The Imagining Summit

Join us on October 12-14, 2024 in Bend, Oregon for a 42 hour retreat dedicated to Imagining a Hopeful Future with AI, presented in partnership with the Bend Entrepreneur Lab and The Haven.

At the Imagining Summit, our goal is productive imagination—we will envisage the possibilities that AI gives us to extend beyond current human experience. Today we catch glimpses of AI’s ability to amplify our creativity, knowledge, connection, and collective intelligence but there’s a need to make this future more concrete, tangible, believable. This salon-style summit will be highly collaborative and creative as we shift perspectives and imagine a hopeful future with AI.

Together, we will craft a vision and a new design philosophy for human-machine collaboration—in which AI serves as a Mind for our Minds, amplifying humanity's creativity, culture, knowledge, trust, values, fun, play, and understanding of the world and of each other. We will synthesize this work into a collectively authored report shared after the Summit, with the hope of catalyzing change.

We acknowledge the profound, even existential, risks presented by adopting AI. We reject the utopian AI rhetoric, fear Big Tech's fantasy to make machines that replace us, and worry about the impact of the unthinking AI hypesters and influencers. While we believe it is important to reveal and address these problems and challenges, we also believe it is important to imagine a future which surpasses the negative.

The Imagining Summit provides an opportunity to set aside the current hype and future fears to imagine a future we can hope for. Because if we can imagine it, we have a shot at creating it.

The Imagining Summit will feature a series of conversations and collaborative sessions led by some of our favorite minds, including:

Jonathan Coulton. Musician known for his eclectic catalog of masterful songwriting on subjects from zombies and mad scientists to sad parents and dissatisfied software engineers. He was the house musician for the NPR show Ask Me Another and is the host and namesake of an annual floating nerd convention called JoCo Cruise.
Adam Cutler. Founding member of IBM Design and one of the first three Distinguished Designers at IBM. For his Distinguished Designer mission, Adam is driving development of IBM’s point of view on the practice of AI Design. In addition to leading the creation of IBM’s AI design language, he is providing artifacts and education that integrate AI, design and design thinking to assist others in bringing responsible, human-centered experiences to AI-driven solutions.
Katie Davis. Associate Professor at the University of Washington (UW), Director of the UW Digital Youth Lab and author of three books, including Technology’s Child: Digital Media’s Role in the Ages and Stages of Growing Up. In each of her books, Katie aims to make sense of the often-confusing landscape of research and media messages about kids and technology.
Jamer Hunt. Vice Provost for Transdisciplinary Initiatives at The New School (2016-present) and author of Not to Scale: How the Small Becomes Large, the Large Becomes Unthinkable, and the Unthinkable Becomes Possible, a book that repositions scale as a practice-based framework for analyzing broken systems and navigating complexity.
Josh Lovejoy. Designer at Google, where he focuses on the UX of trust in personalization systems. He is motivated by a restless curiosity about how our actions as individuals might better align with our values, especially those values that too-often "go without saying.” Previously, Josh was Head of Design for Microsoft’s Ethics & Society team, led UX for Google’s People + AI Research initiative, architected Amazon’s unified design system for online shopping experiences, and co-founded a startup focused on eSports journalism.
Don Norman. Famous for “Norman Doors”: doors that are confusing to open. He keeps changing fields—and his career is too rich to describe quickly. First, as an electrical engineer, then a mathematical psychologist, which became Cognitive Psych. He helped start the world's first department of Cognitive Science at UC San Diego, helped invent Human Computer Interaction, and served as VP of Advanced Technology at Apple. He's an educator, impacting students throughout the world through his lectures and books, including Design of Everyday Things and Design for a Better World.
Steven Sloman. Teaching at Brown since 1992, he studies higher-level cognition. He is a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the American Psychological Society, the Eastern Psychological Association, and the Psychonomic Society. Along with scientific papers and editorials, his published work includes a 2005 book Causal Models: How We Think about the World and Its Alternatives, a 2017 book The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone co-authored with Phil Fernbach, and the forthcoming Righteousness: How Humans Decide.
Barbara Tversky. An active Emerita Professor of Psychology at Stanford and Professor of Psychology at Columbia Teachers College. She is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the Cognitive Science Society, the Society for Experimental Psychology, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Science, and a recipient of the Kampe de Feriat Prize. Her research has spanned memory, categorization, language, spatial cognition, event perception and cognition, diagrammatic reasoning, sketching, creativity, design, and gesture. She is the author of Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought.

These conversation catalysts will bring rich and thought-provoking ideas to help lead all collaborators in an exploration of the possible.

We look forward to bringing together a creative, diverse group of imaginative thinkers and innovators who share our hope for the future and are crazy enough to think we can collectively change things.

We’re excited to welcome our community in person. And we highly encourage you to extend your stay to enjoy beautiful Bend, Oregon.

Details

Due to limited space, The Imagining Summit will be invite-only event. Please submit your interest below and we'll be in touch.
Location: Bend, Oregon
Opening at 5pm Saturday October 12.
Closing at 11am Monday October 14.
Fee: $1,000. Limited scholarships are available.
Sponsorships are welcome and will help extend our reach and include more people.