This TED Talk features artist and writer James Bridle, recorded live at TED 2018.

I'm James. I'm a writer and artist, and I make work about technology. I do things like

draw life-size outlines of military drones in city streets around the world so that people can

start to think and get their heads around

these really quite hard to see and hard to think about technologies.

I make things like neural networks that predict the results of elections

based on weather reports

because I'm intrigued about what the actual possibilities

of these kind of weird new technologies are.

Last year, I built my own self-driving car, but because I don't really trust technology,

I also designed a trap for it.

And I do these things mostly because I find them completely fascinating, but also because I think

when we talk about technology, we're kind of largely talking about ourselves

and the way that we understand the world.

So here's a story about technology.

This is a surprise egg video.

It's basically a video of someone opening up loads of chocolate eggs

and showing the toys inside to the viewer.

That's it. That's all it does for seven long minutes.

And I want you to notice two things about this.

First of all, this video has 30 million views.

And the other thing is that it comes from a channel that has 6.3 million subscribers, that has a total of 8 billion views, and it's all just more videos like this.

...