TED Talks Daily - The army of autonomous robots restoring nature | Tom Chi

Episode Date: November 21, 2025

Impact investor Tom Chi challenges a dangerous assumption: that economic growth and ecological health are opposing forces. He reveals how advances in AI and robotics are enabling a radical shift towards innovation as a force for restoration. Imagine mines that extract less, farms that regenerate soil and fleets of robots that can plant 100,000 mangroves in a single day. What if the same technologies that power our economy could actively repair the planet at the same time? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. What if everything we thought we knew about the relationship between the economy and the environment was wrong? In this talk, impact investor Tom Chi explores the paradox of a world that says it loves the nature around us and yet systematically destroys it. He suggests a new way to think about our place on this planet, challenges what he views as the false trade-offs between economic growth and ecological health, and shows how innovation can become a force for restoration rather than extraction.

So over the last decade, I've been working on resolving a profound paradox and simply stated, it's that if you go and talk with, any person, actually, you could go grab 100 random people off the street, and you were to go ask them, you know, how do they feel about nature? You're going to end up with extremely positive answers, ranging from, you know, nature is inspiring, you know, nature is the most beautiful thing that exists. And you'll see it everywhere. They'll put it as the backdrop of their desktop and their phones, like every little thing, absolutely. every single person you ask,

you're going to get a pretty positive response. And even though if you ask all these individuals how they feel about nature, they're really positive about it, somehow, as a collective civilization, we've come together and we are destroying nature at a planetary scale. And therein lies the paradox.

How did this happen? How did a group of individuals that all love nature somehow create a civilization, create an industrial economy that is out there effectively planetary-level assault on nature. Well, I think it actually stems from a broken mental model

that we've kind of unconsciously adopted, and I'd like to start dissolving that right now. And that's a mental model that whenever you get economic wins, they are traded off against the ecology. And if you really care about the ecology and you really want to make that healthier, unfortunately, you're going to have to trade off economic winds, right?

It's one or the other. It's kind of a balancing act and depending on how much we care about the economy or how much we care about the ecology at any given time, the pendulum swings one way, the scale swings one way, where it swings the other. And I'm going to tell you that, sure, that is a psychological position that you can take,

but it's actually not one that is particularly physically true. I'm formally trained as a physicist, so I do think about what is physically true, and what is actually much more true about the economy is the economy is not versus ecology. The economy is a subset of the ecology. And maybe this is a new idea to you guys, but I can prove it to you very quickly.

Actually, you could prove it to yourself, even just with the clothes on your body or the things immediately around you, because if you think about and you look at everything that the economy has produced, everything in the economy is either mind or grown, which means it comes directly from nature, no abstractions.

You guys might be wearing some cotton, obviously, grown. You'll be sitting on a chair that's got some metal underneath it. That was mined. Everything in the economy is mined or grown, full stop. And some of you guys might be thinking, well, aren't we moving to a digital economy, a virtual economy? Well, not really. Like every line of code that has ever run

runs on a substrate that was mined or grown. Every single service you've ever used is using server architectures that are mined or grown. When I say the entire economy is mined or grown, I mean it literally. There's literally nothing that doesn't come directly from nature. And to the extent that you damage the ecology, you actually start to create problems for the economy.

And this is what we're experiencing right now. And if you think about it in this balancing act-type way, you're going to miss the right way to actually fix these problems. Now, let's talk about exactly how much we are mining and growing. At this point in history, it's over 90 billion tons per year. It comes out to about 11.5 tons per person per year. And if you guys feel like you don't do that much, well, I'll shock you to say that 11.5 is the average in Asia,

but Europe is about 2x that, and America is 3x that. Yay. Now, there's 2 billion people that live on less than $5 a day that are doing substantially less than that. That's why it all balances out. But this is exactly how much we're mining and exactly how much we're growing. Now, in the process of mining and growing this much

and using it to power everything in the economy, because like I said, literally everything in the economy is mined or grown, we've been using really old industrial ideas and industrial processes. Most of how we're growing today was invented about 50 years ago. Most of the ways that we've been mining, refining metals, all that sort of thing, was invented about 100 years ago, 150 years ago. These are not technologies that we have updated recently. And with the arrival of new robotic and AI tools,

I think it's the right time to go ask new questions about whether we could be mining and growing differently in a way that starts to honor this idea that the economy is a subset of the ecology. Now, this is where it overlaps into my world, because my entire career has been built off of doing new inventions or robotics, artificial intelligence, advanced algorithms, and I've shipped everything from Microsoft Office,

sorry about that, you know, to web search. I think that one was fine, to self-driving cars. So I've worked on relatively sophisticated things, and given that, I have an interesting background, perhaps, to be able to go look at these problems and see if we can take a different swing at them. And I'm going to share a number of examples with you today. Now, these examples fall into three major shifts,

Remember, everything's mining or growing, and they're represented by these three images here. We have a bunch of mined materials, and what we need to be doing is we need to figure out more and more ecological ways to be able to go mine materials and get the most of the ores that we extract, so we do the least disturbance of earth and watersheds in the process of mining.

