#02: Our golden age

My opening and closing speeches from this year's Sana AI Summit

It’s been exactly two weeks since Sana AI Summit, the conference my company runs once a year inside a converted church in central Stockholm. The premise is simple: create an immersive experience for 500 humans to reflect on the impact of artificial intelligence across disciplines, ignoring all enterprise conference tropes in the process. (This is how I got to meet jeanette winterson. I invited her to speak at last year’s Summit.)

As the Summit’s MC, my job—across four hours and nine sessions—is to tell our guests a story. Why are they gathered to hear from speakers ranging from the physicist David Deutsch and chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov to founders like Sari Azout and artists like Claire L. Evans? What is the point?

Photo credits: Lucas Marinus and Linda Broström

This year’s Summit began with a 10-minute prelude video montage of iconic individuals reflecting on the impact of technology. David Bowie, Jane Goodall, Steve Jobs, Jeanette Winterson…and right at the end, a clip of Patti Smith from 1978, where she says the following:

Everybody says it's finished.

Oh, art's finished.

Rock n roll is dead, and you know God is dead.

Fuck that.

This is my chance on the world.

I didn't live back there in Mesopotamia.

I wasn't there in the Garden of Eden.

No, I wasn't there with Emperor Han.

I'm here right now, and I want right now to be the greatest time.

This is my golden age.

This is our golden age.

I'm not there in the past.

I'm not there in the future.

I'm right here, and this is the time to make it great.

And if each generation would realize that the time to be great is right now when they're alive.

You see what I mean.

The the time to flower is now.

This is the essence of it, really—call us sentimental! But I can’t hear or read these words from Patti without feeling something stirring inside of me. Especially when I think about humans and AI and this unknown future unfolding before us. We can’t be great in silos. We need each other.

Opening speech

Closing reflections

Excuse the loud video thumbnails. The curse of bending to the YouTube algorithm!

I’ll be back with more written words soon. The Summit has given me a lot to think (and feel) about.

Thanks so much for reading,
Lauren

PS Watch Claire L. Evans’ and Sari Azout’s keynotes. They were exceptional.