After 28 Annual Conferences, TED Is No Longer So Optimistic About the Future | On the Ground at TED 2018
"Sometimes, talking about the future is really a way of talking about the present. It seems less rude, and it's safer." - Benjamin Bratton
"Sometimes, talking about the future is really a way of talking about the present. It seems less rude, and it's safer." - Benjamin Bratton
Over the past year, when I thought about the future of the world, my main feeling was restraint. I only check the news once or twice a week now, because none of it matters. Every day it's Russia did this, Trump did that, some porn star said something. None of that matters. What matters is that the economy is better, jobs are better, the world is safer. Trump will probably get reelected. I don't want it to happen, but he's still likely to win a second term. That doesn't matter either, because Trump's behavior is predictable. By now it's obvious that everything he does, he does for Trump.
That was the first "TED talk" on the main stage at TED 2018 — under thirty seconds long, delivered by Daniel, the man sitting next to me (at his request, only his first name is used here).
Every year TED curator Chris Anderson opens the conference with some device for pulling the audience into the conversation. This year's: have the person next to you share their view of the world's future.
That was also this year's conference theme: The Age of Amazement.
Anderson said he picked the theme for its double meaning. At a press briefing before the conference opened, he explained: "It sounds like, 'oh my god, what a wonderful, moving, exhilarating future! Welcome to the world of the Jetsons!' But that's not it. It could be amazingly good, or it could be amazingly terrifying." TED's job this year was to make the two voices collide.
Daniel is an American investor — the largest single group among TED's attendees. Not many jobs let you spend $10,000 on a ticket and clear four working days for it.
Like the other 1,500 people in the room, he would spend four and a half days listening to 119 TED talks. About 90% of them get edited and posted online over the following year. TED talk videos are free and carry no ads; they have been watched 11 billion times so far. The steep ticket prices paid by people like Daniel keep the whole operation running. (For more on how the conference works, see last year's coverage: What Do You Get for a $10,000 Ticket?; How to Prepare a TED Talk)
After the "mini TED talk," Anderson asked everyone who had felt excited and optimistic over the past year to shout "Aye," and everyone who had felt gloomy and doubtful to shout "Nay." The Nays were much louder.
Daniel was an Aye. In any earlier year, his mood would have been the mainstream at this conference. At an event whose slogan is "Ideas Worth Spreading," most talks take on one specific problem. Even on refugees, terminal illness, dictatorship, massacres or the environment, a talk always used to land on the same note: act, and the world gets better.
Against that background, this year's TED turned into a debate. Not the kind where two sides argue themselves red in the face onstage and shout "can you not interrupt me while I'm interrupting you" — a TED-style debate: one person alone on the round red carpet, talking for anywhere from 5 to 18 minutes.
On opening day, the six talks in the main hall each stood for one of two opposing attitudes, separated in the middle by a jazz set from the Soul Rebels.
The easiest way to believe the world will get better is to believe it has been fine all along
"I did what everyone anxious about the state of politics does — I ran for office." That line from Kirsty Duncan, Canada's federal Minister of Science, got a laugh from the whole hall, and it was also a fair summary of her talk. Angry that the previous government had hidden climate-change information from the public, Duncan went into politics, and took over science policy after Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party won.
A Hollywood-style inspirational story always draws applause.
The more constructive case for the affirmative probably came from Zachary Wood, a Williams College graduate, who shared an idea that has become harder and harder to act on in the current political climate: listening to people. Not to just anyone, but to views you completely disagree with. Wood, who is Black, chaired Uncomfortable Learning, a student group at Williams, and pushed through pressure from the college to bring John Derbyshire — one of the figureheads of the American far right, long attacked for racist remarks — to campus to speak.
But TED saved the closing slot for Steven Pinker, the bestselling author and cognitive psychologist. His talk, and his new book Enlightenment Now!, carried on the glass-half-full mood he has kept up for years.
