Imagine A World

• Imagine: What if AI advisors helped us make better decisions?

  Are we doomed to a future of loneliness and unfulfilling online interactions? What if technology made us feel more connected instead?Imagine a World is a podcast exploring a range of plausible and positive futures with advanced AI, produced by the Future of Life Institute. We interview the creators of 8 diverse and thought provoking imagined futures that we received as part of the worldbuilding contest FLI ran last yearIn the eighth and final episode of Imagine A World we explore the fictional worldbuild titled 'Computing Counsel', one of the third place winners of FLI’s worldbuilding contest.Guillaume Riesen talks to Mark L, one of the three members of the team behind 'Computing Counsel', a third-place winner of the FLI Worldbuilding Contest. Mark is a machine learning expert with a chemical engineering degree, as well as an amateur writer. His teammates are Patrick B, a mechanical engineer and graphic designer, and Natalia C, a biological anthropologist and amateur programmer.This world paints a vivid, nuanced picture of how emerging technologies shape society. We have advertisers competing with ad-filtering technologies and an escalating arms race that eventually puts an end to the internet as we know it. There is AI-generated art so personalized that it becomes addictive to some consumers, while others boycott media technologies altogether. And corporations begin to throw each other under the bus in an effort to redistribute the wealth of their competitors to their own customers.While these conflicts are messy, they generally end up empowering and enriching the lives of the people in this world. New kinds of AI systems give them better data, better advice, and eventually the opportunity for genuine relationships with the beings these tools have become. The impact of any technology on society is complex and multifaceted. This world does a great job of capturing that.Please note: This episode explores the ideas created as part of FLI’s worldbuilding contest, and our hope is that this series sparks discussion about the kinds of futures we want. The ideas present in these imagined worlds and in our podcast are not to be taken as FLI endorsed positions.Explore this worldbuild: https://worldbuild.ai/computing-counselThe podcast is produced by the Future of Life Institute (FLI), a non-profit dedicated to guiding transformative technologies for humanity's benefit and reducing existential risks. If you would like to learn more, or are interested in collaborating with the teams featured in our episodes, please email [email protected] can find more about our work at www.futureoflife.org, or subscribe to our newsletter to get updates on all our projects.Media and Concepts referenced in the episode:Corpus Callosum - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_callosumEliezer Yudkowsky on ‘Superstimulation’ - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Jq73GozjsuhdwMLEG/superstimuli-and-the-collapse-of-western-civilizationUniversal culture - https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/Max Harms’ Crystal Trilogy - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28678856-crystal-societyUBI - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_incomeKim Stanley Robinson - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Stanley_Robinson

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• Imagine: What if narrow AI fractured our shared reality?

  Let’s imagine a future where AGI is developed but kept at a distance from practically impacting the world, while narrow AI remakes the world completely. Inequality sticks around and AI fractures society into separate media bubbles with irreconcilable perspectives. But it's not all bad. AI markedly improves the general quality of life, enhancing medicine and therapy, and those bubbles help to sustain their inhabitants. Can you get excited about a world with these tradeoffs?Imagine a World is a podcast exploring a range of plausible and positive futures with advanced AI, produced by the Future of Life Institute. We interview the creators of 8 diverse and thought provoking imagined futures that we received as part of the worldbuilding contest FLI ran last year.In the seventh episode of Imagine A World we explore a fictional worldbuild titled 'Hall of Mirrors', which was a third-place winner of FLI's worldbuilding contest.Michael Vasser joins Guillaume Reisen to discuss his imagined future, which he created with the help of Matija Franklin and Bryce Hidysmith. Vassar was formerly the president of the Singularity Institute, and co-founded Metamed; more recently he has worked on communication across political divisions. Franklin is a PhD student at UCL working on AI Ethics and Alignment. Finally, Hidysmith began in fashion design, passed through fortune-telling before winding up in finance and policy research, at places like Numerai, the Median Group, Bismarck Analysis, and Eco.com.Hall of Mirrors is a deeply unstable world where nothing is as it seems. The structures of power that we know today have eroded away, survived only by shells of expectation and appearance. People are isolated by perceptual bubbles and struggle to agree on what is real. This team put a lot of effort into creating a plausible, empirically grounded world, but their work is also notable for its irreverence and dark humor. In some ways, this world is kind of a caricature of the present. We see deeper isolation and polarization caused by media, and a proliferation of powerful but ultimately limited AI tools that further erode our sense of objective reality. A deep instability threatens. And yet, on a human level, things seem relatively calm. It turns out that the stories we tell ourselves about the world have a lot of inertia, and so do the ways we live our lives.Please note: This episode explores the ideas created as part of FLI’s worldbuilding contest, and our hope is that this series sparks discussion about the kinds of futures we want. The ideas present in these imagined worlds and in our podcast are not to be taken as FLI endorsed positions.Explore this worldbuild: https://worldbuild.ai/hall-of-mirrorsThe podcast is produced by the Future of Life Institute (FLI), a non-profit dedicated to guiding transformative technologies for humanity's benefit and reducing existential risks. You can find more about our work at www.futureoflife.org, or subscribe to our newsletter to get updates on all our projects.Media referenced in the episode:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Confucianismhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Framed_Roger_Rabbithttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Smithhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Notebookhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek%3A_The_Next_Generationhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-3PO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Baldwin

