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John Hunter puts all the problems of the world on a 4′x5′ plywood board - and lets his 4th-graders solve them. At TED2011, he explains how his World Peace Game engages schoolkids, and why the complex lessons it teaches - spontaneous, and always surprising - go further than classroom lectures can.

Sebastian Thrun talks about Google's amazing driverless car - and his very personal quest to save lives and reduce traffic accidents. Jawdropping video shows the DARPA Challenge-winning car motoring through city traffic with no one behind the wheel; dramatic test drive footage from TED2011 demonstrates how fast the thing can really go.

Medical ethicist Harvey Fineberg shows us three paths forward for the ever-evolving human species: to stop evolving completely, to evolve naturally - or to control the next steps of human evolution, using genetic modification, to make ourselves smarter, faster, better. Neo-evolution is within our grasp. What will we do with it?

It's not like open field farming. OK, it is a little bit. Marcin Jakubowski, of Open Source Ecology, has taken it upon himself to release the blueprints for 50 farm machines in open source. According to his TED page, this is one element in a more ambitious project. "Using wikis and digital fabrication tools, TED Fellow Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing the blueprints for 50 farm machines, allowing anyone to build their own tractor or harvester from scratch. And that's only the first step in a project to write an instruction set for an entire self-sustaining village."

The feeling of security and the reality of security don't always match, says computer-security expert Bruce Schneier. He explains why we spend billions addressing news story risks, like the "security theater" now playing at your local airport, while neglecting more probable risks - and how we can break this pattern.

Steven Pinker charts the decline of violence from Biblical times to the present, and argues that, though it may seem illogical and even obscene, given Iraq and Darfur, we are living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence.

"You need to engage the ethical question all along the way"