Lessons from TED 2026

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Last week was the TED conference in Vancouver. What started as a gathering of technologists and creatives has become the best place to get an early read on where the world is heading. That includes technology, but also markets, culture, and the deeper forces shaping how we live and work.

I’ve been attending TED for twenty years, but you can watch the talks online. Of course, the real value of TED isn’t just the ideas themselves. It’s the patterns that emerge when you see them all at once. Over the course of a week, you start to get a glimpse of signals for what the future might hold.

It would be impossible to capture everything from this year’s TED. Musician Jacob Collier filled us with joy. Harry Mack threw down with his brilliant freestyle. There were too many strong talks, and too many ideas worth sitting with. But here are ten talks that stood out that feel particularly helpful for future-focused leaders. One of the great things about TED is that they put all their talks online for free, so you’ll be able to watch them when they come out shortly.

Ten Great Talks

In 2012, a Taliban gunman shot Malala Yousafzai in the face for the crime of wanting to go to school. This year, she opened TED with a gripping reflection on what she’s learned, and what she got wrong. As a child, Malala thought change was simple. That moral clarity alone would carry the day. It doesn’t. Change is slower, more complicated, and harder than that. It’s a powerful lesson for the rest of us.

Mark Rober has blown up on YouTube by blowing things up. The former NASA engineer turns complex scientific ideas into joyful and accessible experiences. His talk was as much about how ideas land as what they are. And yes, he made stuff explode on stage. It’s a useful reminder: complex ideas don’t just need to be understood; they need to be felt.

Drew McCartor, co-CEO of Pure Earth, spoke about lead poisoning as one of the largest and most overlooked public health crises in the world. One in three children globally are affected, often through everyday exposure. That exposure has well-documented impacts on cognitive development. Curbing lead pollution is one of the most straightforward ways to make our species measurably smarter. McCartor’s enthusiasm was infectious. And the problem is eminently solvable.

Environmentalist Bill McKibben brought some much-needed good news about the progress we’ve made in moving to solar power. Last year, roughly 90% of new electric generation around the world came from the sun and the wind. California now produces 100% of its electricity from solar on many days. Bill speaks with the power and clarity of a revivalist preacher. His mantra is clear: energy from heaven, not from hell.

Michael Snyder, Stanford geneticist, showed how continuous data can transform healthcare from reactive to preventive. By tracking biomarkers in real time, his work moves medicine away from treating averages and toward understanding individuals. It’s a glimpse of a system that intervenes earlier, acts more precisely, and ultimately changes what we think of as healthcare in the first place.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt spoke about how screen time and social media have contributed to rising levels of depression and anxiety among teens. Later, psychologist Candice Odgers offered a competing view. While she’s no fan of tech companies, Odgers argued that the data simply doesn’t support Haidt’s conclusions. Screen time isn’t as bad as you think. I lack the expertise to know who’s right, but it’s worth watching their recent debate at the University of Virginia. You can decide for yourself.

The most provocative idea of the conference came from Carissa Véliz, Oxford University philosopher and author. I’ve often said that future-focused leaders choose preparing over predicting. Carissa elevates that point to an ethical argument. She shows that prediction has always been less about seeing the future and more about shaping it. Prediction isn’t a quest for knowledge. It’s a quest for power. And when someone tells you something is inevitable, they’re often trying to take away your agency. Artificial intelligence, anyone? Carissa’s book comes out today, and I can’t wait to read it.

Neuroscientist Anil Seth returned to the TED stage to explore whether AI could ever become conscious. Spoiler alert: the answer is no. As he sees it, consciousness and intelligence are different things that only happen to coincide in humans. When we think about intelligence, we tend to use the metaphor of a computer. But our brains are far more than that. And consciousness may be less about computation and more a byproduct of being alive.

And then there’s Neal Katyal. This year, Katyal delivered one of the best TED talks in recent memory. The former Acting Solicitor General told the story of how he argued against Trump’s tariffs before the Supreme Court. That case may be among the most consequential decisions in modern American history. But Katyal’s story isn’t about arcane legal theory. It’s actually a sublime dramatization of how American society has been evolving over the last twenty-five years: politically, economically, intellectually, spiritually, and technologically. And his story has an ending worthy of M. Night Shyamalan. I won’t give it away here. You’ll just have to watch it when it comes out.

