For over a century, the World’s Fair has been one of humanity’s great rituals of collective imagination—a place where the future doesn’t arrive as a polite press release, but as something you can walk through, touch, argue with, and dance beside. From the electric light to the Space Age, these exhibitions have given ordinary people their first glimpse of breakthroughs that would later become the wallpaper of everyday life. WIRED is now reimagining that tradition for the twenty-first century with the WIRED World Fair, a one-day event taking shape in Miami’s Wynwood district on November 4. At the Sacred Space, the fair will bring the technologies, people, and cultural forces transforming our world off the page and into real life. This is not going to be a sterile tech expo or a passive panel marathon. It’s more like a carnival of ideas, where a conversation about the future of artificial intelligence might happen beside a robot that is actually walking around, and where the satirists behind The Onion and a scientist who spends her life trying to understand dolphins can share the same room. You can also get a taste of what it feels like to train like an astronaut preparing for the moon and Mars, and settle in for a screening of an eagerly awaited documentary about Elon Musk, followed by a conversation with its director. And yes, there will be robots. As the date approaches, WIRED will be announcing even more programming, but the initial lineup alone reads like a map of the strange, hopeful, and occasionally absurd territory we are all moving into. The full list of speakers, installations, and experiences is available on the WIRED World Fair site, but what follows is a taste of what makes this gathering feel less like a conference and more like a glimpse of where we are actually headed.
The conversation around technology at the WIRED World Fair is less about gadgets and more about power, meaning, and the choices we are making while we still have a say. One major thread is artificial intelligence, and there is no single voice who can speak to it with more dimension than Clément Delangue, the cofounder and CEO of Hugging Face, who will ask a deceptively simple and urgent question: who actually owns the future of AI? In a moment when the algorithms shaping our economies, our art, and our politics are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few enormous companies, Delangue’s work on open and collaborative machine learning is a reminder that the technology does not have to be a monolith. It can be built by many people, with many values, if we choose to shape it. But the fair also understands that the future of AI is not only a matter of governance and open source models—it is also deeply, wonderfully funny. Evan Ratliff, the writer and host of the podcast Shell Game, will appear alongside Husk, a comedian and self-described face of AI satire online, to explore the hilarity that comes when you push generative systems to their limits. The result is a conversation that treats machines not as oracles or saviors, but as mirrors, absurd copilots, and occasionally very confused collaborators. And then there is the question of how far we might take biology itself. Ben Lamm, the cofounder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences, will be on hand to discuss de-extinction—not as a fantasy from Jurassic Park, but as a real, ongoing scientific project that is already forcing us to rethink what it means to bring a species back, and what comes after that. Lamm’s work touches on the deepest ethical questions of our age: If we can revive the woolly mammoth, should we? And if we are capable of altering the course of evolution, do we have the maturity to do so responsibly? These conversations are the heart of the fair—not because they offer neat answers, but because they put the urgency and the humanity of these decisions front and center.
The WIRED World Fair is just as concerned with the stories we tell about power, money, and politics as it is with the hardware and code shaping our lives. Satire, after all, is one of the oldest technologies we have for making sense of a confusing world, and no one knows that better than Ben Collins, the CEO of The Onion. In a moment when the news cycle keeps outrunning even our most absurd expectations, Collins will talk about satire and who it is for now—not as a niche genre for late-night comedy, but as a necessary tool for processing a reality that often feels like it was written by a mischievous algorithm. There is also no shortage of institutional power under the spotlight. The documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney has made a name for himself by taking a cold, careful look at some of the most powerful people and systems on the planet, and his highly anticipated Musk documentary promises to do the same for the world’s most famous and polarizing technologist. After the screening, Gibney will sit down for a Q&A, giving the audience a chance to dig into the questions behind the film: What does our obsession with billionaire geniuses say about us? What do we lose when the future is so tightly tied to the whims of one man? Then there is Mark Lanier, the trial lawyer who has taken on Big Tech and won. His conversation will be about the practical, emotional, and strategic reality of suing the giants who shape so much of our digital lives—and what it actually takes to hold them accountable in a courtroom. The machinery of venture capital is also on the agenda, with Alexis Ohanian, a founder of Reddit and the creator of Seven Seven Six, offering a candid look at where investment goes from here. Ohanian has always been a connector, someone who sees the next wave before it hits, and his talk will be a rare chance to hear how the people funding the future are thinking about risk, responsibility, and the things they are looking for in the next generation of founders. Add to that a conversation about the role of creators in politics, featuring CJ Pearson, a Republican strategist and political influencer, and Kat Abughazaleh, a researcher, journalist, and former congressional candidate, and you have a day that is largely about the messy, human machinery of change. These two come from very different places, and their conversation, set against the backdrop of the midterm results, is bound to be one of the most electric moments of the fair.
