5 Ideas From TED Most Worth Spreading

The TED conference has managed to build an entire culture around their tag line, "Ideas Worth Spreading." The incredible strength of their brand is built around their mind-bending, perspective-challenging talks, which are broadcast online and voraciously consumed by hundreds of millions of people around the world. So after attending TED's 2010 conference in Long Beach, CA, what are the big ideas most worth spreading? Here are my top five.

1. Massive amounts of data will characterize the 21st century. This one may seem a little boring, but it's not. We've never had access to so much information before, but whether it is useful or not will largely come down to the interfaces that make it accessible and the design which reveals the important insights. TED2010 featured demos of a number of new technologies that will fundamentally change the way we interact with information.

2. Our relationship with food needs to change. TED2010 definitely added to the growing buzz and hum around the notion that our broken relationship with food is literally killing us. Chef Dan Barber painted a different vision of what it could mean to "farm," Cancer researcher William Li told us about how certain foods had properties which made them fight cancer naturally, and TED Prize winner Jamie Oliver passionately implored us to fundamentally revolutionize the food system, starting with local schools.

3. The climate crisis underscores everything else we do. It was something of a dramatic moment when Bill Gates, the billionaire philanthropist who has almost never spoken publicly about the climate crisis, decided to devote the entire 18 minutes of his talk to giving his sense of the issue and arguing which technology and renewable resources we need to be investing in. Importantly, he spoke of reducing carbon emissions not to 50% or 25% but all the way to zero by 2050. His speech was just one example of a tone that ran throughout the event.

4. Playful curiosity is important (Sometimes you need laser guns to kill mosquitoes....) Inventor polymath Nathan Myhrvold wowed the TED stage with a laser gun that can accurately detect female mosquitoes who are hunting and then blast them out of the air. While the wide market application of such a technology seems perhaps, well, nonexistent, it was a moment that captured the spirit of playful curiosity that ran throughout the TED stage and community. The conference was a reminder that sometimes if you think of it, or you wonder about it, the best bet might just be to do it -- whatever 'it' is.

5. Wisdom comes in all forms, and we need all kinds. At the heart of TED's DNA is a belief that all type of wisdom -- from scientists to teachers to business people to inventors -- is valuable and vital. Sir Ken Robinson gave another speech this year following in the shoes of his famous "Do Schools Kill Creativity" talk, which made this point. But I think that for me, this point was most underscored by Temple Grandin, an autistic woman who has her Ph.D and has built a successful career by translating her particular mode of visual thinking into designing animal facilities. She is a vocal advocate for the fact that people with autistic spectrum disorders often have incredible things to contribute to society, but her point goes far beyond just that particular group.

With the challenges that confront us, I simply don't believe that we can just manage and direct our way out of trouble. We need to invent our way out, experiment our way out, dance, sing, play, socialize, talk, write, think our way out. And we need to do it together.

After a week at TED, it was this idea of the belief in the power of all this wisdom -- the idea that lies at the center of TED itself -- that seems to me most worth spreading.

Photo Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson