It’s an enormous pleasure to have had Angela Livingstone present for us at Future Day 2026! One of the most pressing questions isn’t just what AI can do, but what it should be to us. We are thrilled to welcome psychiatrist Angela Livingstone to help us unpack the “almost-human” phenomenon. She takes us on a…
We were promised a Star Trek future – a world of abundance, universal health, and the collective exploration of the stars. Instead, we got a subscription-model dystopia. Somewhere between the first moon landing and the rise of the Silicon Valley ‘Founder-Gods’, the future stopped looking like it belonged to humanity and started belonging to a…
In The Superintelligent Will, in discussing ‘goal-content integrity’ Bostrom uses final goals (aka terminal goals) to mean the agent’s ends (as opposed to subgoals/instrumental goals, which are just means). But what about values? Goals and values are not the same; they differ in function and permanence. Values are ongoing guiding principles or “compass directions” for…
As part of Future Day 2026, hosted a debate between two of the most provocative minds in AGI – Ben Goertzel and Hugo de Garis (with Adam Ford as moderator/provocateur) – to tackle the ultimate existential question: Is an Artilect War inevitable, and should humanity accept becoming the “number two” species? The discussion builds upon…
Seatbelt Interpretability Much talk about AI interpretability is modest, staying close to what’s happening on the ground with AI safety today. Engineers want answers to questions like: Why did the model recommend this video?… flag this message?…tag this as X? What feature triggered that refusal? Where is the bug? Is the model lying? Is it…
What if our consciousness is not a ‘thing’ we have, but a simulation our brain runs to make sense of itself? At our upcoming conference, we are thrilled to host Joscha Bach at Future Day 2026 – he is a leading voice in cognitive architectures and the founding director of the California Institute for Machine…
We’ve written about grokking before, and why it’s important that neural networks, after long-term stagnation or overhitting (memorising training data), suddenly experiences a “lightbulb moment” and generalises to perform perfectly on unseen data. Emergent Symbolic Mechanisms Support Abstract Reasoning in Large Language Models According to the paper ‘Emergent Symbolic Mechanisms Support Abstract Reasoning in Large…
Robin Hanson will speak at Future Day 2026 on Futarchy – what a treat! Robin is often described as a person who provides the ‘startling and fresh ways of looking at how the world works’ that we didn’t know we were missing. In 1996 he coined the term ‘The Great Filter‘, the idea of ‘Grabby…
Roman Yampolskiy spoke at Future Day 2026 – video below – strap yourselves in! In this presentation, Dr. Roman V. Yampolskiy provides a rigorous examination of the fundamental limitations of Artificial Intelligence, arguing that as systems approach and surpass human-level intelligence, they become inherently unexplainable, unpredictable, and uncontrollable. He illustrates how the black box nature…
Polymath and trailblazer in bio-rejuvenation Aubrey de Grey gave a talk at Future Day 2026 on the next phase of robust mouse rejuvenation trials! Synopsis: The “damage repair” approach to bringing aging under medical control has made huge strides since I first proposed it 25 years ago. However, since it is a divide-and-conquer strategy, we…