Kevin Kelly — We Can Shape Our Future

In his TED "The Future Will Be Shaped by Optimists," Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired magazine and a former editor and publisher of the Whole Earth Review, says that "every great and difficult thing has required a strong sense of optimism." He believes that we have a moral obligation to be optimistic.

In this incredible talk, he also shares three reasons for optimism during challenging times, explaining how it can help us become better ancestors and create the world we want to see for ourselves and future generations.

Here is an excerpt of the points that I like most:

We are confronting tremendous problems in this world. Things like global climate change, which seems almost impossible to solve, or social inequality, which seems endemic and difficult to eliminate.

The scale of these problems, though, is even more reason why we should be optimistic. Because what we know is that in the past, every great and difficult thing that has been accomplished, every breakthrough, has, in fact, required a very strong sense of optimism that it was possible.
(...)
And it’s no guarantee, just because we believe something will happen that it will happen. But we do know that unless we believe that something can happen, it’s not going to happen inadvertently by itself. And so, it becomes really important that we imagine a world that we want, that we imagine solutions we want, and believe that we can make them happen. And that belief in making something impossible happen is what has shaped our future so far.

So, our own history has been basically shaped by optimists, and if we want to shape the future, we need to be optimistic. That world that we’re shaping is not a world that’s perfect. It’s not perfection; there’s no lack of problems, there’s no absence of bad things. It is totally not utopia. It’s what I would call pro-topia: a world in which things are a little bit better. And that sense of optimism is a perspective where we expect the world to yield a little bit more good than bad, to have a few more reasons to hope than to fear.