It's TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hugh. Climate change, the rise of authoritarianism, numerous refugee crises brought on by war. These feel like intractable, possibly humanity ending, problems. And somehow author Kevin Kelly can still make a case for optimism.

In his talk from Ted Monterey in 2021, he explains the link between problems and progress and says our capacity to solve problems is greater than we think.

We should note this talk was recorded in August 2021.

I want to try and persuade you that there are reasons why we should be optimistic in general.

And that's a very difficult thing to do today because we are confronted tremendous problems

in this world.

Things like global climate change which seem 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.

Think of the first airplanes.

It's hard enough to create something good and great deliberately and with intention.

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 can imagine solutions that 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.

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