Long Now

"The world is terrible, and the world is better," Stefan Sagmeister said. "Both can be true." It all depends on perspective. In his Long Now Talk, Finally, something good, Sagmeister urged us to zoom out. The faster the news cycle spins, and the more we scroll, the more we catastrophize. Meanwhile, the things that improve tend to do so slowly and quietly. In this visually stunning talk, Sagmeister takes us on a journey through his body of work, transforming long-term data on human progress into striking works of art.

Indy Johar pointed to the first photographs of the whole Earth taken from space. “This was the moment the planet became self-aware." This planetary consciousness came with new responsibility, he argued. The task before us is not simply to survive, but to reimagine civilization as a planetary project. As climate and ecological instability creates extreme whiplash effects, we will find it increasingly difficult to predict, prepare, or govern at a global scale. And as artificial intelligence reshapes labor and value, Johar urged us all to reevaluate what it means to be human. So what does that require in a time of such intense, cascading volatility? Indy’s answer is civilizational optionality: the breathing room that keeps futures open when shocks compound and our fates are systematically coupled. As humans, we can't know everything — it's a cognitive impossibility. “But there is a beautiful liberation in accepting our partial knowing,” he said. Reframing this limitation as possibility opens us up to more curiosity and “ways of being that are about tenderness, tentativeness, and care.” Johar imagines a future that leverages human–machine systems that expand our civilizational capacity for complex discourse and problem solving. Intelligence, in this view, is a conversational field: a meta-capacity for coordination, dialogue, and collective sense-making across sectors, species, and systems. Climate cascades will not be local; our planetary fates are entangled. Meeting this reality demands an approach to civilization that is capable of responding to volatility and holding uncertainty. As Johar said with a smile: “It is time to have a fucking worldview.”

Kate Crawford’s Long Now Talk traces an historical arc from Renaissance perspective to AI image models, illustrating how shifts in representational power shape empires, economies—even our shared sense of reality. During the talk, Crawford gives a tour through her detailed artwork Calculating Empires. Through examples ranging from Liebig’s critique of agriculture “robbing” soil nutrients, to Faraday’s latex insulation that devastated rubber forests, Crawford shows how technologies have long created “metabolic rifts”: systems that extract more than they regenerate.  Don't miss the closing Q&A, where host Kevin Kelly asks Crawford what responsible, non-extractive AI might look like. 

What if the solutions to humanity’s greatest challenges — on Earth and beyond — have already been invented by nature? In this forward-looking talk, evolutionary biologist and astrobiologist Dr. Lynn Rothschild explores how life’s patterns, materials, and mechanisms, refined over billions of years, can serve as a blueprint for building better futures on Earth and other planets. Drawing on insights from deep time, Dr. Rothschild will open the doors to “nature’s hardware store” — a vast, largely untapped reservoir of biological strategies available to scientists, engineers, and innovators. From self-healing materials and bio-inspired architecture to regenerative systems for space exploration, she reveals how biology is shaping the frontiers of technology and inspiring bold, surprisingly practical solutions to complex problems. Grounded in astrobiology and evolutionary insight, this talk invites us to rethink innovation through the lens of life itself and to explore what’s possible when we tap into nature’s storehouse of intelligence to solve the challenges of tomorrow. Lynn J. Rothschild is a research scientist at NASA Ames and Adjunct Professor at Brown University and Stanford University working in astrobiology, evolutionary biology and synthetic biology. Rothschild's work focuses on the origin and evolution of life on Earth and in space, and in pioneering the use of synthetic biology to enable space exploration. From 2011 through 2019 Rothschild served as the faculty advisor of the award-winning Stanford-Brown iGEM (international Genetically Engineered Machine Competition) team, exploring innovative technologies such as biomining, mycotecture, BioWires, making a biodegradable UAS (drone) and an astropharmacy. Rothschild is a past-president of the Society of Protozoologists, fellow of the Linnean Society of London, The California Academy of Sciences and the Explorer’s Club and lectures and speaks about her work widely.

Blaise Agüera y Arcas’s talk took us on a journey through What is Intelligence?, his groundbreaking new work connecting the evolutionary dots between life, computation, and symbiogenesis. He explores how, in our symbiotic world, things combine to make larger things all the time. We might think of humanity in terms of the individual — but we're already part of everything we're creating, which is in turn co-creating us. In the story of technology and humanity, are we distinct from the technologies that we make? Agüera y Arcas' cuts through the essentialist dogma with a functionalist view: Biological computing — computation through DNA, RNA, and proteins — is not a strange outcropping of life but its very nature. Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a VP and Fellow at Google, where he is the CTO of Technology & Society and founder of Paradigms of Intelligence (Pi). Pi is an organization working on basic research in AI and related fields, especially the foundations of neural computing, active inference, sociality, evolution, and artificial life. During his tenure at Google, Blaise has innovated on-device machine learning for Android and Pixel; invented Federated Learning, an approach to decentralized model training that avoids sharing private data; and founded the Artists + Machine Intelligence program.