Agents present both an opportunity surface (speed, scale, automation) and a failure surface (security, privacy, authority, accountability). The seminar teaches you to chart both, not just the benefits.
Build Agent Artifacts
You'll create tangible outputs (incident reports, governance memos, role descriptions, onboarding docs) that make agent behavior and risk concrete enough to debate with stakeholders and design policy around.
The Two-Question Lens
You'll develop a practical framework for answering the two questions everyone keeps asking: “What is it good for?” and “What can it break?” — and operationalize that into your organization's agent adoption strategy.”
How Does It Work?
General Seminar offers an alternative to conventional one-way learning experiences like podcasts, TED Talks, or Masterclasses. This is a hands-on seminar where we are all actively engaged in collaborative sense-making by imagining into and creatively conjuring artifacts that represent the futures indicated by the topic. This is followed by sharing and discussions where you will be able to consider how today's emergent themes and cultural idioms may become tomorrow's normal-ordinary-everyday. The goal of General Seminar is to collectively imagine potential futures and derive actionable insights. This is a unique forum for creative stimulation and lateral thinking. General Seminar will invigorates your imagination, leveraging the remarkable efficacy of the imagination to turn ideas into tangible artifacts.
Run of Show
General Seminar is a 90-minute webinar-structured event designed to maximize engagement and insight. Conducted online (and live, in-person on special occasions!)
Participants receive a worksheet and access to the online edition of the Near Future Laboratory's Work Kit of Design Fiction
❥ Reception (5 minutes): Participants are welcomed and introduced to the topic.
❥ Design Fiction Breakout (25 minutes): Using the provided Worksheet, groups of 2-3 participants jump in the Near Future Laboratory's time machine and travel to the near future to engage in creative exploration, world building by 'finding' and imagining the kinds of artifacts one might stumble across in a possible near future world.
❥ Seminar (40 minutes): Facilitated group discussion to delve deeply into the topic.
❥ Wrap-Up (10 minutes): Summary and conclusions.
This immersive, collaborative format distinguishes General Seminar as a space for actionable creativity and innovative thought.
Live on Zoom
Get Your Tickets
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OpenCLAW (formerly Clawdbot / Moltbot) feels like a glitch in my calendar here: one day it’s a clever demo, and the next afternoon it’s a social and economic actor gremlin-running errands in our browsers, operating our tools, booking meetings, moving files, touching credentials, and quietly turning “software” into something more like a resentful weed-smoking roommate.
The elation precedes both confidence and level-headedness; such is the nature of the human consciousness where we seem to be forever looking for something that will lead us to never-never land. That is the elation and the dread mashed up together like a weird new food trend ($12 avocado toast, anyone?)
General Seminar S07 / E03 is for anyone trying to keep their footing as agents go from novelty to (seemingly)infrastructure — and they do this before policy, standards, and (if any of it still exists?) common sense catch up. If you do strategy: you’re being asked to narrate what this is, what it’s for, and what it means for organizations that don’t yet have governance for it. If you build companies: you’re staring at a new layer of value creation — and a new layer of liability. If you’re just a person with a laptop: you’re about to have “co-workers” that never sleep.
Join me! Two sessions: one on February 18th at 10am PT (UTC-8) and another on February 24th at 10am PT (UTC-8). Grab your ticket here.
We’ll treat the moment we are currently inhabiting like a live science-fiction action spectacular event: not “what do we believe,” but “what do we do when this becomes normal?”
Recent reporting has already flagged the obvious tension: OpenClaw’s viral momentum alongside serious security and privacy risks, especially via extensions/skills and exposed deployments. The confusion around these risks is compounded by the fact that the technology is still in its infancy, and there are no established best practices for securing it. This creates a perfect storm of excitement and anxiety, as organizations rush to adopt the technology without fully understanding the implications.
If you do strategy: you’re being asked to narrate what this is, what it’s for, and what it means for organizations that don’t yet have governance for it.
If you build companies: you’re staring at a new layer of value creation — and a new layer of liability.
If you’re just a person with a laptop: you’re about to have “co-workers” that never sleep.
In timeless General Seminar fashion, we’ll use signals, stories, and artifact-making to get past the hype — and we’ll produce tangible outputs you can carry back to your work or practice “on Monday”.
Here’s some stuff you can expct to bring back from our little hop into the agentic near future:
A map of the Agentic Wild West: the opportunity surface and the failure surface (security, privacy, authority, accountability).
A set of “agent artifacts” (memos, billboard ads, incident reports, a quick-start guide for an agentic sleep-ez pull-out sofa, an Ebay page for some vintage so-called “software”, onboarding docs, a new-fangled agentic kitchen appliance) that make tomorrow feel real.
A practical lens for answering the two questions everyone keeps asking: “What is it good for?” and “What can it break?”
(Bring your conflicting feelings, anxiety, antagonism, and curiosity. They’re all valid data.)