Tess Posner, award-winning musical artist, entrepreneur, and community builder, shares her journey from founding CEO of AI4ALL to full-time musician to founder of Resonance. Tess is on a mission to build the infrastructure that empowers local communities to navigate and shape their future with AI based on what matters to them, instead of accepting the defaults.
We discuss facing fear in a modern world, why she's learned it's impossible to heal anyone else and what she does instead, and why Resonance salons are her answer to an epidemic of loneliness and a loss of agency. We explore what it means to "live the questions" (hat tip to Rilke and her St. John's College education), why "education is often effective because of friction," and the human capacities worth protecting in the Age of AI. We compare thirty people lingering at a café in Paris to a Starbucks drive-thru, and consider what American culture traded when it optimized for efficiency.
Tess explains why she doesn't have a P(doom) and makes the case for building a future where technology alleviates suffering and fosters connection, agency, and creativity, instead of eroding what makes us human.
We explore her music—"Vertigo," written in the first weeks of the pandemic; "Party at the End of the World," the dance song she wrote under an orange wildfire sky in California; "You Set Me on Fire"; and "Feral Child," her letter to the inner child the modern world stepped on and that she buried, and what happened after she released it.
If you've ever lost touch with the kid who used to wonder about everything, chased answers when you needed to live the questions, or want a voice in the future being built, this one's for you.
Links:
🎵 Feral Child
🎵 Party at the End of the World
🎵 Vertigo
🎵 You Set Me on Fire
✍️ Living the Questions
