Anthony Doesburg: Talkfests bring out the techies, to put the world to rights

The technology world has spawned numerous talkfests where luminaries and hangers-on get together in some exotic location and convince themselves they hold the keys to the future of humanity.

Whole conference organisations have come and gone to feed and cash in on technologists' love of gabbing. Journalists are invariably invited along because there would be no conference if they weren't there to publicise the event and spread the speakers' golden words.

Not to be too cynical about it - good can come of all the talk, and the best events have as much doey as hooey. The Telecommunications Users Association can fairly claim, for instance, that a series of conferences it staged in the first half of the decade helped get broadband internet access higher up the political agenda.

The TUANZ events, a number of which I was at, forced participants to come up with ideas for using the internet that were relevant to their jobs and which stood some chance of seeing the light of day. One such example is a plan to use the internet to monitor soil moisture sensors on farms, reported in this column a fortnight ago.

Many other conferences I've gone to have been exercises in endurance. When it's actually technologists doing the talking, that can be fascinating. But when marketers seize the microphone on behalf of the backroom inventors and engineers, it can be dire.

Then, the only thing that saves the hapless reporter is the nice venue and the catering. The location can be a double-edged sword, though; too exotic - a snowed-in ski resort near Lake Tahoe, say - and there's no escaping the company of your hosts.

The health of the technology industry, and the economy generally, can be gauged from the number and venues of the events being staged. Nothing has surpassed the dot-com era, when you could find yourself transported to a Hawaiian resort to be yabbered at by a succession of marketers from start-up companies yet to make a product, let alone a profit, but confident of being bought for billions by an established outfit - helped by your reporting of their delusional business plans.

Those "conferences" seem to be on hold for now. But a different class of event, the TED (for technology, entertainment and design) conferences, have kept going through technology's boom and bust cycles since 1986. The latest, TED2010, ended last weekend.

TED does have technologists among its speakers, although not many. The most prominent of the lineup at last week's event at Long Beach, California, was Bill Gates - if he qualifies. He was billed as a philanthropist, though many people would think of the Microsoft chairman as a marketer.

Gates shared the podium with chefs, a secret agent, mathematicians, a comedian or two, musicians, a film director and philosophers, one of whom, Denis Dutton, is a professor from Canterbury University.

Dutton's billing was as author of The Art Instinct, published last year and described by a New Scientist reviewer as a bravely proposed "coherent notion of the 'art instinct' as a product of evolution in the strictly biological sense".

Dutton's prescribed 18-minute talk on day three of the four-day event was book-ended by Canadian typographer Marian Bantjes and Indian artist K.K. Raghava. On other days WolframAlpha inventor Stephen Wolfram, musician David Byrne of Talking Heads fame, outed CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson and Avatar director James Cameron spoke, while Jamie Oliver was the recipient of a TED prize and US$100,000 ($143,000) for his campaign to put better food on children's plates.

Queuing up to hear them speak was an audience prepared to pay a reported US$6000 for the privilege. Merely being prepared to pay wasn't enough - aspiring attendees had to be ready to sit through an hour-long online registration process and be people who could make "a strong contribution to the TED community".

With such eclectic speakers and committed listeners, what is it that TED sets out to do? Nothing less than change the world, in fact, through its goal of spreading ideas.

That's a fine goal, so long as the direction headed in is one you like. A more immediate danger might be the potential for clashing egos of the many celebrities on the stage and in the audience (Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are said to be past attendees - what if they got into a brawl with Bill Gates of the "my search engine is bigger than yours" type?).

My invitation to TED apparently having been lost in the mail, I attempted to ask conference communications head Laura Galloway by phone and email about last week's event. "Can't answer - too busy," came the reply from the conference floor.

Whether that's saving the world or soothing egos, only time will tell.

Anthony Doesburg is an Auckland technology journalist.