The poetry of family | Duncan Keegan (Kelly Corrigan takeover)

0:06You are listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm Kelly Corrigan. I'm a writer. I'm a podcaster. I'm a TED Talker. And I am taking over for Elise Hu this week for a special series on AI and family life. I guest curated a session about this topic at TED 2025. And I'm here now to share these very special talks with you along with a lot of behind the scenes recordings and personal insights to shed some light on the process of how these talks came to life.

0:48So at my day job, which is hosting the podcast Kelly Corrigan Wonders, we do a long form interview on Tuesdays. On Fridays, we do a little thing called For the Good of the Order, which is anything I learned that week that we wanted to share. And then on Sundays, we share a eulogy sent in by a listener. And basically it's our version of church, which is to say it's our way of reminding ourselves that we have a tremendous impact on one another over the course of our lifetimes, and that there are very specific ways that we show people that we love them. And so we received this eulogy that a guy in Dublin named Duncan Keegan had written for someone he lost.

1:30and it was a different category of thought and feeling and expression than we had ever seen before and we have probably received a thousand eulogies submitted for this special part of the feed and Tammy my producer said I'm going to send you something today and I need you to kind of clear your calendar for an hour after you read it at least because it is very affecting and she was right. And I just read these words and totally bawled. So when the TED thing came up, I really wanted somebody to speak to the kind of loss that is always possible in family life and what we risk when we join in relationship with one another, because to me, that risk does not exist with AI.

2:19So I reached out and I felt hesitant because I didn't want Duncan to feel that I was Using his tragedy in any way. I just wanted to say I have an opportunity if it's interesting to you Terrific if it's not don't give it another thought and he was interested He was game And I knew that he would need absolutely no help from me and he did not I didn't change one word of this it was so right there what he said on stage. It was like on the tip of his tongue, and he was so ready for this moment. He gave everybody in that audience, and now for you listening, an unforgettable emotional experience, like an insight that we will carry with us until the days we die.

3:04I don't know what Duncan Keegan's LinkedIn profile says, and I don't care. I met him through my podcast, and ever since, I have wanted more people to know him and his story and his mind and his heart. His talk is so generous and you just kind of have to hear it to believe it. I mean, honestly, people were just pinned to their seat. You could have heard a contact lens hit the floor. It was so quiet. He had the absolute full attention and also the love of every person in that enormous room. And he gave us something sublime. So this is Duncan Keegan's very beautiful talk about his very human family.

3:48Thank you, guys. Hey, Callie. Thanks. I'll do this.

3:59Wow. The American poet Robert Frost once observed that although both scholars and poets work from knowledge, they differ in the way they come by it. Scholars get theirs along projected lines of logic and poets theirs, you know, cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books, they stick to nothing deliberately but let what will stick to them, like birds where they walk in the fields. Now, I know I'm in a hall filled with scholars, and I'm no poet, but I am from Ireland.

4:39A place where even now a poet, a maker of a poem, is seen as someone who has come by an uncommon kind of knowledge. I mean, truly, there's so little left of that older Ireland, but in the little that remains, and in those little truths that only loss can teach, we find small felicities, like how the word for art and that for science were once one and the same, alien. Or a word like dawn, which in our older tongue can mean a poem, a gift, or fate. Or an ear for silence, the high relief that lets a word perfect its progress into intimacy. My wife Sarah has that. A feel for how ambience, presence, the quality of a moment.

5:26It can all shape the meaning and weight of a word. I've heard it when she's with her friends, and I've even seen it with her children. Every week, Sarah used to drive our son Rory to a song and dance class in North Dublin. And one evening, as I was watching them arrive back home, I realized that I could see Rory in the front seat, his face pale in the glow of the headlights. And I could see his hands clasped to the seatbelt, the motion of his head just tilting and turning to look, and his bare arm raised just to point at something. And then he pulled back and he was reaching for his mom just to tell her just something.

6:06I don't even know what it was because I couldn't hear anything. But in that moment, I knew everything about that conversation. Everything about Rory and his mom that truly mattered. You know, we're told that the advent of AI marks a new era when science becomes art, when technology no longer merely invents but creates machine intelligences that will soon form an intimate part of family life. AI companions who will never abandon a child, never belittle them, never maltreat them, who will never sicken, never ache, never long to sleep, who will comfort our children at night, counsel them in the day, care for them when we cannot, be there for them when we no longer are, for they will never die.

