What You May Have Missed at Thesis: 2027

Hello, and happy Sunday. On Thursday, 400 of you joined us at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn for our first conference, Thesis: 2027, and thousands more tuned in online. Across 25 sessions, we worked to answer one question from Dan Shipper: What does great human work look like after automation? Paid subscribers can watch every session now on Every TV, and we’ll release them on our YouTube channel over the coming weeks. Here are some of the highlights. On Tuesday, we’ll start sharing our top insights with a recap of Dan’s closing keynote.—Kate Lee

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Notes from Thesis: 2027

Setting the stage, Dan opened the day by addressing the shock that writers, then artists, then programmers, and now mathematicians have felt watching AI do work that took them years to master. But the people in the room, he argued, were among the few who see AI “not as a loss of who we are, but as an expansion of what humans can be, build, and achieve.” We’d brought them together, “from frontier labs, from tech companies, from startups, from schools, and art studios,” to work out what that expansion looks like in practice, and over the next eight hours, that’s what we tried to do.

Three floors, three kinds of conversations

From there, the day played out across three floors in Pioneer Works, an arts and science center in Red Hook, Brooklyn, founded by artist Dustin Yellin, and each had its own feel.