Since launching in May 2014 Arc has held eight events in five cities on two continents (and on board a ship). Over 600 leaders have joined us for unique evenings of talk, discussion, debate, and problem-solving – plus exceptional meals, wine, and arts and science programs.
Arc guests include leaders and thinkers from health, IT, biomedicine, business, law, policy, advocacy, the media and the arts.
The ideas that people come up with range from the bizarre to the beautiful. Here are some sample comments from our most recent San Francisco event, discussing the future of humans and technology, as recorded by scribes at each table:
Human created problems need human engineered solutions, we are already evolving ourselves to address the problems we have caused in our attempts to advance.
Concept of narrative and story is most important in the future, true wisdom not just data.
In the future our almost pathological individuality will give rise to a 'neo-collectivism’. It will be immoral to withhold data that, when aggregated, can help find cures and solutions to human suffering.
It is the social interactions and shifts in cultural expectation that will have the biggest impact in the future: more than politics or technology.
We will see the rise of machine-assisted empathy. We will see the rise of the “the quantified soul”. We will see increased tools and technologies to lose the self and seek a more tribal experience. We will be nodes in a sensor network, alive in virtual space, you can try out almost anything before you choose, before you make a permanent commitment.
I’m an optimist. I think cancer can be cured in ten years. But I worry about the environment, how long it will take to fix.