Cambridge, MA – MIT Media Lab – EmTech Future. Few cultural critics can diagnose digital rot with the ferocious precision, moral clarity, and linguistic flair of Cory Doctorow. Taking the stage for the session titled Rethinking Our Relationship with AI, Doctorow, an activist, author, and special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was interviewed by
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The Post-GPS Battlefield – Navigating in the Dark with Atomic Magnetometers
Cambridge, MA – MIT Media Lab – EmTech Future. Picture a modern commercial airliner cruising at 38,000 feet through pitch-black skies over the Mediterranean. The ride is smooth, the cockpit instruments are calm, and suddenly an automated, mechanical voice pierces the darkness: “Terrain, Terrain. Pull Up”. The flight crew faces a terrifying split-second dilemma: are
Quantum-Centric Supercomputing: Bridging the Divide Between Theory and Utility
Cambridge, MA – MIT Media Lab – EmTech Future. Quantum computing has long suffered from an exhausting public relations cycle: on one side lies the distant theoretical promise of world-altering supremacy; on the other, the sobering reality of noisy, fragile hardware confined to academic cleanrooms. During the session titled Quantum Convergence, Jerry Chow, IBM Fellow
Escaping Flatland: Biological World Models and the Laplace Engine
Cambridge, MA – MIT Media Lab – EmTech Future. More than two centuries ago, the French polymath Pierre-Simon Laplace conceptualized a powerful scientific thought experiment that would become known to history as Laplace’s Demon. If an intellect could know the exact positions and forces acting on every particle in the universe, nothing would be uncertain;
How Will We Pay AI Agents? Exploring AiFi with Lincoln Murr
For thirty years, the web was built for eyeballs: human fingers tapping credit card numbers into static forms, clicking ‘I am not a robot,’ and waiting for a bank to approve thirty bucks. But that web just slipped into the minority. Today, over 57% of all internet traffic isn’t human—it’s autonomous AI agents scraping, computing,
Systems of Systems: Engineering Clean Baseload Power for the Digital Beast
Cambridge, MA – MIT Media Lab – EmTech Future. As the world wrestles with record-shattering global temperatures, a sobering technological contradiction has taken center stage: the rapid expansion of modern artificial intelligence is running on an immense supply of fossil fuel power. In her compelling keynote address, Evelyn Wang, Vice President for Energy and Climate
The Reasoning Dividend: How Post-Training Models Are Upending the Scientific Method
Cambridge, MA – MIT Media Lab – EmTech Future. A profound structural shift is underway inside advanced research laboratories, and it has almost nothing to do with generating conversational marketing copy. In the session titled Designing the Future, Bob Metcalfe, legendary Ethernet co-inventor and chair of the MIT Corporation, sat down with prominent venture investor
Hijacking the Castle: The Rise of Autonomous Adversarial Cyber Warfare
Cambridge, MA – MIT Media Lab – EmTech Future. In modern corporate cybersecurity, an uncomfortable truth has emerged: the bad guys adopted generative artificial intelligence faster, more aggressively, and with far fewer ethical inhibitions than corporate boardrooms. During the session titled AI x Cybersecurity, Tom Kellermann, Vice President of AI Security and Threat Research at
Beyond the Wet Lab Bottleneck: The Race to Build Biology’s Generative Engine
Cambridge, MA – MIT Media Lab – EmTech Future. Nature has spent roughly 3.8 billion years conducting the most sprawling, creative research and development campaign in history. Evolution engineered millions of functional molecular machines, intricate cellular networks, and robust organisms long before humans ever conceptualized a microscope. Yet, Flagship Labs, President Avak Kahvejian took the
Deeds, Dollars & Code: How Asset Tokenization is Rewiring the Economy with Jason Powell
For centuries, high-value ownership has been trapped behind a wall of clunky legal paperwork, illiquid secondary markets, and gatekept syndications. If you owned a piece of the Empire State Building, you were married to that asset for seven to ten years—whether you liked it or not.
That reality is dissolving. Ernst & Young projects that
Before the Greenlight: Can AI Predict the Next Blockbuster with Ivan Zhurko
If you’ve been hanging out with me since 2017, you know I’ve been tracking the collision of AI and the arts back when ‘AI video’ looked like a surrealist fever dream and ‘AI voice’ sounded like a polite but highly medicated robot. We watched static digital art evolve into generative universes, but today, we are
The 90% Code: When AI Augmentation Turns Into Human Deletion with Sonali Sharma
Across virtually every industry today, billions of dollars are flowing into artificial intelligence. Boardrooms are celebrating instant productivity gains, automated workflows, and algorithmic efficiency. But underneath the hype, a quiet crisis is taking hold.
We are adopting AI tools originally built to augment human judgment, only to watch organizations use them to replace it. Systems
Why the CLARITY Act Is Important, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer
Union Station, Washington DC: The Solana Summit: Washington x Wall Street, the dissonance between the two worlds was impossible to ignore. Outside was the slow, deliberate machinery of Capitol Hill; inside, engineers and founders were measuring latency in milliseconds and debating state machine transitions. Yet when House Majority Whip Tom Emmer took the stage with
Thoughts on the CLARITY Act – From the Whitehouse
Inside the historic architecture of Washington’s Union Station, the tension between legacy power and decentralized rails was palpable at the Solana Summit. Listening to Patrick Witt, Executive Director of the President’s Council of Advisors for Digital Assets, in conversation with Eleanor Terrett and Jacquelyn Melinek, the dialogue cut straight through typical Beltway theater to reveal
Yield on Demand: Burying Legacy Banking with Reid Cuming
Today, we are opening the hood on the invisible infrastructure quietly reshaping global finance. For decades, the financial world has operated on fragmented rails, slow settlements, opaque intermediaries, and capital locked in static accounts earning next to nothing. A pittance, dare I say!
But what if the underlying engine of money was open, instant, and
Fixing Financial Plumbing: Jay Heller on the Future of Autonomous Capital Flow
Every single day, trillions of dollars flow silently beneath the surface of the global economy—moving through governments, central banks, and massive financial institutions. But the underlying plumbing that governs these capital movements was built for a legacy era.
- What if we didn’t need to burn down the existing financial architecture to instantly make it verifiable,