It’s time for TED. A weeklong conference that asks big questions, offers a glimpse into the future, and sometimes raises troubling trends.
Every TED is different, in tenor and topics. The world has a way of shaping both the talks presented from the stage, and the conversations that orbit around the week at the Conference Center, in Vancouver.
This year — the theme, broadly sketched is “The Future You.”
It’s a theme that is sure to bring up complicated conversations, since the future itself is very much being challenged by world events, both political and environmental. Light stuff for sure.
With speakers including Chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov, Journalist, and news anchor Jorge Ramos, and Space Travel and Autonomous Vehicle entrepreneur Elon Musk, attendees are sure to be faced with some dramatic and divergent visions of the future.
TED has always had a strand of technology speakers, but this year the second session takes on the foreboding and promising topic of Our Robotic Overlords. Six TED talks that are sure to push the boundaries of how machines are poised to impact our lives.
Marc Raibert / Founder, Boston Dynamics
If you’ve ever seen videos on YouTube of big, scary, futuristic robots- you’ve seen Marc Raibert’s work. Raibert is the founder and CEO of robot maker Boston Dynamics, and they’ve built some of the world’s most advanced robots, such as BigDog, Atlas, Spot and Handle.
Boston Dynamics was purchased by, and then sold by Google, after Boston Dynamics posted a video of its humanoid robot, Atlas, walking in the snow and recovering from getting kicked. Too sci-fi it seems.
Stuart Russell AI Expert
Stuart Russell is thinking hard about the future of artificial intelligence. And as the author Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the leading text in AI worldwide. His concerned about the threat of autonomous weapons and the long-term future of artificial intelligence and its relation to humanity. And that means we should be too.
Tom Gruber / Siri Co-Creator
Tom Gruber is the co-creator of a AI creature that started a revolution in human/machine interfaces. Siri is his creation, and the voice controlled computer is now a mainstream piece of daily life. Siri, Launched in 2010, Siri is now used billions of times a week in more than 30 countries around the world.
Radhika Nagpal / Robotics Engineer
Can robots be inspired by the design of ant colonies? Radhika Nagpal has redefined expectations for self-organizing robotic systems working with her colleagues at Harvard’s SSR research group. Nagpal’s robots guide themselves into a variety of shapes — that could lead to applications in disaster rescue, space exploration and even more sci-fi scenarios, some of them downright scary.
Joseph Redmon is building an AI in the cloud that can turn your phone’s camera into instant face recognition. How fast can you think of Minority Report after reading that?And Noriko Arai is working on a software system that can pass university entrance exams as the program director of an AI challenge, Todai Robot Project.
TED has always had robots. TED has fostered conversations about Artificial Intelligence for as long as I can remember. But this year — Robot’s are poised to loom large. Our salvation or a sign of the impending apocalypse?
We’ll have to see how the talks play against the background of the real world.