The Human Stakes: AI and the Things Nobody Voted For

Name: The Human Stakes: AI and the Things Nobody Voted For
Start: 2026-05-27T18:00:00-04:00
End: 2026-05-27T20:00:00-04:00
Location: 34 E Beverley St, Staunton, VA, United States, Virginia 24401

Schedule

Wed May 27 2026 at 06:00 pm to 08:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

34 E Beverley St, Staunton, VA, United States, Virginia 24401 | Staunton, VA

Seats are limited to 20 to keep the conversation genuinely intimate. This is a pay-what-you-will event — contribute what feels right, including nothing at all. Your seat includes a cup of tea and a sample of chocolate.
Doors at 6:00 PM, conversation begins at 6:30 PM.
There is a particular kind of conversation that almost never happens in public — the one where people say what they actually think about the world changing around them. Not the optimistic talking points, not the panic, but the honest, complicated middle: what we are worried about, what we value, and what we want to protect.
This is that conversation.
Join us at Staunton Books & Tea for a small, informal salon-style conversation on AI and the future of work, human meaning, and society. This is not a tech talk. There are no panels, no experts to defer to, no predetermined conclusions. Julia Sabin — owner of Staunton Books & Tea, who works professionally with AI implementation — will share her own perspective and open the floor. The goal is a genuine exchange among people whose primary concern is not how to use these tools, but what kind of world is being built around them.
We will draw on ideas from our recent blog post — from Keynes's century-old prediction about leisure to the manifesto documents published this year by OpenAI, Anthropic, Palantir, and others — but you do not need to have read anything to participate. You only need to have thoughts, questions, or worries you have been carrying around and have not had a good place to put.
Some of the threads we expect to pull on: the future of work and who benefits from AI-driven productivity; what it means to be a creator when your work trains a system that competes with you; the gap between what AI companies call "safety" and what ordinary people mean by it; and the deeper question underneath all of it — whether work is a human condition, or a social arrangement we could choose to organize differently.