Bigger Bandwidth = Faster World Brain, with TED's Chris Anderson | Big Think

Well, TED really was made by a major technological disruption. It happened about ten years ago. The price of bandwidth plummeted.

Back in 2004, the cost of sending a lecture from person A to person B on the other side of the world was effectively $2 just for one piece of communication. You'd have to copy it onto a DVD, mail it across the world, and then they'd view it.

And then Internet bandwidth plummeted in cost, and suddenly it was possible to do this thing called online video. And so within literally not much more than a year, the real-world cost of sharing 15 minutes of spoken information plummeted from a couple dollars to about a penny or two.

Now that was an astonishing shift because it suddenly meant that a sponsor could cover that cost, if need be. Effectively, the cost of sending an idea was free. And so we tried an experiment to put a few talks up online.

To our astonishment, they went viral and suddenly TED turned on its head. And instead of being a once-a-year conference in California, it became this online idea of ideas worth spreading.

The interesting thing about technology is that it's a mixture of surprises and predictability. I mean, the most famous piece of predictability is something like Moore's Law, where over many years you see a trend that almost becomes a self-fulfilling thing.

An entire industry acts as if Moore's Law were true and thereby, in a sense, makes it come true because that creates the market to justify the investment in ever more powerful computer chips, et cetera. And so there are definite trends that you can look at.

It's been obvious for a while that the Internet was changing everything. And there's a roadmap out there right now that is actually an amazing roadmap and possibly underappreciated: that the Internet is spreading to every corner of the planet and will be low cost, high-bandwidth everywhere.

Companies like Facebook and Google are investing billions of dollars to make sure that this is so, and that's a complete game changer. That means for the first time in history, not one billion, but seven billion people plus will be interconnected.

What does that mean? Who knows? But it's possible to dream about that future because the technological landscape is set out and it's clear. So that's certainly something that we're thinking about.

It changes our strategy. What is the TED Talk of the future? What would you say if you could have 18 minutes to talk to the girl in the village, the boy in the slum? We don't know the answers to those questions, but we sure as hell need to figure them out.