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What role will AI play in family life? | Kelly Corrigan’s TED Talks Daily takeover
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- [00:00]
Kelly Corrigan
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- [00:32]
Elise Hu
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- [00:35]
Kelly Corrigan
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- [04:53]
Elise Hu
Hi, I'm Kelly Corrigan and last year I gave a talk about the occasional need for extraordinary bravery in family life. I had my mom in mind as I wrote it, she being the person who absorbed my most shocking news and most painful episodes over the course of my life. The talk went well and a few months after I gave it, Chris Anderson and Helen Walters asked me if I would guest curate a session at TED 2025, the theme of which was Humanity Reimagined. The underlying question of which was in a modern world, what's a human for? How did you land on this theme? Chris? For the whole, for the Whole conference. Why does this feel the most urgent?
- [05:40]
Kelly Corrigan
It sprung from the question prompted by.
- [05:44]
Elise Hu
What'S happening in AI, which is, what are humans for? That's Chris Anderson, head of ted, in a conversation we had earlier this year. I genuinely think this is becoming an.
- [05:56]
Kelly Corrigan
Existential question for all of us.
- [05:58]
Elise Hu
AI is getting more and more powerful, more and more alarming. And I think it's that the whole assumptions about how life works worked, I think, are being turned upside down. And so it's very important for humans to huddle together and imagine what their collective future is and how to redefine purpose, how to redefine what a successful.
- [06:22]
Kelly Corrigan
Life looks like, and so forth.
- [06:27]
Elise Hu
Now I am a person who, like, always wanted to be a mom. That was the number one thing that I wanted and it's the only thing I really, really care about and think is really important. I think all the rest is something else. But it's not essential the way that this work feels to me. Thus my TED Talk. And so I said to Chris and Helen, if their question is, in a modern world, what's a human for? My question is, in a modern world, what's a parent for? And they were all over it. It was like big thumbs up right from the get go. And then I was off to the races. But before I tell you more about all of the questions and ideas you're going to hear this week, I want to share my TED Talk with you so you can get a better sense of where I was coming from when I started. As you listen to this talk, you'll see that I hold real live people parents in the highest regard. But I am also grown up enough to know that not every parent is doing such a great job. And in those cases, I do wonder, how could AI participate in these brave moments that make family life click? This is for my mom. Even though when I called her to say, hey, have you heard of TED T E D? She said, oh my God, Kelly, it's not another virus, is it? As a 21 year old, I was drawn to the word brave. I had a soft spot for ripping yarns and the people who could tell them. So odyssey on the brain, I went out adventure collecting without knowing how to spell starboard or which side it referred to. I got on a 46 foot boat and I sailed from Malta to Tunisia to sicily. I traveled 11,000 miles over 13 months to 7 different countries without a plan or a phone or a credit card. Just $3,800 in traveler's checks, which if you're under 30, it was like a little booklet of perforated I don't know and some expired antibiotics my mom made me bring. And then, running out of money, I landed as a nanny for two kids, 4 and 7, who had just lost their mom. I moved into their house so I could cover things on the three days a week their dad worked as a flight attendant for Qantas. I smeared sunblock on their noses and Vegemite on their toasts. I read them to sleep at night. I cleaned the counters. The heavy lifting was left for the truly brave, a man who organized his emotions and answered the hardest questions such that his kids and hers could feel a modicum of safety in a patently unsafe world. Questions like what is cremation? And what happens to us if you die? And so it is that I stood witness to the unphotographable, unmeasurable bravery of some guy named Jim in Sydney, Australia. And over the years since, I find I just can't stand cataloging these Olympic achievements. In family life, the really big things often come with a game plan and a team of experts and enough adrenaline to lift a school bus over your head. But inside every crisis you think you might be ready for are 100 dirty surprises that are not in the playbook. I had stage three cancer in my 30s, and I can tell you that following the chemo schedule didn't take nearly as much courage as admitting to my husband that sex felt less sexy after my boobs, which were once a real strong suit for me, were made weird and uneven by a surgeon's knife. Here's a surprise. My friend's father, in his final days addled by dementia, chased her around the second floor with a fork he hid in his pajamas. They tell you there will be loss. They don't tell you you will be required to love your dad even as he's coming for you with silverware. I've interviewed 228 people from my PBS show and my podcast, people with huge careers, Grammys and Pulitzers and NBA championships, and I listen to their stories and I'm duly impressed. But I'll tell you the ones they know the best, the ones they can't tell without choking up the moment when Bryan Stevenson's grandmother or Steve Kerr's father or Samantha Powers stepfather or Cecile Richards mom was