The Lab’s purpose then, as now, was to explore what computers might mean for everyday life. Not computing, but living. It was never only about technology. It was about perspective. As I’ve said before, the best vision is peripheral vision. The same could be said of Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Bell Labs. These were not just institutions of instruction. They were catalysts that attracted visionaries and outsiders, bringing together brilliant minds who might otherwise never have collaborated.
Today, we find ourselves in a moment that requires a similar response. AI is not simply a faster way to do what we’ve already done. It’s a medium shift, a new substrate for thought, interaction, and aesthetics. But instead of treating it that way, we’re drizzling it onto legacy systems in ways that feel fundamentally mismatched. A few assistants here, a couple auto-completes there. More productivity, less imagination.
Content platforms built for distribution are unlikely to be the natural home for AI. The more promising direction is applications that surface meaningful knowledge — tools designed around depth and connectivity rather than reach.These are fine questions, but they are not the interesting ones. The interesting questions are more fundamental: What new literacies will we need? What new misuses will emerge? Can this technology help us understand ourselves better? History tells us that significant ideas rarely come from the center. They begin at the margins, where ideas are allowed to be incomplete, even incorrect. Places where success is not the goal, but learning is.
Optimization toward measurable outcomes constrains discovery to what can be tracked within a single product. The interesting connections — the ones that reveal how ideas relate across systems — emerge when exploration isn’t bounded by pre-defined success metrics.Because what comes next is not a product. It is a provocation.
