In short: Satiable values have diminishing returns with more resources, while insatiable values always want more, potentially leading to risky AI behaviour – it seems likely that AI with insatiable values could make existential trades, like gambling the world for a chance to double resources. Therefore potentially design AI with satiable values to ensure stability,…
Key Points Understanding UBI and Its Challenges Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a system where everyone gets regular cash payments, no strings attached. It’s seen as a way to help people in an AI-driven economy where jobs might disappear. But there are worries. For example, if landlords know everyone has extra money, they might raise…
The interview has now been released! We covered a lot of stuff which at the time of writing hasn’t been covered elsewhere in detail. Super excited that I’ll be interviewing Nick Bostrom again in a few days – last time was in 2012 (on XRisks of AI and the Simulation Argument). This time we will…
“I argue that there is a realistic possibility that some AI systems will be conscious and/or robustly agentic in the near future. That means that the prospect of AI welfare and moral patienthood, i.e. of AI systems with their own interests and moral significance, is no longer an issue only for sci-fi or the distant…
We’ve built machines that can out-calculate, out-predict, and soon out-think us. But could they ever out-care us – or will it with all that power remain indifferent? We lack the experience with something smarter than us. Fair enough. We’ve never met an entity that verifiably outstrips our cognitive sophistication across the board – after all,…
Nick Bostrom addresses concerns about biased influence on the extrapolation base in his discussions on indirect normativity (IN – i.e., an approach where the AI deduces ideal values or states of affairs rather than running with current values and states of affairs) esp. coherent extrapolated volition (CEV) and value alignment in his magnum opus Superintelligence….
About Robin Hanson gave the talk ‘Our Big Oops: We Broke Humanity’s Superpower’ at Future Day 2025. Abstract Humanity’s superpower is cultural evolution. Which still goes great for behaviors that can easily vary locally, like most tech and business practices. But modernity has plausibly broken our evolution of shared norms and values, as that needs…
Do LLMs have metacognition? What happens when machines begin to “think about thinking”? At Future Day 2025, we hosted an in-depth discussion on metacognition in large language models (LLMs) – with insights from researcher Shun Yoshizawa, supervised by neuroscientist Dr Ken Mogi at Sony Computer Science Laboratories. Together, we explored the current state of metacognitive…
A panel between James Hughes, James Newton-Thomas, Lev Lafayette and Adam Ford (chair) at Future Day 2025. Video of the panel – ‘AI Automation: Human Wage Crash Panel’: About If AI drives human wages to the ground, should everything else crash too? Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen envisions a future where AI-induced wage collapse leads to…
About Below is the abstract for Linda Glenn’s talk at Future Day 2025. In an era where artificial intelligence increasingly shapes our world, the challenge isn’t just developing more powerful systems, but ensuring they embody the wisdom necessary for true flourishing. This presentation explores how wisdom – distinct from pure intelligence – emerges from embodied…