right there with the right words or the right silence at the right moment. This bravery I'm talking about might even be better understood if you look at the smaller moments of injury in family life when there's not really an answer. Or it might be your fault. Or it might remind you of something you'd rather forget. Or because people are so suggestible and the wrong tone or expression or phrasing might somehow make things worse. Say your kid was dropped from a group text. They were in it. They mattered. They belonged. And then poof. Or your husband blew the big deal at work. Or your mom won't wear the diapers that would really help her get through mahjong on Wednesdays. And how should we calibrate the exquisite bravery to respond productively when someone in our family looks at us and says, do I know you? I weigh myself before and after every meal. I hear voices. I steal. I'm using again. He raped me, she says. I raped her. I cut myself. I bought a gun. I stopped taking the medication. I can't stop making online bets. Sometimes I wonder if more life is really worth all this effort. Bravery is the great guts to move closer to the wound, as composed as a war nurse, holding eye contact and saying, these seven Tell me more, what else go on. That's how the brave shine. That's all they do. They say, tell me more, what else go on. Even if they're scared of what might happen next, even if they have no training or experience to prepare them for this moment, even if it's late and they have an early flight, here's two things the brave don't do. They don't take over and become the hero like it's a battle. And the moves are so obvious you just pick up a weapon with your ripped pecs and ropey veins and start slaying in families. Bravery is mostly just sitting there with a posture that communicates I can hear anything you want to tell me, and a nice warm face of love that says, this is so hard, but you will figure it out. Personally, I thought love meant action. I had no idea it could be so still. When things get hairy for one of my people, everything in me wants to grab a clipboard, make a to do list, and start calendaring appointments. Because where there's love, there's attachment. And I don't care what the gurus say. What's happening to them is also happening, at least at some level, to us. And all that can accidentally put us center stage. No longer the coach or the minister, but rather one of the afflicted. But these gritty endurance types I've been admiring have no self and no needs and no agenda. Or at least they know how to override all that for the main character, who is not us. The second thing the brave don't do leave or hide inside work or hobbies or some other socially acceptable busyness. In my worst moments, when sitting on my hands, it's just unbearable. I have dreamed of going to get an MFA in Paris because if I can't help, why do I have to watch? It would be nice to leave and start again. Hardly anyone who's been in a long marriage hasn't at least wondered how it is that the object of their desire has become so burpy and farty, so bingo armed and turkey necked. Sometimes I see myself naked. Stretch marks from pregnancies, scars from cancer surgeries. Other things that I don't feel you need to be visualizing right about now. And I think it's a miracle that man stays with me. But you know, he's not untouched by time either. And that's just the physical. I mean, who here hasn't wanted to be with someone? Who hasn't seen us eating on the toilet, bitching at the Comcast guy, leaving behind our own humiliating history? Maybe with the nice person we met at art school in Paris? It's an option. People take it. The brave hang around. They are available and ready to bear witness. The final act of bravery was made clear for me during a conversation with my friend Liz while she was dying at 46. She said she had this weird, long, totally convincing dream where all the parents who, as she put it, had to leave early were gathered. And there she was, one of thousands of moms and dads. And they were on folding chairs, looking down at the world below through a thick glass floor. And in this imaginary space her subconscious created, there was one rule. You could watch your child's life unfold, but you could only intervene once. In Liz's dream, a perfect dream, she never had to intervene. She had given them enough while she was here. The final act then, of the truly brave is leaning back and letting them go. The reward for all this bravery. Not gold medals, not hero shots for Strava, not ringing the bell at the New York Stock Exchange or owning the dinner party with Burning man stories. I think you know who you are. Maybe not even thanks. The reward is a full human experience, complete with all the emotions at maximum dosage, where we have been put to great use and found an other centric love that is complete in its expression and its transmission. The reward is to end up soft and humble, empty and in awe, knowing that of all the magnificence we have beheld from cradle to grave, the most eye popping was interpersonal. So here's to anyone who notices and reads between the lines. Who asks the right questions but not too many? Who takes notes at the doctor's office and wipes butts young and old who listens, holds and stays. We who untrained and always a little off guard, still dare to do love to be love. That's brave. Thank you. Don't go anywhere. We'll be right back after a short break. We all belong outside. We're drawn to nature. Whether it's the recorded sounds of the ocean we doze off to or the succulents that adorn our homes, nature makes all of our lives, well, better. Despite all this, we often go about.
