by James Yeats Smith, filed from TEDActive 2013, Palm Springs. Thursday, 28 February. The day started with serious speed and intent. There was an Intel Mobile short film to finish; a dozen prolific speakers vying for attention; two-dozen emails clamouring at my screen and the final TEDActive throw down with Reggie Watts to get down to. Between all of this, I did manage to squeeze in two sessions and the speakers did not disappoint.
A session called ‘Indelicate Conversation’ lived up to its description with a darkly humorous talk by Dutch ornithologist, Kees Moeliker. Kees had the crowd in stitches as he described the phenomenon of homosexual necrophilia of the mallard, a piece of research that won him the Ig Nobel prize, an award that honours improbable research that first makes people laugh and then makes people think. While describing this rare occurrence in the animal world he whipped out the stuffed duck in question and began to pass it around the audience. He brought down the house later in his talk when he explained how the prize he’d won made him the unofficial expert in deviant sexual behaviour amongst animals and started receiving images from the public; a moose copulating with a bronze statue of a bison, a toad mounting a dead gold fish and a few others I should probably not describe. He became the first TED speaker in history to close with the big question, “Can I have my dead duck back please?” Read more about Moeliker’s left-field research on his blog.
And then came the stand out talk that definitely identified itself as a contender for the biggest idea of the conference.
Founder of the internet, Vint Cerf took the stage alongside MIT physicist, Neill Gershenfeld; cognitive psychologist, Diana Reiss and musician, Peter Gabriel for what was rumoured to be this year’s biggest announcement.
Reiss got the presentation off to a good start by pointing out that our Darwinian view of evolutionary processes have been largely committed to measuring physical changes in appearance and that biologists have been much more reticent at acknowledging intellectual evolution and consciousness. After explaining the behavioural work she’s been doing with dolphins over the last decade, she pointed out something that occurred to me moments before, dolphins too learn through self-organization – which was the contention of the impressive TEDPrize winner, Prof Sugata Mitra on how to reinvent the way we learn as humans. Ok, I was listening.
Gershenfeld stepped up and patched in Orangutans from Borneo, three bottlenose dolphins and an elephant from Thailand for a live video conference and began to elaborate on how these animals have started showing early signs of inter species communication via iPads. Right, now they had my full attention.
Gabriel took over to talk about inter-species jam sessions and showed a film of a chimp laying down piano riffs with him in his studio. He demonstrated how music was not only a means of communication that served as common denominator amongst culturally diverse humans, but potentially, also between species. Intrigued and somewhat sceptical, I continued to listen intently, not yet sure of where this was all going.
Finally, the internet Godfather, Vint Cerf slowly got up from his chair ambled over to his laptop and asked, “If the internet is one of man’s greatest inventions, how de we integrate the rest of the bio mass into it?” After posing the question he announced the imminent launch of the Inter-Species-Internet and my brain began to melt.
Cerf pointed out that we’re already in the process of establishing the inter planetary internet between Earth and Mars and that, wait for it… what we learn from the Inter Species Internet on Earth may teach us how to engage extra terrestrials one day.
If this didn’t come from the man who created what has become the most indispensable tool of our time, I would’ve struggled to take this seriously. But then I took a moment and remembered two things, firstly 2013 was the year TED saw the first non-human, ‘Gander the Dog’ officially enrolled as a conference attendee and secondly, that all truth passes through three stages: Firstly, it is ridiculed, secondly, it is violently opposed and lastly it is accepted as self-evident.
The Inter-Species-Internet is far from tangible at this stage, but isn’t it exciting to think that 30 years ago the internet endured the same ridicule and disbelief, and look how self evident that has become.
What ever our conclusions may be about ideas like this, they challenge us; they force us to come to terms with our own preconceptions of what’s possible, realistic, and even fathomable. If for nothing else I admire and support Cerf’s vision entirely on the basis that ‘An idea that is not dangerous, is not worthy of being called an idea at all’ -Oscar Wilde
Aint that the truth. JYS.
– More stories for TEDActive 2013
– James Yeats Smith is an award winning Creative Director and writer focused on the convergence of marketing, entertainment and technology. He is based between New York, Cape Town & Johannesburg.
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Vint Serf invented TCP, he hardly “invented the Internet”