7:12But they're here to help you, not replace you. That's what they say. But if you speak of someone counseling my child, caring for my child, you're speaking of a rival for my child's affections. A rival no parent, no mother, however capable, however strong, can ever hope to match. But here's the thing, I actually believe them. We have nothing to fear. Just not for the reasons they think. For behind their promises and beneath our unease, I feel lies a misapprehension that artificial intelligence might become, or perhaps already is, artificial consciousness. and in turn this rests on an assumption that consciousness is a mere product of matter an emerging secondary effect of just a particular arrangement of atoms in the brain and even though we found no way even in principle to divine from matter how it is we love, we grieve we entertain this notion that the processing cores and algorithms will somehow serve as proxy for a living soul Well, they won't.

8:41I mean, they will be useful. But not as the empathetic synthetics or the paper-folding replicants of sci-fi lore, which I love, but more as the board game from Jumanji or Wilson from Castaway or Bianca from Lars and the Real Girl. as devices of distraction for the living heart and all its loneliness and loss.

9:16But what of us? What are we for? That's not a question that I can easily answer. So instead, shall I tell you a story? on a Wednesday in February 2023 our Rory died he was five and we brought his body home and we held his wake and we said goodbye and yet that's not the story The story I wish to tell is actually about our then 11-year-old daughter, Niamh, and how she came to say goodbye to her brother, to her Rory. When they came, the men wore black, but they were kind, and spoke quietly and asked where it would go. The casket. The living room. we said, we helped them clear a path and make a place for it beside the couch.

10:39They touched the lid to lift it, and then they left. And as we looked at him, at how still he was, how pale, we cried.

10:57And Niamh said, She said, come in, come in, it's okay. And from the doorway, she turned and she looked right through me. And then she left. She went round the corner and just some way up the stairs. I had the sense to stay. But Sarah went. And I could hear a little. But I heard no argument, no promises, no words, just the saddle of a child's weight against her mother. A catch of air and tears. And then she was there. We watched her, foot the threshold to a living room where her dead brother lay. we saw her eyes trace every line she saw the gift of him the curving verse of all he was and ever would be she saw his fate we saw her read the poem of a short life

12:24you know our story is yours Yeah? You know that one day you will stand before a door you do not wish to open, a room you do not wish to enter, and when that day comes, when every word, every line of logic fails, what then? Will you turn to all your devices of distraction? I hope not. I hope instead you feel the press of a kind hand taking yours the steady press that says I will take this step with you I hope you hear the silence that holds a friend's words in place that says they hear it too you and the poem of your own life I hope you have a Sarah for then then you'll see what a mother is for and you'll learn what a friend is for and then you'll know you'll know you'll know at last what we are for thank you

13:43stay with us we have a lot more to share right after a short break

13:51For me, one of the most interesting lines in Duncan's profound talk was, you know, our story is your story too. And when I first read it in an early draft, I thought, no, that's not true. And all he meant was there will be a person. You will lose somebody that you cannot bear to live without. And in that moment, you are going to have a set of very human needs that cannot be met by anything other than another living human being, another central nervous system. to meet yours. When you said, do you think this story is not yours? I think that phrasing assumes that the audience isn't with you. Yeah.

14:32They're totally with you. Yeah. So in my phrasing, it would be an inverse of, you know, this moment is coming for you. your person might not be five, but you know there's a land beyond words. You may already know it. Yeah. You know, the story will be yours. I thought that was such a generous and poignant thing that he said there. He didn't set himself off in this tiny circle of one where the thing that had happened to him, which is every parent's worst fear, absolute worst fear, made him different and separate from everyone else. What he was saying was, it makes me just like you. You will go through this.

15:20And when you do, I hope you have a hand to hold as I did. I thought that was the pinnacle of graciousness. There is an experience of parenthood that involves first steps and first moments and moments that you hope you will never forget. And then for some people, there's an experience of parenthood where it is final moments and moments that you wish you didn't have to remember. And also moments that actually you don't even remember. I was talking with Sarah about something to do with the talk today. And I just, I wanted to ask her about it because I have my very indistinct memory. It's almost not a clear memory, but it is a moment.

