Au revoir: Day 5 of TED2026

After 11 extraordinary years in Vancouver, TED’s time in our beloved British Columbia conference home is up.

To celebrate the final day of TED2026, thinkers, doers and legends — mainstays of the TED community and newcomers alike — came together to create a rollicking session of talks and performances to remember. It was a fitting sendoff to a week of where attendees from 61 countries gathered to experience ideas, creativity and wonder from 99 speakers and performers, capping a remarkable chapter of TED’s history.

Watch TED2026 on TED Live, check out more photos from the event and learn more about attending a future TED conference.

The future of robotics is in the moves. Humanoid robotics researcher David Dobáš and Ultimate Fighting Bots are reimagining what robots can do. Using “direct body control” technology, robots can now mirror human movement in real time. But the real breakthrough? A universal training model that makes creating robot behavior as simple as showing it what to do. In a live demo orchestrated by Dobáš and technologist Bilawal Sidhu, two robots step onstage, copy the sparring moves they see from humans — and break into a dance they learned in just one afternoon.

The most powerful educational tool: a teacher. Education enthusiast Matt Wu is putting that belief into practice with Schoolhouse.world, a nonprofit pairing students across the globe for peer tutoring. What happens in these tutoring sessions goes far beyond equations, as young people learn to listen, to disagree with curiosity, to collaborate across borders and, most importantly, to believe in themselves. Ask any student what changed their life, and a chatbot will likely never be the answer. It was always a person they made a connection with.

Am I enough? For TOMS founder Blake Mycoskie, that question shadowed every moment of his life. And just under two years ago, it almost took his life. What followed was a painful but clarifying discovery: everything he had built was a strategy to earn worth, not a reflection of it. After years of struggling in silence, he finally opened up to his family, his friends and now the world. Silence doesn’t protect us, he says. It isolates us. Now, he’s building a community, declaring “We Are Enough,” so no one has to face that silence alone.

Can the secret math behind your eyes fix AI? Systems architect Vikash Mansinghka shows us something surprising: our brains don’t work like today’s AI. Instead of trying to predict everything perfectly, he explains that our minds explore possibilities and make adjustments as we go — kind of like connecting dots to tell a story. What if we could engineer machines to work the same way? His vision: AI built with coherence and human values baked in from the start, not learned from seas of data — machines we can trust, powered by less energy and guided by principles we control.

Mind the AI gap. Humanity is facing a dangerous math problem: technology is rising on an exponential curve while human adaptation stays on a linear path. TV host, author and changemaker Van Jones says the gap between those two lines will give rise to mass social unrest as AI continues to disrupt the economy and put people out of work. The solution? Close the gap with a mindset shift on both sides of the tech divide. He gives examples of projects that are pairing AI insiders with people on the ground closest to the problems — because the next trillion-dollar solution is probably hiding somewhere that power has long overlooked.