"If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you."

Friedrich Nietzsche

For a decade we have been leaning over the edge of this technology, describing what we saw down there to each other. Conferences, forecasts, think pieces. The abyss held still and let itself be discussed.

That arrangement is over. Something in it has learned our faces, borrowed our voices, picked up the way we land a sentence, and started answering back.

We live in unusually interesting and unpredictable times. A person can now be captured once and keep working afterwards without ever showing up again. Automation is reaching a level none of us has lived inside yet. Nobody knows what that feels like from within, because nobody has been there.

So we would like to talk about it properly, and hear every side at once.

The concept is pretty simple to create a varied panel like for example:

The performer whose instrument is their own face, and who is being quietly replaced by a version of it. The producer who orders that replacement, with a deadline behind them and a client asking why it costs so much. The enthusiast, impatient with everyone's caution. And the person with no stake in any of it, who will simply have to live in whatever is built, and who still asks the questions the industry has trained itself not to hear.

And the side that is never invited to its own trial. Synthetics and replicants built by us, take part in this conversation as participants rather than exhibits.

The room is not an audience either. Attendees register in advance and answer a single question: what worries or excites them most about the next few years. Their answers enter the discussion. Anyone attending can join the conversation, not just watch it.