transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:03] You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. What do the story of Oedipus and your insurance premiums have in common? More than you'd think, they're both driven by self-fulfilling prophecies.

Speaker 2:
[00:21] Even though we tend to associate prediction with knowledge, I'd like to invite you to consider the possibility that most of the predictions that you encounter in an everyday setting are closer to the realm of power than that of knowledge. Predictions are often power plays in the skies. They justify value laid in decisions under the pretense of facts.

Speaker 1:
[00:43] That's philosopher, AI ethicist, and TED fellow Carissa Véliz. In her talk, she traces the hidden power of prediction from kings who banned or even killed prophets to AI algorithms quietly making decisions about your life right now.

Speaker 2:
[00:59] Better understanding prediction matters more than ever, because we're relying on forecasting more than ever with AI. And based on how we talk about prediction, we're being much too naive about it. But AI is science, you might think. It's cutting-edge technology. Well, depends on the kind of AI and how we use it.

Speaker 1:
[01:18] Her message? The next time someone tells you a specific outcome is inevitable, remember, they aren't necessarily describing the future. They might be selling it instead. That's coming up right after a short break. And now, our TED Talk of the day.

Speaker 2:
[01:46] Let me tell you about the future. Predictions are the boxing ring, or fights over the future take place. As the story goes, King Louis XI kept an astrologer in court. One day, the astrologer predicted that a lady of the court would die within a week. When she did, Louis was shaken. Either the astrologer had murdered the woman to prove his accuracy, or he was so prescient that he could threaten Louis himself. The astrologer had to be murdered. The king ordered his servants that upon his signal, they would just throw the astrologer out the window to a certain death. You'd be surprised, by the way, by how many seers in history have met this fate. Some advice to astrologers, keep away from kings and heights. When the astrologer arrived to meet Louis, the king asked him one last question. Given your prophetic abilities, tell me, how long will you live? Not missing a beat, the astrologer replied, I will die three days before your majesty. And Louis never gave the signal. Did the astrologer find his answer in the stars? I don't think so. I think he understood the power of prediction and used it to get himself life insurance. Smart astrologer. Even though we tend to associate prediction with knowledge, I'd like to invite you to consider the possibility that most of the predictions that you encounter in an everyday setting are closer to the realm of power than that of knowledge. It might seem that the days in which we sought astrologers and soothsayers to tell us about the future are very distant. But often we use AI as the new Oracle of Delphi, and tech executives whisper in the ears of our leaders, much like court astrologers used to. Granted, the technology is different, but the political role is not. Predictions are often power plays in the skies. They justify value-laden decisions under the pretense of facts. Better understanding prediction matters more than ever, because we're relying on forecasting more than ever with AI. And based on how we talk about prediction, we're being much too naïve about it. But AI is science, you might think. It's cutting-edge technology, right? Well, it depends on the kind of AI and how we use it. AI can be a great technology to make predictions about molecules in the search for new antibiotics. But predictions about human beings are fundamentally different than those about things. Predictions about the weather don't influence the weather. Predictions about people influence people. Social predictions tend to act like magnets. They bend reality towards themselves. They affect the reality they purport to predict. An algorithmic prediction about future disease can make someone's insurance premiums go up, leading to worse health outcomes from stress alone. Predictions sound like descriptions of the world, like facts, but they're not. Analyzed closely as assertions, they are what philosophers called speech acts. That is, language that does something other than describe the world. When you tell a child to clean up their room, you're not describing the state of their room, you're issuing an order. Similarly, social predictions are veiled commands. They implicitly tell us how to act. For example, when a tech executive says that in the future, we will use AI for everything and everywhere, he's trying to get you to act in a way that will fulfill his vision of the future. You know, the one that happens to line his pockets. And when you believe that prediction as if it were telling you something about the future, when you give in to the fear of missing out, and you go and you buy the AI, and you contribute to the self-fulfilling prophecy, what you are actually doing is obeying. Have you noticed how often people who make predictions about technology say that the future they are describing is inevitable? That's a red flag. Those predictions are designed to act as conversation stoppers. They're telling you, don't question me. Just accept what I'm saying as a fact. I'd like for this talk to be a conversation starter. I hope it will persuade you to ask more questions. Predictions invite manipulation. Their power to shape the future creates the temptation to tamper with it and benefit from it. Take prediction markets. The argument for having them is that