It’s 2012. And many of us no doubt imagined that flying cars would be all the rage by now. While that hasn’t happened yet, some major driving innovations are on their way down the pipeline. In a new TEDTalk, Chris Gerdes of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (awesomely abbreviated as CARS) explains that he and his team are busy ...

On March 1 -- just two days after Elon Musk appeared on the TED2013 stage -- a SpaceX CRS-2 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral on a resupply mission for the International Space Station. Two days later, after the righting of a glitch, its Dragon capsule delivered a half-ton of supplies for the astronauts on board. And four days after that, ...

Big cities across the globe will soon be getting much, much bigger. As architect Kent Larson shares in this future-focused talk from TEDxBoston, 90 percent of the world’s population growth is expected to happen in cities. But while newly established cities tend to sprawl to accommodate growth, Larson envisions that the metropolises of the futu...

Jennifer Healey remembers totaling her car as a teenager. She was cruising down the highway, when she noticed the brake lights on the car in front of her go on. She assumed the car was slowing down, but it came to a halting, abrupt stop. Healey, now a research scientist at Intel working on mobile internet devices, simply couldn’t stop in time an...

Let’s shake ourselves out of our four-wheeled stupor, look at the vehicles and devices being developed, and reimagine how we’ll move around our cities, says TED technology curator Alex Moura. Humanity has come a long way from traveling by horse, but when we consider the future of transportation in cities, too many of us are still stuck in the 1...

By Kate Torgovnick May and Thu-Huong Ha In the past 30 years, 300 million people in China have left rural areas and moved to cities. Which means that a lot of thinking about the future of cities is happening here. At the TEDCity 2.0 Salon -- an event held in Chengdu, China, on November 12, in partnership with the Michelin Corporate Founda...

Five months ago, BMW i and TED laid down a challenge. What would the future of mobility look like? There were no constraints on time frame or existing technology. The Next Visionaries project was conceived as a free form exercise in innovation and ideation with the goal to surface some truly breakthrough concepts. Ideas poured in from ...

TED playlists are collections of talks around a topic, built for you in a thoughtful sequence to illuminate ideas in context. This weekend, a new playlist is available: What does the future look like? It's the question none of us is sure how to answer: What will the world look like in 20 years? And in a hundred years, will our lives be reco...

[embed]https://www.ted.com/talks/elon_musk_the_future_we_re_building_and_boring[/embed] In conversation with TED's Head Curator Chris Anderson, serial entrepreneur and future-builder Elon Musk discusses his new project digging tunnels under LA, Hyperloop, Tesla, SpaceX and his dreams for what the world could look like. Below, highlights fr...

We’ve been told that AI-driven cars would soon be all over our roads, but where are they? Writer Janelle Shane explains how our world with all its unpredictable challenges -- things like pedestrians, sinkholes and kangaroos -- are testing the capabilities of the most advanced artificial intelligence. Car manufacturers know: There’s a huge amoun...

"The ultimate sitting machine." Please be kind -- this is only my first attempt at a tagline for the BMW autonomous vehicle which I just went for a test drive, er, test ride in. Yes, I can proudly say that I've gone for a ride in the future -- and it's smooth enough to eat ramen in. Wait, let me back up (just like a car, get it?). A...

Take a trip back to the future with this week's TED Radio Hour, as six TED speakers share their prophecies for what lies ahead. From curing cancer to self-driving cars, these TEDsters offer exciting visions for the future, but not without cautionary warnings. The episode starts with a walk down memory lane with Nicholas Negroponte, who made s...

Do city people really like to share more? Emily Badger of The Atlantic Cities suggests a new and fascinating phenomenon in urban areas -- that city dwellers are moving toward a culture of shared ownership of everything from cars to power tools. Badger shares this thought in an essay from the new TED Book City 2.0: The Habitat of the Futur...

It’s an experience that can inspire road rage in even the calmest person: an urban traffic jam where cars crawl along at a pace of inches per hour.  As Jonas Eliasson, a professor of transportation at Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), explains in today’s talk, traffic congestion occurs in almost every major city across the globe, d...

Twice, Robin Chase has stood on the TED stage and offered powerful visions for a green, and shared, transportation future. At TED2007, the Zipcar founder suggested that car sharing could be the solution to global warming, while also helping drivers without cars. She also posited an even bigger idea: a mesh network of cars that transport cell...

