Human x AI - Is humanity doomed or are we going to thrive with AI?
Every other event this week asks how to use AI. This one asks what it does to us.
Is humanity doomed with AI, or are we about to thrive?
It's the question underneath every product demo, every agent workflow, every "AI-first" strategy deck — and it almost never gets asked directly, because it's uncomfortable and there's no roadmap slide for it.
So we're asking it. Short talks to open things up, then a real discussion: what AI is doing to work, to meaning, to how we spend our days, and to what we think people are for.
The guests
Daniel Duma — PhD in natural language processing. He was working on language models back when almost nobody outside a research lab was paying attention, and now builds agentic AI systems. Someone who has watched this go from an academic problem to a civilisational one.
Luís Miguel Silva — President of Porto Tech Hub. He sees what AI is actually doing to the companies in this city: the hiring, the teams, the roles that are quietly changing shape. Not predictions — what's happening now.
Sarah Rapp — Senior Director, Youth Advocacy & People. She works with the generation that will never remember a world before this, and with the human side of organisations living through it. If you want to know what AI does to people, ask someone whose job is people.
Three very different vantage points on the same question: the research, the economy, and the humans.
The format
Short talks. Exercises. Then open discussion — you're in this, not watching it.
This is deliberately not a panel where three people agree with each other for ninety minutes. Disagreement is welcome. The point is to have the argument in a room, with faces, rather than in a comments section.
Who should come
Anyone with a stake in the answer. Engineers and founders, obviously — but also the people who are being changed by this without having chosen it: designers, writers, teachers, managers, parents, students.
You don't need a technical background. You need an opinion, or the willingness to leave with a different one.
Part of Porto AI Week
Porto AI Week runs 14–18 September. For one week the whole city becomes the venue: dozens of independent events,