tbd/con update #4: last call, four days left to pitch
woohoo!
We've got a pile of submissions now, and the review crew is reading through them as they land.
If you've got something half-formed and haven't sent it yet, this is your week. Call for pitches closes at the end of the day this Friday, August 14.
As a reminder, you don’t need a finished talk to pitch – just a real question you're stuck on, something you're building, or something you want a room full of journalists, technologists and researchers to help you think through.
If you need some inspiration, we’ve kept a running list of the questions people are sending in with their pitches, and it's turned into the best part of reading submissions. A few that have stayed with us:
- What happens to a society where AI can out-earn a human, on average, without trying?
- What's this era's version of “Lotus Notes*,” the tool nobody will remember by name in forty years, but that quietly rewires an entire economy underneath everyone?
- If AI keeps pushing productivity up, are we fine with that happening with zero corresponding effort to even out who benefits?
- Is language actually knowledge, or have we just gotten very impressed by fluent sentence completion?
- What happens when running an unrestricted model at scale, anonymously, costs next to nothing, and anyone can do it?
- Who are the people opting out of AI entirely, and what are they doing instead to meet needs that everyone else now hands to a chatbot?
- What does operations management look like when the person in charge has never had to learn what the engineers used to know?
- Do we end up owning our own AI agents, or do the platforms?
- How does AI avoid repeating the extractive playbook on the Global South, and what would it actually mean to build that relationship horizontally instead?
- Which companies make it through the Mythos era, and which ones don't?
Got one of your own? Submit your pitch before Friday. The four tracks we're looking for are thought, information, practice, and garage. If you’re not sure where your question fits, pitch it anyway.
If you’ve already pitched, you should be hearing from the review crew soon. We’ll be nailing down the schedule later this month and will announce the program by early September.
See everyone on gather.town September 23-24.
More soon,
Madison, David, Zig and Patrick