zuckerman, one of the most prolific of twitterers and bloggers, and whose own talk-by-talk blogs from the meeting are well worth a read. Our supposedly wide-open networking in twitter space is in fact surprisingly segregated, as he demonstrated with traffic statistics showing the almost complete insularity of author ethnicity on certain topics of US tweets. He highlighted regional biases, too: less surprising to non-US audience, the depressing decline in international news as a percentage of US TV newscasts (from 35% in 1970s to 12% in 2000s); the overwhelming bias towards the developed North of Wikipedia regional articles; and the huge preponderance of use of local rather than foreign sources of news by online users – for example, 94% in the US, 95% in the UK.(See his slides and his talk).
Sometimes at TED one yearns for some hard data to get teeth into. The ‘data journalist’ David McAndless made a virtue of such nourishment. His stock in trade is the lateral thought that visualizes the hard-to-comprehend or, at best, stuff you’d never even imagined was there. His Billion Dollar Gram immediately shows you the relative scale of, say, Walmart’s revenues, the cost of the Iraq war so far, a manned mission to Mars and, completely dominating the whole, the worst case total cost of the financial crisis to the US government.
His time series are fascinating too: why, in a timeline of media panics about video games, do you see annual peaks not only around the Christmas gift season but also around April? Because, it turns out, that’s the anniversary of the Colombine school massacre. The wider moral from McAndless’s visualizations is that which scientists know well in principle but probably not well enough in practice: get all your data stored in minable form and then, well, mine it, but with lateral thinking.
Saving the planet was one inevitable recurrent theme, and the lateral thinking required to develop our planetary habitat’s resilience that was the message from Johan Rockström, of the Stockholm Resilience Centre. He highlighted the idea, first published and debated in Nature, that there are nine geochemical and other frames of analysis of planetary health, in which there may be boundaries beyond which we may enter new regimes. These cannot be considered as necessarily separate – ‘Like the Three Musketeers, one for all and all for one,” he suggested. But his emphasis was on new thinking required to change governance into forms that ensure resilience within the perturbations ahead. He highlighted three successful examples of such change: the collaborations between tourism companies and local industry and other interests in making tourism on the Great Barrier Reef sustainable; collaborative management of Sweden’s southern wetlands; and Latin America’s movements for sustainable agriculture in Latin America.
Perhaps the strongest TED Global theme that emerged in global sustainability and equity was the power of some of the largest multinational companies to make a difference. Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund highlighted the evident realisation by big companies, with a little persuasion from the likes of the WWF, that they would only have a future if they could make their supply chains sustainable. This, said Clay, is a precompetitive interest for them. By analyzing 35 centres of threatened biodiversity, the 15 commodities whose production threatens them and the top 100 companies involved in each, the WWF was able to focus down on the major multinationals with the most to lose but also with the biggest clout in the market place. Following unprecedented conversations between them and their competitors and also with NGOs, they can shift the practices of upstream suppliers in favour of sustainability. The power of multinationals to make a difference was also highlighted by labour-rights activist Auret van Heerden, pointing to ways in which a combination of reputational risk, supply chain management and independent audits can shift supply chains away from the use of child-slave labour in the upstream production of raw materials that end up, for example, in our cell phones.
I have focused on the non-science rather than the science at TED because the most compelling science was not new either to me or to a Nature audience, though certainly made an impact on TEDsters. Two who resisted the temptation to resort to hype and yet were compelling were from neuroscience: Gero Miesenböck’s discussion of neural control by bursts of light neatly encapsulated and made vivid the origin and development of the extraordinary power of optogenetics, and its potential to help us understand the neural mechanisms underlying behaviour. Sebastian Seung’s discussion of the connectome – the almost inconceivable map of all connections between human neurons – engaged the audience by raising the philosophical question as to the relationship between one’s identity and the state of one’s own connectome.
Another talk on science-based profundities came from Dimitar Sasselov, head of the Origins Institute at Harvard, who outlined preliminary results from the Kepler mission. Most of us are now used to the insignificance of planet Earth compared to the physical scale of the Universe. But Sasselov tried to boost our egos by thinking in temporal terms – our planet, after all, has existed for a substantial fraction of the Universe’s history. The thrilling prospect: Kepler’s data suggest a gratifyingly huge number of Earthlike planets in orbits around other stars in our Galaxy – perhaps 100 million.
My vote for the best talk goes to science writer Matt Ridley whose ability to articulate complex ideas – something he undertook more than was common at the meeting – was both a challenge and a stimulus to participants, as he explained how so much of important innovation arises collectively from the exchanges and specializations of ideas of the many rather than the high IQs of the few.
Oh, and the maggots? The entomologist Marcel Dicke explained how the planet couldn’t possibly feed itself with conventional sources of animal protein with a population of 9 billion, predicted in 2050. But, he explained, 80% of the population eat 1000 species of insects. It’s just northern Westerners who deny themselves that slice of good living. And the production processes required to produce animal protein in insect form are vastly more efficient than with, say, cattle. And we already have insect protein as residue of natural sources in, for example, chocolate and fruit juice. So get ready for a diet of sweet and sour locusts. Thoughtfully, the organisers had scheduled Dicke’s talk just before a coffee break, and had laid on delicacies containing cooked insects. So I rushed out from the talk and before I could re-engage my visceral revolt against the whole idea, I swallowed my maggot pastry. They weren’t revolting and they stayed down. I guess the future of food might have been worse.