This year’s TED conference kicks off today and runs through to Saturday:
It is an elite event where leaders in technology, entertainment and design gather to cross-pollinate ideas and gain inspiration from presentations on the latest developments in sciences and the arts. Political leaders take the stage too: Former President Bill Clinton received the annual TED prize at last year’s conference; former Vice President Al Gore has also been a speaker.
The conference attracts a wide range of people, from Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to musician Peter Gabriel and filmmaker J.J. Abrams.
At $6000 per ticket, TED certainly lives up to its ‘elitest’ tag. However, we’ll let them go for now, considering they put free videos on their website of some excellent talks from previous years. I’ve included a number here on TDG over the past year, including:
- Wade Davis on the disappearing ethnosphere (highly recommended!).
- Ray Kurzweil discusses the coming technological ‘singularity’.
- Michael Shermer on skepticism.
- Richard Dawkins’s classic lecture “Queerer Than We Can Suppose“.
- Theo Jansen’s artificial creatures.
- David Gallo’s underwater astonishments.
Look forward to seeing what comes out of this year’s get together. Note, they also offer the videos as a free iTunes vodcast, which you can subscribe to – they look great on an iPod Touch.