In addition, what is even better than mining more ecologically and mining less is to not mine at all. And to the extent that we're able to go close the loop through really skillful, mechanical or chemical recycling, we can have a larger and larger proportion of the feedstock for industry move over to closed loop materials as opposed to virginly extracted materials.

The second major shift has to do with the way that we grow. A lot of the way that we've been growing currently is very unsustainable. It basically is damaging soil function, and little by little we've been kind of wearing down top, in agricultural lands all across the world. And Gabe Brown is a friend who has taught me a huge amount about regenerative agriculture, and I've really learned from him that if you invest in soil function,

you can actually make it easier to grow, cheaper to grow, higher margin to grow every single year, and do so in a way that is regenerating soil function, giving more services to biodiversity, and even healing the hydrological function of those soils. And lastly, we need to be thinking about large, because we've been at the industrial revolution for a couple hundred years now, and there's a lot of landscapes that we've heavily degraded.

And if we are serious about the task of renewing the ecology in order to go support a vibrant economy going forward, then we're going to need better tools for large-scale repair. So let's jump into all three of these. So what is here is actually an image from inside the largest lithium-NMC battery recycling plant in North America, a company I have the privilege to work with. And they are a great example of moving closer to that closed-looped world.

And this is an advanced form of chemical recycling that is able to go bring all of these used battery materials because most lithium batteries have a 10-year life. They don't go too many years beyond that. And after that's the case, well, you know, you can't use it in the car or you can't use it in the consumer electronic device anymore. You want to be able to recover those materials.

The process that they do here is about two times cheap, cheaper than the next closest process, and is able to return the material to complete virgin quality. It's better than the stuff that you would have been able to mine out of the ground in the first place. And if we get really skillful about closing these loops, and what's great is a car battery doesn't just evaporate and disappear, it's a relatively large object that you can go handle,

and you can do a reverse logistic supply chain and pull these things together. And whether it's robotics and AI to do advanced mechanical recycling, or in this case, advanced chemical recycling, then there are really skillful ways with our new technologies to be able to go close the loop and make it so that a higher and higher fraction comes from a post-consumer or post-industrial waste stream

as opposed to from the ground. Now, moving over into the regenerative growing side, we're actually at a really compelling point in history because there's a mini-renaissance in regenerative agriculture that's happening right now, with different farmers around the world discovering the benefits of agroforestry, intercropping, you know, no-till agriculture,

and a lot of other practices that really help to establish healthy soil function and healthy soil microbiome. So effectively, they're able to go and measure all these compelling compounds from the soil, so they're able to have the soil speak to them in ways that the soil can basically tell them, hey, here's the next couple things that you should do to make me healthier. Instead of it kind of being a black box that needs to get interpreted, now farmers can have a direct relationship with their soils

and be really skillful in the management toward greater and greater health, fewer inputs and higher margins every single year. Moving on into other ways that artificial intelligence and machine learning might be really useful for agriculture, the development of corn or maize. And it was an indigenous project

that happened over the course of hundreds of years, and they started with basically an inedible, bit of grass, because corn is actually a type of grass. And by selective breeding over generations and generations, they went through lots of different varieties until we got to the lots of calories per growth cycle version of corn that is now feeding huge percentage of the calories around the world. Now, this was an indigenous activity that happened over hundreds of years and really thankful for it, because most of the foods that we eat today were selectively bred to be as large and healthy and nutritious as we experienced them.

But using artificial intelligence and machine learning, we've been working with a company that has been able to rapidly speed up this process. And not through genetic modification. What they do is they're able to take the sequence information from all the existing commercial crops, plus a bunch of native varietals that are not in current circulation,

and work out what the different gene functions do, and then map out exactly the crossbreeding pathway in order to go get the desired traits. So what we have is adaptive sugar cane, which dramatically reduces the amount of deforestation required to get to the yield level that you want. You also have heat-resistant tomatoes that are able to grow in way hotter, way-dryer conditions,

which is really important, because we're going to go through at least a 50-year period where we're going to be destabilizing a lot of the farmlands of the Earth as the climate destabilizes, whether that's hotter, colder, wetter, it's all going to happen. And being able to have seed stock that is ready for that challenge is really powerful.

And lastly, a cotton that basically is drought-tolerant as well, requires a fraction of the water, one-tenth of water, and much less pesticide and fertilizer input. And all of these things are fantastic for the planet, but they're also fantastic for the future of us having viable food and materials in a destabilized at growing environment. Lastly, let's get on to scalable restoration.

