These TED talks show why the future is awesome
Don’t fret about the seemingly constant stream of bad news. The future will be awesome! Here is proof.
With everything going on in the news over the past year it’s easy to think that the world is going to hell in a hand basket.
But that’s not true at all.
If you are reading this it's because you are lucky to be alive during a time when world changing technology is increasingly accessible to the masses.
“A kid in Africa has access to more information than the president of the United States did 15 years ago.” -Ray Kurzweil
As if that quote isn’t enough to convince us that now is awesome, here are a few talks from some people working on amazing things to show us that the future is brighter than ever.
Monster primes
Adam Spencer talks about importance of prime numbers and gives an amazing perspective on the time we live in. This talk is oozing with inspiration.
What is reality really? (Must watch)
Donald Hoffman shattered my entire paradigm in this talk. He asks the question: does evolution favor an accurate perception of reality? Watch his talk for answers.
This one pairs well with my recent post on abstraction.
Human & machine mind meld
At some point soon Ray Kurzweil thinks that we will need to integrate computers into brains. What would that look like? Watch this talk and find out.
The godfather of fractals
Mandelbrot is a legend in the math community for his work on (what he named) fractal geometry. Watch this talk and find out why in nature parts of something are often times the same as the whole.
Genetically modified
Watching Jennifer Kahn talk about the powerful application of CRISPR is both exciting and terrifying at the same time. Terrifying because in the wrong hands this could cause irreversible damage to the world. Exciting because the concept of a “word processor for genes” is something that sounds like fiction but really is science.
Why startups succeed
Bill Gross has IPOed and exited over 30 companies and he’s discovered a few patterns that predict startup success. This one should be required viewing by any founder.
Get amped up about hard problems
Gates reminds us that we face a grand challenge when it comes to energy and encourages us all to “innovate to zero”.
