Chelsey and I went to TEDxBeijing today. It was fun! There were eight speakers covering topics of reproductive health, economics, artificial intelligence, linguistics, art, preservation, technology, and business.
We like TED talks
Like millions of people, Chelsey and I have watched some of the hundreds of videos on the TED website, with curated, rehearsed talks spanning diverse ideas. The “ideas worth spreading” touch almost every corner of modern technology, society, and humanities one could imagine. It’s hard to find a topic that isn’t covered. Chelsey and I think TED videos are usually awesome. Though our viewership has sporadic episodes, we often quip at how informative or inspiring they are. We recently binge-watched many talks about marine science and art. So we were jazzed when we caught sight of of a Beijinger article announcing that an independently organized TEDxBeijing would be held in January. We reserved tickets.
We could not find the complete lineup of speakers before the event, but we were convinced the talks would meet the high bar we have come to expect from perusing the TED archive. The one question was– “What language would the talks be in? Would there be translators?” We wagered that there would be some translation system. Chelsey was stoked when she found out there would be microphone headsets (a la United Nations). Her long-time dream job was to be a UN translator.
Shichahai Theatre
We scooted over to the nearby Shichahai Theatre on this freezing cold Sunday afternoon. The adjacent Hou-Hai lake was peppered with ice skaters, and children on bicycle-like lounge contraptions. We had never seen those contraptions before. We made our way to the theater to find a long line of attendees. We joined them, shifting our positions to accommodate the usual scene of cars driving through an alley that is too small for both cars and pedestrians.
We collected our U.N.-style headset and got our seats. We admired the beautiful Shichahai Theatre, which is apparently famous for its Panda Kung Fu Show. The stage had the characteristic spotlight-on-red-circle in place for the speaker, and the three dimensional TEDx logo on the left side of the stage. After a short (and bungled) introduction, the talks began. We listened to eight talks separated in the middle by a short break.
TEDxBeijing
Helen Hai The first speaker was a Chinese-born investor and CEO of the Made in Africa Initiative. Helen has started a shoe factory in Ethiopia. The main idea is that China will eventually transition away from a manufacturing economy, as its middle class grows. The speaker highlighted other nearby economies that have made these transitions: Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and others. But China’s size means that this transition will cause ripples around the world. Where will these jobs go? The speaker argued for the increasing role of places like Ethiopia, which approached investors like her to bring manufacturing floors to Africa. The speaker extolled the merits–and noted some challenges–of doing business in Ethiopia so far. She ended on a hopeful and personal story showing that she is convinced Ethiopia will go through a phase of economic growth similar to that of China. It was a great talk!
Alessandro Rolandi This talk was meta. The speaker identified himself primarily as an artist, and secondarily as a “Social Sensibility R&D manager.” The justification for the latter title was the topic of the rest of the talk. He explained his role at a Chinese manufacturing company, where he connects artists with product lines or teams. The artist then does some piece which can be anything (performance, installation, sculpture). The art breaks down the traditional hierarchy of the manufacturing company and inspires creativity.
Wang Xiaoshuang This was the first talk delivered in Mandarin, so Chelsey and I put in our U.N.-style earpieces. I fumbled for a moment to get the volume adjusted and channel tuned in, so I missed the first few sentences. When the audio came into clarity I caught the phrase “… show me your hands.” So I raised my hand. I looked around, and thought maybe this polling was a check of the headset quality. I saw only one nearby foreign looking man also raising his hand. I lowered my hand when he did. The translation over the earpiece then said, “Now same question to all the women. Who here is currently carrying a condom?” I realized I had incorrectly raised my hand. The speaker was a reproductive health advocate, and founder of a popular Chinese website on reproductive health. No women had raised their hands at the question, and the speaker used the intrinsic paucity and gender-asymmetry to point out deep deficits in education in reproductive health. She pointed out common misconceptions about dating and sex in China. The talk felt really powerful.
Stuart Oda The speaker was the co-founder of a Beijing-based startup company, Alesca Life whose aim is to bring the food supply closer to their consumption destinations. He called it hyper-local agriculture, but urban agriculture would be equivalent. The main technology advance was to dramatically increase the density and portability of farming. His team achieved this feat by retrofitting the familiar shipping container with vertically stacked beds of vegetables, kale, wheatgrass. He highlighted the dramatic reduction in (areal) size and water consumption compared with conventional farming. It was not clear where the downsides were, how costly the whole thing was, and how scalable it was. Was it sustainable? At one point the speaker admitted that you probably can’t provide the whole world nutrition this way. One obvious pitfall that wasn’t mentioned is that the Sun provides “free” energy whereas the shipping container needs to convert solar energy to electricity (at a loss), and then into LED lights for the plants. But that loss is much less than the cost of shipping things. A further benefit of the shipping container is that there are zero pests, and therefore zero pesticides. Overall I thought it was a great presentation and an idea with loads of possibilities (e.g. disaster relief, arid environments). The lack of downsides made it feel a tiny bit like a startup pitch deck, but that feeling is typical of TED, and the demerit was outweighed by the overall coolness of the project.
There were four more speakers. I might write about the rest of them another time. Stay tuned!