"We all said 2016 was the worst year — until 2017 came along," Pinker said, summing up the public mood of the past two years before turning to data to argue the other way. In Pinker's view, good and bad can be measured, along dimensions including "life, health, sustenance, prosperity, peace, freedom, safety, knowledge, leisure, and happiness."
- Life: 1771–2015, average global life expectancy rose from 30 to over 70.
- Death: 1751–2015, infant mortality fell sharply in Sweden, Canada, South Korea, Chile, Ethiopia and other countries.
- Extreme poverty: 1820–2015, the share of the world's people living in extreme poverty fell from 90% to around 40%; before 2020 the figure may drop below 10%.
- Great-power war: 1500–2015, the share of years in which a war was being fought somewhere in the world fell from 75% to nearly 0%.
- War deaths: 1946–2016, the rate of deaths in war per 100,000 people fell from 10-15% to close to 2%.
- Democracy vs. autocracy: 1800–2015, the democracy-autocracy index rose from -7 to 4.
- Murder rate (Western Europe, the US, Mexico): 1300–2015, annual murders per 100,000 people fell from 20-80 to nearly 0; in the southwestern US the figure fell from over 100 to under 10; in Mexico, from about 50 to under 20.
- Literacy: 1475–2010, the global average literacy rate rose from under 20% to nearly 90%.
- Working hours in Europe and the US: 1870–2000, midweek working hours in Western Europe and the US fell from 60-70 to around 40.
- …
It wouldn't be a TED talk without a joke, so Pinker added that even God has eased up on us: 1900–2015, the number of people per million killed by lightning each year fell from 5 to nearly 0.
Pinker said that even setting 30 years ago against today, you can see plenty of progress.
The number of wars fell from 23 to 12; the number of autocracies from 85 to 60; the extreme-poverty rate from 37% to 10%; the number of nuclear weapons from 60,780 to 10,325; deaths from terrorism in Western Europe from 440 to 238; murders from 8.5 per 100,000 people to 5.3; the poverty rate from 12% to 7%; and pollution from 35 million tons of particulates and 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide a year to 21 million tons of particulates and 4 million tons of sulfur dioxide.
So why do we all feel the world has gotten worse?
The same numbers can be read in completely different ways. Pinker's data only shows that fewer people are dying of terrorism in Western Europe — while more are dying of it in Russia and the United States. Poverty rates have indeed come down, but the middle class in the developed world, who once could work their way up through manufacturing jobs, now take temporary work waiting tables, standing behind counters, or driving for ride-hailing apps. More countries have turned to democracy, but nearly half of humanity lives in the world's three most populous countries.
Never mind that people have always believed the world should be better, and better faster. Pinker himself said in an interview last month that the existence of people like Trump could quickly reverse years of progress. There is clearly plenty of room to argue about these numbers.
But like a typical TED talk, Pinker left all of that out; it would have weakened the point. He explained things instead with another set of data: from 1945 to 2010, the tone of New York Times news coverage and the global broadcast average both grew steadily more pessimistic. Pinker argued that the way the media industry picks its news, and the rhythm of its own work, push it to chase the negative — while human instinct makes us quick to forget past problems and quick to stay alert to current ones.
The media spreads negative and unimportant messages, but the world is actually getting better: that was Daniel's summary. It is no surprise. Every year TED mails attendees a few of the speakers' books ahead of the conference, and this year's was Pinker's new one, Enlightenment Now.
Pinker remained very popular, but after a Thursday-afternoon conversation local time, several audience questions began, "I really loved your book, but I don't agree with the part about XX..."
Timed with the Zuckerberg hearings, tech companies became everyone's target
The three opening-day talks placed opposite Pinker all dealt with the big questions America was arguing about at that moment.
The Hollywood comic actor Tracee Ellis Ross spoke about #MeToo — by now it is hard even to count how many people in America have been swept into the movement. Ross's talk offered no new ideas, but it was still a rousing declaration; when she closed by calling for turning "Me Too" into "No More," most of the hall stood up to applaud.