We’re just a week into 2013, and the year seems filled with possibility. The turn of the New Year is generally an occasion to look back and reflect on the year that's passed -- the victories and defeats, the lives lost and the experiences found. But after we look back, we inevitably turn forward. We make resolutions and predictions for the y...

Please enjoy your weekly roundup of news briefs from members of the TED community: A 21st-century break-in. Security futurist Marc Goodman knows that technology can make both life and crime easier. In a post on Boing Boing excerpted from his book Future Crimes, he tells the story of an auto trading company that installed tiny remote-controlled ...

Suja Lowenthal is the Vice Mayor of Long Beach, but she's also involved in a major project on the other side of the world. She tells us, in the 2012 TED Prize session, a story of a city that is yet to be. Storytelling is a universal language that "survives through our voice and our hearing." There is an African parable about why we hav...

Enjoy these fascinating reads from across the Internet: California Governor Jerry Brown signed a law yesterday making it legal for driverless cars to travel on public roadways. [Forbes] Watch Sebastian Thrun’s TEDTalk “Google’s driverless car” for a description of how such a thing works and Chris Gerdes’ talk “The future race car -- 150m...

Chris Anderson introduces Session 3 with a compelling idea: "Most of the new things happening right now that feel like magic — whether it’s self-driving cars or online translations suddenly getting much better — there’s machine learning behind it." In this session we look at the issues around machines that learn. The challenge of teaching...

We’re on the brink of a future beyond what we can fathom -- a future with driverless cars, designer babies, intelligent robots, and digital doppelgangers. Who will you choose to be in that future? How will it change you? Here are four fascinating questions to get you thinking. See what you would choose -- and ask your friends what they think to...

A cat. A house. A plane. Most 3-year-old children can point at these and identify them by sight. Fei-Fei Li, the director of Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Lab and Vision Lab, has spent the past 15 years teaching machines how to see. Our most advanced machines are like toddlers when it comes to sight, Li says; they can, for instance, recogni...

“Throughout the history of computers, we’ve been striving to shorten the gap between us and digital information, the gap between our physical world and the world in the screen,” interface designer Jinha Lee says in today’s talk. Lee points out that the gap has become shorter and shorter—it’s now “less than a millimeter, the thickness of a...

Monica Araya made a big prediction on the TED stage in 2016: Costa Rica, her home country, would be the first nation in the world to pursue 100% renewable energy. Fast forward to 2018, and they’re on their way. Costa Rica already generates over 99% of their electricity through renewable energy, and went 300 days on clean energy in 2017. An...

In the 1950s, 3 out of every 10 people on the planet lived in a city. Today, that ratio has nearly doubled -- and the United Nations projects that by 2050, nearly 7 in 10 people will live in urban settings. Our population is gravitating towards cities, and this shift is creating amazing opportunities as well as critical problems that need our im...

"We think we have to be successful, then we'll be happier. But the real problem is our brains work in the opposite order," said Shawn Achor in his charming, immensely popular TED Talk from TEDxBloomington, "The happy secret to better work.” Achor is the CEO of consulting firm Good Think, which conducts research on positive psychology and helps p...

According to the United Nations, by the year of 2050, 70% of the world’s population will be living in urban areas. So what will the city of the future look like? These are some of the questions that dominate our conception of “The City 2.0”: How will we transport ourselves? Where will we grow our food? How will we power our homes, our office...

As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights. A real-world test of basic income. Too often, humanitarian aid donations of food and materials, while well-intentioned, aren’t what the recipients actually need. But what about a different approach: giving people a basic income to spend however they l...

Fast-forward 20, 50, or even 100 years into the future -- what will our lives be like? Will flying cars and 3D-printed dinners be the norm, or will they remain mostly science fiction? On Saturday, November 14, kids and teens from all five boroughs of New York City explored these possibilities at the Brooklyn Museum. With 27 speakers and perf...

As the sharing economy gains market share, it needs more support and structure to grow in the right directions. For more than a decade, the sharing economy has functioned as a sort of benign, artsy cousin of the world's corporate capitalist machine. Lately, though, the advances of Uber, Airbnb et al have brought much attention (and money) to th...