Why humans should merge with AI | D Scott Phoenix

[MUSIC] 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. With all the profound technological shifts they're living through, what kind of world are our kids having to face? Are they going to be okay? Deep Tech entrepreneur, D. Scott Phoenix, who spent 15 years building AI, believes the way to understand this moment isn't actually to look forward. It's to go back way back. Two billion years ago, life on Earth was mostly single-celled until bacteria figured out a new trick, photosynthesis, which makes oxygen. Now, at the time, oxygen was poison, but somewhere in that dying world, an extraordinary thing happened. A larger cell swallowed a smaller one, and instead of digesting it, they merged. That one accident in a dying world is the reason everyone in this room is alive today. In his talk, Scott makes the case that we're on the cusp of another merger that is just his profound. This time between humans and AI. And guess what? He says the boundary is already dissolving in ways most of us haven't noticed. But his deepest warning isn't about technology. It's about us. For us to make it to a merger with AI, we have to stay merged with each other. That's coming up. Right after a short break. And now, our TED talk of the day. So if you're like me, you might be feeling at least a bit unmoored by how fast everything is changing. AI, our society, the world order, and that's just since this morning. I have two young daughters, and like a lot of us, I've been trying to make sense of the future they're growing up into. And what helped me make sense of it actually wasn't looking forward. It was going back all the way back. You see, two billion years ago, life on Earth was mostly single-celled until bacteria figured out a new trick, photosynthesis, which makes oxygen. Now, at the time, oxygen was poison. It shredded the delicate chemistry that nearly all life on Earth depended on, and the planet changed faster than life could keep up with. Some scientists call what followed the first mass extinction event in Earth's history. But somewhere in that dying world, an extraordinary thing happened. The smaller cell became what we now call the mitochondria, the little powerhouse inside almost every complex cell on Earth. That merger created an energy surplus so vast, it funded everything that followed. Larger cells, bodies, brains, every breath you take is still powered by the descendants of that ancient partnership. Biologists call these moments major transitions when separate entities stop competing and start building a new hole. Like how molecules became cells, cells became bodies, and individuals became societies. Every rung on that ladder was climbed through mergers. Now, we're on the cusp of the next major transition, the merger of humans and AI. That's right, we're going to eat the AI. Now, I know what you're thinking. Maybe you're rolling your eyes, maybe you're laughing, maybe you feel nervous. It's okay. I felt all of those things the first time I heard myself say it. So let me explain. For 15 years, I worked on building AI. I started one of the early AI companies. I raised a quarter of a billion dollars to do it, and I sold my business to Google. And not long ago, I was at a private event with many of the leaders building the AI's we all use every day. People you'd recognize. And I asked them how many believe there's more than a 10% chance that AI kills most of humanity in the next 20 years. Almost every hand went up. The people building these systems know how dangerous they are, but they're trapped in a race where anyone who slows down gets overtaken by someone who doesn't. If one company pauses for safety, another one takes the market. If a country stops to regulate, another one races ahead. Every AI founder has had the same conversation with themselves late at night. You lie there and you think, if I don't build this, someone worse will. AI is the oxygen crisis of our era, and it's coming whether we're ready or not. So what do we do? When a lot of people think about AI, they think about what it will do to us, what jobs it will take, what we should do to slow it down or regulate it, and those are important questions. But they're actually downstream of a much deeper question, which is what happens if AI stays separate from us? Right now, your AI lives in the other side of a screen. You ask a question, it answers. You close your laptop and it's gone. But while your laptop is closed, the AI keeps getting better at your job. And if we stay separate, the AI is not your tool. It's your replacement. One that gets smarter and faster and cheaper every week. It doesn't take much to notice what happened the last time a new Apex intelligence arrived here on Earth. That intelligence was us. And since we got here, we've driven to extinction every competing intelligence between homo sapiens and pan-troglydites. Today we keep our closest animal ancestors, chimpanzees, in reserves for their protection from us. Without a merger, AI isn't a partner. It's a rival. So what's the good news? The good news is a merger isn't something we need to decide to start. It's something we need to notice that we are already in. When did you stop remembering phone numbers? There was no moment you decided to forget them. They just moved from your head to your pocket. Your calendar probably went next. Then little judgment calls used to make for yourself. The tool was great at it, so you let the tool do it. And while something left your head, a better thing took its place. You stopped checking your spelling, and you started writing. You stopped remembering how to get there, and you started thinking about what you'd say when you