General Seminar

Upcoming General Seminars

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The Future of Education
(Imagine the future of education...through a course catalog from the future!)
2 AVAILABLE TIMES:
Tue, Apr 15, 2025, 16:00 UTC
Tue, Apr 15, 2025, 22:00 UTC
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.
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The Future of Jobs
(Imagine the future of jobs...through a classified ad from the future!)
2 AVAILABLE TIMES:
Tue, Apr 22, 2025, 16:00 UTC
Tue, Apr 22, 2025, 22:00 UTC
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.
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Science Fiction is Strategy? WTF!?
(An inquiry into speculative foresight, entrepreneurial imagination, and design fiction.)
2 AVAILABLE TIMES:
Tue, Apr 29, 2025, 16:00 UTC
Tue, Apr 29, 2025, 22:00 UTC
Entrepreneurs write science fiction now.

Not the entertainment kind.

Not to dream.

But to strategize. I mean — what is that even?

And I don't even know if they realize what they're doing, to be honest.

You've got a generation of entrepreneurs who grew up with a vision of the future that was shaped by science fiction. I mean..why else would the man-child billionaire of the 21st century, who grew up watching Star Trek, and feeling the echos of Apollo 11, and the Space Shuttle and dreamed into the speculative futures of Terminator and HAL, and Her — I mean..am I making my point here? They spend their stacks on building rocket ships, and non-human intelligences, and gewgaws that they basically saw while sitting in their suburban Cineplexes. Of all things..that could be a basis for a future we are inhabiting..this is it??

Heading to Mars isn't destiny. It's a childhood dream, and I mean that in the most pedestrian sense of things. That childhood dream could have been entirely different were the context that shapes what is dreamed been different.

Which, like...raises some questions. Some practical questions. Because I'm kinda done with the whole "what if" thing. I mean, I get it. It's a great way to think about the future. But what if we could actually do something with that thinking? What if we could use science fiction as a tool for strategic thinking and decision-making? What if we could be operationally better at using imagination, and foresight, and design fiction, and science fiction to help create strategic visions of the future? Futures we'd actually want to inhabit?

Can we become better at building habitable worlds that draw people into them rather than agonizing about the other guys' futures?

Let's discuss! Get your ticket now!
What Is General Seminar?
GENERAL SEMINAR IS A 90 MINUTE GENERATIVE DESIGN FICTION SPRINT WHERE WORK GROUPS IDEATE FUTURES THROUGH RAPID ARTIFACT CREATION. IT IS A WORKSHOP PLATFORM DEVELOPED BY NEAR FUTURE LABORATORY, USED IN OUR WORKSHOPS ALL OVER THE WORLD.
EACH GENERAL SEMINAR IS FOCUSED ON ONE TOPIC AT THE VANGUARD OF CULTURAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS. PAST TOPICS INCLUDE AI, BLOCKCHAIN, CRYPTO, DAOs, FUTURE OF WORK, CIRCULAR ECONOMY, METAVERSE, AUGMENTED REALITY, WEB3, SOLARPUNK.
WE CHOSE TOPICS THAT ARE DELIBERATELY AT THE VANGUARD OF CULTURAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND FOR WHICH THERE ARE NO ANSWERS..ONLY DISCUSSIONS, POSSIBILITIES, AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR APPLIED INTELLIGENCE & CREATIVITY.

Previous General Seminars