Shadowing Practice: Why Humans Should Merge with AI | D. Scott Phoenix | TED - Learn English Speaking with YouTube
C2
.
205 sentences
If sentences are too short or too long, click Edit to adjust them.
1
.
2
So if you're like me,
3
you might be feeling at least a bit unmoored by how fast everything is changing.
4
AI, our society, the world order,
5
and that's just since this morning.
6
I have two young daughters,
7
and like a lot of us,
8
I've been trying to make sense of the future they're growing up into.
9
And what helped me make sense of it actually wasn't looking forward.
10
It was going back, all the way back.
11
You see, two billion years ago,
12
life on Earth was mostly single-celled until bacteria figured out a new trick,
13
photosynthesis, which makes oxygen.
14
Now, at the time, oxygen was poison.
15
It shredded the delicate chemistry that nearly all life on Earth depended on,
16
and the planet changed faster than life could keep up with.
17
Some scientists call what followed the first mass extinction event in Earth's history.
18
But somewhere in that dying world, an extraordinary thing happened.
19
A larger cell swallowed a smaller one,
20
and instead of digesting it, they merged.
21
The smaller cell became what we now call the mitochondria,
22
the little powerhouse inside almost every complex cell on Earth.
23
That merger created an energy surplus so vast,
24
It funded everything that followed.
25
Larger cells, bodies, brains.
26
Every breath you take is still powered by the descendants of that ancient partnership.
27
That one accident in a dying world is the reason everyone in this room is alive today.
28
Biologists call these moments major transitions,
29
when separate entities stop competing and start building a new whole.
30
like how molecules became cells,
31
cells became bodies, and individuals became societies.
32
Every rung on that ladder was climbed through mergers.
33
Now, we're on the cusp of the next major transition,
34
the merger of humans and AI.
35
That's right, we're going to eat the AI.
36
Now, I know what you're thinking.
37
Maybe you're rolling your eyes,
38
maybe you're laughing, maybe you feel nervous.
39
It's OK.
40
I thought I felt all of those things the first time I heard myself say it.
41
So let me explain.
42
For 15 years, I worked on building AI.
43
I started one of the early AI companies.
44
I raised a quarter of a billion dollars to do it,
45
and I sold my business to Google.
46
And not long ago, I was at a private event with many of the leaders
47
building the AIs we all use every day, people you'd recognize.
48
And I asked them, there's more than a 10 percent chance that AI kills most of humanity in the next 20 years.
49
Almost every hand went up.
50
The people building these systems know how dangerous they are,
51
but they're trapped in a race where anyone who slows down gets overtaken by someone who doesn't.
52
If one company pauses for safety,
53
another one takes the market.
54
If a country stops to regulate, another one races ahead.
55
Every AI founder has had the same conversation with themselves late at night.
56
you lie there and you think,
57
if I don't build this, someone worse will.
58
AI is the oxygen crisis of our era,
59
and it's coming whether we're ready or not.
60
So what do we do?
61
When a lot of people think about AI,
62
they think about what it will do to us,
63
what jobs it will take,
64
what we should do to slow it down or regulate it,
65
and those are important questions.
66
But they're actually downstream of a much deeper question,
67
which is what happens if AI stays separate from us.
68
Right now, your AI lives on the other side of a screen.
69
You ask it a question, it answers.
70
You close your laptop and it's gone.
71
But while your laptop is closed,
72
the AI keeps getting better at your job.
73
And if we stay separate,
74
the AI is not your tool,
75
it's your replacement, one that gets smarter and faster and cheaper every week.
76
It doesn't take much to notice what happened the last time a new apex intelligence arrived here on Earth.
77
That intelligence was us.
78
And since we got here,
79
we've driven to extinction every competing intelligence between Homo sapiens and pantroglodytes.
80
Today, we keep our closest animal ancestors,
81
chimpanzees, in reserves for their protection from us.
82
Without a merger, AI isn't a partner, it's a rival.
83
So what's the good news?
84
The good news is a merger isn't something we need to decide to start.
85
It's something we need to notice that we are already in.
86
When did you stop remembering phone numbers?
87
There was no moment you decided to forget them,
88
they just moved from your head to your pocket.
89
Your calendar probably went next,
90
then little judgment calls you used to make for yourself.
91
The tool was great at it,
92
so you let the tool do it.
93
And while something left your head,
94
a better thing took its place.
95
You stopped checking your spelling and you started writing.
96
You stopped remembering how to get there,
97
and you started thinking about what you'd say when you arrived.
98
And notice how we keep pulling these tools closer to us.
99
The mainframe was in a whole other building.
100
We put the PC on our desk,
101
the smartphone in our pocket,
102
the smartwatch on our wrist,
103
smart glasses on our face.
104
Every step closer to our minds,
105
closer to the speed of thought.
106
And even that boundary is starting to blur.
107
Right now, paralyzed patients are typing with their thoughts.
108
Neural implants are restoring speech,
109
vision and hearing to people who've lost them.
110
Noland Arbaugh, the first person to receive a Neuralink brain implant,
111
says that using it feels like using the force.
112
The machine doesn't feel like a machine, it feels like him.
113
And you may not realize it,
114
but a technology we all use every day is learning to hear our thoughts.
115
The Face ID system used to unlock your phone is being repositioned into headphones and glasses,
116
where it can recognize microscopic muscle movements just beneath our skin,
117
movements imperceptible to the human eye.
118
The system that first learned to recognize us is now starting to see inside.
119
Today, a brain implant has about 1,000 connections into the brain,
120
and soon it will have 10,000,
121
and then 100,000, and then a million.
122
At 1,000 connections, you can restore movement.
