I’m behind on my book reviews — but I’ve been reading. One I keep coming back to is Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination by Sir Geoff Mulgan.
I’ve followed his work for a while. This one is about the state of our collective imagination. He makes the point that we’ve become very good at picturing collapse and very poor at picturing renewal. We can describe the future of technology in detail, but struggle to imagine what democracy, care, or learning might look like if they actually worked better.
He distinguishes between vision and imagination. Vision is the image on the horizon — useful, but often weightless. Imagination is the work underneath: experiments, prototypes, feedback, and the patience to turn fragments of possibility into something real.
He also notes how few institutions make room for that kind of work. Universities analyze. Governments manage. Companies optimize. Not many are in the business of imagining. So we end up with a vacuum that gets filled by dystopias or nostalgia.
Imagination doesn’t happen in isolation. It needs friction and conversation, people willing to think past the obvious. That’s what our Summit is for — a temporary commons where we can do that work together.
Having Sir Geoff join us in Bend in less than two weeks feels like a small milestone — the Artificiality Institute growing up enough to bring our first international speaker. It's exactly the kind of conversation we hoped to make possible.
Helen Edwards is a Co-Founder of Artificiality. She previously co-founded Intelligentsia.ai (acquired by Atlantic Media) and worked at Meridian Energy, Pacific Gas & Electric, Quartz, and Transpower.
