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Visions of future on show at TED meet
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Dreams and nightmares that could shape the future took center stage on Monday at the TED gathering known for brilliant minds exploring potentially world-changing ideas.
Astro Teller of the boundary-pushing X lab run by Google parent company Alphabet, and television producer and writer Shonda Rhimes were among those who took to the intimate stage during the opening session of the five-day event.
“This year’s TED program includes speakers with truly extraordinary visions of the future,” said Chris Anderson, curator of the Technology, Entertainment, Design Conference.
“We’ll hear ideas — some hopeful, some frightening — that will jolt us awake.”
Teller, nicknamed “captain of moonshots,” shared insight on the inner workings of the lab known for projects including self-driving cars and wireless Internet streamed from high-altitude balloons.
Google has long sponsored TED, and its founders have spoken at the conference.
Teller predicted that efforts by X and others would eventually see billions of people in remote or rural areas getting life-changing Internet access within the coming decade. The X team’s high-speed Internet service known as “Project Loon” began its first tests in Sri Lanka on Monday ahead of a planned joint venture with the government there, the country’s top IT official said.
Teller said he expected Project Loon balloons to be tested over Indonesia this year. The project, he quipped, might be the craziest to date at the X lab, which was once part of Google but became a separate unit with a restructuring that created parent company Alphabet. “Our balloons today do everything we need,” Teller said. “So we are going to keep going.”
Some 1,400 people from 58 countries are expected to attend the annual event at which more than 70 speakers or artists will deliver talks or performances centered on a “Dream” theme.
The rich roster of speakers ranged from the founders of ride-sharing service Uber and home-sharing startup Airbnb to France’s “Lady Gaga of mathematics” Cedric Villani and Wanda Diaz Merced, a blind astrophysicist who uses sound to study the stars.
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