A MacArthur "genius" on why the only question for AI is whether we still matter.
Erudite, warm, novelistic, commanding. A genuine philosopher-storyteller.
Rebecca Goldstein is a philosopher and novelist, a MacArthur Fellow and a recipient of the National Humanities Medal. Her books include Plato at the Googleplex and 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, and she has spent a career refusing the split between rigorous philosophy and storytelling. Her new book, The Mattering Instinct, arrived in January 2026.
Her subject is the human drive to matter, which she treats as something close to a biological imperative — the will to survive, in a self-reflective creature, becoming the will to count for something. She argues it is the engine behind our best achievements and our ugliest conflicts, and she draws a hard line between being connected and mattering. You can be surrounded by people and still feel inconsequential.
She is at the Summit because philosophy is the discipline that has spent millennia living productively with questions that cannot be settled, which makes it the deepest available lineage for a weekend about unknowing.
You'll take away: something that outlasts the weekend. Most AI anxiety is really a mattering question posing as technology design. Goldstein gives you the vocabulary to name that — about your own work, and about whoever comes to you worried that their contribution is being quietly written out.
ONE READ — "The Mattering Instinct," Edge.org. The original conversation that became the book.