You've Got To Watch This: The Future of Pandemics, Surveillance, Online Security, and The Super-Enhancement Of Human Intelligence

With the rapid pace of information technology, we have access to all sorts of information. These three TED talks cover issues pertinent to our future. This is an important part of this blog simply because the future is becoming more and more rapidly NOW, especially as technology and human knowledge speed up. 

This is a kind of TED theatre. What's important about the exercise of watching multiple TED talks is not the individual talks themselves, but how the ideas from the collection of talks meld with and bounce off each other to create higher-level questions and observations that ultimately lead to discussions with others. 

It is important that we learn more about the future, especially when we are talking about the broader context of insurance as the act of mitigating and securing against risk. 

1. Larry Brilliant: My Wish: Help Me Stop Pandemics: Accepting the 2006 TED Prize, Dr. Larry Brilliant talks about how smallpox was eradicated from the planet, and calls for a new global system that can identify and contain pandemics before they spread. 

Larry Brilliant: My Wish: Help Me Stop Pandemics

2. Hubertus Knabe: Dark Secrets of the Surveillance State: The first talk is about the dark secrets of the surveillance state. With news traveling about the power of Google and how our locations are being perpetually tracked on a daily basis, not to mention the NSA and other organizations, being aware of privacy issues is critical for living in the 21st Century. Hubertus Knabe studied the Stasi, the East German Secret Service, and was even spied on by them. 

 Hubertus Knabe: Dark Secrets of the Surveillance State 

3. Nicholas Negroponte: 30 Year History of the Future: Inventor, innovator, and scholar, Nicholas Negroponte (of the Negroponte $100 laptop computer), talks about predictions he made in the 70s and 80s that came true, and leaves you with a prediction for the next 30 years.

Nicholas Negroponte: 30 Year History of the Future

4. Lorrie Faith Cranor: What's Wrong With Your Pa$$word? Lorrie Faith Cranor has studies thousands of internet passwords and has discovered a number of common mistakes users make when creating them that compromises security. How did she get at these passwords to study them? That's part of the story itself.

Lorrie Faith Cranor: What's Wrong With Your Pa$$word?

5. Ray Kurzweil: Get Ready for Hybrid Thinking: Two hundred million years ago, our mammal ancestors developed a new brain feature: the neocortex. This stamp-sized piece of tissue (wrapped around a brain the size of a walnut) is the key to what humanity has become. Now, futurist Ray Kurzweil suggests, we should get ready for the next big leap in brain power, as we tap into the computing power in the cloud. This talk has had over 1,000,000 hits on TED.

Ray Kurzweil: Get Ready For Hybrid Thinking