In this 90-minute immersive seminar, we explore a near future where artificial intelligence is embedded throughout our everyday experiences, material and metaphorical touch-points. With AI as ubiquitous as air, how does education transform? Who teaches? Who learns? What counts as knowledge, and how is it exchanged, assessed, or even resisted?

This isn’t a panel or a podcast. General Seminar is an active, collaborative workshop—a space to engage your imagination and critical thinking by producing Design Fiction artifacts that emerge from this provocation.

Through break-out sessions with your fellow attendees, worksheets, and group discussions, we'll explore how education can evolve — perhaps should evolve — in a contingent world where the imposition of things like AI, algorithmic learning, and new roles — even epistemologies — are all around us. We’ll consider the implications of AI in education, from the mundane to the radical, and how these changes might affect our lives.

Together, we will generate fictional-yet-feels-real artifacts like school supply catalogs from 2035, feedback reports from AI tutors, enrollment contracts for synthetic apprenticeship platforms, or even rebellious zines authored by students resisting algorithmic learning norms.

Through creating and reflecting on these tangible glimpses of possible futures, we’ll explore not only what education might become — but what values, assumptions, and power dynamics are embedded within those possibilities.

You sit down with the morning paper and a coffee and buttered roll you got at the corner bodega. You flip to the classifieds, wondering what you'll get up to today.

Who needs what you got — and what have they got in trade?

Join us for The Future of Jobs where we'll be exploring a near future where what counts as a job somehow looks different than it does today. Who's to say what that might be? Blacksmiths are in high demand, as are master welders, agricultural engineers, and folks adept at training athlete models for simulated sports (yes..models meaning LLMs).

The future of jobs/work/value creation is already a strange, shifting terrain, and imagining into that through Design Fiction is exactly the kind of thing that makes General Seminar such fun and by “fun” I mean an important valuable platform for imagining into actionable intelligent opportunities.

We'll have our usual break-out sessions where you and your fellow attendees will use worksheets, and group discussion to time-travel and explore how “work” may evolve in a possible future full of..well, all the things you can and cannot imagine.

You will generate fictional-yet-feels-real artifacts like a classified “help wanted!” ad that represents what it means to create value in some possible future — value that is meaningful on both sides of the value exchange ledger.

Experts used to be experts. They had degrees and pedigrees and came with fancy alphabet soup of pre- and post-nominals to asset qualifications, to astound and to amaze. Some even earned those things. I grew up in that world and I still rely on it. But I wonder..with friends who have a zillion followers and dispense “influence” (admittedly innocuous influence) might ‘Influence’ become the new ‘Expertise’? And if so..like..now what??

Seriously. Now what the f**k?

Eh? A super compelling and provocative angle — and just the kind of slimey slippery cultural shift that Design Fiction can make visible through artifacts. Let's go rooting around into the fuzziness between authority, trust, charisma, and credibility, which are all very live questions right now, especially as we see expertise being redefined in real time on TikTok, YouTube, and AI-generated content platforms.

Another 90-minute immersive session, we’ll explore a world where traditional gatekeepers of knowledge—academics, institutions, credentialed professionals—have been displaced (or at least rivaled) by a new class of networked authorities: influencers, charismatic AI personalities, and branded “knowledgepreneurs.”

Expertise isn’t what it used to be. In a reality saturated with persuasive media, micro-celebrities, and frictionless information, credibility is increasingly a matter of style, reach, and vibe rather than formal credentials. In this General Seminar, we’ll explore what that means—by making artifacts from futures where this is simply the normal-ordinary-everyday.