singularity

Jon Ronson's TED talk on public shaming on Twitter, centered on Justine Sacco and others whose lives were upended by online mobs. He argues we have become a baying crowd and should rethink how we treat each other online.

Luis von Ahn, creator of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, explains how small contributions from many people online can digitize books. He then introduces Duolingo as a way to translate the web while people learn languages.

Skateboarding pioneer Rodney Mullen talks about how the open skate community and its environments drive the invention of new tricks out of pure passion. He draws parallels to collaboration and open source.

Bret Victor's talk proposing a new kind of maker space built for seeing and understanding a project's behavior: inside it, across time and across possibilities. It argues for scientific understanding over recipes and rules of thumb.

Eli Pariser's TED talk argues that personalized web services trap users in filter bubbles, limiting exposure to challenging information. He says this is bad for individuals and for democracy.

An excerpt from an RSA event in which physicist David Deutsch makes the case for optimism as a driver of progress in the 21st century. It is a short highlight of a longer discussion.

Scott Galloway's TED talk uses data to argue that young Americans are financially worse off than earlier generations, calling it a great intergenerational theft. He covers root causes and what could change it.

Bill Gates's 2015 TED talk, given after the 2014 Ebola outbreak, argues the world is unprepared for the next fast-spreading epidemic. He calls for scenario planning, vaccine research, and trained health workers, in the way countries prepare for war.

Steven Pinker's TED talk presents data on homicide, war, poverty and pollution to argue that the world has improved over the past decades. He frames progress as problem-solving, not inevitability.

Steven Johnson's TED talk argues that good ideas come from connected, slow-building hunches and liquid networks, from London coffee houses to Darwin to the modern web, rather than lone Eureka moments.

A ten-minute clip from Jonathan Blow's talk on preventing the collapse of civilization, arguing that software quality and the knowledge to build it are in decline.

Tony Seba of RethinkX presents the case that solar, wind and batteries are on a cost-decline path that makes a fully renewable grid achievable. It was made for the Global 100% RE Strategy Group's joint declaration.

Balaji Srinivasan's Startup School 2013 talk on Silicon Valley's Ultimate Exit, arguing for building alternatives outside existing institutions. It is the primary source for a much-retold and much-distorted idea.

Writer and artist James Bridle shows how strange and disturbing children's videos on YouTube, from surprise eggs to algorithmic mashups, are produced for ad revenue. He argues they reveal problems in a data-driven internet.

A five-minute C-SPAN clip of Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath testifying to a US Senate committee that screen time, including in schools, harms children's learning and cognitive development.

A short Supernova 2007 provocation in which Clay Shirky uses a 1300-year-old Japanese shrine, rebuilt periodically, as a metaphor for how networks change business and collective creativity.

David Deutsch's TED talk arguing that humanity's survival depends on solving problems through knowledge growth. He frames people as improbable "chemical scum" capable of understanding distant quasars.