TED2006: The magic to come

Eighth session of TED2006 (background): running notes.

Saul Griffith is presented in the TED guide as innovator and adrenaline junkie who uses cartoons to teach science, found a way of producing eyeglass lenses inexpensively, and has an open-source website showing how to make stuff. "Who am I? I do hardware: clean water, clean energy and cleaner, more functional materials", he says. His speech is about how we make things and how we will make them in the future - things like autonomous self-assembling, self-replicating computers (there are already some basic applications in the toy industry) or electronic ropes (which know the load at any point in the rope).

Videogames pundit and "Enter the Matrix" (after the eponymous movie) game designer David Perry is next on stage. He runs through some vgames statistics (see this previous post; the synthetic real estate market is valued at 800 million dollars a year) and through some history, with a video that takes us from "Pong" (1972) to the newest basketball, starwars or driving games, and beyond, and then he shows a video by student Michael Highland on his vgame-addict life. "Games are starting to make me feel", says Highland. What's next? There are currently 350 colleges and schools around the world teaching videogames. "On the surface, games seem simple entertainment, but they can upen up new frontiers and help us think big".

New tech, because it's new, needs to be explained and made understandable, and that's what people like David Pogue, the New York Times' tech columnist, do. He starts sitting at the piano singing a funny song on being on hold, computers crashing and other "Sound of silence" tech moments of contemporary daily life (he sings over Simon and Garfunkel's classic notes). "People feel overwhelmed, there is too much technology, and it is too complex and confusing". Why is the tech overload crisis feel like it's accelerating now? Because gadgets are getting smaller (but fingers are still the same size...); because software keeps being upgraded and complexified (he calls it the "upgrade paradox: if you improve a piece of software enough times, you finally ruin it"); and so on. He talks about writing a column on trying to reach Dell's customer support hotline, and how within a few hours 700 readers sent in "me-too" e-mails.
David's is a call for simplicity in design of technology, and particularly of computer and devices interface design. He runs through many examples of absurd design, sings two more funny songs (on Bill Gates and Steve Jobs) and then heralds the iPod as the icon of simplicity, and Google's homepage interface, and SanDisk's USB-friendly flash memory cards (so we can stop carrying around tangles of cables). And he commends software firm Nuance: when they released version 8 of their "Dragon NaturallySpeaking" speech-recognition software, "they added no new feature: they just made the software work better!".

To close, a bit of good entertainment (T-E-D): Dynamo, the young magician from Bradford/UK,  shows a few amazing card tricks (accompanied by rap music).

(tags TED2006 - TED 2006) (TED site  - flickr photos)