TLDR

‍The 1 week pop-up created a genuine intellectual community that balanced structure with spontaneity. Standout moments included philosophical discussions with Brendan McCord, insights on humanoid robotics from Luis Sentis, hands-on workshops, and daily workouts. Thoughtful organization, clear schedules, appropriate downtime, and staff who modeled curiosity and engagement provided a strong foundation for a range of organic, attendee organized activity. The mix of disciplines felt strangely natural, and brought together many of many of my favorite makers and thinkers in Austin. The variety of attendance options allowed people to engage at their own pace while maintaining a sense of community depth. By the end, I found myself wondering why everyday life doesn't afford this same spirit of open-minded exploration and connection - it's set a new standard for me.

Highlights

• Great flow, beautiful venue at Hotel Magdalena
• Impressed with the team's ability to set things up and keep them running smoothly
• Discovered many more people in Austin doing interesting things - EC was a wonderful filter
• The interdisciplinarity was so refreshing and yet so ‘natural’ or ‘fitting’ at the same time. I never expected someone else to bring together so many of my favorite Austin based makers & thinkers given their disparate disciplines.
• Genuinely functioned as a platform: activities happened outside the 'main' programming all the time - wish I’d stayed in the hotel to better engage with the sponteneity
• Workouts were wonderful. Diana Wilcox runs an awesome class.
• Team was fantastic - appreciated the welcome and curious questions every time walking in the door - really role modeled how participants should approach the event - and I think that carried through to the attendees
• Mix of people (hotel residents, city residents, day/week passes) definitely kept the experience fresh and made it feel more permissible to pop in and out. That said, everyone wanted to be there - even if just for the day - nobody was showing up for free food - and there were enough intense full-time folks with specialized interests / projects on telegram that, even as a part time participant, you had the sense of an undercurrent to the whole week - the sense that you could dive deeper if you wanted to at any point

Favorite Sessions/Talks

• Vitalik
  • D/ACC - this talk really clarified the ideas behind D/ACC for me with some handy examples (e.g. protective mountains = built in, passive security - we need more tech that affords the same safety). I'd never heard Vitalik speak live before - super informal, charming, and much more creative that I had expected.
• Brendan McCord
  • McCord began by speaking on the historical upsdies and downsides of powerful technologies to situate the need for grounding the development and implementation of artificial intelligence in good philosophy.
  • The room was full and quiet. As Brendan spoke, it just got quieter. There was a bit of experiential magic there.
  • The structure was participatory (though I don’t think many people had done the pre-reading). The format was much like a philosophy class: BM read a quote out loud and asked for reactions. Which he received in the manner of a philosophy class - mostly by raised hands, but not always - wide ranging, each a bit personal and confused, some quite articulate, some not. I don’t think it was exactly the intended rigor, but it certainly made the point: one semi-structured philosophical discussion immediately uncovered a wide range of thought from an audience that, to an outside participant, might have seemed quite narrowly aligned around a few flavors of techno-optimism - or at least aligned enough to have had an awesome time learning and socializing with strangers for several days straight. I definitely think more conversations of this flavor - led by Cosmos or otherwise, with someone facilitating in a semi-structured format, would benefit any city.
  • Overall, this was a high point for me, just to witness people come alive in the way that philosophy discussions can enable / elicit. I don’t think it was quite what BM had intended, but it abundantly demonstrated the point that philosophical rigor is needed in technologically focused contexts.
• Luis Sentis
  • paraphrasing: ‘When people would to ask. how long it would take to get humanoid robots, I used to say 2 billion dollars’ ‘now that there’s that level of investment, I’m in a precarious position: either within 18 months humanoids will do remarkable things, or they’ll be out’ ‘and I find that exhilerating’
    • I don’t actually believe that’s true - autonomous vehicles had their own hype cycle and took longer than expected, but they were never totally abandondoned. I think it’s just as likely that in 18 months, if humanoids have done some amazing things but not as much as expected/hoped for, the prospect of their eventual success will just be solidified into an image of longer term inevitability. The idea of humanoids has such legs in the imagination anyway - fiction has been dreaming of that future for like 100 years now.
  • Really compelling likeable personality and presentation approach - a whole range of interesting work going on in his lab beyond just engineering humanoids -  also focused on how people react to robots in their space. Sincere empathy for the anxiety that large machines walking around on their own can elicit in someone whose not seen them before or who is surprised.
• Josie Zayner workshop
  • always super fun. plant engineering workshop. Super simple set up. My plant expressed some red, so I think the edit was successful.
• Diana Wilcox's workouts are just simply the best. That’s all.
• Adrian Yu on Music, AI, & feeling
  • This was awesome. The work he showed and the forward looking concepts he outlined were fantastic. Great stage presence / really positive personality as well.
• Peter Voss
  • Really useful skepticism of LLMs, and a positive future vision of neuro-symbolic work. The symbolic stuff definitely (ironically) feels very fringe and radical now. Voss has his own perspective and it’s oddly refreshing.
• Wish I'd attended more unfamiliar topics just to see what's happening!

Experience Design Takeaways

• The event had a great flow throughout - appropriate volume of blank space for improvisation and rest - schedule visible all over the place (keep that up for sure) - telegram was a great tool - consistency in schedule great
• Themed days were effective
• Brendan McCord's approach was fascinating and delightful - more events with pre-reading and designated facilitators would increase rigor - there’s much more to realize there
• The EC team role-modeled the kind of engagement they wanted to see at the event - I think that was key
• The event combined talks from ‘weirdos’ and experts / topical authorities effectively
• Health events were well integrated
• The venue contributed significantly to the experience - hotel seemed like a great host
• At the end, I just found myself wondering "why isn't life always like that?" - what a wonderful question
• Nearly everyone I met came off as a bit of a genius and a bit of a goofball at least once during my interactions with them. That might be the crowd, but I think it was largely the level of social comfort afforded by the event: result was a bunch of smart people ‘letting their hair down’ while learning.

Notes for Future Events

• I would stay in the hotel next time to be closer to the community and experience
• I feel like I barely scratched the surface - the limiting factor on engagement for me (other than schedule constraints) was just social battery.
• Calendar export for the whole event or for each event would be helpful, though recognized as potentially difficult to maintain
• Consider ways for participants with depleted social battery to contribute/connect/support - sometimes I was drained but didn’t want to be a wet rag on other people’s experience - I wonder how people can still support the overall creation when in that state. For me, opportunities to collect or put out chairs between events are a nice way of taking a break form talking while still indicating broad good-will to the people around me. Surprisingly handy moment.
• More events with pre-reading and designated facilitators would be beneficial - McCord’s talk was great, but nailing the structure could make it something really special - especially over a longer period of time, I think learning needs to get participatory
• Curious how the team approaches contingency planning & risk management.
  • does someone go through and list all the things that could go wrong, their severity (1-5), likelihood (1-5), and the appropriate response / contingency plan?
  • do you ever offer EMTs / paramedics / physicians discounts?
• Keeping the community going - having spin-out meetups or developments that persist locally seems key

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