Pragyan Mishra works for a small startup in Seattle whose mission is to bring connectivity and machine intelligence to communities in remote parts of the world: places still without reliable internet access, often rural, gritty, and gorgeous, carrying histories that predate the infrastructures being installed within them.
He holds a PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University. His technical work is in augmented intelligence and automation, the engineering of putting intelligence into machines that must work without a network: at the thin end of a supply chain, wherever the grid runs out, where the stakes are measured in lives.
Most of his ideas arrive in transit through these places, or in the stillness of his garden afterward. He works across several forms and materials: writing, welding, sculpture, and bonsai. What these share is that the material gets a say. Steel moves when it is hot and not before. A bonsai measures its progress in decades and cannot be hurried into being, only tended toward it.
We are what we create.
Sumus quod creavimus.
Seattle. 2023
