Nicholas Negroponte opened the first TED conference in 1984 and has come back for the 30th anniversary. Here’s his TED biography,
The founder of the MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte pushed the edge of the information revolution as an inventor, thinker and angel investor. He’s the driving force behind One Laptop per Child, building computers for children in the developing world.
Negroponte discusses what has changed over the years. When he first started in the 1970s no one thought you’d ever use a touchscreen and putting your fingers on the screen was considered silly. This sort of thinking (touchscreens) is what went into the development of MIT’s Media Lab. He seems to be highlighting some of the high points of his thinking. He finds some of today’s internet of Things thinking to be pathetic (he references some of the sessions earlier today). He (?) started Wired magazine. Negroponte has gotten more interested in computers and learning over the years. He compares iteration to learning and mentions One Laptop Per Child. There was virtually no international aid for that project, the money came from the countries that used the program. After that project, he worked on an initiative where they dropped off computers to children (in Ethiopia and ?) with no instruction. Within days, the children had figured it out and within six months they hacked Android. He now wants to connect 100M people (on the African continent?). He predicts that in 30 years, we will ingest information (swallow a pill where the information travels through the bloodstream and on into the brain).
For some reason, they thought it would be amusing to play the Joe Canadian commercial. Chris Hadfield is then introduced. Here’s his TED biography,
Tweeting (and covering Bowie) from the International Space Station last year, Colonel Chris Hadfield reminded the world how much we love space.
Hadfield (who has a guitar on stage with him) talks about danger (asks the audience what’s the most dangerous thing theyu’ve done) and notes that space travel is dangerous. He then describes in detail what it’s like to get into a space shuttle and head for the space. He says that a space shuttle is the most complicated machine (?) ever built. He next shows a shuttle launch and describes being on the International Space Station. You see a sunrise every 25 minutes due to the speed at which you are travelling. He describes his first space walk when his left eye went blind. His left eye teared up while he continued work outside the station.
In space your tears don’t fall, they build up until there’s enough force to push them across the bridge of your nose and land like a small waterfall in your right eye. When the tears wooshed over to his right eye, he became completely blind.
Hadfield asks the audience again about danger and talks about overcoming fear and dealing with real danger as opposed to perceived danger. One of the ways astronauts deal with their fear and danger is to practice until they’ve changed their primal fear.
Hadfield plays a guitar and covers David Bowie’s Space Oddity and ends his talk with these words “Fear Not.”
I am done for today and I hope there aren’t too many mistakes in this post.