Written by Andrew Guilbert
Calgary is home to a wide range of interesting individuals with fascinating ideas worth sharing. We’ve welcomed many to the TEDxYYC stage and some of those talks have been seen by hundreds of thousands of people online.
Here are three of the most-watched ideas to come out of TEDxYYC (and collectively they have been viewed over a MILLION times)
How to Get Unstuck – Terry Singh
Views: 500K+
Do you ever feel like you don’t have any ideas worth sharing? This is what clinical psychologist Dr. Terry Singh refers to as the “experience of being stuck.” For Singh, getting unstuck is not the same feeling as feeling better or successfully changing. It’s the first step we take towards change. To the stuck person, it’s more important to “get unstuck” than feel better. Both goals are important, but one is more pressing, and one is dependent on the other.
He suggests that, rather than seeking a solution to an issue, instead focus on your experience of being stuck. Notice how your body reacts to your feelings, and trace that back to other areas of your life that seem to cause these issues. “It’s my view increasing your awareness of the whole of your experience is quite literally preventative medicine,” he says.
Check out Terry Singh’s TEDxYYC talk if you’re curious to know his full solution.
Can Thorium End Our Energy Crisis? – Kirk Sorensen
Views: 400K+
During Kirk Sorensen’s decade working at NASA, he had to think about how they would provide energy on a lunar community on the desolate satellite, eventually finding nuclear energy to be the most practical under the circumstances. In his research, he found that thorium, a naturally occurring nuclear fuel, was not only four times more powerful than uranium, but so energy-dense that you can hold a lifetime’s supply of it in the palm of your hand.
The energy produced from a liquid thorium reactor could recycle all the air, water, and waste products within a lunar community, and would be 200 times more efficient than traditional uranium, all while producing only a fraction of the waste.
But if it could work on the moon, why wouldn’t it work on the earth? “Thorium is not a rare substance,” says Sorensen. “There are many sites where an area the size of a football field would produce enough thorium each year to power the entire world.”
Check out Kirk Sorensen’s TEDxYYC talk for more interesting information about this possible energy solution.
Preparing for a Future with Artificial Intelligence – Robin Winsor
Views: 375K+
“Soon, we’re going to have to reassess our whole relationship with technology,” says Robin Winsor, President and CEO of Cybera, a not for profit that oversees the development and operations of Alberta’s cyberinfrastructure.
Winsor believes there are two major waves of change sweeping over us. The first has already started. That’s the age where we have specialist artificial intelligence programs, called narrow AI, and robotics. The second wave is even more fundamental. Within most of our lifetime, we’re going to see artificial general intelligence with the capacity of all of us combined, “and that will be like sharing the planet with a new lifeform.”
Winsor shares a few lessons on what we can do to prepare for a future where humans will, for the first time, be competing with AI in the job market.
If you want to know how universal basic income, sea squirts, Luddites, and glue sniffing in Glasgow relate to human nature and the advent of AI, then Robin Winsor’s TEDxYYC talk is for you.
We are consistently impressed by the quality of ideas our speakers bring to the TEDxYYC stage and love that we can play a part in spotlighting the brightest and best minds in our community.
Watch our tickets page for the chance to purchase tickets to attend our next event on June 6, 2020!
