Choose Our Future With AI

Dave Toole, H Corps co-founder, opens with a frame that runs through the whole day. When the Model T arrived, society had to invent labor laws — "young people doing sweatshop kind of jobs," as he put it. When social media arrived, we're still inventing the norms. AI is here, and in Dave's words, it's "moving faster than us humans can digest." A trillion dollars on AI infrastructure this year; $29 billion to feed every American. "Are we making the right choices?" His one-line ask of the room: "We got to put the human in the center."

Marin Wilts, songwriting professor at ASU, picks up the thread by inviting the room to "imagine a future where AI makes a room like this — one of the most powerful governing bodies in the country." Jorge Costa, Marin's collaborator at ASU, brings out the H Corps anthem — "Heart and mind awake / Human agency still starts with us" — performed live, the lyrics drafted with an LLM and re-recorded with human performers.

The morning panel — Gary Bolles (Singularity University), Liv Levin, Marti Grimminck (International Connector) — explores agency in practice. Liv's wave metaphor lands as the shareable frame: "You can let the wave hit you, or you can ride it."

A youth-journalism Q&A with Greta Reich (former Editor in Chief of the Stanford Daily, headed to the Wall Street Journal) and Ethan Toven-Lindsey, who oversees KQED's newsroom and teaches at Berkeley J-School. The Stanford Daily ran an AI chatbot on its website. Berkeley's J-School surveyed graduate students and found students, not faculty, were the ones pushing back hardest on AI use.

Then the day's anchor story: Ethan Toven-Lindsey, as a young reporter in rural Oregon during the Iraq war, had to knock on the doors of families who'd lost a son or a daughter. "1 out of 10 will slam the door. 9 out of 10 want to share the story of their son and daughter, because they want to celebrate the person that existed in the world." No generative model replaces what happens in that doorway.

Tim Olsen at KQED lays out three pillars of the station's response: cover the AI ecosystem locally, double down on media literacy through KQED's education team, and commit to convenings — "we'll remember the conversations we're having human-to-human, much more than our scrolling that goes by." Kevin Kelly, executive director of the California Community Colleges Digital Center, introduces Vision 2030 and the September Futures Summit.

Dave Toole closes the day with a personal story. He'd never written song lyrics. For his daughter's wedding, he gave an LLM the details of her life and got back a draft. Then he and Jorge replaced every digital element of the song with human performers. "AI was a coach for me that helped me build my confidence that I could do something I had never done before."

That's the day, and it's also the thesis: AI as a coach, not the performer. The room finished with cookies on the deck and a manifesto in progress.