More affecting still was Diane Wolk-Rogers, a history teacher at a Florida high school where 15 students were killed in a shooting on February 14 this year. Wolk-Rogers moved from her own experience that day to the constitutional right to bear arms.
But several people we talked to afterward said the day's most illuminating talk came from the computer scientist Jaron Lanier.
In a black T-shirt, brown sandals, and braids long enough to nearly drag across TED's red carpet, he walked onstage right after Wolk-Rogers's heavy account of the shooting, wiped away tears, and waited until he had steadied himself before he began.
Lanier is one of the earliest pioneers of virtual reality. Back in the 1980s he appeared at TED — before there were TED talk videos, and before Anderson ran the conference — to show off the new products of his company VPL: a VR headset and gloves.
Lanier introducing his virtual-reality equipment in the early 1990s
As Lanier began his talk, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was being questioned by the Senate in Washington. And what Lanier talked about was exactly that: social networks, and what the internet as a whole is doing to human behavior.
Back on the TED stage, Lanier tried to explain to people where all of this went wrong.
He cited a debate that ran hot in computer science in the 1950s. The computer scientist Norbert Wiener had raised a possibility: a global computer system, with people carrying devices every day that respond to their behavior, so that all of human behavior gets reshaped by the system. Such a society would be too insane to survive. Wiener wasn't very worried about it at the time, because he thought it was technically out of reach.
The hall laughed. Today everyone carries such a device.
"When digital culture first took off in the '90s, we made a mistake. We had this overly left-wing, socialist goal — we wanted everything on the internet to be free."
As computers grew smarter and algorithms more precise, with everything running so that you would see more ads, things seemed to come apart. "I don't call them social networks anymore. I now call them 'behavior-modification empires,'" Lanier said.
Lanier reached for the classic Pavlovian example from psychology: ring a bell every time before you feed a dog, and eventually the dog starts salivating at the bell alone — the bell becomes a conditioned "stimulus." Social media has in a sense become a kind of "symbolic stimulus" for people. Every like on something we post is a small reward; no likes, or a diss, tells us people don't like what we shared, that we aren't popular enough.
And academic research shows that negative stimuli are always reinforced more easily and more quickly than positive ones — "just as it's much easier to destroy trust than to build it, much easier to destroy love than to cultivate it," Lanier explained.
One of the main principles internet companies follow when they adjust a product's design is to get people to use it more, so they see more ads. Built for advertising, the whole system ended up as a tool for reshaping human behavior.
Who pays for all this? "I don't think this is bad people doing bad things. This is a global disaster — not caused by some dark force, but by an astonishing, absurd system," Lanier said.
But Lanier had no reliable solution to offer. He argued that tech companies should now turn the clock back, change their revenue models, stop measuring returns by viral clicks, and work instead to supply more trustworthy information. He suggested people pay for internet services. "When you pay, things usually get better," he said, and pointed to Netflix.
The remark carried more irony than construction, of course. Netflix was one of the most-mentioned companies at last year's TED, because its CEO had said, "Our competitors are YouTube, Facebook, and sleep." (Netflix CEO Reed Hastings was due onstage at TED early Sunday morning Beijing time — also part of the conversation about the future.)
"If we don't fix this problem, I don't think humanity can survive. We can't have a society where, if two people want to communicate, they can only do it through a third party that wants to manipulate their behavior. And in the meantime — if the companies don't change, delete your account, okay?" Lanier ended on those lines, and the whole hall stood up to applaud.
The topics TED discusses haven't changed much — but they are getting closer to the "1 percent" in the room
Like many problems raised at TED before, the one Lanier described did not find a quick fix just because the talk was electrifying.
At a private dinner on the second night of the conference, the host asked everyone at the table when they last opened Facebook. At this small gathering, where the average age was at least in the 40s, everyone answered "today."
