Man of Tomorrow

Igor Decision: I got a message you wanted to talk to me about Ted. I presume you meant Ted Kord, CEO of Kord Industries, and, I don’t think I’m shoving him out of the closet as the Blue Beetle and a member of your Justice League.

S: Actually, I was talking about the TED conference, Technology, Entertainment, Design- though Ted is usually one of the most eagerly anticipated speakers at every TED.

ID: You did that deliberately to hurt my head, didn’t you?

S: Maybe a little.

ID: So what’s TED?

S: TED is where the future starts, or, to use their own advertising line, it’s the home of “Ideas worth spreading.”

ID: So exactly how much have TED paid you to plug them?

S: Nothing. I wouldn’t accept a penny from them- they’re doing important work, because what the conference is doing is creating a fertile soil for ideas to grow. Aside from the conference itself, which actually took place last week, they put all of the lectures up online for free.

ID: I think I read something about that on the BBC. Wasn’t this TEDGlobal?

S: Yeah, it’s the international companion to the TED conference, and was held this year in Oxford. And it’s run by the nonprofit Sapling Foundation.

ID: It’s sort of rare to see you this excited by something.

S: Rare for you, maybe, but these are the kinds of things I can get passionate about. I’m usually relegated to helping people one at a time with my hands, but I watch people like Ted Kord get up on stage every year- this year he was showing a version of his flying Bug car that runs on 95 percent solar power- the other 5 percent is still jet fuel, but still, it moves at nearly the speed of sound on 95 percent solar power. It’s not just the future of personal conveyance, but shipping and transport- you know, once he figures out how to get the cost of production a bit below 2 billion. But at TED people like Ted (sorry, couldn’t help myself) get to stand up and talk about designs and innovations that will touch thousands if not millions of lives- and not some time off in the near and distant future, but as soon as tomorrow.

ID: Okay. I’m going to take a flying leap and say you weren’t able to see most of the talks live and in person, that you’re probably one of those people downloading the videos and watching when you can, but since it’s been a week, give us your highlights.

S: There were quite a few, but for starters, there was Dan Pink’s talk about incentives, and how incentives are great for mechanical work, but the moment even rudimentary cognitive skills are involved, incentives lead to worse outcomes. Magnus Larsson talked about a way to stop desertification- the fact that the world’s deserts are slowly increasing in size, decreasing the arable land in the world- by using bacteria to turn sand dunes into stone- and the possibility of using the stone dunes for housing. And there was Eric Giler’s WiTricity, which allows wireless electrical transmission.

ID: This is normally the part where I’d interrupt to tease you about being “the Man of Tomorrow,” but honestly, it’s refreshing to see you geeking out this hard over something. But for those of us who aren’t regular TEDites

S: TEDsters.

ID: Whatever, since you’re a reporter, I imagine you’ve got some things scrawled in a notebook, so give us a favorite quote.

S: Uh, I think my favorite quote of the conference was, “The problem with stereotypes isn’t that they’re untrue, it’s that they are incomplete and make one story the only story.” That was from Nigerian storyteller Chimamanda Adichie. It also actually echoes something Alain de Botton said, which, when out of context, parallels Adichie, “A snob is someone who takes a small part of you and uses that to paint a complete picture of who you are.”

ID: Hmm… I think I’m going to interrupt you, there, and turn the conversation from stereotyping to profiling. Obama, who you seem to broadly approve of, seems to have stepped into a cowpie over his comments related to the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, a professor of African American studies at Harvard. Just for those who aren’t Daily Planet RSS feed fiends, Gates was arrested while trying to unjam his front door after proving that it was indeed his home- reportedly for disorderly conduct. The incident was at least partially racially charged, if only because Gates brought it up at the time. As someone who has been an outsider, and someone who really wants to see America live up to its potential, and because I want to, like the President, completely destroy your point for a moment by going off topic onto a racial issue, what’s your take on it?

S: You know, like yourself, I’m a bit of a news junky. I’ve been following Sarah Palin and the Gates affair far more closely than I’d like to admit. But honestly, I think it’s all been blown out of proportion. I think it would be ridiculous not to admit that racial politics come into play whenever a white officer confronts an African American- that’s just a part of the culture and social history of the country. The degree to which it played a role is arguable, but is in this case, at least, unimportant. The officer probably did act stupidly- so did Gates. It’s never a good idea to be confrontational with police officers. And I’m not saying a white officer is never justified in arresting a black man for disorderly conduct- I’m saying the police should have been more careful in their application of the law, because I don’t think the described behavior amounts to disorderly conduct under Massachusetts law. And when the President learned that his friend was arrested by a white officer under less than perfect circumstances, he felt the same sting and stigmas that African Americans have felt going back decades at least; in responding to that understandable personal feeling publicly, in stating that the officer acted stupidly, even though I think it’s pretty clear he did, the President himself acted stupidly. So really, you have three men acting stupidly, and unfortunately it happened in public- but they’re all people, and I think that’s where the story begins and ends.

ID: Okay, unlike the President, I’ll let you finish off on-topic; what was the most important part of the TED conference for you?

S: Thanks, I guess. But I think, for me, the most biggest moment came in the talk by Josh Silver, and for that one I was actually lucky enough to be in attendance, albeit in my more mild-mannered reporting persona. Silver asked the audience how many of us were wearing some kind of corrective lenses- glasses or contacts, and most of the audience raised their hands- including me, since as Clark Kent, and I still do it out of habit, I wear glasses.

And it’s not particularly surprising that most of our hands went up, since 60 percent of the world needs some sort of vision correction, but then he mentioned that, while we at the conference were fortunate enough to have the lenses we need, that a full 1 billion of people in the world don’t. A full billion people in the world can’t see as well as they should be able to- if that doesn’t strike you, then I- I just don’t know. Silver pioneered a pair of $19 eyeglasses that can be assembled by anyone anywhere in the world- but the catch, of course, is that many of the target users are surviving on $1 or less a day- so the price is still a bit steep.

And I remember the first time I ran into one of these issues, granted, not quite on this scale; it might have been antiretrovirals for a country in crisis, something like that, but I flew right to Bruce’s home and told him it was a simple problem he could solve with only a few hundred million dollars. And what struck me was he was aware of the problem, quoted me the figures I’d just found out about, that I’d been so excited to share, and then told me about the depth of the same problem in the country bordering it to the west, and then the same in the country bordering it to the east. “I could help,” he said, “but if I spend the money today, then I can’t put that money towards research and reform, where it will reap ten times the benefits in a few years’ time.”

And I’ll never forget what he said to me: “I envy, you, Clark. All that power, and you can’t fix the world, you can’t even really start. But me- I could solve a dozen problems- but there will always be more. So I can do the most good by damning millions of people to suffer in the short term.” It’s the only time I remember his voice cracking, when he said, “I truly envy your powerlessness.”

I found out later that he managed to help the country secure a loan through some contacts he has at the World Bank, and helped provide some generic antiretrovirals at what was almost certainly below cost. But he was right, and that’s why I wanted to talk about TED. Doing what I do, I could never really save the world. But people, ideas, innovation- that’s how the world changes.

We’ll be trying to bring you a new section of the interview every Tuesday. Some of the questions have already been prepared by the interviewer, but to ask Superman a question, leave a comment or send an email to DeathofSuperman@gmail.com.