This TED talk features business systems consultant manager Rebecca Knill recorded live at Ted Wells Fargo 2020.

Ted talks daily, is brought to you by progressive saving money on your car insurance is easy with progressive. It's an average savings of over seven hundred fifty dollars for customers who switch and save. In fact, customers can qualify for an average of six discounts on their auto policy with progressive discounts just for starting a, quote, online or having multiple vehicles on their policy. Get your quote online at progressive dotcom and see how much you could be saving national annual average auto insurance savings by new customers surveyed in 2019.

Potential savings will vary. Discounts vary and are not available in all states and situations.

Support for TED talks daily comes from ODU, ODU, suite of business apps, has everything you need to run a company.

Think of your smartphone with all your apps right at your fingertips. ODU is just like that for business, but instead of an app to order takeout or tell you the weather, you have sales, inventory, accounting and more all on ODU, you name the department. We've got it covered and they are all connected. So go to ODU Dotcom slash Ted to start a free trial. That's o d o dotcom Ted. My name is Rebecca and I'm a cyborg.

Specifically, I have 32 computer chips inside my head which rebuild my sense of hearing, this is called a cochlear implant. You remember the the Borg from Star Trek, those aliens who conquered and absorb everything inside. Well, that's me, the good news is I come for your technology and not for human life forms.

Actually, I've never seen an episode of Star Trek, but there's a reason for that television in close caption When I was a kid. I grew up profoundly deaf. I went to regular schools and I had to lip read, I didn't meet another deaf person until I was 20. Electronics were mostly audio back then, my alarm clock was my sister, Barbara, who would set her alarm and then throw something at me to wake up my hearing aids for industrial strength sledge hammer volume.

But they helped me more than they helped most people with them. I could hear music and the sound of my own voice. I've always liked the idea that technology can help make the world more human. I used to watch the stereo flash color when the music shifted and I knew it was just a matter of time before my watch could show me sound to. Did you know that hearing occurs in the brain, in your ear is a small organ called the cochlea in the cochlea is lined with thousands of receptors called hair cells.

When sound enters your ear, those hair cells, they send electrical signals to your brain and your brain then interprets that as sound. Aerosol damage is really common noise exposure, ordinary aging illness, my hair cells were damaged before I was even born. My mother was exposed to German measles when she was pregnant with me. About five percent of the world has significant hearing loss by 2050, that's expected to double to over 900 million people or one in 10, 15 years.

It's already one out of three. With a cochlear implant, computer chips do the job for the damaged carousels. Imagine a box of 16 crayons and those 16 crayons in combination have to make all of the colors in the universe. Same with the cochlear implant. I have 16 electrodes in each of my cochlea as those 16 electrodes in combination send signals to my brain representing all of the sounds in the universe. I have electronics inside and outside of my head to make that happen, including small processor magnets inside my skull and a rechargeable power source.

Radio waves transmit sound through the magnets. The number one question that I get about the cochlear implant when people hear about the magnets is whether my head sticks to the refrigerator.

No, it does not.

Anthony, thank you. Thank you. I know this because I tried hearing people assume that the deaf live in a in a perpetual state of wanting to hear because I can't imagine any other way, but I've never once wished to be hearing. I just wanted to be part of a community like me. I wanted everyone else to be deaf. I think that sense of belonging is what ultimately connects our stories and made felt incomplete. When cochlear implants first got going back in the 80s, the operation was Frankenstein monster scary.

By 2001, the procedure had evolved considerably, but it's still wiped out any natural hearing that you had, the success rate then for speech comprehension was low, maybe 50 percent. So if it didn't work, you couldn't go back. At that time, implants were also controversial in the deaf culture. Basically, it was considered the equivalent of changing the color of your skin. I held off for a while, but my hearing was going downhill fast and hearing aids were no longer helping.

So in 2003, I made the tough decision to have the cochlear implant. I just needed to stop that soul sucking cycle of loss, regardless of whether the operation worked. And I really didn't think that it would. I saw it as one last box to check off before I made the transition to being completely deaf, which a part of me wanted. Complete silence is very addictive. Maybe you've spent time in a sensory deprivation tank and you know what I mean.

Silence has mind-expanding capabilities in silence see sound when I watch a music video without sound. I can hear music in the absence of sound. My brain fills in the gaps based on the movement. I see my mind is no longer competing with the destruction of sound. It's freed up to think more creatively.

There are advantages to having bionic body parts as well. It's undeniably convenient to be able to hear and I can turn it off anytime I want.

I'm hearing when I need to be. And the rest of the time I'm not. Bionic hearing doesn't age, although external parts sometimes need replacement. It would be so cool to just automatically regenerate a damaged part like a real cyborg. But I get mine FedExed from Advanced Bionics.