The WIRED World Fair also understands that the future is not just something to be analyzed—it is something to be felt. That is where the art and immersive installations come in, and they offer some of the most unforgettable experiences of the day. Marina Abramović, the legendary performance artist, will present Slow Walking, a first-of-its-kind avatar performance featuring a lifelike digital twin of the artist herself. Abramović has spent her career testing the limits of presence, endurance, and the relationship between artist and audience, and this piece carries that spirit into new territory. It is not a simulation of her work; it is an extension of it, a meditation on what it means to be present through a body that is no longer bound by the usual limits of time and place. Then there is Refik Anadol’s Large Nature Model, the world’s first open-access generative AI model devoted to the natural world. Anadol is one of the most exciting artists working with data today, and his work transforms vast sets of information into fluid, breathing visual experiences. The Large Nature Model is not simply a piece of art; it is an invitation to reconsider the relationship between machines and the environment, to see AI as a means of honoring nature rather than merely extracting from it. Visitors can also step inside Emergence, created by Kinda Studios, an evidence-based immersive sensory experience designed to expand liminal states of consciousness, spark creative insight, and deepen your sense of presence. It sounds like something you would have to travel to a retreat to experience, but at the fair it is just one stop on a day that moves from the lofty to the visceral, from the cerebral to the deeply embodied. In a world that often feels fragmented and overstimulated, these installations are a reminder that technology can be a doorway back to ourselves, not just a portal into distraction. They are not passive displays; they are invitations to participate, to slow down, to wonder.
There is also the raw, unadorned wonder of science and exploration, and the fair pays tribute to the fact that the future has not always been about sleek interfaces and social networks—sometimes it is about looking outward, toward the stars, and inward, toward the mystery of other minds. Denise Herzing, founder and research director of the Wild Dolphin Project, has spent her life trying to decode the language of dolphins. Her work is not just a scientific endeavor; it is an attempt to bridge the gap between species, to understand how another intelligent creature experiences the world. At a time when we are anxious about building machines that can think, Herzing reminds us that there are already other intelligences on this planet that we have barely begun to understand. Her conversation will be a moment of pure fascination, an opportunity to think about communication not as a transaction but as a form of relationship. Then there is NASA XOSS, a hyperrealistic activation that drops you into the environment, conditions, and mission scenarios of an astronaut crew living on the Moon and Mars. This is not a fun-up ride; it is the same kind of simulation software astronauts use to prepare for the rigors of deep-space exploration. You will get to feel, at least a little, what it means to be far away from Earth, surrounded by technology and the vast silence of space, responsible for your own survival. It is a humbling and exhilarating experience, and it captures something essential about the human desire to push beyond borders. Finally, there is the quiet but unmistakable presence of Unitree Robotics’ G1 humanoid robot, which will be roaming the grounds. The G1 is a machine designed to move through the world the way we do, and seeing it in person is equal parts thrilling and strange. It is one thing to watch a robot on a screen; it is another to walk past one, to feel the uncanny weight of its movements, and to catch yourself wondering where the line between machine and life really is. Together, these experiences capture the spirit of the fair: not as a place where the future is announced, but as a place where it is encountered, tested, and felt in the gut.
The WIRED World Fair is still unfolding, with more programming to be announced in the weeks leading up to November 4, and the promise of new surprises around every corner. But even with what has already been revealed, it is clear that this is more than a lineup of talks and installations. It is an attempt to capture the true spirit of a World’s Fair for an era that has grown both cynical and hungry for genuine encounter. There will be thinkers, builders, artists, and comedians. There will be robots moving through the crowd and conversations that probably should not work on paper but somehow do. There will be questions about who owns the future, what it means to bring back a species, how we hold the most powerful people on the planet accountable, and whether the stories we tell ourselves about progress are actually true. And there will be moments of pure, unguarded wonder—standing in the middle of an immersive artwork, listening to a dolphin researcher describe the complexities of communication, or catching the eye of a humanoid robot as it walks past on its way to who knows where. That is the heart of what WIRED has always been about: curiosity, not as an abstract ideal, but as a way of moving through the world. The WIRED World Fair takes that curiosity and gives it a body, a place, and a day. It will happen in Miami, in the colorful and restless neighborhood of Wynwood, a location that feels almost too perfect—a place where art, technology, and culture are not separate rooms but one open, messy, vibrant floor. If you are in love with the future, or worried about it, or simply confused by it, that is exactly where you need to be. The fair is a chance to remember that the future is not a distant destination. It is being built right now, by real people, with all of our talents and flaws. And for a few hours, in a warehouse in Wynwood, you can step inside it, walk around, and decide with your own senses what you think it should become.
