What role will AI play in family life? | Kelly Corrigan’s TED Talks Daily takeover

0:07You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. Today, we're kicking off something we've never really done before, a TED Talks Daily takeover. Kelly Corrigan is a writer, podcaster, and TED speaker, and she was a guest curator for the big TED 2025 conference this year, working directly with speakers to help them develop their TED Talks. Now, Kelly's going to take over my job for the next week, sharing the talks she curated and reflecting on her experiences in bringing them to life. There's a lot of special surprises in store for you, including some rarely seen behind-the-scenes peeks at how TED Talks come to life.

0:49And Kelly guides us through it with her expertise and personal experience. This week is going to be all about parenting and technology, asking the fundamental question, what is a parent for? Especially today, in a world of artificial intelligence. Ever since giving her own TED Talk, Kelly's been fascinated with this topic of the messiness and beauty of human love and connection. So Kelly's going to share her own story and her own TED Talk from 2024 before taking the reins for the rest of the week. I'm so excited and I'll be listening alongside you.

1:27Hi, 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 conference? Why does this feel the most urgent?

2:14It sprung from the question prompted by 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 existential question for all of us. AI is getting more and more powerful, more and more alarming. And I think it's the whole assumptions about how life works, 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 life looks like and so forth.

3:01Now, 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.

3:50As you listen to this talk, you'll see that I hold real live people parents in the highest regard. But I'm 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.

4:22This 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?

4:41As 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 seven 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.

5:32And some expired antibiotics my mom made me bring. And then running out of money, I landed as a nanny for two kids, four and seven, 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 toast. 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.

6:21Questions like, what is cremation? And what happens to us if you die? And so it is that I stood witness to the unfotographable, unmeasurable bravery of some guy named Jim in Sydney, Australia. And over the years since, I find I just can't stop 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 a hundred dirty surprises that are not in the playbook. I had stage 3 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.

7:28Here'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 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 Power's stepfather or Cecile Richard's mom was right there with the right words or the right silence at the right moment.

8:26This 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.

9:06And 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 words, tell me more, what else, go on. That's how the brave shine, that's all they do.

9:59They 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.

10:49Personally, 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.

11:38The 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 is 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.

12:37And I think it's a miracle that man stays with me. But, you know, he's not untouched by time either.

12:48And 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 or 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.

13:37And 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.

14:30I think you know who you are.

14:36Maybe 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.

15:33We, 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.

15:59Strangely 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 in to 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. is the crazy specificity of every one of us, the idiosyncratic natures that we come to accept over a lifetime.

16:50And 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.

17:15Here'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-Gro 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.

18:08Specifically, 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, a 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.

18:56We 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 a godsend to be your daughter.

19:59I 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.

20:50And 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 Patella-Thompson. Duncan Keegan. Vinini Kimisera Sika. Sarah Blaffer-Hurdy. 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?

21:26And 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 going to breastfeed. And the person was like, of course, a mom bot's going to breastfeed. Like they're going to build it and it'll have the same touch and temperature as a breast and the milk will flow through it. And the mom bot 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.

22:03I cannot deal with that. Babies, they prefer the mother's breast to another breast, though when they're hungry, they'll settle for any breast. That's one of my speakers, Sarah Blaffer-Hurdy. If, you know, a 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. 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.

22:46In 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. Alison 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 and 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 mamba who remembered every single thing you said and was available to you 24 7 for limitless conversation and attention.

23:53Will that make you less tolerant of your actual dumb, moody, sleeping, sometimes mother or your hardworking, 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 are those very moments that we need to be careful not to lose in the rush to do this.

24:46These 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 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, etc., etc., etc.

25:30And 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.

26:13So 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 care about optimal child development, we'd acknowledge that properly designed AI would outperform human parents in providing what children actually need to thrive.

27:07The 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 guard 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 Kimsara Sikar. We actually get the opportunity to sit around the bonfire as a family while eating together and singing together and enjoying, you know, the stories from our elders, our ancestors.

27:57I 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?

28:50But 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.

29:39And that's Andy Lass. that we could be designing help for parenting that's sort of, it would be a shame to replace those. 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, you know, pedestrian aspects of parenting, I don't think I would have received the sort of the prize of parenting, which is really a 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.

30:15Where does AI fit in family life?

30:21Thanks 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.

30:49And 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 Estopinos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, and Tansika Sungmar Nivang. 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.