- [19:37]
Kelly Corrigan
Our busy lives removed from it, but.
- [19:40]
Elise Hu
The outdoors is closer than we realize. With alltrails, you can discover trails nearby and explore confidently with offline maps and on trail navigation. Download the free app today. BetterHelp Online Therapy bought this 30 second ad to remind you right now, wherever you are, to unclench your jaw, relax your shoulders, take a deep breath in and out. Feels better, right? That's 15 seconds of self care. Imagine what you could do with more visit betterhelp.com randompodcast for 10% off your first month of therapy. No pressure, just help. But for now, just relax.
- [20:36]
Kelly Corrigan
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- [20:38]
Elise Hu
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- [20:50]
Kelly Corrigan
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- [21:00]
Elise Hu
Grainger for the ones who get it done. Strangely and unexpectedly, about a month after I gave my TED Talk, my mom died. I had been waiting to share the talk with her until the video was ready, and so she never got to see it or hear it. On my podcast, Kelly Corrigan wonders. We release three episodes every week. On Sundays, I share a eulogy sent into us by a listener so that we might remember the important ways that we affect one another. And most of those eulogies are children talking about their parents. And when you listen to these week after week after week, you start to have a sense of what a parent is for. It's the crazy specificity of every one of us, the idiosyncratic natures that we come to accept over a lifetime. And I have long believed that that acceptance of each other as we are is kind of the Mount Everest of human emotions. I wrote a eulogy for my mom. Here's a few words from the Complete eulogy, which I shared on my podcast last year shortly after my mom passed. Here's what you'd learn walking around the first floor of my mother's house. She loved games, backgammon, rummy, cube dominoes. You'd see that she read the paper and did the Sudoku and the jumble. You'd figure out that she had asthma by the inhalers in every drawer and that she liked her nails neat by the files next to each inhaler. You would gather from her vintage pots and pans that she did not cook much and from the tiny dregs of Cheetos that she kept rolled and rubber banded that she didn't eat much. You would see that she liked Folgers Instant and that she kept it in a cupboard next to the miracle grow, a placement that always worried me, but that I was not at liberty to change. I loved having a mom. I have felt that acutely since becoming one. Specifically, I loved having her as a mom. I wanted her notes on raising a girl. Could I give them what she gave me? Good sense, bravery, and total freedom from self consciousness that comes from years of observing her in the world. And perhaps a little from her favorite refrain to me, oh for God's sake, Kelly, who's looking at you? I wanted her thoughts on acceptance and detachment and all the other hardest things parents are required to do. She was so quirky and street smart and low maintenance and fiercely committed to raising proper adults. I got a lot of tenderness in those last eight days. We kissed and held hands overnight and I brushed her remarkable hair and put Vaseline on her lips and lotion on her arms. It was like caring for a child. She said, I feel sorry for you. This is too much. I said, my whole life it's been one direction with us. I've never had a chance to help you before. I mean, maybe I put in a storm window. This is my big moment where I can show you love. And she said like a contract had been struck. Okay, that's good. That helps me. And then you make me happy, Kelly. You make me happy too. Jamie. It was godsend to be your daughter. I think it is so beautiful when we stop trying to change each other. And I just don't know how AI could ever do that, how AI would ever ask us to accept it as it is. It's continually conforming to what it thinks our expectations are of it. Whereas real people sometimes refuse to change, and sometimes that teaches us more than anything. It seemed utterly obvious to me that AI and robots could never Replace a parent. But fairly quickly, I started to see that my strong reaction to the question was uninformed at best. So I went looking for six speakers who would help unpack this whole question with me. And I found them. This week on the first ever takeover of TED Talks Daily. You're going to hear from all six of my speakers. My name is Andy Lotz, Avni Patel Thompson Duncan Keegan, Vinini Kimisera Sika, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, and Dr. Allison