10 Must-See TED Talks - Part II

Sorry for the delay on this folks. The truth is that I just happened upon a little game called Eve Online, which has sucked up a lot of my time. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if you see a blog post about this in the future after I've got a better grip on what it's all about.

Anyway, back to the TED list.

6. Craig Venter: A voyage of DNA, genes and the sea

We have mastered the techniques of reading DNA. Craig Venter is now pioneering our efforts to start writing DNA. In this talk Venter describes the astonishing things that are being discovered from his around-the-word expedition to sequence the DNA of ocean-going microbes.

He goes on to address the concerns of those who fear designer viruses, and sets out a roadmap for the creation of engineered life. He predicts that human manufactured bacteria are only a couple of years away. Early this year - about 3 years after he gave this talk - the J. Craig Venter Institute announced that they had manufactured the genome of a bacterium.

He finishes by noting that engineered life has the potential to profoundly change the world by providing abundant food, solving our energy problems, and curing disease.

Watch it

7. Bjorn Lomborg: Our priorities for saving the world

Bjorn Lomborg asks, in a world with limited resources for solving world problems, what should we be addressing first? We must, of course, choose those projects that will do the most amount of good for the least money. In other worlds, the good projects are those that are the most efficient.

Looked at this way, obvious priorities like solving global warming do not seem like such good investments. Lomborg points out that the best case scenario for the Kyoto Protocol - that we push back the catastrophic consequences of global warming by 6 years - is not an efficient way to spend $15o Billion a year. Spending that money on other priorities like curing Aids/HIV and Malaria would have more positive outcomes for much less money.

Lomborg doesn't go into the possible role that nanotechnology will play in solving our climate change problems, but in about 10 - 15 years' time we should have the means to combat global warming for significantly less money than $150 billion dollars a year. Using nanobots we will be able to effectively remove the excess CO2 from our atmosphere. This will bring about a complete end to the climate problem without spending anything like the cost of the Kyoto Protocol. We should not do something today if putting it off until tomorrow will give us a greater chance of success.

Watch it

8. Hod Lipson: Robots that are "self-aware"

Hod Lipson uses a talk based around demonstrations of some of his experimental robots to ask questions about how living creatures learn and evolve, and how we can engineer robots to do the same thing.

Lipson has created robots that create themselves. His robots decide for themselves how they want to walk, develop an understanding of what they look like, and can even construct other robots.

Watch it

9. David Bolinsky: Fantastic voyage inside a cell

David Bolinsky is a medical illustrator. In this talk he presents a 3-minute clip from his project to animate the inside of a cell. This stunningly beautiful animation gives an insight into the true complexity of the internal life of a cell, and shows just how simplistic the traditional line drawings that we are shown in school really are.

Bolinsky's animation illustrates how technology can be used to give educators the tools to really engage their students, and to provide a visual model on which students can hang everything else that they are learning.

Watch it

10. David Deutsch: What is our place in the cosmos?

This final talk is not about any particular piece of science or technology, but rather about our place in the cosmos and what it means for our ability to overcome problems.

Deutsch argues compellingly that due to our unusual position in the universe we have the pre-requisites - matter, energy, and evidence - to accumulate knowledge, and therefore we have the power to solve problems.

Despite our ability to gain knowledge, though, there are some things that we don't know. This means that some things will happen that we cannot predict, and that there will be problems that we have not anticipated. Deutsch argues that in light of these twin truths - that we can solve problems and that there are some problems that we cannot anticipate - the correct stance is not one that seeks to avoid problems, but one that attempts to solve them.

Watch it

Bonus Talk: Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you've ever seen

This talk doesn't really have anything to do with technology, and so is a bit off-topic for this blog, but I wanted to include it as a bonus because it is one of the best presentations of any kind that I have seen.

Hans Rosling uses statistics, and an ingenious method of presenting them, to deeply explore the phenomenon of poverty in the world, and how it is changing.

Watch it

I hope that this list has opened up the world of TED to you if you weren't previously aware of it. I am almost never let down by these talks, and there are many, many more of them at the TED website. TED 2008 has just finished, so we can look forward to more fascinating presentations in the coming months.