Since its inception in 1983, TED Talks has been devoted to ‘Ideas Worth Spreading’. The conference invites thought leaders from all walks of life to share inspirational stories and radical ideas. Below, we look at seven of the most interesting TED talks about artificial intelligence.
Get ready for hybrid thinking
Ray Kurzweil is an American computer scientist and futurist who pioneered pattern recognition technology. He also invented the first Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to transform written words into data. In this TED Talk, Ray spoke about hybrid thinking, an ideology that combines human and computer thinking. He spoke about how AI can augment neocortex, the seat of higher cognitive functions, in human brain. He also predicted that a nanobot-neocortex interface connected to the cloud would emerge. Ray called it the next big leap in brainpower.
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Elon Musk talks about Twitter, Tesla and how his brain works
This TED talk is an unedited conversation between the head of TED, Chris Anderson, and Elon Musk. Musk spoke about his bid to buy Twitter, the biggest regret of his career, how his brain works, EVs, his’ master plan’ energy economy, and the future of our planet.
Why AI isn’t smarter than you while being smarter than you
Eric Steinberger is an ML researcher and the co-founder and CEO of ClimateScience. He has previously worked for Facebook AI and MIT. AI can beat us in complex games, translate between languages, and diagnose skin cancer. Yet, it lacks an understanding of humour. He answers ‘why’ in this illuminating 17-minute talk.
Why people and AI make good business partners
Shervin Khodabandeh is a senior partner and managing director at Boston Consulting Group and co-leads BCG’s AI and Analytics business. In his two-decade-long career, Shervin has helped clients harness the power of AI and analytics to transform their businesses. In this TED talk, he spoke about the potential of combining AI with human creativity and ingenuity. He outlined the opportunities this futuristic collaboration could bring to the workplace and how we can redesign companies so that people and machines can learn from each other.
How humans and AI can work together to create better businesses
Sylvian Duranton is the senior partner and managing director at Boston Consulting Group and the global leader for BCG GAMMA. His specialisation lies in transformation, organisation and change management. As companies try to streamline their businesses with AI helping make critical decisions, he said they might inadvertently make themselves less efficient. Sylvian advocates for a ‘Human plus AI’ approach that uses AI systems alongside humans and not instead of them. He spoke about the formula companies can follow to employ AI while keeping humans in the loop.
The danger of AI is weirder than you think
Janelle Shane is an AI researcher, writer and public speaker. Her blog, AI Weirdness, documents the unsettling ways machine learning algorithms get things wrong. In her TED talk, Janelle explored the danger of artificial intelligence- which isn’t that it’s going to rebel against us, but that it’s going to do exactly what we ask it to do. She shared weird and alarming examples of AI algorithms trying to solve human problems and why AI doesn’t yet measure up to real brains.
AI isn’t as smart as you think, but it could be
Jeff Dean is the SVP, Google Research and Health, and Google Senior Fellow with a PhD in computer science. In this TED Talk, Dean answers the question- what is AI, really? He spoke about the underlying technology enabling AI to do things and provided a roadmap for building better, more reliable systems with a deeper understanding of the world. The 20-minute video also includes a Q&A session with TEDx head Chris Anderson.
