Day 3 at TED@ASPEN 2008

Day 3 - How dare we be optimistic?

I have been sitting in the blogging lounge at Aspen and I just thought I would give a view of what it is like and the amazing view we have! There are around 10 bloggers at the conference - some 'live' blogging like me - others doing reflections and musings - a list is at www.tedblog.com

 

Johnny Chung Lee showed how to make an interactive whiteboard for $40! A demonstration of how to use a Wii remote as an infrared camera to scan a screen and translate it into computer drawing etc. The software is available from http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/. This was an amazing demo of both the interactive whiteboard and a head tracking system which has been picked up by the gaming community. I will certainly be building one of these this weekend to see if it works. Watch the blog for the results!

The Economist, Paul Collier, has written on the subject of the poorest people of the world. A billion people have bee stuck in an economy that has been stagnant for a long time. He offers a recipe for the two forces that have changed the world - a billion people are living in societies that have not offered credible hope. The alliance that changes the world is 'getting serious' what can we do for these people. What did we do the last time the world got serious about developing another region - the rich world was America and the region that needed help was Europe - Post War. Aid was provided and tore up the trade policy and reversed it - instigating GATT also totally reversed the security policy. National Sovereignty was so sacrosanct before the war and founded United Nations and the IMF. We need to be as serious as we are then. He talked about governance - how can we strengthen it? Some of the poorest countries have started to discover resources - oil, iron etc. Angola alone is getting $50bn of money from Oil. The relationship between commodity prices and output/GDP is very strong in the early years but the long run is a different story - most countries have suffered if there was a boom. The critical issue is the level of economic governance - if there is good governance there is no boom - no resource curse. Nigeria are worse off if they never had oil.There are two elements to democracy - electoral competition and checks and balances - so what the countries as the bottom need are good checks and balances. If we can provide international standards for governance we can help these societies who are struggling. Unless we have an informed society is purely gestures! His book The Bottom Billion is an economics book that can be read on the beach. Please become ambassadors!

Eric Kuhne presents a 3 minutes slot - the patterns of cities are the DNA of our civilization. What are the new cities for our time? The Breath of Compassionate an ancient symbol from the far east is being used to create the fingerprint of a New City - in the Arabian Gulf. "The geometries of the ancients become the model for the house of wisdom. Architecture has become a new diplomacy for us - we want to restore the storytelling quality of cities. A city is and always will be a great work of art". Eric was the Architect of the Bluewater centre in the UK as well as many other amazing buildings around the world

The last three minute audience slot by Andy Hogsbawn - in times of need we need great creativity - can spread tolerance can make eduction seem like a great idea = make politicians electable and can make war a great tragedy or farce. Science is clever but creativity is magic to provide us to think different to promote us to act differently. Lets get creative against climate change and do it soon!

The next speaker is the one many people have been working for - of course I refer to Al Gore. A lot of this is verbatim comments from Al Gore. The biggest challenge of TED is trying to process all the what we heard and the information we have heard! Religion properly understood is not about belief it is about behavior. Optimism is sometimes seen as a belief but it is really a behavior.  Behavior is not what people think it is - we need to change the behavior of the laws and the democracy. We have to become incredibly active in our democracy - to solve the problem with the climate crisis we have to solve the democracy crisis! We have to find a unified earth theory - waste problems, resource problems are common to all of us. We tend to think of local environmental problems but there are also regional problems such as acid rain. But the climate crisis is the global or strategic crisis and we need to respond appropriately. We need a global Marshall plan - understand the links between the rich and the poor. What we do with the poorest countries matters a lot! Since the post war economic boom - one the aspects is a pattern of consumption that morphed into over consumption. If we remove over consumption what will replace this in economic terms?

The polar ice-cap in 1980 is equivalent to the whole of the US minus Arizona - in 2007 the extent is equal to the US minus everything to the right of the Mississippi! Earth and Venus are exactly the same size - they have the same amount of carbon - on earth has leached over time as coal etc. On Venus most of the carbon is still in the air - the temperature of Venus is 855c! If there is more heat coming in from the sun the stratosphere would be hotter, however it is cooler. Over 68% of Americans belief that human activity is responsible for global warming. Global warming is still listed at the bottom of the presidential candidates priorities. 

We have to have a unified view of how to challenge the problem. We need to put a price on carbon rather than on employment. If you are investing in oil you are investing in sub-prime climate resources. Kyoto ratified by every nation apart from the US. We can't wait for the kind of drought Australia had we have to act now. We need a new Hero generation - we have to understand that history has presented us with a choice - we have a culture of distraction. We have to find a way of creating a generational mission to rally to the problems of climate. If we have just one weeks funding from the Iraq war we could fund this initiative. One final point - I do feel very deeply that the kind of moving spirit is alive in all of us - I believe we have the capacity to set aside the causes of distraction and focus on the challenges that are being presented. How many generations have been given the opportunity to rise to the challenge - I think we should approach this challenge with pride.

Be optimistic in what you do - become an active citizen - change the light bulbs and change the law! Buckminster Fuller wrote - if the whole of civilization depended on me - what would I do - Al Gore faces the same question.

If you want o go quickly go alone - if you want to go far - go together - we need to go together quickly!

Break

John Francis was silent for 17 years and the first words he spoke was in Washington DC - he didn't recognize where his voice was coming from. Think about your own journey - he witnessed two oil tankers collide in 1981 and saw half a million gallons of oil seep in to the bay - he decided to give up driving and taking up walking. People said that he was walking to make them look bad. On his 27th birthday that he was going to give up speaking for just 1 day - for the first time he began listening. It was a sad day because he realized that he hadn't been learning - so he decided to do it for another day and then another and so on for 17 years. He walked to Oregon (500 miles) and graduated with a bachelors degree - he had written to Montana University and it took him two years to get there. He taught classes without speaking. He walked across the USA, which took him 7 years, He learned about listening to each other. He made a UN Goodwill Ambassador and writes oils spill legislation. He then walked through all the Caribbean Islands to Venezuela. He started talking again to the environment moved from the birds and trees etc. and moved to people - he decided he was going to spread the message. He never asked the question why did he stop driving in motorized vehicles and only walked - he had become a prisoner in himself. He needed to leave behind the security of who we have been and become who we are to be. We have to do something NOW - we have to change NOW - we have to become activists. We are the environment and how we treat each other is how we are going to treat the environment.

The Happiness Hypothesis is written by Jonathan Haidt is social psychologist. Ideology and openness to experience people who are low on this trait are less likely to travel etc. Open individuals have an affinity for liberal progressive, left-wing political views, whereas closed individuals prefer conservative traditional, right wing views: (McCrea 1996). People are trapped in the oral matrix - you can take the blue pill and stay where you are or take the red pill and step outside your moral matrix. What is morality - kids come into the world with a first draft of the moral mind -  information about the world.. Five moral foundations:

1. Harm care
2. Fairness/Reciprocity
3. Ingroup/loyalty
4. Authority/Respect
5. Purity/Sanctity

As children grow up how is the first draft of morality changed and developed. On the website www.yourmorals.org they have got thousands of people to take a questionnaire. Hironimious Bosch Triptych Garden of Delight looks at the different views of morality. Cooperation decays without punishment - particularly in large groups.  What does religion do for us - the grand canyon isn't the wonder it is the fact that people lived in the canyon in cooperation. Traditional morality uses every tool in the toolbox. Liberals speak for the weak and oppressed - Conservatives speak for the institutions and traditions. Many religions have both the stability and change - yin and yang. How do we step out of this battle from good and evil, from wrong and right.

Bob Geldof a musician and activist - from being a rock musician he persuaded musicians and companies to bring together live aid and band-aid. It is impossible to follow the last few days. Another Irishmen George Bernard Shaw said all depends on unreasonable people because reasonable people accept it as they meet it - unreasonable people challenge it. TED is the Olympics of unreasonable people. There can't be revolution of thought without difference.

Society constantly needs to test itself to create change. Science can take us so far but people have made a fetish of progress. From humble beginnings in Ireland he used to listen to Radio Luxembourg - he listened to Sputnik when it was launched. The confidence of modernity - the dialog had started with the transatlantic communications. His career was coming to an end and he was sat at home and he saw 30 million people starting in Africa.

We paid taxes in the west to grow, store and destroy food. He thought is wasn't enough to put the dollar in the box - just doing another song wasn't enough. He wrote the song 'Do they know its Christmas in the back of a taxi and got together people he had met over 10 years. The lingua-franca of the world isn't English it is rock and roll. Live aid was organized through the telex! Live Aid and Band Aid were charities - if he impulse for one human being to hep another what is? The act of putting a dollar in a charity box is a political act then that is OK. What he had seen was political and economic - poverty is a condition and it will and can be beaten.

Twenty years down the road Live Aid was about changing the political landscape - 1 billion on the website! Africa will transform itself through technology - only 1% broadband but mobile phones increase 80% year on year.THere is a great mapping of mankind to be done - photos, movies, drawings, recordings and put them in this big Cyber Hole - there are 900 types of 'us'. We will watch ourselves unfold  - you don't have to join YOU will be there! Culture is the narrative of man - cyber-culture and our philosophies tie us together, Human cultural diversity is as important as biological diversity.

The point is you, me, us.

The final session of the Aspen conference was superb with a standing ovation for the organizers by the 300 strong crowd.

The challenge now for all the attendees is to maintain the sense of 'activism' that the conference engendered - a sense of purpose and drive.

A few of the people at the conference who are based in the North East of America have decided to meet up in Connecticut within the next month for dinner and if anyone is in the area and wants to get involved let me know and I will count you in.

Signing off for the weekend and some relaxation after a hectic four days.