UPCOMING CONVERSATIONS

The fastest-growing technology in human history is running directly into the world’s slowest-moving infrastructure: the electric grid. With interconnect queues stretching past four years, rising community resistance, and utilities passing billions in upgrade costs onto ratepayers, the current pace of AI expansion faces a hard physical ceiling.

On November 11, join clean infrastructure pioneer and former DOE Loan Programs Office Director Jigar Shah for a live, unscripted C[i] Forecast community Q&A. Named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People, Shah has spent his career financing and scaling real-world energy infrastructure—from pioneering the solar PPA to overseeing $108 billion in federal loan authority.

In this session, he will tackle the looming grid crisis, the breakdown of traditional hyperscale economics, and how decentralized, low-latency compute can bypass the bottlenecks threatening tech growth.

Forecast is built around direct, candid interaction between the world’s leading innovators and a global community of leaders, researchers, journalists, entrepreneurs, and executives. RSVP now and submit your most pressing question for a chance to be selected to ask Jigar live during the session.

Anthropic just told investors, in its own IPO filing, that advanced AI could pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.” Frontier-lab researchers are resigning in public with extinction warnings. The UN’s human rights chief is calling for international red lines.

Meanwhile, AI has mapped essentially every known protein, fusion is attracting billions, and the labor market has not collapsed on schedule. Cancer cures, shorter workweeks, and broad prosperity no longer sound like fantasy.

So which is it? Are we building our own replacement, or the greatest set of tools humanity has ever held?

Stephen Messer says the doomers are selling something. The co-founder of Collective[i] and author of Artificial CommonSense, one of the fastest-growing publications on AI and the global economy, which grew to more than 150,000 subscribers in under six months.

Stephen argues that the models are brilliant but not alive, that the real danger is people rather than machines, and that we are entering “the most magical age in human history.” Expect data, a few uncomfortable questions about who profits from the fear, and zero hand-wringing.

Toby Stuart isn’t buying the clean ending. The UC Berkeley Haas professor, founding chair of Workday’s AI Advisory Board, and author of Anointed studies how technology reshapes power, status, and work. He argues the real danger may be the fog: a future so opaque that no one can safely bet a career, a degree, or a company on it. He’ll press on the junior-job hole, on winner-take-most dynamics, and on whether “this time is different” really is different.

Two sharp minds. One question that decides everything else. This is the session people will be quoting for weeks. If you’re in the room, you’ll shape the conversation. If you’re not, you’ll be hearing about it secondhand.

Join us for the great debate. 

Come ready to take a side. You may leave with a different one.