AGI Summit at the Palace of Fine Arts

The future usually feels safest when it is far away.

Reverse aging. AI writing software. Cryptocurrency replacing traditional payments. These are ideas I normally encounter through headlines, arguments, or science fiction. They seem close enough to imagine but distant enough that I do not have to seriously consider what living with them would mean.

Then I found myself standing in an exhibition hall, surrounded by people trying to build them.

The first conversation that truly changed how I thought about the event was with Generation Lab.

The representative explained that the company works on therapeutics and diagnostic tests related to health and aging. One of its tests, he said, examines 21 different systems in the body and attempts to identify changes in health before a clinician might otherwise be able to diagnose a disease.

The distinction he made was important: they were looking at the DNA level rather than simply the protein level.

But what caught my attention most was something much larger.

Reverse aging.

When I brought it up, I told him that the idea “almost sounds like science fiction.”

“It sounds like it,” he responded, “but it’s reality.”

For a moment, I did not know what to make of that answer.

He explained that one of Generation Lab’s co-founders, Irina Conboy, had spent around 25 years at UC Berkeley studying these questions. According to him, her frustration with existing testing methods was that they could not adequately show how well certain therapeutics were performing. Over decades of research, she developed a test intended to examine how different systems in the body respond to different therapeutics.

The goal, as he described it, was first to identify and reduce factors that contribute to aging. If those factors can be reduced, aging might be slowed dramatically.

But the other half of the company’s work goes further. He described developing therapeutics intended to rejuvenate cells toward a younger state.

There was something strange about hearing those words spoken so casually in the middle of a crowded exhibition hall.

For most of human history, aging has been treated almost like gravity: not a problem to solve, but a condition of existence. You grow older because that is simply what humans do. Yet here was someone speaking about aspects of aging as something that could potentially be measured, manipulated, slowed, and perhaps partly reversed.

My excitement quickly turned into another question.

If we really could do that, what would happen to everything else?

So I asked him about ethics.

His answer surprised me because he did not pretend that the consequences would be simple. He mentioned Social Security as an example. If people remained healthy for much longer, existing retirement systems might no longer work in the same way. Someone who had already stopped working might eventually have to return. A longer healthy lifespan could reshape employment, healthcare, retirement, and the structure of society itself.

But he also pointed toward the other side of the equation: imagine, he suggested, a society in which people did not become sick in the same ways and healthcare costs were dramatically reduced.

The tradeoff stayed with me.

We often describe progress as solving problems. But perhaps every sufficiently powerful solution also creates new questions. Eliminating one limitation does not eliminate responsibility; it simply moves responsibility somewhere else.

I found the same pattern in a completely different conversation.

At Cognitive Trust, I spoke with someone working on infrastructure for AI-assisted software development. He described the product as a “system of record” for an AI software-development lifecycle. If developers use tools such as Cursor or Claude to build software, the system can maintain records of code activity and AI coding-agent traces.

At first, this sounded extremely technical and distant from my own life.

Then I asked why a company would need such a system instead of simply building one itself.

His answer was less about technology than attention.

If a company is growing quickly, he explained, building all of this infrastructure internally means that instead of focusing on its actual product, it suddenly has to build another system just to manage how that product is being created.

That idea made sense far beyond software.

There are countless things we could do ourselves. But our time is limited, and choosing what deserves our attention may matter just as much as having the ability to do something.

I asked him one final question: What advice would he give young people who want to work in his field?

“Build projects.”

His answer was simple.

He said that going to college and learning online were valuable, but that the biggest learning came from actually building products: doing projects, putting them on LinkedIn or GitHub, asking people for feedback, and thinking about real business problems.

That answer stayed with me because I spend so much of my life preparing.

As a student, there is always a future checkpoint. Finish this class. Get into college. Study something. Earn a degree. Then, eventually, begin doing the things that matter.

But his advice suggested almost the opposite.

Start now.

Create something before you know everything. Let other people see it. Let them criticize it. Learn because you tried.

My third conversation brought me to another supposedly futuristic idea: using cryptocurrency for everyday purchases.

A representative from PayAll described the company as a cryptocurrency-card aggregator. Its platform, he explained, brings together more than a hundred crypto cards that users can apply for and manage through one account. Users can top up cards with tokens, withdraw from them, and convert digital assets into fiat currency when making purchases at retailers.

I asked whether he saw this as part of the future of finance.

He did, although he admitted they might be “a little bit early.”

He compared the situation to the transition between older forms of payment and the widespread adoption of credit and debit cards. Crypto cards, he argued, could follow a similar trajectory.

But once again, the most interesting part of the conversation came when possibility collided with uncertainty.

I asked him about security because that is one of the first concerns many people have when cryptocurrency enters a conversation.

He argued that the system could actually be safer than traditional payment methods in certain respects. Simply possessing someone’s device or physical card, he explained, would not necessarily provide access to all of the person’s finances because the card is connected to a wallet and limited by the assets made available to it. He also described individual wallet addresses and the ability to shut cards down through the issuer.

Still, he acknowledged something important.

Regulation is needed before systems like these can become truly mainstream.

That answer echoed what I had heard throughout the day.

The longevity researcher could imagine a world where aging itself changes, but he also thought about what that would do to Social Security and work.

The AI developer was building tools around a technology that makes software creation faster, but his advice to me was not to rely on technology. It was to actually build things and learn from other people.

The cryptocurrency representative believed digital payments could become part of ordinary life, but even he recognized that innovation alone could not create trust. Systems, security, and regulation still mattered.

Three conversations. Three completely different industries.

Yet I kept hearing versions of the same idea.

The question is not simply, Can we build it?

It is what happens after we do.

Before these interviews, I tended to imagine technological progress as a straight line. A problem exists. Someone invents something. The problem becomes smaller. Humanity moves forward.

I no longer think the line is that straight.

If we slow aging, we have to rethink what a normal human life looks like.

If AI changes how we create software, we have to rethink how people learn, work, and prove what they have created.

If cryptocurrency changes how money moves, we have to rethink what makes a financial system secure and trustworthy.

Every answer creates another question.

Perhaps that is why the Generation Lab conversation affected me so strongly. When I said reverse aging sounded like science fiction, I was really separating two worlds in my mind: the world I live in and some hypothetical future where these questions become real.

But standing there, I realized that distinction is disappearing.

I am sixteen. The technologies being developed now may mature alongside me. By the time I am middle-aged, some of the questions I heard discussed in that exhibition hall may no longer be hypothetical philosophical questions. They may be ordinary decisions.

How long should we try to extend human life?

How much should we trust AI with the things we create?

What should money look like?

Who should regulate technologies that move faster than the institutions governing them?

I do not know the answers.

What changed that day was that I stopped believing the future would answer them for us.

Technology can expand what human beings are capable of doing. It can give us new tools, new treatments, new systems, and perhaps even more time.

But it cannot decide what we should do with them.

That responsibility remains remarkably old-fashioned.

It remains ours.