Ideas Change Everything

Every TED Talk is individually fascinating. However, the real value comes from stepping back and looking at them together. As the week went on, I found myself noticing the same questions coming up again and again, often from very different angles. It’s about what’s happening in the world, and how we decide what to believe about it.

1. The World We Don’t Want

Over the course of the week, I found myself coming back to a simple, uncomfortable thought: we’re building a world that many of us don’t actually want. Adam Bry showed how Skydio’s autonomous drones can navigate complex environments on their own, tracking objects and making decisions in real time. Garrett Langley described how Flock is building networks of cameras and sensors that help law enforcement monitor neighborhoods at scale. Noor Siddiqui of Orchid envisions a world where IVF is the standard way to get pregnant. Of course, that also means that wealthy parents might have kids who are stronger, smarter, and more beautiful than poor ones.

Layer in the steady advance of AI, and you start to see the shape of it. A world that is more efficient, more optimized, and more controlled—but also one that quietly takes away human agency. As science-fiction writer Cory Doctorow said a few months back, “There’s a cadre of tech billionaires who’ve read our dystopian fantasies and mistaken them for business plans.”

2. The Leadership Gap

The march to a dystopian future seems intrinsically tied to the reasoning abilities of our leaders. Too many tech companies seem to be founded by individuals with breathtaking computational intelligence and the moral architecture of eight-year-olds. Some, like Bry and Langley, justify their work through edge cases. (“I can save a little girl getting abducted, so give up your liberties!”) Others were simply blithe to the consequences of their work. OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger giggled as he talked about launching his agentic AI into the world without any safeguards. After all, what’s the worst that could happen, right? One need only go back and watch the old TED talks of Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey to have our answer. 

To be sure, there were some notable exceptions. Steve Huffman of Reddit was quite thoughtful about how the internet can be a city for citizens, and not just a stage for influencers. Tekedra Mawakana at Waymo showed what it looks like to scale advanced technology with care, intention, and a focus on safety. If only they weren’t the exceptions. As comedian George Civeris said on Tuesday night, TED is “the only conference that brings together the people solving the world’s biggest problems with the people creating them.”

3.     We Still Have a Choice

For all the concern about where things are heading, there was another thread running through the week. None of this is inevitable. The same technologies that can constrain human agency can also expand it. The same systems that can centralize power can be designed to distribute it. Again and again, you could see moments where a different set of choices—about incentives, governance, or simply what to build—would lead to a very different outcome. The future isn’t something that’s happening to us. It’s something we’re creating, decision by decision. To quote Kyle Reese, “The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.”

The Work Ahead

If there was one thing I took away from this year’s TED, it’s that the future isn’t going to be determined by what we’re capable of building. It’s going to be determined by what we choose to build, and just as importantly, what we choose not to. The technologies on display are extraordinary. Autonomous systems that can see and act, biological tools that can reshape life itself, and platforms that can influence how billions of people think and behave. None of this is theoretical anymore. It’s here, and it’s scaling.

But the more powerful these tools become, the more they reveal something else. The constraint is no longer technical. It’s human. It’s about judgment. It’s about restraint. It’s about whether the people making decisions understand the systems they’re creating, and the second- and third-order consequences that come with them. We’re not short on intelligence. We’re short on wisdom.

That’s what made this year feel different. There was less awe about what technology can do, and more unease about what it’s doing to us. Not in a dramatic, science fiction way. In a quiet, cumulative way. A thousand small decisions that slowly shape the world around us. And most of those decisions are being made by a relatively small group of people.

Which brings us back to the role of leadership. If you’re responsible for shaping the future of an organization, or even a small part of it, you don’t get to sit this one out. The question isn’t whether these forces will affect you. It’s how you’ll respond to them. Whether you’ll simply adopt what’s available, or take the harder path of deciding what should exist in the first place.

The future isn’t something that arrives fully formed. It’s assembled, piece by piece, by the choices we make every day. And if this week was any indication, those choices are only getting more consequential.