TED Technology

Martine Rothblatt: My daughter, my wife, our robot, and the quest for immortalit

The founder of Sirius XM satellite radio, Martine Rothblatt now heads up a drug company that makes life-saving medicines for rare diseases (including one drug that saved her own daughter's life). Meanwhile she is working to preserve the consciousness of the woman she loves in a digital file ... and…

20 May 2015 21 min

Abe Davis: New video technology that reveals an object's hidden properties

Subtle motion happens around us all the time, including tiny vibrations caused by sound. New technology shows that we can pick up on these vibrations and actually re-create sound and conversations just from a video of a seemingly still object. But now Abe Davis takes it one step further: Watch…

6 May 2015 18 min

Nick Bostrom: What happens when our computers get smarter than we are?

Artificial intelligence is getting smarter by leaps and bounds — within this century, research suggests, a computer AI could be as "smart" as a human being. And then, says Nick Bostrom, it will overtake us: "Machine intelligence is the last invention that humanity will ever need to make." A philosopher…

30 Apr 2015 16 min

Nizar Ibrahim: How we unearthed the spinosaurus

A 50-foot-long carnivore who hunted its prey in rivers 97 million years ago, the spinosaurus is a "dragon from deep time." Paleontologist Nizar Ibrahim and his crew found new fossils, hidden in cliffs of the Moroccan Sahara desert, that are helping us learn more about the first swimming dinosaur —…

29 Apr 2015 6 min

Fred Jansen: How to land on a comet

As manager of the Rosetta mission, Fred Jansen was responsible for the successful 2014 landing of a probe on the comet known as 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. In this fascinating and funny talk, Jansen reveals some of the intricate calculations that went into landing the Philae probe on a comet 500 million kilometers…

10 Apr 2015 17 min

Dame Stephanie Shirley: Why do ambitious women have flat heads?

Dame Stephanie Shirley is the most successful tech entrepreneur you never heard of. In the 1960s, she founded a pioneering all-woman software company in the UK, which was ultimately valued at $3 billion, making millionaires of 70 of her team members. In this frank and often hilarious talk, she explains…

30 Mar 2015 13 min

Fei Fei Li: How we're teaching computers to understand pictures

When a very young child looks at a picture, she can identify simple elements: "cat," "book," "chair." Now, computers are getting smart enough to do that too. What's next? In a thrilling talk, computer vision expert Fei-Fei Li describes the state of the art — including the database of 15…

24 Mar 2015 18 min

Monica Lewinsky: The price of shame

In 1998, says Monica Lewinsky, “I was Patient Zero of losing a personal reputation on a global scale almost instantaneously.” Today, the kind of online public shaming she went through has become a constant. In a brave talk, she takes a look at our “culture of humiliation,” in which online…

23 Mar 2015 22 min

David Eagleman: Can we create new senses for humans?

As humans, we can perceive less than a ten-trillionth of all light waves. “Our experience of reality,” says neuroscientist David Eagleman, “is constrained by our biology.” He wants to change that. His research into our brain processes has led him to create new interfaces to take in previously unseen information…

20 Mar 2015 20 min

Joseph DeSimone: What if 3D printing was 100x faster?

What we think of as 3D printing, says Joseph DeSimone, is really just 2D printing over and over ... slowly. Onstage at TED2015, he unveils a bold new technique — inspired, yes, by Terminator 2 — that's 25 to 100 times faster, and creates smooth, strong parts. Could it finally…

20 Mar 2015 10 min

Andy Yen: Think your email's private? Think again

Sending an email message is like sending a postcard, says scientist Andy Yen in this thought-provoking talk: Anyone can read it. Yet encryption, the technology that protects the privacy of email communication, does exist. It's just that until now it has been difficult to install and a hassle to use…

6 Mar 2015 12 min

Topher White: What can save the rainforest? Your used cell phone

The sounds of the rainforest include: the chirps of birds, the buzz of cicadas, the banter of gibbons. But in the background is the almost-always present sound of a chainsaw, from illegal loggers. Engineer Topher White shares a simple, scalable way to stop this brutal deforestation — that starts with…

4 Mar 2015 9 min

Jon Gosier: The problem with "trickle-down techonomics"

Hooray for technology! It makes everything better for everyone!! Right? Well, no. When a new technology, like ebooks or health trackers, is only available to some people, it has unintended consequences for all of us. Jon Gosier, a TED Fellow and tech investor, calls out the idea of "trickle-down techonomics,"…

3 Mar 2015 6 min

Kenneth Shinozuka: My simple invention, designed to keep my grandfather safe

Sixty percent of people with dementia wander off, an issue that can prove hugely stressful for both patients and caregivers. In this charming talk, hear how teen inventor Kenneth Shinozuka came up with a novel solution to help his night-wandering grandfather and the aunt who looks after him ... and…

13 Feb 2015 5 min

Zeynep Tufekci: How the Internet has made social change easy to organize,

Today the speed at which we spread information is so fast that a single email can launch a worldwide awareness campaign, as with the Occupy movement. Yet as techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci seeks to show, the ease of social media can actually hurt social change in the long run. From Gezi…

5 Feb 2015 16 min

Sarah Bergbreiter: Why I make robots the size of a grain of rice

By studying the movement and bodies of insects such as ants, Sarah Bergbreiter and her team build incredibly robust, super teeny, mechanical versions of creepy crawlies … and then they add rockets. See their jaw-dropping developments in micro-robotics, and hear about three ways we might use these little helpers in…

22 Jan 2015 6 min

Catherine Crump: The small and surprisingly dangerous detail the police track ab

A very unsexy-sounding piece of technology could mean that the police know where you go, with whom, and when: the automatic license plate reader. These cameras are innocuously placed all across small-town America to catch known criminals, but as lawyer and TED Fellow Catherine Crump shows, the data they collect…

7 Jan 2015 5 min

Jeremy Howard: The wonderful and terrifying implications of computers that can l

What happens when we teach a computer how to learn? Technologist Jeremy Howard shares some surprising new developments in the fast-moving field of deep learning, a technique that can give computers the ability to learn Chinese, or to recognize objects in photos, or to help think through a medical diagnosis…

6 Jan 2015 19 min

Bruno Torturra: Got a smartphone? Start broadcasting

In 2011, journalist Bruno Torturra covered a protest in São Paulo which turned ugly. His experience of being teargassed had a profound effect on the way he thought about his work, and he quit his job to focus on broadcasting raw, unedited experiences online. In this fascinating talk, he shares…

6 Jan 2015 13 min

Michael Rubinstein: See invisible motion, hear silent sounds. Cool? Creepy?...

Meet the “motion microscope,” a video-processing tool that plays up tiny changes in motion and color impossible to see with the naked eye. Video researcher Michael Rubinstein plays us clip after jaw-dropping clip showing how this tech can track an individual’s pulse and heartbeat simply from a piece of footage…

5 Jan 2015 13 min