Dreaming the Reality: Designing Institutions for the Age of AI

What if we treated AI as a societal actor in its own right—alongside people, governments, and businesses? In this interactive workshop, part of the AI Digital Gorilla project, we’ll use that thought experiment to probe what breaks (and what might be rebuilt) in democracy, markets, and everyday life.

You’ll step into a future where automation reshapes scarcity, work, and legitimacy, then redesign three core domains from first principles: knowledge industries, capital markets, and human flourishing. Through fast prompts, individual sketching, and small‑group clustering, we’ll map who holds power, how value is created and shared, and what new social contracts might emerge in AI‑mediated societies.

We’ll leave with prototype institutional models, governance hypotheses, and research questions that can feed back into ongoing work at HKS and beyond. No technical background required—just curiosity about AI, institutions, and the future.