Stretching abundance in the age of AI

Acumen Academy Director Bavidra Mohan shares reflections from the TED2025 Conference together with a group of Acumen Fellows and members from the Acumen Academy team.

At TED 2025 in Vancouver, I stood alongside 15 Acumen Fellows — builders, dreamers, doers — among thousands gathered to explore a singular question: What might it mean to reimagine humanity? The future was both dazzling and disorienting, with AI at its center.

From a nutritionist building a movement to feed 1 million school kids a day in Kenya to a robot promising a future void of “menial tasks,” the TED stage pulsed with a restless tension: So much is still broken, yet so much more is possible. Angus Harvey called it the “collapse alongside the renewal” — the story of humanity, not unique to this moment, but perhaps more acutely in focus these days.  

Amid the swirl of ideas, one idea crystallized for me: AI offers us the chance to expand what fits inside the singular first-person pronoun “I.”

With these new tools, one person can know more, build more, imagine more. An individual’s reach, creativity, and impact are poised to stretch beyond anything we once thought possible. But the expansion of the “I” demands a parallel expansion of the “We.”

If I can do more, know more, be more, then my circle of concern, my sense of responsibility, must grow too. If abundance is within reach, it cannot be abundance for a privileged few. How might we strive for abundance held in common? And so, the challenge is not merely technical. It is moral. In many ways, our moral imagination lags behind our extraordinary technical capacity to drive this technology forward. Despite the many pleas from foundational AI thinkers to slow down, pause development, and exercise restraint, this does not seem likely. Megan J. McArdle reminded us in her TED talk this year that “holding back innovation is a form of theft from the future.” The question then becomes, how do we expedite our moral imagination to keep pace with our technological advancements? 

One of the other animating questions for the conference was: “What are humans for?” The question is unsettling and brings light to an uncomfortable examination. If everything can be done better, faster, and more efficiently by AI, then what is left to be done by us? 

I found myself thinking of Khalil Gibran’s wisdom from The Prophet: 

“You work that you may keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth. For to be idle is to become a stranger unto the seasons, and to step out of life’s procession, that marches in majesty and proud submission towards the infinite…

…Work is love made visible.” 

To me, both work and love are deeply human. Dignified work allows us to matter, as Jennifer Wallace reminded us in her piercing talk about “mattering.” By denying ourselves the chance to work, we risk losing something essential: the feeling of being valued. I wonder, rather than asking how we eliminate menial tasks, can we explore how this technology can help create more dignified work? Dignity is not reserved for the complex or the glamorous. It lives in honest effort. One promise of AI is not to strip dignity from work, but to make dignity attainable in more places, for more people.

At Acumen, we believe workforce development is one of the most powerful bridges out of poverty. In regions like West Africa, India, and Latin America, we’ve seen how access to dignified work through skills training, employment pathways, and entrepreneurship can transform lives at scale. But dignified work also depends on the foundations that make it possible: access to energy, connectivity, and education. In East Africa, where nearly half the population lacks electricity and quality schooling remains out of reach for many, those foundations are still being built. 

Innocent Tshilombo understands this deeply. As a 20-year-old growing up in the Kakuma Refugee Camp in the northwest regions of Kenya, he fought hard to pursue online education only to be cut off when his laptop batteries died — no power, no digital infrastructure, and no support. Today, as co-founder of Kakuma Ventures, he’s changing that. By building microgrids that power Wi-Fi hotspots in refugee camps, Kakuma enables over 11,000 people each year to access online learning, remote work, and e-commerce, unlocking new paths to education, employment, and agency. Innocent embodies the expansion of the “We.” 

The future could be defined by how fast our tools evolve or by how expansively we imagine who we evolve with. We need an era where abundance stretches wider than technical advancement or the most lucrative business model — where the newly expanded “I” naturally flows into a more inclusive, more audacious “We.”

If we can hold that expansion of moral imagination and responsibility, then our partnership with AI may lead us to that promised land of abundance.  

This is the work ahead. This is the love we must make visible.