The future of our memories

This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're gonna find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading from TED and NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, the future of our memories. So it was 2014, and it was during one of the biggest refugee crisis, from the last decades here in Europe. This is Pau Alekum Garcia. Pau lives in Barcelona, but a decade ago, he was in Greece helping relocate Syrian refugees who were escaping civil war. I remember one conversation one night with this elderly woman, and she told me, Pau, I'm not afraid of of being a refugee now as I have lived my life. What I'm afraid is that my grandkids will be refugees forever. And I said, how come? I don't think so. Like, they will find a new place, a new home, they will keep on. She told me, yes. The thing is that whenever they try to ask the question, where do I come from? They won't be able to answer it because we have lost our home. We have lost our neighborhoods, the streets where they were born. And of course, we have lost all our photo albums from our family, the diaries of my husband. Not only community and country heritage have been lost, but also where family individual family history have been lost through this forced migration. And that kind of made us reflect on the role that memory and visual memory has in the build up of our identity and how we construct ourselves. And that idea of reconstructing memories was stuck in us. Reconstructing memories this got Powell thinking. Could he help people capture their memories in a photograph, something to hold and see, even if their family albums, diaries and letters were lost because Pao is a technologist. And so over the next decade, he and his colleagues at his design studio in Barcelona worked with AI tools to create something that they now call synthetic memories. A synthetic memory in the context of this project, of course, refers to a digitally reconstructed representation of a personal memory. And and we use artificial intelligence models that using words, prompting them with words, can generate certain images. But the goal is to find an image that can bring a face to stories of people that have lost these images of that have never been able to document, part of their memories. Pau Alekum Garcia explains from the TED stage. Memories are the architects of our identity. Right? Memories remind …