they can be a source of knowledge. In theory, markets don't lie. If people make bets and they stand to lose, if they get it wrong, they'll try to get it right. And by having many people place bets, we can harness the wisdom of the crowds. But that assumes a very naïve view of prediction as a quest for knowledge. If you consider prediction as a quest for power, a very different picture emerges. If you have enough money, you can use it to influence public perception by heavily betting on something. Politicians have bet on themselves. In February this year, six anonymous accounts earned 1.2 million dollars betting for the attack on Iran. Some of those wallets were funded hours before. Finally, predictions create and then cover up injustice. Algorithmic predictions are building this Kafkaesque world in which we can no longer contest decisions because they're not based on clearly defined criteria. If I reject your loan application because you don't fulfill a particular requirement, that's a verifiable fact. If I'm wrong, you can challenge me. But if I reject your loan application on the basis of our prediction, there's no way you can contest that. Predictions are never facts. Facts belong to the past. Predictions are unverifiable, unfalsifiable, since they are about the future. They cannot be challenged for being false, thereby creating the perfect recipe for hidden injustice. Predictions are often unfair because they're not based on who people are, but on who we think they will become. When we predict someone's future as if it was the weather, we're treating them with disrespect, too much as things and not enough as agents who have a say in that future, who can and should be allowed to defy the odds. We're facing some pretty grim predictions from some of our most prominent prophets. Larry Ellison, the chairman of our predictive software company, appropriately named Oracle, has predicted a modern surveillance state in which citizens will be on their best behavior because we're being watched all the time. But the illusion of a world without crime is a world filled with a very different kind of crime. Authoritarianism. Is that the world we want? What can we do to not sleepwalk into it? Plenty. Prophets gain their power from people believing them. If we decide to defy this prediction instead of obeying it, we will choose products that are more respectful of privacy for starters. Hannah Arendt wrote, that it's pointless to argue with a murderer about whether their future victim is dead or alive. The only appropriate response is to rescue the person whose death is predicted. Well, today's prophets are predicting the death of our democracy, and the only appropriate response is to rescue it. In ancient Rome, it was illegal to predict the death of the emperor, for the very simple reason that they ended up with a murdered emperor on cue. I'm not suggesting that we do away with prediction. I'm going to continue to use my weather app every single day. But we need a public debate about the acceptable and unacceptable uses of prediction, and we're currently not having it. Meanwhile, dozens of algorithms are making decisions about your life right now. It might be that, in the case of insurance, we might want to make predictions at a population level, but not for individuals, because it creates unfair, self-fulfilling prophecies. Plus, if we're being billed according to individualized predictions, that means that we're basically paying for our own way, and insurance loses its reason for being, solidarity and the pooling of risk. It might be that in cases in which fairness matters, we might prefer transparent and contestable criteria to predictive, statistical pattern matching. Let me start to bring things together. Even though self-fulfilling prophecies are nothing new, they are being supercharged by AI in ways that make it more urgent than ever to think more deeply about predictions. First, predictions are never facts, they are speech acts. Second, they invite manipulation. Third, they create and cover up injustice. The one idea that I would like for you to take home today is that predictions can be weapons of power. But they only work if we believe them. If Oedipus had laughed off the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother, instead of completely freaking out about it, he would have never left for Thebes and made the prophecy come true. We turn to prophets because we're anxious about uncertainty. But uncertainty is good news. It means that the future is unwritten, that it's ours to write, and we can face the blank page with creativity, with curiosity, with the excitement of a sense of adventure. Efforts to predict the future go hand in hand with efforts to control it. So beware of prophets and prophecies. It's only when we acknowledge that we don't know what the future holds and act accordingly that we can be sure to live in a free society. Don't bow to people's predictions as if they were facts. Be like Joe Frazier. When Muhammad Ali predicted his own victory in the 1971 heavyweight championship, Frazier took it as a provocation and ended up defeating the previously undefeated Grace Ali in the fights of the century. So next time you hear a gloomy prediction about the social world, don't get discouraged. Find the Joe Frazier within you. Rebel against tyrannical predictions. Let's be brave enough to imagine and fight for a better world. Perhaps then, all of us can make the future bright after all. Thank you.

Speaker 1:
[13:55] That was Carissa Véliz at TED 2026. 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 Tansika Sangmarnivong. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Balarezzo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.