16:09It is a moment. And she just said, I don't remember that. I don't remember that day very well. I don't remember it. But she started crying, and I started crying. I have these experiences with Sarah and with her grief and with losing Rory and with loving Eve, our daughter, and I it makes me very skeptical of a lot of the inflated claims about what AI can or might be able to do and I think of it very much in terms of poetry what human beings can do with poetry think of it as Michael Longley that poetry is an event not a construction you don't like you unfold it on the page but the poem is an event something that happens and there is a moment where a poem reveals itself and it's full delight to you and i feel like those moments that you have with a person with another person are the words can drift in that are just right for that moment that they are not those words do not truly describe what it is the moment you are having.

17:26And we can, with the technology we have, you can do beautiful things like we can have, we can have a conversation over preparing dinner with someone who's another way across the continent or another side of the road. But I would say the key thing is that we can travel in many instances and we can be in the presence of someone there with them. And then you can really rub your nervous system up against someone else. It was also so interesting to have these lead up conversations with Duncan because he needed zero help or support from me in shaping his talk and choosing his words. I mean, he's a complete expert.

17:59I mean, he exceeds my abilities. And so that wasn't the point at all. But these lead up conversations were so interesting to me because I was asking him to think about how AI might factor in here. And I was delighted by his willingness to go there intellectually and have that conversation and consider those factors and features that might make family life something that is good for childhood development or that might have factors and features to aid the growth of children in a way that we couldn't quite imagine when we first started talking. People use AI for like they're lonely and they're in grief and they're in loss and that's what they won't be looking to fight like a tie it's actually more look will you turn to ai for this right or will you turn to a person who will really hear you and really know you right and and that goes to this finer point which is in that moment i hope you have a sarah yeah i hope you don't have to i hope that most people can find a living, breathing organic intelligence to turn to.

19:13A lot of people are saying, yeah, first in an ideal world, everyone has a Sarah. As you say, Sarah is rare. It's true. In a less than ideal world, could we get somebody this, could we sub in an AI? But it's that element of listening, that element of like, can he hear me? You know, what is that? What is that nature of like, of someone being present, and then of a person not being present? And I think if we entrust the care of our loved ones, and even our own sense of being seen and heard as another human, if we entrust it to something that isn't even there, it's in some way, it's like you say, it's a statistical process that's been rendered into an anthropomorphically engaging screen.

20:13Like we're cheating ourselves and we're closing ourselves off from the mystery of what it is to be with another person. And it is a mystery. Right. It is a mystery. I could imagine ways in which you would tip your hat to, there are all kinds of roles for AI to play in my story. Here are some. If it could remind me that I need to take Neve to the eye doctor, fantastic. Yeah. If it could do a scan of Rory's blood type faster and give us more personalized options, yay. You know where it doesn't belong? Right here. And then you just do the moment. Yeah. I love that, Ellie. I love that. Yeah. AI can technically live forever.

21:04It is totally unlimited. It can take care of, quote unquote, millions of people at the same time. But people, people have to choose where to spend their limited time, where to invest their limited energy. People have to sacrifice for each other. That's part of how we know someone loves us, is they choose us over someone else. They choose us over work, over play. They pick us. And it comes out in these eulogies that we play on Kelly Corrigan Wonders. It comes out because people talk about that time their special person dropped everything to be with them in their moment of need. That is a feature of what love feels like.

21:43And to me, a takeaway from this work with Ted and everything you've heard this past week is that that cannot be replicated by AI because AI doesn't have limitations and AI doesn't die, at least not in the human sense. And you can walk away from AI. You can be rude to AI. You can fail AI. And theoretically, it will show up again the next day, chipper and ready to receive you. So there are no stakes like there are in a human relationship where often you can't walk away. Again, this is not something for this talk. But, you know, the way I see it with Rory and any number of people who've lost someone, I think it's almost like the presence of their body.

