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…
When Interpretability Becomes Mind-Reading Seatbelt Interpretability Most AI interpretability research asks a near-term engineering question: can we understand enough of a model’s internal processing to explain, predict or control important behaviour? Why did it refuse this request? Which internal features mattered? Is it representing a hidden objective? Can we tell whether a safety mechanism is…
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…
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…
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…