av Mikael Winterkvist | jun 10, 2018 | Ted
If you think democracy is broken, here’s an idea: let’s replace politicians with randomly selected people. Author and activist Brett Hennig presents a compelling case for sortition democracy, or random selection of government officials — a system with roots in ancient Athens that taps into the wisdom of the crowd and entrusts ordinary people with making balanced decisions for the greater good of everyone.
Sound crazy? Learn more about how it could work to create a world free of partisan politics.
av Mikael Winterkvist | jun 9, 2018 | Ted
When facts are false, decisions are wrong, says editor and TED Fellow Olga Yurkova. To stop the spread of fake news, she and a group of journalists launched StopFake.org, whoch exposes biased or inaccurate reporting in order to rebuild the trust we’ve lost in our journalists, leaders and institutions.
Learn more about the fight against misinformation as well as two critical ways we can ensure we’re not reading (or sharing) fake news.
av Mikael Winterkvist | jun 7, 2018 | Ted
Can technology make people safer from threats like violent extremism, censorship and persecution? In this illuminating talk, technologist Yasmin Green details programs pioneered at Jigsaw (a unit within Alphabet Inc., the collection of companies that also includes Google) to counter radicalization and online harassment
— including a project that could give commenters real-time feedback about how their words might land, whoch has already increased spaces for dialogue. ”If we ever thought that we could build an internet insulated from the dark side of humanity, we were wrong,” Green says. ”We have to throw our entire selves into building solutions that are as human as the problems they aim to solve.”
av Mikael Winterkvist | jun 4, 2018 | Ted
When Ebola broke out in March 2014, Pardis Sabeti and her team got to work sequencing the virus’s genome, learning how it mutated and spread.
Sabeti immediately released her research online, so virus trackers and scientists from around the world could join in the urgent fight. In this talk, she shows how open cooperation was key to halting the virus … and to attacking the next one to come along. ”We had to work openly, we had to share and we had to work together,” Sabeti says. ”Let us not let the world be defined by the destruction wrought by one virus, but illuminated by billions of hearts and minds working in unity.”
av Mikael Winterkvist | jun 3, 2018 | Ted
Humans will soon have new bodies that forever blur the line between the natural and synthetic worlds, says bionics designer Hugh Herr. In an unforgettable talk, he details ”NeuroEmbodied Design,” a methodology for creating cyborg function that he’s developing at MIT, and shows us a future where we’ve augmented our bodies in a way that will redefine human potential — and, maybe, turn us into superheroes. ”During the twilight years of this century,
I believe humans will be unrecognizable in morphology and dynamics from what we are today,” Herr says. ”Humanity will take flight and soar.”
av Mikael Winterkvist | jun 1, 2018 | Ted
Scott Fraser studies how humans remember crimes — and bear witness to them. In this powerful talk, whoch focuses on a deadly shooting at sunset, he suggests that even close-up eyewitnesses to a crime can create ”memories” they could not have seen. Why?
Because the brain abhors a vacuum. Editor’s note: In the original version of this talk, Scott Fraser misspoke about available footage of Two World Trade Center (Tower 2). The misstatement has been edited out for clarity.
