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Articles
Meeting of minds in Monterey; Dan Fost You know you’re at a surreal conference when attendees mingle in front of the only great white shark in captivity -- at the Monterey Aquarium -- while noshing on sushi. If the conference is TED -- Technology, Entertainment, Design -- that’s only the start of the surreality. When you’ve got your toro in hand, which do you look at -- the live bluefin tuna and dolphinfish in the brilliant blue tank, or the extraordinary human life forms on the dry side of the glass? There, in a chair, is James Watson, the Nobel Prize-winning co-discoverer of DNA, who earlier in the afternoon has confessed to having his heart broken while he mapped the strands of life. A few feet away, engrossed in conversation while lolling on a futon, is Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson. It’s all par for the course at the exclusive high-end gathering that ended Saturday, and provides inspiration and cross-fertilization for the business leaders, artists, scientists and others who attend. To the credit of another Chris Anderson, this one a successful publisher who runs TED through his nonprofit Sapling Foundation, the conference also has ambitions to be something more: a place where the assembled brainpower and financial clout may actually join forces to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems, instead of merely concocting more megamergers and slick products. Anderson’s big idea is the TED Prize. On Thursday night, he presented $100,000 checks to three winners -- U2 lead singer Bono, nature photographer Edward Burtynsky, and medical inventor Robert Fischell. Each was then invited to present three wishes to the assembled TEDsters, as attendees call themselves. Anderson challenged the audience to “be the genie” and make the dreams come true. The otherwise little-known Fischell and Burtynsky stirred and inspired the audience with their passionate stories of saving lives and saving the Earth. But the rock star, speaking by satellite (from what one blogger called a “Cheney-esque undisclosed location”) knew best what the audience was capable of and how to provoke it to action on behalf of his favorite cause, eradicating AIDS and poverty in Africa. “What turns me on about the digital age is: You have closed the gap between dreaming and doing,” Bono said. “Imagination has been decoupled from the old constraints. I would like to see idealism decoupled from the old constraints. The geopolitical world has a lot to learn from the digital world.” He spoke movingly of his travels in Africa, of famine and AIDS and civil wars killing millions of people, of “a continent in flames.” “This stuff isn’t even on the news,” he said. “Does stuff have to look like an action movie these days to exist in the front half of our brain? We devote more attention to things we cannot prevent. I believe that kind of thinking offends the intellectual rigor of the people in this room.” And then he addressed the former ’bearded, beaded, Birkenstock-wearing West Coasters” in the room. “You rewrote the rules for the rest of us... You changed the digital world. You can change the physical world.” His wishes: build a movement of 1 million American activists for Africa, get 2 billion media impressions for his campaign for Africa. And get all the schools and hospitals in one African nation -- Ethiopia -- wired in the next year. Will the TEDsters respond? Early reports sound positive. “That was the high point of TED,” said venture capitalist John Doerr, a regular attendee. Doerr was most impressed with Bono’s formidable capacity “to harness the imagination, caring and strengths of this community... to move from success to significance.” Tom Rielly, founder of Planet-Out and a conference regular, said, “Everyone walked out thinking: What can I do?” Rielly is already thinking of business and personal acquaintances who could help Bono and the other prize-winners realize their wishes. (The wishes, and other information about the conference, are online at www.ted.com.) John Gage, the chief researcher at Sun Microsystems and a longtime Berkeley hippie, is already working on Bono’s wishes. He believes that despite some of the daunting obstacles, Sun and other Silicon Valley firms should be able to make connections on the ground. Such inspiration and energy represent what longtime TEDster Danica Remy, president of San Francisco nonprofit Tides Inc., called a new heart for the conference. But the conference still had enough of the famous TED moments that attendees pay $4,400 for. Columbia University physicist Brian Greene explained string theory and a possible 10th dimension unknown to humankind. Olivia Judson, author of “Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation,” gave a campy dissertation on animal and insect sex. On a stage packed with flat-panel monitors, Irish cabaret singer Camille O’Sullivan purred and crawled through an over-the-top set of Jacques Brel tunes. There were rides in a hydrogen car, a Simulcast room full of flat-panel displays, a tank full of large millipedes. And a three-minute talk by an audience member on a new way to tie your shoes. For Sausalito photographer Rick Smolan, producer of the “Day in the Life” books, the TED moment was Cuban American storyteller Carmen Agra Deedy, who “had you laughing, and then in five words, had everyone in tears” with a story about her often embarrassing but always endearing mother. For Howard Rheingold, the leading authority on virtual communities and a presenter at the conference, it was seeing “every venture capitalist I pitched when I was a dot-commer.” Some in the crowd, like America Online Founder Steve Case or Google co-founder Sergey Brin, preferred not to talk about what was moving them at the conference. The conference is designed as an assault on conventional ways of thinking. Musician Thomas Dolby spoke of “sonification,” putting the plinks of a raindrop into his synthesizer or creating cell-phone ring tones of the exotic sounds of endangered birds and animals. “If our hotels were filled with these ring tones, perhaps it would encourage the animals to mate with each other,” he said. PayPal co-founder Elon Musk spoke of his SpaceX project and his ambition to put average humans on the moon and Mars. Genome mapper Craig Venter described how he finds 40,000 new life forms in a barrel of seawater. Sessions at TED are grouped into loosely related topics, such as intimacy (Judson’s sex talk, followed by Agra Deedy’s stories), and the one that truly delivered on its billing was Astonishments. Former Wired editor Kevin Kelly gave an erudite talk positing that technology constitutes a new sort of kingdom, right alongside animals, plants, bacteria and other living things. “You can delay technology, but you can’t stop it,” he said, noting that old technologies “don’t die.” “Imagine Mozart before the technology of the piano. Imagine Van Gogh before the technology of affordable oil paints. Imagine Hitchcock before the technology of film,” he said. “We have a moral obligation to develop technology.” Irene Pepperberg, a University of Arizona professor who has shown that parrots are intelligent enough to know what they’re talking about, followed. And then “mathemagician” Arthur Benjamin blew everyone away with his lightning-fast calculations, even producing the square of 57,683 (it’s 3,327,328,489). You could see presenters like actress Anna Deavere Smith shaking her head in wonder. Benjamin even demonstrated how he did it, with the brazen assertion that “I know as a magician we’re not supposed to reveal our secrets, but I’m not too worried that anyone is going to do my act anytime soon.” After a brief video about Delicious Monster, a Seattle company whose offices are in a local coffee shop with Wi-Fi, Swedish magician Lennart Green displayed a set of sleight-of-hand card tricks indecipherable by even the smartest of the crowd. Not many other conferences could assemble a set that entertains, educates, provokes and flat out inspires attendees with the feats humans, nature and technology are capable of. © San Francisco Chronicle, 2005 |
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