Jamie Metzl

Our world is being transformed by far more than AI. Mutually reinforcing technologies are advancing at extraordinary speed just as the postwar international order is fracturing, the foundations of global commerce are being rewritten, and individuals and small groups are gaining powers once reserved for governments and large corporations. At the same time, challenges from pandemics and climate change to nuclear proliferation and AI safety are becoming more global while our capacity to address them collectively is weakening. The result is a world of extraordinary possibility and profound danger that can no longer be understood or navigated using the assumptions of the past.

One of the most essential challenges for leaders today is understanding how these powerful forces intersect, amplify, and reshape one another—and then translating that understanding into smarter decisions, greater resilience, and new opportunities for growth and success.

Drawing on a unique career spanning the White House, diplomacy, geopolitics, biotechnology, AI, finance, business, and global governance, leading futurist and bestselling author Jamie Metzl connects the dots across these rapidly changing fields to reveal the bigger picture of where our world is heading and what it means for the decisions leaders must make today. He gives leaders a framework for anticipating the cascading consequences of accelerating change, identifying opportunities and risks before they become obvious, challenging assumptions that no longer hold, and making smarter strategic choices about where to invest, what to build, and how to position their organizations to thrive in a future that will operate by very different rules than the world we know today.

We are entering an age of superconvergence, in which dizzying advances in artificial intelligence, genetics, biotechnology, automation, advanced materials, energy systems, and other transformative technologies are converging, accelerating one another, and rapidly expanding what humans and our organizations can achieve. At the same time, geopolitical fragmentation, populism, and shifting social expectations are reshaping the world in which these technologies will be developed, governed, and deployed.

Drawing on the ideas in Superconvergence and his decades of work at the intersection of technology, healthcare, geopolitics, business, and public policy, Jamie Metzl brings these forces together into a single frame in this exciting keynote. Rather than treating AI, biotechnology, global competition, demographic change, and institutional disruption as separate trends, he shows how they interact, reinforce one another, and reshape the strategic landscape in ways that are easy to miss when each is viewed in isolation.

Jamie connects these dots to help leaders see around corners, identify opportunities and risks before they become obvious, and make smarter strategic choices about where to invest, what to build, and how to position their organizations to ride the wave of accelerating change rather than be overwhelmed by it.

Artificial intelligence is becoming astonishingly powerful, but much of the debate about its future is still trapped in the misleading idea that intelligence sits on a single ladder, with humans near the top and machines steadily climbing past us. Jamie Metzl offers a very different way of seeing what is coming. Human and machine intelligence are developing along different paths, which means our machines can become vastly better at many consequential tasks without becoming conscious or wise in our way or superior to us at all cognitive tasks. Yet machines do not need to become “generally intelligent” to transform economies, accelerate scientific discovery, reshape work, influence politics, alter the balance of power, and become deeply embedded in our everyday lives.

In this provocative and fast-moving keynote, Jamie explores how the growing speed, scale, connectivity, and autonomy of AI will expand what individuals, organizations, and societies can do while raising profound new questions about judgment, responsibility, agency, trust, and power.

Drawing on The AI Ten Commandments and his broader work on the future of technology and humanity, Jamie takes audiences beyond the usual hype and fear to focus on the choices that will matter most. Where should we rely on machines, and where must humans remain firmly in charge? Which distinctly human capacities become more valuable as AI improves? How should leaders think about responsibility when decisions are increasingly shared between people and intelligent systems? And how can we use these extraordinary new tools to expand human flourishing rather than merely accelerate the systems and incentives already shaping our world?

Creativity has long felt like one of humanity’s final sanctuaries. Machines might calculate faster and recognize patterns at superhuman scale, but composing a great symphony, writing a profound novel, or creating transformative art seemed to belong to us.

That assumption is now under direct challenge.

Artificial intelligence can already generate music, images, stories, designs, and scientific insights of astonishing sophistication. As machines become collaborators, competitors, and creators in their own right, we face deeper questions: What is creativity? Does it require consciousness or lived experience? Can something without a body, childhood, mortality, longing, or love create art of lasting human significance?

Jamie Metzl is uniquely positioned to explore these questions. A leading futurist and specialist in emerging technologies, he is also a novelist who has spent years imagining the human consequences of worlds that do not yet exist. Drawing on his novel Virtuosa and developments across AI, neuroscience, robotics, mathematics, music, and the arts, Jamie explores how creative machines may transform culture, originality, genius, and our understanding of what remains uniquely human. The deeper opportunity is to use this extraordinary moment not only to understand what machines can create, but to discover more clearly what human creativity is, why it matters, and how we can cultivate it to enrich our lives and expand what is possible for humanity.

Most people already know the foundations of healthy longevity: exercise, nutrition, sleep, meaningful relationships, and stress reduction. But beneath the hype about “hacking” aging and living forever, something genuinely important is happening. Advances in artificial intelligence, genetics, biotechnology, diagnostics, and preventive medicine are giving us powerful new ways to understand individual risk, intervene earlier, protect our health, and potentially extend both healthspan and lifespan.

In this eye-opening, optimistic, and highly practical keynote, technology and healthcare futurist Jamie Metzl—who has completed 60 marathons, 40 ultramarathons, and 13 Ironman triathlons—separates credible science from wishful thinking and explores what the emerging science of longevity means for our lives and our society. He shows what individuals can do today to live healthier and more resilient lives, how to position ourselves to benefit from the next generation of predictive and preventive medicine, and how longer, healthier lives could reshape careers, retirement, healthcare, insurance, productivity, public policy, and society itself.

The opportunity is not to chase immortality, but to use the best available science to live better now, prepare intelligently for what is coming next, and ultimately gain more of life’s most precious resource: healthy, meaningful time.