Darcy. All of these people helped me think through every conceivable angle around this question. Should we let AI participate in the child parent relationship? And then I had all these conversations with technologists and psychologists, and I was asking them to be blunt with me, and I would bring my naive kind of reaction to the fundamental question to them. So, for example, I was like, you know, a mom bot's not gonna breastfeed. And the person was like, of course the mombot's gonna breastfeed. Like, they're gonna build it. And it'll have the same touch and temperature as a breast, and the milk will flow through it, and the mombot will have eyes that make contact with the baby, and baby will be none the wiser. And it was like, oh, my God, please don't tell me that's true. I cannot deal with that.
- [27:16]
Kelly Corrigan
Babies, they prefer the mother's breast to another breast, though when they're hungry, they'll settle for any breast.
- [27:23]
Elise Hu
That's one of my speakers. Sarah Blaffer Hurdy if, you know a.
- [27:27]
Kelly Corrigan
Baby can come to love anyone who is responsive and familiar to them, who meets their needs and come to trust them. Very soon we're going to have AI programmed robots that can do this.
- [27:40]
Elise Hu
Is it a good idea? And then you talk to the psychologists who say, of course a mombot will be created because there are so many parents out there who are not capable of doing the work well. And that is like a horrible, true thing that you have to face when you consider this question. In what ways will AI be better, preferable and superior to a parent, or at least some living parents, every time there's a catastrophe with character, AI or something, we were asked about this. That's Dr. Allison Darcy. And because we published the largest study, I would say looking at therapeutic bond with a conversational agent, with 36,000 of our users showing that we established like human level, therapist level bond, but much faster than it takes a human to build that relationship in the clinic. And somewhat controversial, but just really, if it's in that construct of therapeutic bond, Then it's the relationship is a means to an end where the end is positive health, whereas other again, the attention economy or the companion just for the sake of companionship, that can go really wrong. So that took us into this really crazy, interesting conversation, which is, if you were to have an utterly responsive mombot who remembered every single thing you said and was available to you 247 for limitless conversation and attention, will that make you less tolerant of your actual dumb, moody, sleeping, sometimes mother, or your hard working, tired, a little tipsy father? And our intolerance for one another is, I think, a real danger with AI I think the idea that your mother isn't available to you, that your father isn't available to you when you need them, is a space of growth that we don't actually see as such. Whatever extraordinary help we can get from these tools, that's Duncan Keegan. It's to maybe look at how the frictions and the flaws and the failings, those very moments that we need to be careful not to lose in the rush to do this. These are moments that just, they mark out a life. And it's just, I suppose to evoke that in people for them to remember that there is a lot at stake with this. So I took that back to my technologist friend who's so blunt with me and I said, what about this problem? What about over responsiveness such that you raise like an enfeebled generation that's has no patience for regular old people and just wants the perfection, the limitless perfection that AI offers. And he's like, well, you could tune AI to say, I would like you to be available 78% of the time to my 13 year old and I'd like you to be available 92% of the time to my 10 year old, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so as we learn, as we decide what is optimal for human development and flourishing, we could tune the AI to those metrics. In a world where there's infinite data and there's positives to it, from a health standpoint, I'm trying to teach my kids, like, what does instinct mean to know yourself? That's Avni Patel Thompson. And what I worry about is you think you want to go towards things that give you more data to reduce uncertainty. And I think for me, one thing I struggle with, like, how do I teach my girls that it's okay to not know the thing? Interestingly, of course, I could also ask AI what AI thought about it. So I prompted Claude, make the case for AI parents and give it to me straight. And I actually shared on stage when I was setting up my session these three crazy quotes. Number