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• Imagine: What if AI enabled us to communicate with animals?

  What if AI allowed us to communicate with animals? Could interspecies communication lead to new levels of empathy? How might communicating with animals lead humans to reimagine our place in the natural world?Imagine a World is a podcast exploring a range of plausible and positive futures with advanced AI, produced by the Future of Life Institute. We interview the creators of 8 diverse and thought provoking imagined futures that we received as part of the worldbuilding contest FLI ran last year.In the sixth episode of Imagine A World we explore the fictional worldbuild titled 'AI for the People', a third place winner of the worldbuilding contest.Our host Guillaume Reisen welcomes Chi Rainer Bornfree, part of this three-person worldbuilding team alongside her husband Micah White, and their collaborator, J.R. Harris. Chi has a PhD in Rhetoric from UC Berkeley and has taught at Bard, Princeton, and NY State Correctional facilities, in the meantime writing fiction, essays, letters, and more. Micah, best-known as the co-creator of the 'Occupy Wall Street' movement and the author of 'The End of Protest', now focuses primarily on the social potential of cryptocurrencies, while Harris is a freelance illustrator and comic artist.The name 'AI for the People' does a great job of capturing this team's activist perspective and their commitment to empowerment. They imagine social and political shifts that bring power back into the hands of individuals, whether that means serving as lawmakers on randomly selected committees, or gaining income by choosing to sell their personal data online. But this world isn't just about human people. Its biggest bombshell is an AI breakthrough that allows humans to communicate with other animals. What follows is an existential reconsideration of humanity's place in the universe. This team has created an intimate, complex portrait of a world shared by multiple parties: AIs, humans, other animals, and the environment itself. As these entities find their way forward together, their goals become enmeshed and their boundaries increasingly blurred.Please note: This episode explores the ideas created as part of FLI’s worldbuilding contest, and our hope is that this series sparks discussion about the kinds of futures we want. The ideas present in these imagined worlds and in our podcast are not to be taken as FLI endorsed positions.Explore this worldbuild: https://worldbuild.ai/ai-for-the-peopleThe podcast is produced by the Future of Life Institute (FLI), a non-profit dedicated to guiding transformative technologies for humanity's benefit and reducing existential risks. If you would like to learn more, or are interested in collaborating with the teams featured in our episodes, please email [email protected] can find more about our work at www.futureoflife.org, or subscribe to our newsletter to get updates on all our projectsMedia and resources referenced in the episode:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_3.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1_the_Road https://ignota.org/products/pharmako-ai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-scientists-are-using-ai-to-talk-to-animals/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ship_Who_Sang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sparrow_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Yang

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  1:04:07
• Imagine: What if AI-enabled life extension allowed some people to live forever?

