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*Bruce Nussbaum, Contributing Editor at Businessweek, moderated the discussion for this conversation:
Richard Saul Wurman*, Author, Founder of TED Conferences
Richard talked about a lot of stuff. He is a man of ideas. For example, the case studies project (19.20.21) he’s instigating in 19 cities around the world to study the population phenomenon. The name 19.20.21 comes from 19 cities, 20 million people in the 21st century. This one I really liked: he described himself as a tango – he is a balance between curiosity and ignorance. No one is as in touch with their own ignorance more than him, and he says that’s what makes him different from people who try to look smart. He also talked about the fable he wrote about how this leader that did the opposite of our laws. For example, you couldn’t copyright anything except bad ideas. It was very clever and is a good reflection on some of the generally unquestioned assumptions about our society like where we build schools and museums. Oh, and the old TED talks are going to go up on the website. Awesome.
Joseph Coughlin, Director, Age Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Joseph started by asking us what do we think of as old? Turns out, collectively, we tend to think of someone 15-20 years older than ourselves as “old”, but he invited us to think about aging in terms of how we’re living. He talked about three kinds of aging evolution. Longevity 1.0 – you live as long as you can outrun anything that can eat you or shoot you. Longevity 2.0 – you live long enough to outrun predators, and you get lunch and maybe a little medicine (which added 20-40 years to the average life span).
Longevity 3.0 – What’s next. We are living longer, and yet thinking about retiring at the same age. Now, the idea of retiring early, even in your 60s, takes the value from society of your life for an additional 20-30 years (add to that the years before you were productive, and it’s a huge chunk of your life). How are we going to re-invent society to have people living longer? There has to be an exchange where we contribute more valuable years to society.
The whole culture will have to shift as age, even our infrastructures and the way we plan cities. 70% of Americans are either not served by public transit at all or only poorly. So you’re either wedded to your car or stuck at home. He talked more about care. He said 60 million Americans have a chronic disease; 20 million Americans have 5 chronic diseases. On work, the boomers want to retire from their current jobs and do something else, but how do you enable a new employee in a different field that has 30 years of experience doing something else? We don’t have flexible workplaces, something as seemingly insignificant as lighting will have to improve to help older eyes stay productive at work. Another implication of a flexible workplace is that we need to redefine education. Going to school once won’t be enough. Technology is moving so fast, you will age even faster than the last generation.
Deb Roy, Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, MIT
Deb created his own in-home experiment to try and better understand how his son learned to speak. He recorded his infant son for 3 years as he learned to talk using 9 overhead video cameras around his house. When it was done, he had something like a quarter of a million hours of tape. Then they created a digital record of voices to isolate where there was speech. Then he talked about the trace of individual words. He showed over an evolution of a few weeks the acquisition of a single word and how the pronunciation changed over time.
That was awesome, but then he layered on a whole visual layer. They digitized movements in the house and compared them to the child’s speech. They looked for routine patterns within an area using algorithms to isolate certain activities and compare them to the acquisition of language to see how they are related. This is behavioral research using algorithms to uncover what kind of behaviors are warnings, or causative to other outcomes. It could be used in a lot of applications, but the one he mentioned was earlier diagnosis of autism. It was nothing short of a mind-blowing kind of data analysis.
Lewis Gordon Pugh, Explorer, Swimmer and Environmentalist
This dude redefines hardcore. Lewis has swam in every ocean on earth. Has witnessed the changes in sea ice. Wanted to do a swim that would bring attention to the issue. So he swam at the North Pole. It was very inspiring, and he had an accent. I was so stunned I forgot to take a picture, so I found this one:
