Can TED change the world?

Although our world often feels small and little coincidences inspire us to say "what a small world" - it is still an exceedingly LARGE world to FIX. And FIXES it defintely needs. (No matter your religion or your politics you have to agree with that.) There is hunger and disease, an inevitable pandemic in the next 3, 10, 15, 30 years... There are wars that flare up based on agendas no one really knows anything about... There are genocides that slip through the cracks of history and are lamented only after it is too late for the comfortable "first world" countires to do anything about it.
The world as an organism is often an overwhelming thing to me and in that light I suppose it is surprising that we haven't blown the whole planet up already. However, I find brief moments of faith in people who ground the problems for me with their belief that there is a way to plan for the worst, support the best and make the most out of what we have. There are people who fight every day for hunger to be eliminated one person at a time, for polio to be wiped out one country at a time. And they understand that this is what it takes - tackling everything one step at a time. These people help me believe there is something we can all do and it is worth it for us to fight for our future, for our planet, for what is right.
We hear lots of news stories about wealthy capitalists fighting for their dollars to be protected. They could care less if 10% of their fortune could feed a small country, or give the millions of poor in their OWN country health care.
However, there are those that are wealthy, brilliant, at the top of their professions - people that actually have the power to direct the state of the world and the human race, even if it is just bit by bit... and some of these people get together every year to talk to each other about their goals, their dreams, and what the future might hold.
Each year 1,000 such people congregate in Monterey, California at a conference called TED.

You can download podcasts from their website (click on the title of this blog entry) and watch many of the speeches. I watched one about the new interface technology for computers, it was very Minority Report and yet actually possible and manufacturable.

One of the ones that blew me away was Larry Brilliant's simple presentation about polio and the Bird Fly pandemic. He was one of the 3 TED prize winners. Each prize winner is supposed to craft a wish (as wide in scope as they can think of ) and the TED foundation will help make that wish a reality. (That's right, they're modern day leprechauns.)
Larry Brilliant's wish is to create a system of early alert for disease around the world. From reading the blurb about his wish I did not realize why this was such a ground breaking enourmous wish. After watching the podcast it struck me to my core that the lack of funding and support for the type of program he wants to create is absoutely, literally insane. Watch the podcast and see for yourself how SARS was stopped in its tracks and how close we came to a pandemic and how the entire world being over run by a disease with no cure (the global economy standing still) rests in the shaky grasp of the bureaucratic WHO and a band of citizens around the world scraping to keep up.

Some of the 2006 Speakers were:

SIR KEN ROBINSON - Senior Advisor, The J. Paul Getty Trust - "This visionary cultural leader was knighted in 2003 for his achievements in creativity, education and the arts. He advises governments and global corporations on the urgent need to reshape our ideas of intelligence and creativity for the 21st century, especially through radically new approaches to education."

SAUL GRIFFITH - Inventor - An innovator, inventor, and adrenalin junkie with a unique approach to problem-solving, his recent projects include: a technology for slashing the cost of prescription glasses, a way of teaching science through cartoons, and an open source website showing how to make an array of incredible devices.

PENELOPE BOSTON - Cave and karst researcher - She finds undiscovered organisms deep in the highly mineralized environments of caves and works to determine whether they might have pharmaceutical or biomedical applications. She is also passionate about the search for life beyond Earth and is working on ways to find and sustain life on Mars.

NICHOLAS NEGROPONTE - Founder of MIT Media Lab - He is currently leading the $100 laptop initiative. The laptops he is developing will be sold to governments and issued to children in an effort to provide every child in the world access to knowledge and modern education. (If you watch his podcast you will see that the execution of this program is not a matter of if, but when, he is moving forward on the force of sheer will power.)

NAT IRVIN - Futurist - He founded Future Focus 2020 to engage urban communities in futurist thinking. He works with young people to examine the social, political, economic, technological and environmental issues that are expected to have the greatest effects on urban communities by the year 2020.

MAJORA CARTER - Founder, Sustainable South Bronx - Brought up in the South Bronx, this 2005 MacArthur Fellow has devoted her life to implementing sustainable development projects in her neighborhood that fill the community with beautiful green space, create jobs for its residents, and protect the environment.

LARRY BRILLIANT - Public Health Visionary - He helped manage the World Health Organization's successful smallpox eradication program in Asia, founded an organization which has restored sight to more than two-million blind people, and also co-founded the online community, The Well, to name just a few of his accomplishments.

AL GORE - Since becoming a private citizen, Vice-President Gore has been shaking up influential audiences the world over with his powerful warnings on climate change. He has also launched the innovative cable news channel, Current, which aims to bring an independent voice to a target audience of people ages 18-34.

There are even speakers I don't necessarily agree with, in terms of their belief system or morals, but that's the coolest thing about TED - it's a foundation that is truly democratic. There is room for all opinions and ideas to be heard.

Please check out the web site and the speakers, I'm sure there is inspiration there for everyone not just me, after all it's a small, small world.