Solve For X: Google Presents Moonshot Thinking in Short, TED-Style Talks

Last week, Google host­ed a gath­er­ing called “Solve for X,” which brought togeth­er entre­pre­neurs, inno­va­tors and sci­en­tists inter­est­ed in find­ing tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tions to the world’s great­est prob­lems. These solu­tions weren’t small in scope. No, they were all “moon­shots,” ideas that live in the “gray area between auda­cious projects and pure sci­ence fic­tion; they are 10x improve­ment, not 10%.” And these moon­shot ideas were all pre­sent­ed in TED-style talks that now live on the WeSolve­ForX web­site and the WeSolve­forX YouTube Chan­nel.

Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin kicked off the event and framed the project, paving the way for Nicholas Negro­ponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab and One Lap­top Per Child, to dream big and ask: Can emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies empow­er chil­dren to learn to read on their own? Imag­ine how that would change the edu­ca­tion­al prob­lems beset­ting the devel­op­ing world? (Watch above.) Or how about this big thought from Adrien Treuille, assis­tant pro­fes­sor at Carnegie Mel­lon, who imag­ines a day when knowl­edge cre­ation won’t be dri­ven by uni­ver­si­ties and cor­po­ra­tions, but rather by loose groups of indi­vid­u­als tak­ing advan­tage of the inter­net and big data. That talk appears right below.