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Jason Pontin

Editor in Chief/Publisher, MIT's Technology Review

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"Why Can't We Solve Big Problems?"

I'll be giving a TED U Talk in Longbeach at the end of the month. I'll be asking "Why Can't We Solve Big Problems?" I think that blithe optimism about technology’s powers has evaporated as big problems that people had imagined technology would solve, such as hunger, poverty, malaria, climate change, cancer, and the diseases of old age, have come to seem intractably hard.

I'd love to know what the TED Community thinks our difficulties are - or, even if the idea is true at all.

Here's a URL to the story I wrote in MIT Technology Review on the subject: http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/429690/why-we-cant-solve-big-problems/

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    Theodore A. Hoppe 200+

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    Feb 21 2013: This is the first time our history that we are able to comprehend what the human mind really is, not your mind and my mind, but the mind of an infant. We have only recently dispelled the notion that babies' brains are blank slates. We are now developing the understanding that young minds can process information in very capable ways.
    Parenting is the most important job many in us will ever have, and we receive almost no training for it. But because we are the role models for young minds the problems in a society are often reflected in its youth. Perhaps the reason we have stopped solving the "big problems" is that we have forgotten how to instill a fascination about world in our children. We do not prepare them to solve great problems anymore. Perhaps this happened to us and we then become pessimistic about the world, and now leave a legacy of hopelessness for our children.

    This was the message Jane McGonigal brought to TED when she spoke about gaming for a better world.

    "Right now we spend three billion hours a week playing online games. Some of you might be thinking, "That's a lot of time to spend playing games. Maybe too much time, considering how many urgent problems we have to solve in the real world." But actually, according to my research at The Institute For The Future, it's actually the opposite is true. Three billion hours a week is not nearly enough game play to solve the world's most urgent problems."

    McGonigal understands that immersive virtual worlds are the perfect place to model real world problems. She asks, "What about games makes it impossible to feel that we can't achieve everything? How can we take those feelings from games and apply them to real-world work?"

    A very good question.

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