The Futurists

Mark Ghuneim is an American internet entrepreneur, activist, and art curator who has launched pioneering ventures in many fields including music, digital marketing, television, privacy advocacy, and fine art. Today he is co-founder of Narrative.New, which harnesses the power of AI for creative writers. Key to Mark’s career is curation, the process of making conscious choices among a wide range of alternatives. AI makes cognitive outputs cheap and abundant; that raises the value of human curation to critical importance amid a flood of fresh content. According to Mark, today the highest, rarest value is a distinctive point of view and taste.

To understand the future, it’s best to begin by studying the past. Jeff Jarvis returns to the Futurists to share a lively summary of the long arc of mass media, and he unpacks several valuable lessons for our present moment. Jeff’s new book Hot Type provides a compelling account of the long struggle to mechanize typesetting, one invention at a time, including the many failures that led to other mechanical breakthroughs. The invention of the Linotype machine made print cheap, and thereafter society consumed far more printed works, paving a path for modern mass marketing and mass consumption. Rob Tercek and Jeff discuss the direct parallel between the economic impact of mass media 100 years ago and the current advent of AI and the commoditization of human cognition. Topics include Jevon’s paradox, human-mechanical hybrids, unanticipated change versus technological determinism, a dozen parallels to our contemporary media economy, the importance of advertising and the attention economy, the advent of subscription sales of literature, a new definition of literacy.

In November 2025, the global techno-economy shifted subtly, then dramatically, as AI agents became viable additions to the workforce. Mark Pesce has documented these changes, what he refers to as “The Watershed”, in a remarkable series of articles at https://thewatershed.markpesce.com/. Pesce joins the Futurists to explain his perspective about how companies and work have changed forever. Pesce and Rob Tercek discuss the future of jobs for humans working alongside AI agents, and what happens when an AI with compounding capability begins to set its own goals. Topics: relative super intelligence versus AGI; The Bitter Lesson and what remains durable work for humans; private insurance markets as the mechanism for pricing AI risk, why governments will evade that measurement, and the dissolving boundaries that used to define corporations.