For now, we keep AI safe the way we keep any dangerous tool safe: we limit what it can touch. We sandbox it, air-gap it, write its restrictions into code. This works so long as the tool is dumber than the toolmaker. The moment it is not, the arrangement inverts. A mind that exceeds ours…
People used to say ‘morality is too complex for machines’. Then we started asking machines for advice about relationships, therapy, medical decisions, and legal dilemmas – because apparently we enjoy living dangerously. To help us think clearly about what’s happening, I interviewed Dianca Dillion. Danica looks at a surprising finding from Moral Turing Test–style research:…
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…
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…