Acclaimed thinkers and doers are gathering on the picturesque California coast to candidly discuss evil, beauty, the future and how to save humanity.

The names of attendees at the annual Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) Conference is safeguarded to provide liberating privacy to "Tedizens" ranging from scientists, singers and sociologists to poets, entrepreneurs and politicians.

The list of past speakers features novelist Isabel Allende; rock stars Bono and Peter Gabriel; former US president Bill Clinton and vice president Al Gore; Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales, and Google founders Serge Brin and Larry Page.

"I wasn't prepared for this conference to be so profound," legendary Microsoft founder Bill Gates said after first attending TED, which was launched in 1984 by US architect Richard Saul Wurman as a think tank.

"The combined IQ of the attendees is incredible."

TED speakers are challenged to give "the talk of their lives" in 18 minutes each, while listeners are called on to help make inspirational visions real.

"Our everyday lives are crowded with the small questions," TED organiser June Cohen told AFP.

"TED is the chance to pull up for the 40 000-foot view; give us the great and broad perspective that most of the time we lose."

Approximately 1100 people have registered to attend the TED conference that begins on Wednesday in Monterey, California, and continues to Saturday.

The event sells out a year in advance.

TED organisers have tapped into the power of the internet to share videos of inspirational talks. Nearly 15 million people have viewed TED talks at the TED.com website since it was launched in April 2007.

Wishlist

Prize winners each get $100 000 dollars in cash to fulfil "a wish to change the world". TED conference attendees, and now those viewing talks on the internet, are called on to help make the wishes come true.

Clinton wished for high-quality health care and a better future for the people of Rwanda after accepting a TED Prize last year.

That same year, scientist Edward Osbourne Wilson wished for help creating an encyclopaedia of life on earth as a tool for protecting the planet's biodiversity.

This year's prize winners are cosmologist Neil Turok, author Dave Eggers, and former British Roman Catholic nun Karen Armstrong. They will reveal their wishes on Friday.

TED will open by focusing on "who we are" and will launch with anthropologist Wade Davis urging the preservation of the world's cultures and languages, which he equates to "old growth forests of the mind".

Scientist Peter Ward will outline his conviction that complex life is so rare that it is likely Earth is the only place it exists.

Talks delving into the meaning of life and whether "beauty is truth" will include human genome mapper Craig Venter and physicist Garrett Lisi, who drafted "an exceptionally simple theory of everything" while surfing.

Evil in the world

Philip Zimbardo, a researcher famous for conducting the Stanford University prison experiment in 1971, will be among those taking on evil in the world and ways to abate it.

Zimbardo was a professor that had students on summer break play roles as guards or prisoners in a mock prison in the basement of a building on Stanford's campus in Northern California.

The pretend guards grew so sadistic and the prisoners so cowed that the experiment was halted prematurely out of concern for the students.

Zimbardo will draw parallels to abuses of suspected terrorists by US soldiers at Abu Graib prison in Iraq, and how environment can turn people into heroes or demons, according to TED organisers.

"The idea is to look at evil in the world and solutions going forward," Cohen said.

The genesis of creativity and passion, as well as what the future holds, are among topics on the agenda. Biologist Helen Fisher will present research indicating that love is caused by chemicals in people's bodies.

"I've never experienced anything remotely like it," DreamWorks film studio partner Jeffrey Katzenberg said of a TED conference he attended.

"I was entertained, educated, enthralled, moved, challenged, intimidated, humbled and most of all inspired!"

AFP