"Success in creating Artificial Intelligence would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last."

"I read poetry all the time, I write about poetry frequently, and I take poems apart to see how they work," says Stephen Burt as he takes the TEDGlobal stage. "I'm a word person. I understand the world best and most fully through words, rather than pictures or numbers. When I have a new experience, I'm frustrated until I can try to put that ...

"Five hundred years ago, Christopher Columbus sailed across a vast ocean and opened a new chapter in human history, for better or worse," says Stephen Petranek. "I believe we are on the verge of a much greater age of discovery. We’re going to become a two-planet species." The TED audience did not leave this statement unchallenged. For man...

[embed]https://www.ted.com/talks/casey_gerald_the_gospel_of_doubt[/embed] The TED community is brimming with new books and projects. Below, a selection of highlights. A powerful story of an American odyssey. Writer and business leader Casey Gerald has published a new memoir on his journey through American life. Titled There Will Be No Mira...

The description of last night’s episode of The Colbert Report reads: “At the Clinton Global Initiative University Meeting, President Bill Clinton discusses foreign aid, poverty, TED Talks, Twitter and the Colbert Galactic Initiative.” So how did TED enter the conversation? Colbert suggested that Clinton, who accepted the TED Prize in 2007 with ...

“This is Tanis from Indiana Jones, from Raiders of the Lost Ark?” asks Stephen Colbert, holding up a pair of photos, one that shows a barren patch of desert, and another that shows an intricate system of buildings and streets buried underneath it. “This is the city of Tanis that they find with the medallion burned into the guy’s hand, the thi...

Stephen Friend wants your genes -- no, really. Today at TED2014 he announced  the Resilience Project, a new crowdsourced effort to understand the quirks and patterns of human genetic code that control -- and could help treat -- genetic diseases. Thirty years ago, the open-science advocate was working as a pediatric oncologist at the Children’...

Members of the TED community sure were busy this week. Below, some highlights: Legendary biologist E.O. Wilson has come out with a bold idea: that we set aside half of Planet Earth for wildlife. If we don’t, he warns, he sees us hurtling toward a “biological holocaust” that could send us the way of the dinosaurs. (Watch his TED Prize talk: ...

Community member Peter Carpenter wrote this in response to Stephen Friend's TED Talk, The hunt for "unexpected genetic heroes": "One of the earliest examples of this kind of work was Terry Hamblin's 1999 identification of protective mutations for Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL). Long before the current tools were available, he did it the h...

David Blaine, the magician, illusionist and endurance artist, is back on prime time TV tonight with the special, David Blaine: Real or Magic. Traveling around the world, the TED speaker (watch his talk, "How I held my breath for 17 minutes") performs magic and elicits astonished reactions from people on the street — as well as from a formidabl...

It’s Friday afternoon, and TED staffers are cutting and folding strips of white felt, carefully sticking the little strips into grates of chicken wire stapled to wooden frames. On the floor are five large wood panels and some metal pans filled with paint. Just a normal day at TED’s headquarters. In less than a week, we’re hosting a design salon...

TED was well-represented at the 87th annual Academy Awards last night. Documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras took home the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature for Citizenfour, and brought journalist Glenn Greenwald (watch his TED Talk) onstage with her to accept the award. The film dives into the world of Edward Snowden (watch his Q&A at...

Humans are off to live on Mars. At least, that's the case journalist Stephen Petranek makes in his TED Book, How We'll Live on Mars. According to Petranek, the move is no less than an "essential back-up plan for humanity." Here, he shares just some of the factors those who make the first trip will have to manage.   Infographic by Josh ...

The TED community is busy as ever! Below, a few highlights. Brené Brown special planned for Netflix. As she announced on Instagram, vulnerability expert Dr. Brené Brown has partnered with Netflix for a one-hour special: The Call to Courage. In the show, Dr. Brown will explain how to embrace vulnerability as a source of power and choose “co...

Ron Finley, the self-described renegade gardener, gave a hit talk at TED2013 on his gardening efforts all over South Central LA. Finley is an object of my fascination for more than one reason: In the 35 days since Finley's talk went live, he's left 178 comments on the site, making him the 3rd most prolific speaker commenter. (Trivia: the 1st...

