Seven weeks to go until the #WorldBeautifulBusinessForum in Athens—the ten-year anniversary festival of
@houseofbeautifulbusiness
And 42.195 kilometers from Marathon to Athens—the distance Pheidippides ran in 490 BC to announce victory over the Persians, inspiring the name and spirit of today’s race.
At the Forum, we will run our own “AI Democracy Marathon”—one of ten experiential program tracks exploring what it means to live and lead beautifully in a more-than-human world.
Democracy is messy, friction-filled, and agonizingly slow. Yet arguably, the most effective system for enabling prosperity and human flourishing.
Or does it?
What changes when the demos expands to include non-human intelligence—nature and AI alike? Is there such a thing as a more-than-human democracy?
And will we move toward distributed intelligence—or toward concentrated authority, whether embodied in human founders or algorithmic oracles?
In Athens, we will explore these questions through a “plenary in motion”—over exactly 42.195 kilometers. Through discussions, debates, workshops, and walks across the city—from the Pnyx, the birthplace of democracy, to Exarchia, Athens’ “anarchist” neighborhood—we will think on our feet.
And while the humans rest (or party), we will hand the conversation over to the “AIssembly,” our night shift of AI agents. This cohort—Plato, Cleopatra, Muhammad, Scheherazade, Ada, Fyodor, Hannah, Bob, Audrey, Peter, Whanganui and even an octopus—will synthesize, interrogate, and extend the day’s discourse.
By morning, the humans resume.
The Marathon is open to all but features a group of “scholarly runners,” including Jon Alexander (on citizenship), Roger Berkowitz (on solidarity and friendship), Claudia Chwalisz (on deliberative tech), Sean White (on human-centered AI), James Bridle (on the expanded demos), Payal Arora (on inclusion), Miriam Meckel (on post-Enlightenment consciousness), Larry Irving (on media), and Lisa Witter (on political leadership), among others.
With thanks to our partners
@artificialityinstitute and curator Monique van Dusseldorp.
🍋 And now go—or run—and get your ticket, in link-in-bio
