TED2025: And I Don't Think Very Highly Of His Shirt, Either

TED2025 is taking place in Vancouver this week. It’s entitled (eyeroll emoji) “Humanity Reimagined” (sigh emoji) (Gen-X and thus too detached to use the actual emoji emoji)

The public doesn’t have access to the presentation videos yet, but one of this year’s presentations already has me super-excited. Based solely from an online photo and a summary, I think it’s likely to be the TED talk that I’ll be citing every time I’m pressed to explain why I’m so cynical about TED, generally.

I’ll soon be telling everybody my new mental slogan for the enterprise:

“The TED Conference: Where A Couple Of Thousand Extremely Wealthy People Sit And Listen To A Tech Bro Wearing Cargo Shorts And Flip-Flops Explain His Vision For Humanity’s Future And Why Deathbots Powered By Autonomous AI Are An Absolutely Crucial Part Of That Vision, Well, Yes, I Suppose He Is The Head Of A Big Company That Makes Deathbots Powered By Autonomous AI, But I Don’t See How That’s In Any Way Relevant.”

(Check out a photo from the TED talk and the summary on the TED blog. I would’ve embedded the photo here, but I don’t think it’s licensed for redistribution.)

I guess I shouldn’t present it as emblematic of TED in general. TED has put a great many genuinely neat and thought-provoking speakers on its stage. Many of them aren’t promoting a barmy, overblown vision, fueled by a commercial self-interest that’s about as subtle as a drag act. A few of those speakers (unlike the AI deathbot guy) were never even named to Forbes’ list of the wealthiest entrepreneurs under 40 (and thus can’t afford TED’s minimum $6250 entry fee).

And, although I’ll always complain that the discourse permitted from the stage is inevitably shaped and limited by the fact that the audience is composed exclusively of wealthy people…well, the videos are free for everybody, and they're very well-produced. I also think highly of most of the TED nonprofit’s broader education mission. So, yeah, there are folks in the audience who scoffed at the middle-class stink of TED’s $25,000 Precious Princess Scrumpkin ticket tier and zipped straight to the edge of the “Compare Options” table where the “Price” row simply says “Contact Us”. But at least that group's helping to underwrite the good stuff.

(I ask you: how many TED attendees have, at one time or another, illegally cut down dozens of acres of ancient forest located on public land because the trees spoiled their view of the mountains/ocean from their estate’s new pickleball pavilion? We’ll never know the actual number. I’m 100% certain it’s greater than zero. I probably can’t blame that directly on TED.)

I promise: I’ll hold off on actually judging the presentation, or its presenter, until TED has posted the actual video.

But I'll say one thing right now: to my knowledge, only one man in history has ever stood in front of a large group of people and shared his thoughts about the arc of humanity, while wearing sandals, and come off with any kind of credibility.

AI Deathbot Guy ain’t him. In fact, the very notion of building weapons that make warfare slaughter more efficient and impersonal, and moreover (literally) reaping a huge personal fortune from death and violence would have sent that dude into one of his patented table-flipping rages.