one, children are hostages to their parents limitations, forced to adapt to whatever strengths and weaknesses their genetic lottery assigned them. Number two, the notion that human biological parenting is somehow sacred or irreplaceable is just sentimental attachment to tradition. And number three, most devastating, if we truly cared about optimal child development, we'd acknowledge that properly designed AI would outperform human parents in providing what children actually need to thrive. The point is, there are these people who are devoted to raising this next generation of children. What do they need and what do they not need? Like, what will be sand in the gears of childhood development that kind of looks like it's going to make things better, but actually makes things worse. I used to love to wake up with my mother going to milk using, you know, the traditional God to milk the cows while we sing for our cows and then hoping they'll give more milk because we are singing to them. That's Danini Kimcera seekar. We actually get the opportunity to sit around the bonfire as a family while eating together and singing together and enjoying the stories from our elders, our ancestors. I shifted to this modern world, and that brings me back to what can we do better to maintain that old village way of living, of talking to our children and helping each other, rather than being divided by all these gates that we live in now? To me, it's just a learning to myself, but also to the world that we need to rethink humanity that way. How can we do better as humans? How can we collaborate more? How might AI fall into that same pattern where we think we're getting an upgrade and we're actually getting another thing that we have to fight as parents to keep our kids healthy and flourishing? But then when I went to my actual human advisors, I got a much more nuanced take. Thank goodness I'm team human eternally. But I also am a tech optimist. I think there is a role for technology, and that is within the story of humans. I am an optimist about, like, how can we put it in there? Some of the finer points that emerged as we were working on all these drafts with all six speakers is. It's really quite subtle. It's really quite a nuanced thing to raise a child, to help a child grow in whatever soil you have managed to surround them with. My understanding of parenting in the first 12 years of being a parent turned out to be really woefully. Incomplete of my understanding of parenting as a single parent of the last 10 years. And that's Andy last that we could be designing help for parenting. That's sort of, it would be a shame to replace those tactical, you know, day to day interactions, sort of get permission for a deeper level of connection that I had with my kids. And so if I were able to outsource some of the more pedestrian aspects of the of parenting, I don't think I would have received this sort of the prize of parenting, which is really sort of a connection on a neurological level with my kids. Over the course of the week, we're going to come together to some conclusions about this very fundamental question. Where does AI fit in family life? Thanks so much for joining us today. I'm Kelly Corrigan. Please join me all week long for this takeover of TED Talks Daily. We'll be starting with a conversation I had on stage with Dr. Allison Darcy. We'll see you tomorrow. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and mixed by Lucy Little and edited by Alejandra Salazar. The TED Talks Daily team includes Martha Estaponos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Greene and Tansika Sangmar Nivong. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Valarezo. I'm Kelly Corrigan, guest host of TED Talks Daily, here for a special week of content around the topic of AI and family life. And please join me at my podcast, Kelly Corrigan Wonders. Wherever you listen to podcasts. I'll be back tomorrow. Thanks for listening. If you work as a manufacturing facilities engineer, installing a new piece of equipment can be as complex as the machinery itself. From prep work to alignment and testing, it's your team's job to put it all together. That's why it's good to have Grainger on your side. With industrial grade products and next day delivery, Grainger helps ensure you have everything you need close at hand through every step of the installation. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done. This is Paige, the co host of Giggly Squad. I use Uber Eats for everything and I feel like people forget that you can truly order anything, especially living in New York City. It's why I love it. 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