Robot Butlers, Tattoo Tourism and Sam Altman Gets Grilled At TED

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3 Powerful Talks From TED This Week That Are Already Available Live To Watch

The TED conference took place this past week and some of the talks have already been released. While most of the year the TED social channels repackage and release talks from past events, this is the one moment when you actually can watch talks close to when they were first presented live. Going through the site and watching some of the talks, here were three that stood out as important to watch along with some of my thoughts:

Meet NEO, Your Robot Butler in Training | Bernt Børnich | TED

How would a robot butler actually work? In this fascinating live presentation, roboticist and founder of 1X Bernt Børnich introduces NEO, a humanoid robot designed to help you out around the house. As he talks about the possibilities, you see NEO doing household tasks. Børnich’s main insight is that if robots are going to gain more intelligence, it will not come from doing limited tasks in a factory setting. Instead, we will need to test them in the home, and this is an example of what happens when you do that.

This Is What a Digital Coup Looks Like | Carole Cadwalladr | TED

Perhaps the most shared talk from TED already is this urgent talk from investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr who breaks down the “broligarchy” and the real costs of allowing technology companies to dismantle democracy. Most importantly, she shares some actionable ways to take the power back by protecting your data, pushing back on surveillance and giving money and support to those that are protecting the things that matter such as journalists and platforms like the Wayback Machine.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman Talks ChatGPT, AI Agents and Superintelligence — Live at TED2025

Clearly this conversation between TED founder Chris Anderson and OpenAI founder Sam Altman was going to be a blockbuster … a fact that the TED team likely knew since this was available to watch live. In the talk, Anderson asks Altman tough questions about IP theft, future plans, ethical issues and all the things you would want to know about. Altman largely sticks to the script, offering a utopian take on all the ways things could go right while generally avoiding any thought or suggestion that perhaps things could go awry. I’m not sure you’ll get much new from this interview, but as Anderson concluded, “Sam, I think over the next few years you’re going to have some of the biggest opportunities, some of the biggest moral challenges, some of the biggest decisions to make of perhaps any human in history. We are all cheering you on to make the right decisions.” Yikes.

The Gardens of the Future Are On Display

Sometimes a garden show is about more than stopping to smell the roses. At the upcoming Chelsea Flower Show, some of the exhibits will help imagine what the future of gardens and open spaces could be. There’s a concept ADHD Garden that features a central reflection pool and “the plant selection has been chosen to provide a subliminal effect on the senses, inducing a sense of calm and rest from an overactive mind.” Another intriguing concept is the Peace of Mind Garden where the plantings are laid out to reference a colour wheel and the aim of the garden is to “grounded in the moment to mindfully observe plants and colour which can enhance mood and benefit mental wellbeing.”

One of the most inventive ideas is a futuristic Dog Garden that teaches people plants to avoid that are harmful to dogs and how to create a hardy lawn that is perfect for pets to roll around and do their business. The entire show is a perfect reminder of the importance of time outdoors (we wrote about the therapeutic effects of this in our Green Prescriptions trend from The Future Normal), and also how the best gardens are created with intention. We don’t need to settle for dog “parks” that are basically a rectangular cage around some turf spread out over concrete.” As we head into Spring up here in the Northern hemisphere—it’s a great time to go plant something. And if all these garden concepts seem like a lot of work, you can always try “chaos gardening” instead.

The Complex Reality of “Girlbosses” In Space

This week the first all-female crew for a “manned” spaceflight headed to space—for ten minutes—on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket. One of the passengers was pop singer Katy Perry who reportedly broke into song while on the flight (What a Wonderful World) and promptly kissed the ground when she landed safely back to Earth. Again, she was gone for ten minutes. Of course, the backlash was swift and fierce, which surprised some of the passengers. People online called it everything from a publicity stunt (true) to a complete waste of money (maybe true). Katy Perry, to her credit, did exactly what she has always done and owned her own choices while offering soundbites along the way: “We’re putting the ass in astronaut!”

Not exactly the sort of female empowerment that the world needs, but the fact that this is the first all female space mission is historically significant. This underscores the biggest problem with private space travel itself: it may simultaneously be something great for the future of humanity and a “vacuous PR stunt” too. In the rush to criticize or praise it, we can easily miss this fact. Good things can be done for selfish reasons. Just as world shifting inspiration can come from unexpected places. Even someone who’s greatest contribution to science is putting the ass in astronaut.

Tattoorism and the Elusive Quest for the Ultimate Souvenir

How do you remember a trip forever? Last year there was a feature story about “the rise of tattoo tourism” and how more Millennials and Gen Zers were planning vacations around visiting famous artists around the world and coming home with the ultimate souvenir. A boutique hotel in NY opened an in-house tattoo parlor and one hotel chain even had a program where they brought celebrity tattoo artists into the hotel so you could have a more exclusive experience and get inked in style and comfort. All these earlier efforts had one thing in common … the tattoo artists were creating memorable works of art as part of the travel experience.

This week, Kimpton hotel group announced a program teaming up with Tiny Zaps (a studio specializing in tiny tattoos) where they offer a fixed range of “locally inspired” tattoos for guests to pick from and then get local artists to do them in first-come, first-served sessions. This is a brilliant idea, but sadly the range of tattoo designs they offer are obvious, uninspired and forgettable.

As someone who has engaged in “tattoorism” by getting multiple tattoos while traveling, the beautiful thing about the experience is meeting a local artist (like these guys in Bali) with a style that you like and having them customize something truly personal for you. Without that, Tiny Zaps and Kimpton just offered the tattoo equivalent of going to Venice to try the coffee and grabbing a latte at McDonald’s instead.

The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

It is perhaps odd to describe a book as both timely and urgent when it was first published more than 15 years ago … but that’s the thing that will probably strike you first about The Shallows. The scenarios and human behaviors it describes are chillingly accurate for right now. Deservedly selected as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize when it first came out, the book was an interesting read for me this week as I turned back to some of the pages because amidst many of the dated references to innovations of the time (video books known as “vooks” and limited discussion of AI or social media), the larger arguments and points he raises feel still important today:

“Every tool imposes limitations even as it opens possibilities. The more we use it, the more we mold ourselves to its form and function.”

Reading passages like this make The Shallows feel as though it was written with a cautionary tale for modern times. Much of the book is indeed exactly that. For offering a sobering historical perspective on the dangers of the past days of the Internet and reminding us all that some of the ethical technology questions we face today are the same ones we left unanswered from years ago.