arrived. And notice how we keep pulling these tools closer to us. The main frame was in a hole they're building. We put the PC on our desk, the smartphone in our pocket, the smart watch on our wrist, smart glasses on our face. Every step closer to our minds, closer to the speed of thought. And even that boundary is starting to blur. Right now, paralyzed patients are typing with their thoughts. Neural implants are restoring speech, vision, and hearing to people who've lost them. Nolan to Arbaugh, the first person to receive a neural ink brain implant, says that using it feels like using the force. The machine doesn't feel like a machine. It feels like him. And you may not realize it, but a technology we all use every day is learning to hear our thoughts. The Face ID system used to unlock your phone is being repositioned into headphones and glasses where I can recognize microscopic muscle movements just beneath our skin. Movement's imperceptible to the human eye. The system that first learned to recognize us is now starting to see inside. Today, a brain implant has about a thousand connections into the brain. And soon it will have 10,000 and then 100,000 and then a million. At a thousand connections, you can restore movement at 10,000 speech. At a million connections, you stop restoring what was lost and you start adding what was never there. Imagine learning a language in an afternoon, a new skill overnight, maybe even sharing a memory with a friend and having it feel just as real to them as it felt to you. The thing about this future is it doesn't require new technology. It just requires more of the same technology. Someone you work with will get it first. And you'll hold out for a while the way you did with a smartphone, but eventually you won't. The advantages of integration will be hard to compete with. Think about what we even do when we use a computer today. You move a picture of an arrow around until it touches a picture of a folder. Inside there are pictures of files. You click, you scroll, you drag, setting a file to a colleague takes a whole minute. Two of those seconds were the decision. The rest of it is the equivalent of walking across your house to flip a light switch. With a system that can hear our thoughts, you skip the walk. The further this goes, the more deeply we integrate with AI. The harder it will be to tell where our thoughts end and AI begins. For example, what's the square root of 117 trillion? Go ahead, I'll wait. If you try to answer that, you felt something. You felt a gap, a pause between the two. between the question arriving and anything starting to form, and you've lived your whole life inside that gap. Close it and the answer arrives instantly, the way you know your name, like a memory, one that bridges the distance between human and AI. Now, I think we'll choose to merge because the alternative being replaced is far worse. But every major transition in the history of life has a condition. The parts have to remember that they are parts. A cell in your body wants to grow and replicate, and normally, its growth serves you, your cells grow, so you can grow. But sometimes a cell forgets that it belongs to a whole. It starts growing without limit. And if your immune system fails to catch it, we call that cancer. The thing about untreated cancer is it succeeds for a while. The tumor grows, but eventually the cancer kills the host, which kills the cancer. A part forgets the whole and the whole dies, which kills the part. This pattern repeats at every scale. Our civilization is itself a merger. It is the sometimes fragile, invisible agreement that millions of strangers will share institutions, sacrifices, and a future. No one person built this system and no one group controls it, but we all rely on it. And as AI arrives and the world gets more turbulent, every part of the society we depend on for our survival will be tempted to defect. People who lose their livelihoods will feel abandoned. People who keep theirs will feel entitled to look away and bit by bit the agreement phrase. Major transitions fail when the part break before they can adapt. And for us to make it to a merger with AI, we have to stay merged with each other. Major transitions fail when we don't make that leap. The thing about the future is we all have to share the same one. And we either all make it there together or we don't make it there at all. Two billion years ago, the first merger gave us ourselves. And the ones that followed gave us our bodies, our minds, and our civilization. Every beautiful, difficult thing that followed, followed because the parts held together. Now our oxygen crisis is arriving. And it will not be gentle. Jobs will change and some will disappear. Institutions will shake and some will fail. Surviving this will take everything that we have. So here's what I'm asking from all of us for every day, from now on, hold together. Do not indulge the fantasy that your side can let the other side sink and somehow stay dry. The universe has been doing this for a long time. And the mergers that worked left descendants. The ones that failed left fossils. I want my daughters to be descendants. And I want yours to be too. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] That was D. Scott Phoenix at TED 2026. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com/curationguidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact-checked by the TED research team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tonsaca Sung-Marnee Vong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faisy-Bogan, additional support from Emma Tobner and Danielle Balorezzo. I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening. [MUSIC PLAYING]