RejectTED Talks. Onion Talks. DED Talks. Here in the TED office, you often hear chuckles as someone watches one of the quickly growing crop of TED spoofs floating in the ether. And surprisingly, there are some pretty good lessons for speakers embedded in these spoofs. See what I mean below. The spoof: Stephen Colbert’s RejecTED Talks Cr...

In today's TED Talk, guerilla gardner Ron Finley tells the story of how he was issued a citation, and then a warrant for his arrest, all for planting delicious vegetables in the 150 x 10 foot patch of earth in front of his house in South Central, Los Angeles. It's a rousing talk -- one that will make you want to stand up and cheer ... and ma...

Joan Halifax: Essential to compassion: We cannot be attached to outcome. Donna Karan: I realized I needed to address people, not just dress them. Sejal Hathi: I made it my mission to build a sisterhood of change-makers. Madeleine Albright: Women's issues are the hardest issues; they are the ones that...

In today’s thrilling TED-Ed lesson, Bill Nye the Science Guy admits that he has S.O.D., otherwise known as Sundial Obsessive Disorder. But there is a good reason for it -- a sundial helped Nye’s father escape from a prison camp in China during World War II, launching a lifelong obsession that Nye eventually picked up himself. At an event s...

The TED community is brimming with new projects and updates. Below, a few highlights. Malaria vaccine begins wide-scale testing in Malawi. RTS,S -- the only malaria vaccine to successfully pass clinical trials -- will be made available to 360,000 children in Kenya, Malawi and Ghana in the first round of implementation testing. Immunologis...

Craft -- in the timeless, universal sense of making -- connects us all. We craft our environments, our tools and toys, our transport and communications, our world. At Radical Craft -- an evening of talks curated by TED's design curator, Chee Pearlman, and co-hosted by Pearlman and Stephen DeBerry -- seven designers, inventors, artists, m...

Countdown is a global initiative to accelerate solutions to the climate crisis. Watch the talks, interviews and performances from the Countdown Global Launch at ted.com/countdown. Transforming big systems is a huge task. Energy, transportation, industry and infrastructure all pose their own challenges. And yet that transformation is alrea...

IBM's language-savvy computer Watson has been dominating against humans on the game show Jeopardy! for the past two nights, and makes his final appearance this evening. And tomorrow, live on TED.com, IBM is hosting an insider's conversation about Watson with Watson's principal investigator Dr. David Ferrucci, IBM Fellow Kerrie Holley, and Co...

The final full day of TEDGlobal 2013 comprised three jampacked sessions. "State of the Nations" included insights from China, the Middle East, and thoughts for fixing the dysfunctional global system of governance. "Forces of Change," curated by TED Senior Fellows Erik Hersman and Adrian Hong, introduced us to fresh thinking about Africa, and pro...

If you look at mortality data across the United Kingdom, a striking correlation materializes: the higher the latitude, the greater the relative risk of death. This is true even when controlling for risk factors like smoking cigarettes and eating bad food. So, what’s going on? The answer may lie in sunlight—there’s more in the south than there i...

In January, Alex Trebek read the following Final Jeopardy! prompt: “This intellectual forum started in 1984, bringing together people from three different industries, hence its 3-letter name.” The answer, of course: What is TED? Tonight, Jeopardy! took its TED enthusiasm to the next level, with a full category about TED Talks. See if you can ans...

(TED is on its annual two-week vacation. During the break, we’re posting playlists from the TEDTalks archive. We’ll be back with new talks Monday!) The wonderful thing about the universe is not just how big it is, but how every time we look into it we find something new and extraordinary. Here are four talks about the vastness of space, a...

On February 16, 2011, TED.com hosted a live webstream of IBM experts and insiders discussing supercomputer Watson's victory against Jeopardy!'s top human contestants. Watch this fascinating conversation between host Stephen Baker, author of Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and Watson's principal investigator Dr. David Ferrucci, IBM Fellow Ker...

The 2012 Paralympic Games are underway in London, and several TED speakers are right there on the front lines. During Wednesday night’s dazzling Opening Ceremony, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking took the stage to expound on the evening’s theme of Enlightenment. “What is it,” he asked, as the performers around him brought Big Bang imager...

Beauty is always a key theme at TED, and in this session, Imagined Beauty, there's something for everyone, with speakers including a couple whose professions have required the coining of new words.  Meet the "cloudspotter," the "mathemagician," and the others who presented to us in this session of TEDGlobal. Click on their name for a full ta...