TED 2023: Possibility

Every April in Vancouver, around 2000 bright people get together at the main TED conference. They share ideas and their work on how to change the world, how to make it better, and how to improve society, human rights, democracy, mental health, and life on this planet in general.

I’m honored to be a part of this community of open hearts and minds. Last year everyone was touched by Ukraine’s war and TED collected millions of dollars for Ukraine.

This year’s theme was POSSIBILITY.

As legendary composer Ben Zander explained in his speech, that Possibility is not “positive thinking”. It’s a verb. It’s an act of courage and an act of purpose. A possibility is the language of creation. He reminded all of us in the theatre that the path to triumph is possible even from a dark place of despair, as he was playing Beethoven’s famous work. As he was playing it, he reminded us that Beethoven was deaf, depressed, and lonely, yet even in that state he could create one of the most incredible melodies of all time. Isn’t it inspiring?

Benjamin has reminded us that all preconceived assumptions and existing habits stand in the way of possibility. We must break free from them and embrace the change.

Charismatic Yara Shahidi doubled down on the topic of change. She believes that could be done by tapping into curiosity. Curiosity evokes dreaming of “how it could be?”. The gap between the status quo and how it could be creates rupture. We should not be afraid of rupture, but pursue the possible head-on, embracing our internal curiosity and building support systems of people who truly support our interests. Yara believes that what we do in our lives, only partially represents who we are.

One of the main topics was AI. Greg Brockman, the co-founder of OpenAI, has shared his vision of the future where AI will supercharge humans. Moreover, we are going to witness a massive change in Machine-Human interfaces. He showed an early demo of new capabilities, and the audience was both impressed and concerned.

Sal Klan, from Khan Academy, was optimistic about the prospects of how AI can change the world for the better. We can finally create personalized learning experiences for every student in the world, at scale. KhanMigo is an AI-powered tutor that will become an integral part of Khan Academy, thus, making education even more accessible.

Doubling down on education prospects, the founder of Duolingo has shared some details on how they managed to gamify education in the era of TikTok and Instagram. Turns out, the best predictor to engage a user in another learning session is simply sending a notification 24 hours after his/her last session.

TED is known for the openness and vulnerability of its speakers. Every year a few people share very personal stories about how they dealt with trauma and depression. Andy Dunn, a famous entrepreneur who build and sold the Bonobos brand for $300M has shared his impressive story of being an entrepreneur diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I was impressed by how his girlfriend at a time and her family reacted to his hardships -> they have supported him all the way, and committed to working it out through therapy, commitment, and support. Yet, he mentioned that at this wedding rabbi said that almost all forms of love are conditional. Only one type of love is unconditional — that is from a mother to a child. Thus, we have to work with our partners to make things work and do not expect that people should love us unconditionally forever.

One of the most profound talks was about death. Death creates a context for our lives. It gives us the ultimate authority to live our lives according to our desires and principles. It’s healthy to look at our lives from a perspective of death and imagine the last moments in our bodies. What thoughts would you have? How would you want to live your life? Have you done what you wanted? How should we spend our lives and what do we want to leave behind? We assign meaning to anything. Worthiness is a birthright, not a factor of productivity and achievements.

We should hold life lightly. Knowledge mortality. Live life with dying for. As life is a sheer wonder that we live at all.

In this light, the talk about repairing relationships has hit me. We must get good at repair.

• repaid is the act of going into the past, acknowledging certain behaviors, and opening up a conversation
• Repair assumes that there has been a rupture
• What will happen if you don’t repair it? — another person will be alone, overwhelmed, and distressed, and they will rely on the most basic coping mechanism -> self-blame.
• Repair brings safety, connection, and coherence
• With repair we can assign a different ending, and therefore a different theme altogether
• With repair, we effectively change the past.

And to end this overview of TED’s best talks by the brightest people I want to quote my mother, who said: “Завжди можна все виправити допоки ми живі”.

This means: “ We can always repair and fix things while we are alive”.

TED 2023: Possibility was originally published in denzhadanov on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.