Can AI really be moral – or does it just produce moral-sounding answers? Wendell Wallach, co-author of Moral Machines, joins me to discuss machine ethics, moral motivation, AI governance, and why controlling AI may not be enough. Wendell Wallach is one of the foundational voices in AI ethics and machine ethics, best known as co-author…
Is it dangerous to talk about AI becoming more moral than us? I think the idea of AI being more moral than humans is a real taboo in some circles. Many alignment researchers are uncomfortable with the idea because it seems to smuggle in the assumption that AI could have genuine moral agency, which conflicts…
One way to think about the long-run behaviour of advanced civilisations is not merely in terms of power, resources, or survival, but in terms of convergence. If sufficiently capable minds explore the landscape of value deeply enough, and if they are forced to reckon with the same physical universe, the same strategic constraints, and the…
Who gets to decide what happens next? – and by what mechanisms? Economist Robin Hanson argues that many of today’s failures are downstream of “pretty broken systems of governance”, and that we’ve “hardly tried” most plausible alternatives. His proposal, futarchy, separates values from beliefs: elected leaders define measurable national wellbeing goals, while prediction markets help…
How our understanding of valence, qualia, and binding determines the long-term future Most people think the future will be shaped by AI or energy. Andrés Gómez Emilsson argues it will be shaped by how we define feeling. As a co-founder of the Qualia Research Institute (QRI), Andrés has spent years pioneering a “topological” approach to…
A Conscious Cyborg Leviathan? Minds in the Machine, Minds in the State: Joscha Bach and Anders Sandberg in conversation. Are we building new minds, or new organs of civilisation – and what happens if the answer is both? Joscha’s Future Day talk, The Machine Consciousness Hypothesis, asks what would make a computer system actually have…
We are delighted to welcome Dr. Eyal Aharoni (Georgia State University) to the Future Day 2026 stage to discuss one of the most provocative frontiers in technology: the automation of moral judgement. He tackles an uncomfortable possibility: not that AI will fool us into thinking it’s human – but that we may come to prefer…
Danica Dillion is a Postdoctoral Researcher working with Dr. Mirta Galesic at Complexity Science Hub and Dr. Kurt Gray in the Deepest Beliefs Lab at The Ohio State University. Previously, she was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow at UNC at Chapel Hill. Synopsis People have long doubted that machines could ever model the complexities of…
We are incredibly honored to welcome Christine Peterson to speak at Future Day 2026, a woman who has spent decades looking over the horizon to see the future before it arrives. Christine is the Co-founder and Senior Fellow of the Foresight Institute and is famously credited with coining the term ‘Open Source‘ – a concept…
We are often told that the future of our planet is a choice between two extremes. But according to Lev Lafayette, the reality lies in the complex interaction of technology, policy, and human behaviour. Lev has spent his career managing complex systems – both in the world of IT and in the realm of social…