The Ideas Worth Spreading From This Year’s TEDx Macquarie Uni Talks

“Want to know what a four-day working week feels like? Here’s one I prepared earlier,” says entrepreneur Craig Errey, referencing the upcoming long weekend to mark, of all things, ‘Labor’ Day. Craig’s all about getting legislation for a ‘four-day working week with full pay’ passed in the next five to ten years. And it’s not unprecedented: it was only in the 1920s US that the six-day working week was dropped to five days by really smart dude named Henry Ford. When your days of work to rest are 5:2, work-life balance is really tricky; 4:3 is, logically, much more balanced and allows us to have time to do the things that really matter, like fam hangs and you-time.

The title Jack Delosa‘s talk is: ‘What is the value of a degree?’, which is ironic considering old mate’s a uni drop-out, but now owns a ~$25 million dollar business. Jack says that what we’re at the moment is a real “skills gap”. Students going off to work placements and then discovering afterwards that their textbooks aren’t actually helping them. He urges young people to have a long, hard think about what they want educational institutions to do for them, and not the other way around. “Higher education is a 4.4 trillion dollar industry”, which have experienced at “1120% growth since the 1978”, but the curriculums aren’t made to be changed every single year, he says. Jack’s online education business, The Entourage, provides and alternative pathway to higher education, and he plans to offer a Bachelor of Entrepreneurship by 2018.

Today I raised this question at TEDx and discussed the factual argument around the increasing skills gap between what is taught through traditional education and what the world actually needs. I’m incredibly passionate about empowering up and coming generations to make an informed decision around their education and their life, and I hope the conversation continues. The presentation will be online soon. #tedxmacuni it was courageous of you to invite me along, so thank you very much ??

A photo posted by Jack Delosa (@jackdelosa) on Sep 25, 2015 at 7:41pm PDT

Douglas Nicol, resident ‘data geek’ and his team at The Works Sydney have data crunched our social media habits and found that only 51% of people are actually as happy as they appear on social media, so it’s important for us to learn not to benchmark your happiness on someone’s Instagram. His report: ‘The Deceit Algorithm‘, also revealed a few other interesting tidbits, suggesting that women are more deceitful on social media (64%) than men (36%), and that one of the most obvs ‘signs’ of online lying is when people omit personal pronouns like ‘I’ or ‘Me’. Something to remember next time you’re swiping through Tinder and Grindr profiles, he suggests.

Also this – the most common lies told by men and women on SM:

An insight into or lies! Lol #TEDxMacUni pic.twitter.com/fYrCoD7g8L

— Chantelle Vella (@NutritionMunch) September 26, 2015

Ben Ross, the ‘gadget guy’ and UX designer, spoke on robotics and new tech and how we should really get our act together and start thinking about creating some sort of rule of law about how we’re going to ctrl these things. An important topic, if we ever did hear one. Ben is pretty pro-A.I because he sees new tech as a means of helping us cure things like alzheimer’s – a cause that’s personal for him. According to Ben and those in his field, technology is developing at an exponential rate and by 2040 we’ll have human level intelligence – machines that are just as smart as us, and by 2060, we’ll have super intelligence – machines that are smarter than us. It’s the first time something that we’ve created poses an actual existential threat, but steady now, we still have time, he says, let’s just figure it out.

What if a super intelligence decided it didn’t want or need us anymore? Enter Asimov’s Laws. #tedxmacuni @benross50 pic.twitter.com/blwWB0TsfM

— James Curnow (@JamesCurnow4) September 26, 2015

Until next year!