Good morning, Broadsheet readers! UPS is starting negotiations with the Teamsters Union, Kim Kardashian's investment firm poached new leaders, and Fortune editor-at-large Michal Lev-Ram reports from TED. Have a wonderful Wednesday.
- 'Curiosities' at TED. I spent Tuesday evening at a dinner hosted by Bay Area recruiter Jana Rich and Kelly Bush Novak, founder of Hollywood PR firm, ID. The duo gathered a small group of women who are attending the TED conference in Vancouver—which is currently underway. Rich started hosting this intimate dinner about 20 years ago, when she first began coming to TED and says that back then, she just wanted to find more women to hang out with.
This is my first TED, so I can’t make any comparisons. But it’s hard to imagine this event without a strong female presence. These first couple of days, women seemed well represented on stage. And they had some impactful and memorable words to share. Here are a few highlights:
Nadya Tolokonnikova from the band and activist group Pussy Riot, who last month was named one of Russia’s most wanted criminals, asked the audience to stand and imagine how she felt when she was being sentenced back in 2012 after publicly criticizing Vladimir Putin. “I was handcuffed, standing in a small stage,” she said. Tolokonnikova served two years in prison, forced to separate from her young child.
“Did we achieve what we wanted? Yes and no,” she told the audience. “Much work remains to be done.” (The musician-activist finished her talk by directly addressing Putin, saying she was talking to him “a wanted criminal to a wanted criminal.”)
Another female speaker at TED who spoke truth to a different kind of power is researcher Yejin Choi from the University of Washington. Choi has made it her mission to investigate if and how artificial intelligence systems can learn common sense—and to highlight the risks and the flaws in A.I., even as the technology (and the companies who develop it) becomes more influential and more mainstream. Many believe A.I.’s current mistakes can be corrected in the future, but that’s not necessarily the case, according to Choi. “A.I. is almost like a new intellectual species,” said the academic, whose slides included some of the most creative uses of emoji I’ve seen to date.
And then, there was actress Yara Shahidi, of Black-ish fame, who spoke about unleashing our creativity and shared this gem of a quote: “Our curiosities are often mislabeled as distractions.”
The women at the dinner also had lots of insights to share with each other, so I'll be leaving TED with food for thought from women on the main stage and from those I dined with—and plenty of new curiosities.
Michal Lev-Ram
michal.levram@fortune.com
@mlevram
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