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…
The most famous thought experiment in AI safety comes in two versions. One empties the universe. The other fills it with grins. The second is worse. The smiley face was commissioned in 1963 by an insurance company that wanted its employees to look happier after an unpopular merger. It has been standing in for happiness…
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…
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). This discussion primarily concerns agents with persistent objectives or learned value representations. It should not be assumed that every present-day AI system possesses stable final goals…
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…