What if AI is not here actually to replace us, but to remind us who we actually are?
That was the question at the heart of Kim Carson’s Long Now Talk. In “Inspired by Intelligence: Purpose and Creativity in the AI Era,” Carson, a creative technologist and futurist, challenged us to avoid the easy narratives of tech-driven utopia and dystopia, charting a course through those two extremes that made the case for AI not as a way to make humans unnecessary but to emphasize our most important creative capacities.
For Carson, AI is a sort of tool for thought — a mirror that we can use to re-inspire ourselves towards greater creativity. Accompanied by video art made using the SORA text-to-video model by Charles Lindsay, she made the case that AI could be used not just for automating labor but also for reclaiming human agency. That means using these new technological modes as enablers for human thought and action, while recognizing their gaps, too — the questions about ourselves that only we can answer, no matter how sophisticated our technology becomes.
Throughout her talk, Carson expounded upon the power of vulnerability. The ability to use AI tools to help us reconnect with ourselves, to jar us into seeing our own identities and creative capacities in new lights, is one that will fundamentally help us change our world. In Carson’s view, vulnerability and creativity are the necessary precursors to any sort of technological innovation.
As she ended her remarks, Kim made one final note on how we can make a better world collaboratively and creatively: our society does not need “more optimization, it needs more imagination.”
This talk was presented April 22, 02025 at The Interval at Long Now in San Francisco.
Episode notes: https://ift.tt/oG8sIWw
This talk is part of Long Now Talks.
Launched by Stewart Brand in 02003, Long Now Talks has invited more than 400 leading thinkers to share their civilization-scale ideas with a live audience and millions around the globe tuning in to our podcast and videos. Long Now Talks are brought to you by The Long Now Foundation, which has spent the last 25 years igniting cultural imagination around long-term thinking.
By inspiring thought and conversation about how we’ve been shaped by the last 10,000 years and what might be in store for us over the next 10,000 years, Long Now Talks seek to expand our collective sense of the present moment. Long Now Talks cover futurism and speculative fiction; time, nature, and contemplative practices; the intersection of the humanities and sciences; the evolution of counterculture to cyberculture; cultural imagination, land art and public monuments; and of course, long-term thinking and being a good ancestor.
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