At TED2014, we challenged attendees to vote on 10 potential drivers of change in the next 30 years, via that enormously sophisticated piece of technology: the sticky note. As we could likely have predicted, there wasn’t much consensus among those in Vancouver, but the range of opinions was vast and intriguing. And what do you think? Take the poll — and see how your thoughts match up with the rest of the TED community. Below the poll, some relevant quotes from TED Talks.
Climate Crisis
“Our world faces a true planetary emergency.” — Al Gore
Rising Inequality
“To be sure that this new economy benefits us all and not just the plutocrats, we need a new New Deal.” — Chrystia Freeland
Aging Populations
“My father, 92, says: ‘Let’s stop talking only about how to save the old folks and start talking about how to get them to save us all.'” — Laura Carstensen
Online Learning
“What happens when every precocious 13-year-old in the world has access to every bit of information they could ever want?” — Salman Khan
Transparency v. Privacy
Just as the Internet has opened up the world for each and every one of us, it has also opened up each and every one of us to the world. — Gary Kovacs
Space Technology
“Do we want to be a space-faring civilization exploring the stars … or forever confined to Earth until some eventual extinction event?” — Elon Musk
Machine Intelligence
“By the 2030s, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will predominate.” — Ray Kurzweil
Work Reinvented
“The key to winning the race is not to compete against machines but to compete with machines.” — Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
Genomics Revolution
“I firmly believe that the next great breakthrough in bioscience could come from a 15-year-old who downloads the human genome in Egypt.” — Thomas Friedman
Internet of Things
“This is like the birth of the Internet, but it’s literally an Internet of things. It’s an Internet where data becomes things and things become data.” — Neil Gershenfeld
