During a special edition of Friday Next on Friday, August 28, 2026, philosopher, artist, and director of the Next Nature Museum Koert van Mensvoort took the audience into the world that humans are building together with technology. The future lecture took place at the Next Nature Museum in the Evoluon, serving as a prelude to DE OPENING, the festive kick-off of the cultural season in Eindhoven.

From artificial intelligence and healthcare to energy, mobility, living, and working: the lecture focused on how technology is becoming increasingly commonplace and beginning to function as a new nature. Using surprising examples, Van Mensvoort demonstrated how innovations gradually become part of what we consider normal.

In doing so, he specifically looked at the future of Eindhoven. What if the city were not a regional outpost, but the center of a new urban network spanning Amsterdam, Brussels, and Düsseldorf "Amsterbrusseldorf"? And can technologies often viewed primarily as problems sometimes be part of the solution? For instance, he explored the intriguing question of whether Bitcoin - despite its high energy consumption - could play a role in the energy transition.

Artificial intelligence was also viewed from a different perspective during the lecture. While AI is often portrayed in Silicon Valley as a future superintelligence that surpasses or renders humans obsolete, Van Mensvoort presented a different image from the perspective of Brainport: that of a superorganism in which humans, machines, companies, cities, and infrastructures become increasingly interconnected. The focus was not on the question of when AI might replace us, but rather on how we coexist with an intelligent system of which we ourselves are a part.

With humor, philosophy, and imagination, Van Mensvoort demonstrated that the future is not something that simply happens to us; it emerges from the designs, habits, and choices of today. Consequently, the audience left the venue not with a list of predictions, but with a fresh perspective on the world as it is now.

Koert van Mensvoort is a philosopher, artist, and director of Next Nature. As a Next Nature Fellow at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU Eindhoven), he explores how the human-designed world is increasingly taking on the characteristics of a "new nature." Through books, exhibitions, and lectures, he inspires a broad global audience to view the relationship between humanity, nature, and technology in a new light.