And what's really compelling about this company, a company, Chloristia Spatial, is that they've done a really deep work on sensor fusion across a bunch of satellite feeds, and they also paired that with over a decade in the jungles meter by meter doing ground-truthing data to be able to really verify

how much terrestrial biomass is associated with signals that can be detected from satellites. via remote sensing. And given this, they've been able to make the most accurate, both historical and current assessment of above-ground biomass on planet Earth, and the data stretches all the way back

to the beginning of the 21st century. So over 20 years of data on that front, and that really allows us to see which landscapes were hurting, which landscapes are recovering, and if people are developing restoration projects or carbon projects, this is a fantastic way to go,

stay on top of how those are going. Now, this is great technology and also uses really advanced algorithms and allow the things that I've been talking about. But in some ways, it's a little bit passive. This doesn't restore the forest itself. This doesn't restore the grassland itself. This just helps people monitor the changing of that.

But what if we were to get more ambitious and we were to say, let's challenge this linkage between the industrial machines that run our economy and nature, and instead of it having been an accidental, relationship of damage, what would it look like if it was an intentional relationship of active repair? And I'm going to show you that right now with my last two examples. This one's a short video, and what you're going to hear, you're going to hear these little ticks. And every one of those

ticks is a mangrove seed being planted. The pace of these ticks is basically planting about 100 mangroves per minute from one drone. And then two months later, we have over 90 percent that that get to germination. And 14 months later, the landscape is fully established over 85% full establishing of the mangroves that were planted. Now, the scale of this technology

and the scale that it's capable of is incredible. Just four people are able to go plant over 80 hectares of land representing 120,000 mangroves being planted and over 100,000 being established in a one day. When you get to robotic scale on things, all of a sudden, then human action, human intention,

and if we have good intentions, we can really multiply that in ways that can completely rewrite our landscapes. And I've worked with this company for about a decade at this point, and I got really inspired by them, because they have not just restored mangroves, but they've restored 20 different terrestrial ecosystems on four different continents,

dry land, inland, mountainous, you know, near shore, all these sorts of things. And I got inspired, like, could we also do this below the water? And I'm going to show you something that I founded and was the original electrical engineer for. And this is the reef gen robot, which is basically its own kind of planting drone.

And this robot line is the first in the world to plant live corals back into a coral reef. It's the first in the world to plant live seagrasses back into seagrass meadows. And it can also plant them in seed form as well. And this robot, you know, has been able to plant 10,000 street gas seeds in a single day, which covers an entire underwater acre

with one robot in one day. And the other thing that we did is we wanted to make sure that this robot was affordable enough that we could make a bunch of them, right? Because when I went around and I talked to people about the underwater robot that I was going to go build to restore these ecosystems, they're like, you should budget like $2 million for the robot.

Like, if you spent less than that, it's probably not going to do anything interesting. And I remember sitting there thinking, like, I was thinking more like $5,000. And we're not quite there, but this is more like $10,000. And in the grand scheme of things, it's way, way less than $2 million. And the whole point is you want this to be an accessible technology

to all the communities that have near-shore ecosystems to restore, whether they be coral, whether they be seagrasses, you want something like this to be also skisible, from the CAPEX perspective, right? Like a single billionaire could like spend $50 million and have a fleet of 10,000 of these, and that is actually meaningful scale in terms of ocean restoration of all different types.

I'll show you a little bit more here. So right here is a stake because this is actually not a seed planting end effector. That's a seedling planting end effector because there's actually two ways to plant seagrasses as well. You can plant it from seed, but then there's other types of seagrasses that actually wanted to be plant as a sapling,

and they want to grow rhizomically. So they send out these little rhizomes laterally, and then the grasses grow up from the lateral rhizomes that are heading out. And this is basically a stake that we go and put the seagrass seedlings into, and then that feeds into a thorough tube into a hopper, and basically, bit by bit, this current layout is able to go and plant

about half an acre of seedlings per day with just one robot. And our next version of it is going to be able to do an acre to an acre and a half in a day per robot. So we are really kind of moving into this space where by really digging into that mental model in a different way,

instead of economy versus ecology, we start taking the best tools that we're using in the current economy and robotics and AI and intentionally using them to support ecology so that we're able to go build both a healthy planet and a healthy economy for the future. Thanks so much.

Thank you. That was Tom Chee at a TED Countdown event in New York in partnership with the Bezos Earth Fund in 2025. If you're curious about Ted's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. Ted Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Colleges. This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team

and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tonica, Song Marnivong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faisi Bogan. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Balareso. I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.

Thanks for listening. Thank you.