22:27isn't there but there are moments when it's almost like they've they've moved from the perfect body and presence that they had there into the world around us and that is the thing about this the the artificial intelligence side of things and that move to screens and that move to removing the friction of the world through the latest app or the latest latest function it's like it it's constantly pulling our attentions away distractions away from what it means to be present in the world. And it's just... Right, right. And it's like perfecting away. Yeah, it's almost, it's that whole, it drives me crazy.

23:06The self-overcoming of humanity, the transhumanist nonsense of like, we can improve ourselves so that we are no longer even humans. I want also to allow for a stronger contrast between the positive representation of what AI companions or whatever could be for people with the frailty and the feelings of being a human. At the beginning of the week, I shared my TED Talk. And as we wrap up this week and thinking about all the ways that AI is spectacular and terrifying, horrible and useful, and things we cannot imagine yet, I can't stop thinking about the very act of staying, which is the heart of my whole TED Talk from 2024.

23:49That extraordinary bravery that it takes to sit with someone through their worst moment and say, tell me more. What else? Go on. Like, I can hear anything you want to tell me. That loving space that's created that's so painful and terrifying cannot be replicated by a mom bot or a parenting bot. Because the mom bot isn't afraid. The mom bot doesn't know pain. The mom bot cannot love you. The mombot does not need courage to stay. And so Duncan's talk has left me feeling glad to be human, feeling glad to be living inside the tremendous risk that comes with deep human relationships. There's nowhere I'd rather be.

24:39I have had loss. I've suffered it. And that suffering feels a lot like love, just in a different form. Duncan put humanity in the absolute center of the conversation. He put our deepest humanity, our most human moments, dead center. And I know not everyone agrees with me or the questions and thoughts that we've explored here this week. And of course, that's great. But for me, in the wake of all my speakers, I find myself feeling strongly that I am just so team human. I believe what I said in my own TED Talk more than ever, which is that the reward of all this interpersonal bravery is a full human experience, knowing every emotion, even the worst ones, at maximum dosage.

25:30That's what I signed up for. That's what I'm here for. when someone dies in Ireland one of the ways of saying it is that someone has gone on the way of truth the great truth sliena firma or sliena firma or rory immeher sliena firma it's gone on the way of truth and that is the great truth isn't it, the one we don't know

25:55Duncan, thanks for coming all this way thanks for laying it out for people that was a really hard thing you did really brave. Seriously, Kelly, thank you so much for a chance to share our story with other people and to, you know, there's very little consolation in the events that happen in certain people's lives, but one of them is maybe to be able to share a story that touches other people and in some way helps them feel less alone. I mean, that's, that's it. That's it. You should to end the conference. Yeah, see you later, everybody. That's the point. Yeah, like he said. Oh my God, you did it.

26:35You were perfect. You were so perfect.

26:40So nice to meet you. So nice to meet you.

26:49Don't set me up again. Don't set me up again. Don't set me up again. I just got my shit back together. Yep, don't, don't. I'm going to. Yep. It's like I couldn't let it out until now. It's not fair making the whole crew cry. I know. They're amazing. They're amazing. And how, like, Duncan is sublime. I mean, he is transcendent. He is otherworldly. He is so calm. I couldn't, I mean, I was like. Because there was no noise. Oh, yeah. It was so silent. It was at the end of the show. Yeah, I could hear my heart beating. All I heard in the comm was, okay, everyone has to stop crying in here. Okay, you could stop tape.

27:32Yeah. I mean, it was sublime.

27:39And that's it for today. Elise Hu will be returning tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. I loved doing this work from start to finish, so thank you for listening, for sharing it with your friends, for letting it be fodder, for bigger, more important conversations. That's all I've ever wanted to do in my whole life, start good conversations. And I hope this set of talks and podcasts does just that. You can find me at kellycorrigan.com or on my podcast, Kelly Corrigan Wonders, wherever you listen to podcasts. TED Talks Daily is a part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and mixed by Lucy Little, edited by Alejandra Salazar, and fact-checked by the TED Research Team.

28:24The TED Talks Daily team includes Martha Estofanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, and Tansika Sungmar Nivong. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Belarezo. I'm Kelly Corrigan, guest host of TED Talks Daily, here for a special week where we're taking a deep dive into the topic of AI and family life.