TED 2015: Truth and Dare.

Last week I had the opportunity to see the future. I attended the TED conference and watched speakers present incredible opportunities for the future. Some of my favorites are linked below:

• Fei Fei Li - How we are teaching computers to understand pictures.
• David Eagleman - Can we create new senses for humans?

While the future may include colonizing Mars, artificial intelligence as smart as the combined intelligence of humans, and the possibility of our conscience to live forever, the speakers also presented a world that is fraught with conflict. We have a very big disparity between people that are willing to pay $500,000 to travel to Mars and those growing up in poor urban neighborhoods where college education is not even an option and prison is a reality. Or countries where violence is still keeping the populace in a state of poverty.

I look forward to one day seeing some of the technologies presented last week become reality but also hope that many of today's realities (overcrowded prisons, violence, rampant income inequality) can be overturned by putting todays technology and human ingenuity into place.

As a father of soon to be teenage daughters I felt most compelled by Monica Lewinsky's talk about Cyber Bullying and mistakes that become all too permanent.