Old Why, New Hunger

Robots, Falcons, and the Questions Between

on a Sunday, on a day that often expands and infuses our lives with the richness of a sacred pause, the kind only freedom from the work grind offers, I find myself in deep contemplation about these last weeks’ of events; the sheer wildness of new tech frontiers always tethered and rooted in the human directive to push beyond where we are into something ‘more’.

Dubai Future Forum did that for me. With its cutting edge convos and immersive experiences that mimicked the dreamtime of liminal space between awake and sleeplessness. A persistent, hopeful vision of waves of brightly bubbling art, flowing into conceived space, blending and bending with projection onto AI tools that formulate, seize and light up different parts of the brain, perhaps never before activated and wholly promising for the world ahead.

From soaring and floating and losing embodied grounding in VR virtual space to literally going into the spacetime of exoskeletal planets and the makings of intelligence we don’t understand yet; to the intergenerational debates even my own College of Global Futures was posing in an international, weighted space where the old clashes with the new in who has it figured out, instead of just realizing we all have an artistic bent in the mosaic that’s ever building.

In a gorgeous land of extremes, Dubai pushed, expanded and perplexed me in the greatest of ways. Molecules hanging in the air (dust, smog, impossible to tell) mingling with incense from the markets, calls to prayer saturating the interiors and calling home the embodied in the material. I felt totally safe there, held by a tech surveillance I would resist elsewhere, and found myself reorganizing what I thought I knew about privacy and protection without easy answers. The contrasts were everywhere: a robot approaching me, looking at me without eyes, while I held a falcon and felt its heartbeat, metal instead of bone. circuitry instead of sinew, the profound awkwardness of that meeting. Both asking the same question in such different tongues.

Because all of life is deeply relational. All of tech is relational. The biological and the synthetic are both asking: how do we relate? How do we want to relate? The narratives we’re building about these things create the worlds we’ll inhabit with both. They’re already blending and merging, from our feeds into our minds into our material lived realities.

How do we show up as we are, right now? Who will we be to each other, and who will we become to ourselves? How will we meet them… wisely?

New friends, barely scratching surfaces, old friends coming together, new worlds being built on scaffolding of ancient materials. I hope for more, I want more for all of us, especially as we aim to harness this moment for the benefit of All, driven by that hunger not for knowledge, but for understanding.

And Yet.

I’m very happy to sit with it now, even in the awkwardness, even in the not-knowing. The feel of a falcon’s heartbeat under my fingertips as I look him in the eye; the incandescent glow of ancient dance; stealing fire in the hissing whhuuff of a stage performer’s gas-laden plumes, this tech conversation will continue in myriad forms, dazzling us, choking us, blinding us at times in the heat of our moments, fragmented among the masses who are individual in their collectives of individuals. It’s a beautiful but humbling dance to know something of the emergent while knowing nothing of so much.

Here we are together, in the questions... in the dance… in the heartbeat… in the remix of old while we so desperately long for the freshness of what’s ahead in the preferred futures we know are possible.

To all of you constantly grappling with these questions, the ones that live out in our minds, in our lives, in the meetings with human, other-than-human, and the synthetic.. I’m deeply grateful to be here with you. You inspire me on the daily.