TEDxSJCC

We have known the world as a space where humans strive for intellectual competence. Now machines emulate, and sometimes outsmart, our thinking. Ask anything, and AI answers; imagine anything, and it appears on the screen. The techno-business world's dream of exploring the infinite seems to have found its wings in AI. However, the planet it stands on runs on a tight budget of water, minerals and land. AI lives in vast data centres that consume staggering amounts of electricity and water; the chips it thinks with are dug out of the earth; yesterday's hardware becomes tomorrow's e-waste. Can we call any technology intelligent if it innovates at the cost of the planet it stands on? Machines, we say, hallucinate. Perhaps the bigger hallucination is ours: the quiet belief that all this intelligence comes for free, and that we have now invented the ultimate problem solver. Who enjoys the benefits, and who quietly pays the price? And yet, somewhere right now, a farmer is saving a season because an algorithm read the sky in time. A city is breathing easier because a machine untangled its traffic and its waste. Scientists are spotting patterns in climate data no human eye could ever catch. Used wisely, this could be the most powerful tool the sustainability movement has ever had, and that is the unresolved paradox: the same technology is at once the planet's greatest hope and its heaviest burden. This edition of TEDxSJCC is about what happens when the age of infinite intelligence meets the age of finite resources. What do we automate, and what do we keep human? These are not questions engineers or environmentalists can settle alone; they need economists who can count the real costs, entrepreneurs who can build responsibly, policymakers who can see past the next quarter, and importantly, all of us — the members of the hallucinating society. TEDxSJCC 3.0 brings together entrepreneurs, innovators and changemakers who have closely seen the promise and the price of intelligent machines. We invite you to come listen and join the conversations.