Ted at TED — TED 2026 Vancouver

Ted Shelton's personal dispatches from TED 2026 in Vancouver — ideas, talks, and reflections from the world's leading ideas conference.

Khan TED Institute

TED Conference News

Sal Khan announces the creation of a higher education initiative that is a partnership between Khan Academy and TED

Bill McKibben

Session 3

Speed matters more than direction, and the battle isn't over whether clean energy wins, but whether it wins in time.

Leopoldo López

Session 3

Technology can be a key to unlock political freedom

Vjosa Osmani Sadriu

Session 3

A warning about AI-driven disinformation that carries unique moral weight precisely because it comes from someone who has lived through what happens when truth is systematically destroyed by a regime willing to use violence to enforce its version of reality.

Drew McCartor

Session 3

The overwhelming scale of the problem of lead poisoning is reframed not as cause for despair but as an urgent, tractable opportunity, distinguishing lead poisoning from the category of global crises that feel impossible to address.

Rapelang Rabana

Session 3

The pedagogical breakthrough is adaptive personalization delivered at a scale and cost that no human teacher-to-student ratio could ever achieve.

Saloni Dattani

Session 3

Reframe the conversation about medical progress shifting from the drama of scientific discovery to the quieter, more consequential failures of the economic and institutional systems that determine whether discoveries actually reach people.

Felix Brooks-church

Session 3

Malnutrition is not as food access problem but a food quality problem, Felix Brooks-church explains the importance of fortification.

Amy Bowers Cordalis

Session 3

Decades of legal struggle, coalition building, and indigenous knowledge converge into a single image of ecological memory and renewal that makes the abstract case for nature's resilience viscerally real.

Robbie Schingler

Session 2

Technological capability without institutional capacity is insufficient

Carissa Véliz

Session 2

Carissa Véliz reframes prediction from a neutral epistemological tool into an instrument of social control, and the foundation for everything that follows about manipulation, injustice, and the politics of AI forecasting.

Maya Higa

Session 2

Maya Higa has built a model that intercepts ordinary internet users in their natural habitat and quietly turns them into the next generation of conservationists.

Keith Coleman and Jay Baxter

Session 2

Community Notes produces something neither human editorial teams nor simple majority-vote systems can: corrections that people across the political divide actually trust.

Sam Wickert

Session 2

Sam Wickert believes that the filmmaker's creative judgment and human collaboration remain irreplaceable, and AI's proper role is as an amplifier of craft rather than a substitute for it.

Gina Raimondo

Session 2

Gina Raimondo makes a counterintuitive claim that worker displacement isn't just a humanitarian concern but a direct strategic threat to American technological leadership, reframing the labor transition problem as inseparable from the AI competitiveness problem.

Vitalik Buterin

Session 2

Creator of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, makes the argument that the goal isn't to choose between human judgment and artificial intelligence, but to deliberately design systems that keep humans meaningfully in the loop — extending agency rather than quietly erasing it.

Mark Rober

Session 1

Mark Rober explains his pedagogical thesis, the insight that drives both his YouTube channel and the science curriculum he's announcing, and the clearest statement of why spectacle and emotion aren't distractions from learning but the very conditions that make it stick.

Silvana Konermann in Conversation with Chris Anderson

Session 1

Silvana Konerman explains that by treating RNA as the cell's language and applying the same logic that made large language models work, science may finally have a tool powerful enough to take on diseases that have defeated every previous approach.

Jacob Collier

Session 1

Jacob Collier brings a musical framework into focus as a life philosophy — the talk's three technical concepts (melody, rhythm, harmony) are revealed as a extended metaphor for how to move through uncertainty with resilience rather than resistance.

Hiba Qasas

Session 1

Hiba Qasas makes a deliberate inversion of the conventional peacebuilding playbook, and the clearest statement of why she believes empathy-first approaches so often collapse when participants return to the reality of the conflict.

Garrett Langley

Session 1

Garrett Langley founder of Flock, makes the argument that the Flock technology isn't just about catching criminals faster, but about fundamentally changing how policing decisions get made — replacing gut instinct and implicit bias with verifiable, data-driven triggers.

Adam Bry

Session 1

Adam Bry describes repositioning drones from niche or controversial tools into foundational public infrastructure, as routine and essential as the power grid or the telephone network.

Malala Yousafzai

Session 1

Malala asked us to reframe hope from a passive emotion into an active, collective practice, earned through persistence rather than optimism alone.

Legally Recognizing and governing the global commons

Braindate

The US is not a global policeman. The UN is about to go broke. We do not have functional world law, but need it to thwart the impunity of bad actors who spoil the global commons: oceans, climate, etc.

Post Capitalism

Session 1

Robin Chase led an engaging conversation on Post capitalism: what should it be? How do we get there?

Starlings Murmuration 1

TED Exhibits

Terrific new company exhibiting at TED which plans adventure learning tours starting in San Francisco this year...

The Future of TED

TED Conference News

Arrival notes - news on where the TED conference is heading!