Artificiality Summit 2025 Program

What if intelligence is not a single property, but a spectrum of forms — biological, cultural, and synthetic? In his new book What Is Intelligence?, Blaise Agüera y Arcas argues for a radically plural view, showing how minds emerge through interaction, pattern, and scale. His keynote invites us to see AI not as an imitation of human thought, but as part of a larger story of diverse intelligences co-evolving with us.

This session explores the evolving nature of creativity in an era defined by collaborative networks, cultural remix, and synthetic co-authors. From songwriting and storytelling to product design and AI-powered media, we trace how deeply individual acts of creativity are now shaped by broader systems of influence and information, and ask how new forms of authorship emerge when ideas flow across people, machines, and cultures.

Provided by one of Bend’s favorite restaurants: Barrio.

How should we think about how we each individually are teaching AI? Giving us an accessible framework to navigate the enormous impact of AI upon human culture, values, and the flow of information, De Kai shows us that society can not only survive the AI revolution, but also flourish in a new world where we all play our part in a more humane, compassionate, and understanding society — alongside our artificial children.

What if large language models could change the very way we come to agreement? In this social experiment, Jenna Fizel of IDEO uses an LLM to help us co-author a vision for human-AI collaboration, shifting the conditions of how collective meaning takes shape. The outcome might be awesome, boring, weird, or something else entirely — but the point is the experience of finding new ways to make societal-scale decisions.

AI may well completely reframe what a mind can be. In this session, philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel navigates the blurred boundaries of consciousness, pushing us past quick judgments to reckon with the moral ambiguity of how and why we assume minds exist. Together, we explore the disorienting, uncanny, and generative spaces that open when meaning meets the machine.

What if we think of intelligence as distributed across the planet, biologically and technically? Benjamin Bratton reframes AI within ecological and geopolitical systems, showing how synthetic cognition, climate, and computation intertwine. A closing keynote that asks us to see planetary intelligence not as metaphor, but as the scale at which our futures will be decided.

Provided by one of Bend’s favorite restaurants: Shimshon.

Scaling shapes the world we share, spreading patterns of thought, design, and culture across systems and societies. Jamer Hunt and Adam Cutler join Helen and Dave to explore how scaling can become an act of imagination: what values, practices, and forms of care we choose to amplify, and how human-synthetic creativity might point toward new kinds of growth worth multiplying.