Oh. I get updates downloaded into my head, it's not quite airdrop, but close.

With the cochlear implant, I can stream music from my iPod into my head without earbuds.

Recently, I went to a friend's long, tedious concert and unknown to anyone else, I listened to the Beatles for three hours and instead.

Technology has come so far, so fast, the biggest obstacle I face as a deaf person is no longer a physical barrier. It's the the way that people respond to my deafness, the outdated way people respond to my deafness, pity, patronization, even anger, because that just cancels out the human connection that technology achieves. I once had a travel roommate who had a complete temper tantrum because I didn't hear a knocking on the door when her key didn't work.

If I hadn't been there, no problem, she could get another key, but when she saw that I was there, her anger boiled over. She it was no longer about a key. It was about Dafnis stop being a good enough reason for her inconvenience or the commercial about the deaf man whose neighborhood surprised him with sign language messages from people on the street. Everyone who sent me the video told me they cried. So I asked them, well, what if he wasn't?

What if his first language was Spanish and everyone learned Spanish instead? Would you have cried? And they all said, no, they weren't crying because of the communication barrier. They were crying because the man was deaf. But I see it differently. What if the Borg showed up in that video and the Borg said Daphnis is irrelevant because that's what they say, right? Everything's irrelevant. And then the Borg assimilated the tough guy, not out of pity, not out of anger, but because he had a biological distinctiveness that the Borg wanted, including unique language capabilities.

I would much rather see that commercial. Why does thinking about ability make people so uncomfortable, you might know a play later, a movie called Children of a Lesser God by Mark Medoff that play that title actually comes from a poem by Alfred Tennyson. And I interpret that both the play and title to say that humans who are perceived as defective were made by a lesser God and live in inferior existence, while those made by the real God are superior class because God doesn't make mistakes.

In World War Two, an estimated two hundred and 75000 people with disabilities were murdered in special death camps because they didn't fit Hitler's vision of a superior race, Hitler said that he was inspired by the United States, which had enacted involuntary sterilization laws for the unfed in the early 1980s. That practice continued in more than 30 states until the 70s, with the last laugh finally repealed in 2003. So the world is not that far removed from Tennyson's poem. That tendency to make assumptions about people based on ability comes out in sentences like You're so special.

I couldn't live like that or thank God that me. Changing how people think is like getting them to break a habit before the implant, I had stopped using the voice, telephone and switch to email, but people kept leaving me a voicemail. They were upset that I wasn't reachable by phone and not returning messages. I continued to tell them my situation. It took them months to adapt. Fast forward 10 years and you know who else hated voicemail millennials and you know what they did.

They normalise texting for communication instead. Now, when it comes to ignoring voicemail, it no longer matters whether you're gas or just self-absorbed.

Millennials changed how people think about messaging, they reset the default. Can I just tell you how much I love texting? Oh, and group texts my if I have six siblings, they're all hearing, but but I don't think any less of them and we all text.

Do you know how thrilling it is to have a visual means of communication that everyone else actually uses. So I am on a mission now as a consumer of technology. I want visual options. Whenever there's audio, it doesn't matter whether I'm deaf or don't want to wake the baby. Both are equally valid. Smart designers include multiple ways to access technology, but segregating. That access under accessibility, that's just hiding it from mainstream users in order to change how people think, we need to be more than accessible, we need to be connected.

Apple did this recently and my iPhone, it automatically displays a visual transcript of my voicemail right next to the audio button. I couldn't turn it off even if I wanted to. You know what else? Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime no longer stay closed. Captioned for the hearing impaired, they say subtitles on or off with a list of languages underneath, including English. Technology has come so far, our mind set just needs to catch up. Resistance is futile.

You have been assimilated. Thank you. Support for TED Talks Daily comes from ODU, meet Dan Dan built a bike company, but his old software made it impossible to keep up with demand. It took so much time just to make things work, it was essentially sucking the life out of him.

Then he found ODU O2 automated his business by integrating inventory, manufacturing, accounting and marketing. Now he can meet the demand and grow even faster with the e-commerce app. Thanks to ODU, Dan doubled his revenue and can focus on what matters. Go to Oju Dotcom head to start a free trial. That's odd. Oh, dotcom flash Ted.

Ted talks daily, is supported by Expensify, the most widely used expense management platform in the world with more than 10 million users. Time is precious, and Expensify makes it easy to manage your expenses, bills, invoices and business travel all in one place so you can focus your time elsewhere. You can even get reimbursed as soon as the next day. Whether you are a business of two or two thousand, Expensify is made for you because you weren't born to do expenses.

Head over to Expensify dotcoms, Lactaid to get started on your free trial. PR ex.