My Lessons Come in the Form of Longing

A Wrap-up of TED 2025

I sit here after this year’s TED conference pensive and grateful and longing. I am coming away from the conference with a profound sense of gratitude for being human. This year’s theme was ‘What are humans for’ and the theme engaged the question of how to get in proper relationship with AI, robots, and the dawning apocalypse we in modernity now find ourselves in.

That term, “apocalypse” need not be frightening though it does come with monsters. It is always somewhat monstrous to unveil and to reveal what is, to uncover the illusions we prop up to cope with the mystery of our mortal frame.

All my favorite sessions at TED revealed that simple inescapable frame, and signaled that the quintessential essence of Human Being lies in our capacity to connect, coordinate, and carry Grief, a being that I am constantly learning, is constantly being revealed to be a sister of mine.

Grief is my companion, big boned and heavy, and always seems to be sitting on a swing behind me, twirling the ribbons in her hair, a natural kin. She has walked with me all my life and AI can neither experience this nor deny it. And maybe it was just the disposition I was in this year but it seemed to me like this year — in contrast to last — TED moved away from its over-romanticization of the robotic and closer to more sober contemplation.