123
At 10,000, speech.
124
At a million connections, you stop restoring what was lost and you start adding what was never there.
125
Imagine learning a language in an afternoon,
126
a new skill overnight, maybe even sharing a memory with a friend
127
and having it feel just as real to them as it felt to you.
128
The thing about this future is it doesn't require new technology,
129
It just requires more of the same technology.
130
Someone you work with will get it first,
131
and you'll hold out for a while,
132
the way you did with a smartphone, but eventually, you won't.
133
The advantages of integration will be hard to compete with.
134
Think about what we even do when we use a computer today.
135
You move a picture of an arrow around until it touches a picture of a folder.
136
Inside, there are pictures of files.
137
You click, you scroll, you drag.
138
Sending a file to a colleague takes a whole minute.
139
Two of those seconds were the decision.
140
The rest of it is the equivalent of walking across your house to flip a light switch.
141
With a system that can hear our thoughts, you skip the walk.
142
The further this goes, the more deeply we integrate with AI,
143
the harder it will be to tell where our thoughts end and AI begins.
144
For example, what's the square root of 117 trillion?
145
Go ahead, I'll wait.
146
If you try to answer that,
147
you felt something, you felt a gap,
148
a pause between the question arriving and anything starting to form,
149
and you've lived your whole life inside that gap.
150
Close it, and the answer arrives instantly,
151
the way you know your name,
152
like a memory, one that bridges the distance between human and AI.
153
Now, I think we'll choose to merge because the alternative being replaced is far worse.
154
But every major transition in the history of life has a condition.
155
The parts have to remember that they are parts.
156
A cell in your body wants to grow and replicate,
157
and normally its growth serves you.
158
Your cells grow, so you can grow.
159
But sometimes a cell forgets that it belongs to a whole.
160
It starts growing without limit.
161
And if your immune system fails to catch it, we call that cancer.
162
The thing about untreated cancer is it succeeds for a while,
163
the tumor grows, But eventually,
164
the cancer kills the host, which kills the cancer.
165
A part forgets the whole,
166
and the whole dies, which kills the part.
167
This pattern repeats at every scale.
168
Our civilization is itself a merger.
169
It is the sometimes fragile,
170
invisible agreement that millions of strangers will share institutions, sacrifices and a future.
171
No one person built this system,
172
and no one group controls it,
173
but we all rely on it.
174
And as AI arrives and the world gets more turbulent,
175
every part of the society we depend on for our survival will be tempted to defect.
176
People who lose their livelihoods will feel abandoned.
177
People who keep theirs will feel entitled to look away.
178
And bit by bit, the agreement phrase,
179
Major transitions fail when the parts break before they can adapt.
180
And for us to make it to a merger with AI,
181
we have to stay merged with each other.
182
Major transitions fail when we don't make that leap.
183
The thing about the future is we all have to share the same one.
184
And we either all make it there together,
185
or we don't make it there at all.
186
Two billion years ago, the first merger gave us our cells,
187
and the ones that followed gave us our bodies,
188
our minds and our civilization.
189
Every beautiful, difficult thing that followed,
190
followed because the parts held together.
191
Now our oxygen crisis is arriving,
192
and it will not be gentle.
193
Jobs will change and some will disappear.
194
Institutions will shake and some will fail.
195
Surviving this will take everything that we have.
196
So here's what I'm asking from all of us,
197
for every day from now on.
198
Hold together.
199
Do not indulge the fantasy that your side can let the other side sink and somehow stay dry.
200
The universe has been doing this for a long time,
201
And the mergers that worked left descendants.
202
The ones that failed left fossils.
203
I want my daughters to be descendants,
204
and I want yours to be, too.
205
Thank you.
Download App
AI scoring for every sentence you speak
TRENDING
Popular
Why practice speaking with this video?
Integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) into our lives is a popular topic, especially as we witness rapid technological transformations. In D. Scott Phoenix's TED talk, he emphasizes the historical significance of merging entities for evolution. By practicing speaking through this engaging video, learners can enhance their English speaking practice while diving into a thought-provoking subject. The context provided in the video helps learners understand complex ideas, allowing them to articulate their thoughts more clearly. Additionally, using the shadowing technique—repeating what the speaker says in real-time—can significantly improve fluency and confidence in everyday conversations.
Grammar & Expressions in Context
Throughout the talk, several grammatical structures and expressions illustrate effective communication:
- Conditional Statements: "If you're like me, you might be feeling..." This structure helps express possibilities and personal reflections, making it a valuable tool for learners.
- Past Tense Narratives: "I started one of the early AI companies." Using the past tense effectively conveys experiences, a crucial element in storytelling.
- Complex Sentences: "That merger created an energy surplus so vast..." This type of sentence connects ideas and encourages learners to explore more intricate sentence structures in their own speaking.
By practicing these structures, you can improve English pronunciation and enhance your communication skills in both casual and formal settings.
Common Pronunciation Traps
In the realm of technology, specific vocabulary may present pronunciation challenges. Here are some words from the video that learners might find tricky:
- Merger: Watch for the soft 'g' sound, which can be misunderstood if pronounced as a hard 'g'.
- Mitochondria: This multi-syllable word can be particularly tough; practice breaking it down into smaller parts to master the pronunciation.
- Photosynthesis: Another complex term, it's essential to pronounce each syllable clearly to avoid confusion.
Utilizing a shadowing app can facilitate your learning process, helping you to hear and repeat these difficult words accurately, which is fundamental for effective English speaking practice.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.
☕ Buy us a coffee
ShadowingEnglish remains 100% free thanks to your support. Server and AI costs are high — your coffee keeps us going! 🙏