Building on the momentum of last year’s theme, “Break the System,” this year’s theme, “Man and Machines,” confronts a world defined by complex systems—environmental, economic, political—now under unprecedented strain. As resources tighten and information accelerates, the interface between human limitation and machine power becomes the central challenge of our time. As systems break, we look to our creations—the Machines—as a way forward, but this partnership is fraught with risk.
This is the age of integration: Will the machines be our partners, servants, prosthetics, or our replacement?
The Georgetown Steam Plant, once a triumph of industrial innovation, provides the perfect stage for this exploration. Its GE Vertical Curtis Turbines—towering symbols of an era when machines were iron, steam, and physical force. Today, our machines are increasingly invisible: silicon chips, algorithms, neural networks, and AI systems shaping daily life at the speed of computation.