Deleting your social-network account is still just an idea, and not many people will do it. And deleting the account probably wouldn't solve the underlying problem anyway.
TED became an annual conference in 1990. After 28 years of preaching about the world's progress, the audience at this year's conference had more doubts about whether a more technologically advanced world would be a better one.
How could they not? TED's first letter stands for "Technology." West Coast tech leaders like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin and Larry Page are all regulars, and they, along with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, have all preached the gospel of advanced technology on that red carpet. TED has watched generations of American tech companies grow from experiments into empires — and now Facebook and Google are the ones being doubted.
At this year's conference, after almost every talk about a technological breakthrough, the host would step in to ask whether the new technology might do harm.
A couple of years ago, giving a TED talk about dengue fever, Gates released a jar of mosquitoes onstage and said, "There's no reason only poor people should get bitten." That joke was also a cross-section of TED: the conference always discusses weighty issues, but those issues rarely threaten the people in the seats. Not just dengue fever — even mosquitoes are too far from their lives.
Apart from the staff, most people in the TED hall look to be over 40. Many are executives of companies and nonprofits, family-fund managers or investors, lawyers, directors and producers — a high-income crowd, most of them from the United States or at least frequent visitors. Refugees, dictatorship, massacres, poverty, environmental disaster: they may have cared about these topics before, but never felt them on their own skin.
Now the topics TED discusses are reaching this very audience.
Take #MeToo. Its reach goes well beyond Hollywood. A well-known Silicon Valley investor and active TED supporter publicly apologized for misconduct last summer, and has all but vanished from public view since. At the end of the conference's first day, Anderson issued a specific warning about inappropriate behavior, saying TED had expelled two attendees over it the year before.
Then there is authoritarianism. Some of the year's hottest topics never made it onstage: nobody talked nonsense about "blockchain," and nobody mentioned Trump.
One of TED's principles is neutrality, yet last year, in the first two days alone, three speakers named Trump onstage. The head of the civil-rights group ACLU, in a highly inventive talk, called Trump a "tyrant" outright; the ACLU had just won against him — the immigration policy Trump announced soon after taking office was struck down on the day it was issued.
This year's conference is now into the evening of its third day, and no one has mentioned Trump onstage. In Anderson's words: "Don't shy away from the important issues, but don't chase what's on the front page of The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal."
Not naming him didn't make his influence smaller — it made it larger. Every day, off the main stage, people discussed his latest move. Days before TED, Trump's threats against Amazon wiped more than $100 billion off the company's market value. Earlier, a federal agency put out a statement urging Americans to boycott the outdoor brand Patagonia for opposing the White House's new environmental policy (or, more precisely, its anti-environmental policy).
American billionaires never used to worry, the way the rich on the other side of the globe do, about a ruler attacking private businesses for political reasons. Now some things affect everyone in the world, including the 1 percent at the top of the pyramid.
In this new atmosphere, almost every TED talk still ends on a hopeful note, but the conference itself has changed in subtle ways. Its Fellows program for younger speakers, for instance, brought in more speakers working on civil-rights causes this year. Yesterday TED announced a new initiative, "The Audacious Project", which has raised more than $400 million toward a goal of over $600 million and will fund nonprofit projects chosen by TED over the long term. The first five NGOs will get an average of more than $100 million each. TED is no longer only spreading ideas.
This morning TED published the first talk video from the conference — not Pinker, who thinks things are going fine, but Lanier.
We will keep reporting from the floor on the talks and projects at TED 2018.
Here are the TED 2018 articles we have published so far:
《Surveillance Has Another Possibility Now: Knowing How You See a Problem》
《A Thai Architect, and the Urban Green Space She Built to Solve Bangkok's Flooding》
《Why Does That Internet Celebrity Keep Building Useless Robots? She Says It's Where Thinking Starts》
《SpaceX's President Says Flying From New York to Shanghai by Rocket in Half an Hour Isn't Just Talk》
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.