CLINICAL MATTER
One of the things I was looking forward to this year was going back to the TED conference in Vancouver this month.
As a senior TED fellow, I got reinvited to come back to this mothership TED conference featuring some of the best speakers in the world. This year’s theme is “Possibility,” and the program is quite exciting and innovative. A major theme in today’s world is artificial intelligence (AI) and one of the featured speakers is Greg Brockman, the cofounder of OpenAI, the maker of Chat GPT. Another speaker is the founder of TikTok Shou Chew.
While most know TED for the TED talks and TED-Ed videos, not many people know the origins of the TED organization. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design. It was founded in Silicon Valley by Richard Saul Wurman and Harry Marks in 1984 as a tech conference that eventually evolved into its present-day format as a premier conference featuring cutting-edge topics and world-class speakers. The main TED conference is held in Vancouver, Canada every year, with a hiatus in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic. It came back strong in 2022, which I attended as a senior fellow. There are many official TED-affiliated events such as TED Countdown and TED Women throughout the year along with hundreds of local TEDx events, but the mothership TED conference is by far the biggest and the most prestigious. It normally costs $10,000 to attend and it is by invitation only, but as a TED fellow I get to participate for free with all my travel costs covered.
The TED fellowship program originated in 2009. It provides transformational training in public speaking and the opportunity to give your own TED talk on the TED stage. I was accepted into the program in 2017 and I gave my TED Talk on the dangerous evolution of HIV, which is now at 1.4 million views (https://www.ted.com/talks/edsel_salvana_the_dangerous_evolution_of_hiv). More important, the skills I learned as a TED fellow in public presentation and speaking enabled me to convince the Philippine government to do an early lockdown at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and this is estimated to have saved over 350,000 lives.
TED fellows come from all walks of life and include artists, social entrepreneurs, medical doctors, and scientists. My room mate this conference is Dr. Adam Kucharski, an epidemiologist from the London School of Tropical Medicine. He is the author of the bestselling book The Rules of Contagion. Other invited fellows include multi-awarded Iranian photographer Kiana Hayeri, MacArthur “Genius Grant” Award winner and video artist LaToya Frazier, LGBTQ Indian activist and author Parmesh Shahani, Sierra Leone minister of education David Moinina Sengeh, and internationally renowned chocolatier German Santillan, among many others. There were no new TED fellows selected this year since the program is in the process of being reimagined, but us so-called “All-Star” fellows were brought back to participate in the reimagination process as essential stakeholders of the community and we are looking forward to new TED fellows being selected again in the near future.
To date, there have been about six Filipino TED fellows as well as some fellows of Filipino descent in the mix. The latest Filipino TED fellow was Ryan Gersava, founder of the NGO Virtualahan, which seeks to assist people with hidden disabilities find meaningful employment through coaching and teaching life skills. Each year, thousands of highly talented individuals apply for TED fellowships with around 20 being selected after several rounds of interviews. Many TED fellows leverage the fellowship to increase their visibility on the world stage exponentially and end up with a significant boost to their work and advocacy.
On the first day of the conference, the fellows went on a walk at Stanley Park on the coast of Vancouver with First Nations guides and we learned the history of the area as well as the traditions surrounding the land and the people. In the afternoon was the first of many discovery sessions, which included kayaking, food crawls, hiking, and in my case learning about raptors up close and personal with three live birds of prey—a falcon, a hawk, and an owl. The main sessions started at 5 p.m. on the purposely built TED stage with the curator Chris Anderson welcoming the attendees or TEDsters, as they are called to the conference.
The first presentation was by Future Crunch founder Angus Harvey and he presented a more optimistic take on the future and highlighted momentous events that occurred in the past year. He did this in a faux-news anchor format that was quite entertaining.
The second speaker was complex systems researcher Stuart Kaufmann who talked about the “adjacent possible,” which is how when different tools and elements are brought together in a group, more possibilities for using a tool originally meant for a specific task emerge.
The next presenter was Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna, who was one of the discoverers of CRISPR-Cas9, a revolutionary gene editing tool derived from bacteria that has opened up unprecedented precision in manipulating genetic material to the point of being able to transform not just individual bacteria but a whole community of bacteria called the microbiome. Since the microbiome has significant effects on people’s health, modifying it can be an important tool in treating disease and improving people’s wellbeing.
Other speakers who highlighted important problems were Metaphisic CEO Tom Graham, who demonstrated how their AI software, in real time, could change a person’s face and voice into someone else. This was comically (and scarily) highlighted when he switched his face and voice with that of Chris Anderson and vice versa on the live video feed as they were talking onstage. Conservation technology researcher Karen Bakker talked about sounds that we cannot hear, but animals such as bats and even plants use these inaudible frequencies to communicate.
The final speaker for the first session was Benjamin Zander, the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra who spoke about the emotions permeating classical music and persuaded the entire audience to sing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” in the original German.
This was only the first of a total of 12 sessions and it already left me breathless and raring for more. In the next column I will present the talks about the major theme of the conference, Artificial Intelligence, and its wonderful possibilities as well as the immense dangers of what those possibilities might pose to the future of mankind.