TED Talks Daily
What role will AI play in family life? | Kelly Corrigan’s TED Talks Daily takeover
04 May 2025
Kelly Corrigan, host of the podcast Kelly Corrigan Wonders, is taking over TED Talks Daily for the week leading up to Mother’s Day! As a guest curator for TED 2025, Corrigan asks big questions about the role of parents in the growing age of AI, how AI will change family life, and if it should play a role in the first place. In this episode, she’ll guide you through conversations she had with technologists, community leaders, evolutionary anthropologists, and physicians on whether technology limits or broadens the scope of parent-child relationships – and what this means for humanity.This is episode one of a seven-part series airing this week on TED Talks Daily, where author, podcaster, and TED speaker Kelly Corrigan and six TED2025 speakers explore the question: in the world of artificial intelligence, what is a parent for? For more from Kelly Corrigan listen to Kelly Corrigan Wonders wherever you get your podcasts or at https://www.kellycorrigan.com/podcast. For a chance to give your own TED Talk, fill out the Idea Search Application: ted.com/ideasearch.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You'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. And 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.
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 conference? Why does this feel the most urgent topic?
It 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...
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Chapter 2: How does Kelly Corrigan define the role of parents in the age of AI?
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 Power's 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 words. 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.
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Chapter 3: What existential questions does AI raise about parenting?
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.
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 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.
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-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. 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, 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?
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Chapter 4: How can AI potentially improve parenting experiences?
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 OK to not know the thing?
Interestingly, of course, I could also ask A.I., 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 care 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 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 Kimsera 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. 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.
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