"I have doubts about my doubts - I start this post at Long Beach Airport on my way home after four days at the TED2009 (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference, the most fascinating of any I have ever seen. I was able to attend. (...) It invites me to question many ideas more or less firmly established in my head. An exercise always beneficial (...)
The people I saw during these four days work "so that it changes" without locking themselves in the old dialectic "personal change" or "collective change", without believing that the only solution is revolution, without seeing contradiction - for many of them - between working for a better world and enriching themselves.
They do. They spot a problem, imagine a solution, a technology, a method and get started. Whether it's starting a business or launching a movement. An example: BetterPlace, a company that is trying to generalize electric cars. The state of mind is different. Instead of seeing what makes an idea difficult to realize, they imagine what it takes to make it happen. It is all my skepticism (of which I am so proud) which takes full mouth (...)
A very concrete way of saying "Yes we can" without waiting for the message to come from above (...) It is all the erasure behind the distance and the abstraction which, this time, has died away. My reservations? Of course I have some (which shows that critical thinking dies hard, a good thing if it does not prevent action (...) that would not be enough to solve everything, but, a little optimism and confidence don't hurt anyone. "
http://pisani.blog.lemonde.fr/2009/02/0 ... es-doutes/
http://conferences.ted.com/TED2009/program/