Kim Carson is a thought leader at the crossroads of artificial intelligence, creativity, and human purpose. With over two decades of experience, she has built a career around designing systems and strategies that align technological innovation with the timeless pursuit of human connection, creativity, and self-discovery. At Imagine Global, Carson leads initiatives and makes investments in technologies that leverage AI to enhance personal and societal transformation. Her approach is deeply informed by wisdom from across disciplines, drawing on Eckhart Tolle’s mindfulness, Elizabeth Gilbert’s exploration of creative flow, Rick Rubin’s artistry of inspiration, and principles from The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.

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What if AI is not here actually to replace us, but to remind us who we actually are?

That was the question at the heart of Kim Carson’s Long Now Talk. In “Inspired by Intelligence: Purpose and Creativity in the AI Era,” Carson, a creative technologist and futurist, challenged us to avoid the easy narratives of tech-driven utopia and dystopia, charting a course through those two extremes that made the case for AI not as a way to make humans unnecessary but to emphasize our most important creative capacities.

For Carson, AI is a sort of tool for thought — a mirror that we can use to re-inspire ourselves towards greater creativity. Accompanied by video art made using the SORA text-to-video model by Charles Lindsay, she made the case that AI could be used not just for automating labor but also for reclaiming human agency. That means using these new technological modes as enablers for human thought and action, while recognizing their gaps, too — the questions about ourselves that only we can answer, no matter how sophisticated our technology becomes.

As she ended her remarks, Kim made one final note on how we can make a better world collaboratively and creatively: our society does not need “more optimization, it needs more imagination.”

This talk was presented April 22, 02025 at The Interval at Long Now in San Francisco.

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