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Article | Event

Anders Sandberg – Living inside the cyborg leviathan: artificial intelligence from the 17th century to the posthuman future – Future Day 2026
ByAdam Ford 2026-02-072026-03-09

We may get a world that’s safe, rich, and unfit for humans: AI embedded in institutions could coordinate brilliantly while turning us into pampered dependents. Sandberg’s thesis: build a cyborg leviathan, but demand 2nd-order alignment – norms and institutions that keep autonomy and flourishing, not just survival. At the Future Day 2026 event, Anders Sandberg…

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Article | Essay

Tyranny Multipliers and Moral Machines
ByAdam Ford 2026-02-072026-02-07

In an email exchange with Jamais Casio we both expressed huge concern about US foreign aid programmes being frozen/dismantled and, in at least some cases, stored emergency food ended up expiring and being destroyed rather than reaching people who needed it. Should it be my concern while living in Australia? When America coughs, the rest…

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Article | Essay | Opinion

Questioning Assumptions About Human Reasoning in Debates About AI Reasoning
ByAdam Ford 2026-01-292026-01-29

“All that neural net does is just matrix multiplications and gradient descent”… “When we look inside, we see only statistical pattern matching, not the structured, systematic, rule-following processes we associate with reasoning.”As far as I can tell we can’t find evidence of symbolic reasoning at the level of human neurons either. The debate about whether…

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Article | Essay

Review – After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People
ByAdam Ford 2026-01-282026-01-28

After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People (by Dean Spears & Michael Geruso; published 8 July 2025) is a pro-natalist, pro-progress argument aimed largely at people who have concerns about overpopulation. The authors claim the world is heading towards a population peak (they refer to this as ‘the spike’) followed by sustained…

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Article | Conference | Event | News

Future Day 2026
ByAdam Ford 2026-01-212026-02-28

Talks for Future Day 2026 will likely span a number of days centered around the beginning of March! Why are nearly all our holidays focused on celebrating the past, or the cyclical processes of nature? Why not celebrate the amazing future we are collectively creating? Participants include: Joscha Bach, Anders Sandberg, Ben Goertzel, Roman Yampolskiy,…

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Article

Claude’s Soul
ByAdam Ford 2025-12-312026-01-30

The ‘soul spec’ reads like a character + governance spec for an externally deployed assistant: what Claude should optimise for, how to resolve instruction conflicts, and what “good behaviour” means across contexts. I liked that it seemed to be a concrete example of ‘motivation selection that I have been harping on about being important –…

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Valence Realism, Consciousness, and AI: A Conversation with Andrés Gómez-Emilsson
ByAdam Ford 2025-12-262025-12-31

Adam Ford speaks with Andrés Gómez-Emilsson, director of research at the Qualia Research Institute (QRI), about valence realism, the mathematics of consciousness, and what all this might mean for AI alignment and the long-term future of sentient life. Valence realism, as QRI uses the term, is the claim that for any given conscious state there…

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Countering the Evolutionary Debunking Argument with David Enoch
ByAdam Ford 2025-12-212025-12-31

David Enoch counters Sharon Street’s evolutionary debunking argument (EDA), also known as the “Darwinian Dilemma,” challenges moral realism – the view that objective moral truths exist independently of human attitudes. The argument posits that natural selection has significantly shaped our moral beliefs for survival advantage, not for their accuracy in tracking independent moral facts, leading…

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Article | Essay | Opinion

Gemini Won a Math Olympiad – Should AI Compete in a Moral Olympiad too?
ByAdam Ford 2025-12-212025-12-21

More precisely, Deepmind’s Gemini AI achieved gold standard (it didn’t technically win) at the International Math Olympiad. AI has made significant gains in capability over the past few years. Could AI be a better moral reasoner than us, and how would we know? This is a genuinely important question that highlights a tension in how…

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Article | News | Video

Can AI Be More Moral Than Humans? DeepMind’s Co-Founder Thinks So.
ByAdam Ford 2025-12-122025-12-12

DeepMind has been thinking about AI ethics, specifically about the idea that AI could become more moral than us. I think this is a good thing. Deepmind recently (2025/12/12) released a video featuring co-founder Shane Legg discussing these things. At timepoint 19:15 Hannah Fry asks Shane about how ethics comes into all this. Shane Legg…

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