Theme: Technology Wellness

IN A WORLD THAT IS RUN BY TECHNOLOGY ONE OF THE KEY QUESTIONS WE HAVE TO GRAPPLE WITH IS HOW DO WE WANT TO USE IT. OUR SPEAKERS FEATURED TONIGHT AND THE TALKS WE SHOW FROM THE TED.COM COLLECTION WILL SPARK SOME NEW WAYS OF THINKING ABOUT THIS ESSENTIAL QUESTION.

Wayfinding Academy
8010 N. Charleston Ave.
Portland, Oregon, 97203
United States

Astrid Scholz

Chief Everything Officer

Dr. Astrid J. Scholz is the CEO of Sphaera, a for-purpose, for-profit tech company. A company built off the daunting question, ‘Will we learn to collaborate effectively in time to survive the 21st century?’ Astrid has been dedicated to putting the best solutions into the hands of people working on the front lines of change. Sphaera creates pathways that make it easy and rewarding to share, innovate, aggregate, measure, and finance solutions across a global infrastructure for mobilizing innovations and capital required to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.

Avery Merritt

Question Generator

Avery has been asking follow-up questions as long as she's been verbal. Coincidentally, that's about how long she's been telling stories. A firm believer in the power of narratives to shape social consciousness, broaden understanding, and impact people for deep and lasting change, she envisions fiction as a tool to figuratively (if not literally) see into the future. The stories we proliferate about what futurism means will shape how we move into the future. Subconsciously, what we believe is going to happen is then more likely to happen. To that end, she tells stories that try to envision a future being different - and ones that question those narratives that already exist about what the future should be.

Jeff Raymond

The Real Martian

Jeff Raymond, a 38-year old former Air Force engineer, really wants to be an astronaut. He wants to be one so badly, in fact, that instead of waiting for NASA or SpaceX to begin shuttling people to the Red Planet, he's constructed his own self-sustaining Martian habitat in his backyard. Raymond was doing a lot of research on living off the grid and he realized that there is this really big population problem on the horizon, and some reports say that by the year 2050 there's going to be 9.5 billion people on the planet. In order to feed all those people, we're going to have to increase agricultural production by over 75 percent from today.