The Speculist

Have to Make It One of These Years

Kurzweil also has a link to an excellent write-up on the TED conference from the New York Times.

To the TEDsters assembled here, happiness is to some extent a product of design. It is hearing about a prototype of a flying car (being developed by the inventor Paul Moller — he's serious), or the chance to view a Johnny-Depp-look-alike robot head with video camera eyes and tiny electronic sensors embedded in its skin. The robot responds to human voices with realistic facial expressions and is made from "frubber," a high-tech polymer, the brainchild of David Hanson, a 34-year-old doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Dallas. Founded by the information designer Richard Saul Wurman, the conference has historically been a male-heavy, somewhat geeky inside-baseball kind of event, a launch-pad-by-the-sea for the Next Big Thing, from the unveiling of the Macintosh computer and Sony compact disc to the hatching of the M.I.T. Media Laboratory.

Sounds like my kind of party. I was especially intrigued by this new idea for a TED Prize.

As if to underscore a new other-directed definition of happiness, Mr. Anderson, who has funneled the roughly $1 million proceeds from the conference — formerly a profit-seeking venture — into various worthy causes, announced the creation of the Ted Prize, "an award program like nothing else out there," in which three "remarkable people" will be granted three wishes, presumably to be fulfilled by zillionaire, clout-heavy and intellectually supercharged TEDsters. As a backup, each winner will also be awarded $100,000. The plan is for the winners, who will be communally nominated and announced later this year, to unveil their wishes at next year's conference, where they will be anointed as "the most perfect TEDsters we can find," Mr. Anderson said. They will also be given a three-year pass to TED (worth $12,000).

I'll probably get in trouble for suggesting this, but what the heck. Since we seem to be stuck with them anyway, wouldn't the awarding of this prize be a great idea for a reality TV show? Like the Apprentice, only with the winner awarded for having the best vision of the future rather than being the best cutthroat corporate jerk.

Anyhow, I'd watch it.