  If you could extend your life, would you? How might life extension technologies create new social and political divides? How can the world unite to solve the great problems of our time, like AI risk? What if AI creators could agree on an inspection process to expose AI dangers before they're unleashed? Imagine a World is a podcast exploring a range of plausible and positive futures with advanced AI, produced by the Future of Life Institute. We interview the creators of 8 diverse and thought provoking imagined futures that we received as part of the worldbuilding contest FLI ran last year.In the fifth episode of Imagine A World, we explore the fictional worldbuild titled 'To Light’. Our host Guillaume Riesen speaks to Mako Yass, the first place winner of the FLI Worldbuilding Contest we ran last year. Mako lives in Auckland, New Zealand. He describes himself as a 'stray philosopher-designer', and has a background in computer programming and analytic philosophy. Mako’s world is particularly imaginative, with richly interwoven narrative threads and high-concept sci fi inventions. By 2045, his world has been deeply transformed. There’s an AI-designed miracle pill that greatly extends lifespan and eradicates most human diseases. Sachets of this life-saving medicine are distributed freely by dove-shaped drones. There’s a kind of mind uploading which lets anyone become whatever they wish, live indefinitely and gain augmented intelligence. The distribution of wealth is almost perfectly even, with every human assigned a share of all resources. Some people move into space, building massive structures around the sun where they practice esoteric arts in pursuit of a more perfect peace.While this peaceful, flourishing end state is deeply optimistic, Mako is also very conscious of the challenges facing humanity along the way. He sees a strong need for global collaboration and investment to avoid catastrophe as humanity develops more and more powerful technologies. He’s particularly concerned with the risks presented by artificial intelligence systems as they surpass us. An AI system that is more capable than a human at all tasks - not just playing chess or driving a car - is what we’d call an Artificial General Intelligence - abbreviated ‘AGI’. Mako proposes that we could build safe AIs through radical transparency. He imagines tests that could reveal the true intentions and expectations of AI systems before they are released into the world. Please note: This episode explores the ideas created as part of FLI’s worldbuilding contest, and our hope is that this series sparks discussion about the kinds of futures we want. The ideas present in these imagined worlds and in our podcast are not to be taken as FLI endorsed positions.Explore this worldbuild: https://worldbuild.ai/to-lightThe podcast is produced by the Future of Life Institute (FLI), a non-profit dedicated to guiding transformative technologies for humanity's benefit and reducing existential risks. If you would like to learn more, or are interested in collaborating with the teams featured in our episodes, please email [email protected] can find more about our work at www.futureoflife.org, or subscribe to our newsletter to get updates on all our projectsMedia and concepts referenced in the episode:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Ignota https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence#Paperclip_maximizer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_in_the_Brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matrix https://aboutmako.makopool.com/

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  58:53
• Imagine: What if we developed digital nations untethered to geography?

  How do low income countries affected by climate change imagine their futures? How do they overcome these twin challenges? Will all nations eventually choose or be forced to go digital?Imagine a World is a podcast exploring a range of plausible and positive futures with advanced AI, produced by the Future of Life Institute. We interview the creators of 8 diverse and thought provoking imagined futures that we received as part of the worldbuilding contest FLI ran last year.In the fourth episode of Imagine A World, we explore the fictional worldbuild titled 'Digital Nations'.Conrad Whitaker and Tracey Kamande join Guillaume Riesen on 'Imagine a World' to talk about their worldbuild, 'Digital Nations', which they created with their teammate, Dexter Findley. All three worldbuilders were based in Kenya while crafting their entry, though Dexter has just recently moved to the UK. Conrad is a Nairobi-based startup advisor and entrepreneur, Dexter works in humanitarian aid, and Tracey is the Co-founder of FunKe Science, a platform that promotes interactive learning of science among school children.As the name suggests, this world is a deep dive into virtual communities. It explores how people might find belonging and representation on the global stage through digital nations that aren't tied to any physical location. This world also features a fascinating and imaginative kind of artificial intelligence that they call 'digital persons'. These are inspired by biological brains and have a rich internal psychology. Rather than being trained on data, they're considered to be raised in digital nurseries. They have a nuanced but mostly loving relationship with humanity, with some even going on to found their own digital nations for us to join.In an incredible turn of events, last year the South Pacific state of Tuvalu was the first to “go virtual” in response to sea levels threatening the island nation's physical territory. This happened in real life just months after it was written into this imagined world in our worldbuilding contest, showing how rapidly ideas that seem ‘out there’ can become reality. Will all nations eventually go digital? And might AGIs be assimilated, 'brought up' rather than merely trained, as 'digital people', citizens to live communally alongside humans in these futuristic states?Please note: This episode explores the ideas created as part of FLI’s worldbuilding contest, and our hope is that this series sparks discussion about the kinds of futures we want. The ideas present in these imagined worlds and in our podcast are not to be taken as FLI endorsed positions.Explore this worldbuild: https://worldbuild.ai/digital-nationsThe podcast is produced by the Future of Life Institute (FLI), a non-profit dedicated to guiding transformative technologies for humanity's benefit and reducing existential risks. If you would like to learn more, or are interested in collaborating with the teams featured in our episodes, please email [email protected] can find more about our work at www.futureoflife.org, or subscribe to our newsletter to get updates on all our projectsMedia and concepts referenced in the episode:https://www.tuvalu.tv/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_Kenya https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World https://thenetworkstate.com/the-network-state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series

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