The Turning Special: "These are their stories"
In 2045, as we know, the world no longer runs on technology. It runs with it. Two decades after what historians call The Turning, AI has threaded itself through every root and rhythm of our lives here on Earth. Cities breathe, schools think, and data now flows through a network of people who share their true passions in life. The boundaries between human and machine, nature and system, have dissolved into a living circuit of coexistence.
Here in the Pacific Northwest, now a unified bioregion spanning Vancouver to Portland, we aim to document what this integration looks like for many of our ordinary people. Not the scientists or policy-makers, but the children, artists, laborers, and dreamers who live within the world AI helped reimagine.
These are their stories, told twenty years after the moment the future began to listen back. This series gathers their voices. Each conversation reveals a fragment of how humanity has changed, not just in what we build, but in what we feel. For some, AI has become an invisible collaborator, freeing time for craft, family, and care. For others, it remains an unfamiliar yet inescapable reality.
