Futuristic Musings · by James Brown

Bring back the World's Fair

By James Brown · Published Oct 20, 2026 · Updated Oct 20, 2026

In 1964 you could stand in line to touch the future. In 2026 the future lives in a chat window. A musing on why the AI age needs a pavilion.

A year ago last week, on October 13, 2025, Expo 2025 Osaka closed its gates on Yumeshima island. Over six months it logged about 29 million visits. I keep coming back to that number, because it argues with one of the quiet assumptions of our era: that nobody wants to go stand somewhere and look at the future anymore.

My opinion, stated plainly: the AI revolution is the most important technology story in decades, and it has almost no public stage. It needs one. It needs a World's Fair.

The future used to have a ticket booth

At the 1964-65 New York World's Fair in Queens, the future was something you queued for. General Motors' own guide said that on an average day about 70,000 people rode its Futurama, a fifteen-minute trip past underwater resorts, Antarctic harbors, lunar outposts and a city of tomorrow. Disney built General Electric's Carousel of Progress, a rotating theater that walked audiences through decades of electricity in the home to the tune of "There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow."

Plenty of it was corporate theater. That was fine. The point was that ordinary families walked out having seen a version of where things were heading, argued about it in the car, and decided whether they liked it.

Picturephone was wrong, and right

My favorite exhibit from that fair is Bell System's Picturephone. Visitors were picked at random from the waiting crowd and connected by live video to a stranger elsewhere in the pavilion, or all the way out at Disneyland. By most accounts it was a hit, and many people discovered they had nothing to say to the stranger on the screen. The Picturephone service Bell later launched flopped commercially.

And then, of course, video calling ended up in nearly every pocket. The fair got the timing and the business model wrong and the human desire exactly right. That's what a good public demo does: it doesn't predict the future so much as let people rehearse it.

Our future lives in a chat window

Compare that with how most people meet AI today: a text box, alone, on a phone, often at midnight. The most transformative tools of the decade arrive as an app update. The infrastructure behind them, the data centers, the power plants, the chip fabs, sits behind fences in places most of us will never visit.

That invisibility has a cost. When people can't see a technology, they fill the gap with whatever story is loudest, and the loudest stories are usually fear or hype. Neither builds trust. Seeing, touching and asking questions in person does.

Osaka proved people still show up

Expo 2025 ran under the theme "Designing Future Society for Our Lives," with 158 countries and regions taking part. Attendance started slowly and then snowballed as word spread. The official tally shows more than 200,000 visitors a day for 34 straight days at the end. Strip out accreditation-pass holders and it was still about 25.6 million visits.

That isn't a culture that has lost interest in the future. It's a culture that rarely gets invited to look at it together.

What an AI-age fair could look like

Speculation, labeled as such. Here's the pavilion list I'd want to walk:

• The Agent Arcade: give an AI agent a real errand, watch every step it takes on a big screen, and press the big red approve button yourself.
• The Power Hall: a glass-walled slice of a working data center next to the generation feeding it, so the energy story is something you can see instead of a headline.
• The Picturephone Booth, take two: talk to a stranger in another country through live AI translation and find out whether you have something to say this time.
• The Carousel of Work: a rotating theater that shows one job, say a nurse or an electrician, in 1964, 2026 and 2040, honest about what changed and what didn't.
• The Open Lab: a room where you can poke at open-weight models and ask the researchers who trained them hard questions.

None of this needs to wait for Expo 2030 in Riyadh. A city, a university or a handful of companies could run a small version next summer. Libraries could run a tiny one this winter.

Build the pavilion anyway

The retro-futurists of 1964 got a lot of specifics wrong. We still don't have the undersea resorts. But they got the most important thing right: a future that people can see is a future people can choose. A future that only shows up as a notification gets decided for them.

So here's the optimistic ask. If you build with AI, demo it in public, in a room, to people who aren't in tech. If you run a museum or a meetup, give the revolution a booth. The great big beautiful tomorrow deserves a ticket line again.

Sources

1. General Motors, Futurama guide booklet (1964 New York World's Fair)
2. World's Fair Photos, The 1964-1965 New York World's Fair: Bell System pavilion
3. The Walt Disney Family Museum, Look Closer: 1964 New York World's Fair
4. Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai, Japan in Data (official site)
5. BIE, Farewell to Expo 2025 Osaka Kansai (Oct 17, 2025)
6. Expo 2025 post-event sustainability report, vol. 1

This essay is opinion and speculation, not factual reporting or financial advice.

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