READ ALOUD: Dear AI: We’re not here to stop you. We’re here to guide you, dance with you, hold you accountable, and ensure that whatever world we co-create is more human, more just, more alive.

Let’s ease into this. What are your fears? Energy? Creativity? Consolidation of power? Surveillance?

“Hopes & Fears” opener?

Story vignette: “playing the wrong game.”

You ever get the feeling we’re playing the wrong game? Like, somewhere along the way, we got tricked into thinking that being human means running the most advanced mental software possible—hyper-intellectual, hyper-analytical, hyper-yang, optimizing everything like a bunch of flesh-and-bone Excel sheets.

And yet, for all that brain power, we still trip over our own feet, fall in love with the wrong people, and laugh until we cry at stupid internet memes. That’s the part AI doesn’t get.

That’s the part that maybe we don’t even fully get anymore.

What if all this progress—this age of AI, automation, and algorithms—isn’t actually about making us think faster, compute harder, or win at capitalism? What if it's the opposite?

What if it’s about reminding us to lean into the things AI can’t do?

The list of what makes us unique is getting real short: laughing, crying, kissing, getting lost in the woods, breaking into spontaneous dance, feeling music so deeply that it rearranges our atoms.

Maybe the next evolution of humanity isn’t about being better machines—it’s about being worse at being machines and way better at being animals.

Because here’s the thing: AI is already smarter than you at math, logic, extracting patterns from data and playing chess. But it still doesn’t know how to dream. It doesn’t know what it feels like to wake up at 3AM with a deep, gut-wrenching longing for something you can’t name. It doesn’t know how to sit in a room full of strangers and feel the unspoken electric current of a shared experience.

What do you refuse to give up?

What do you need from AI right now?