What if the point of self-improvement were not just to feel better or get ahead, but to become more capable of helping in a hurting world? I recently had the pleasure of welcoming Magnus Vinding back to the channel. We last spoke a few years ago about his book Suffering-Focused Ethics, and this time we…
Can AI really be moral – or does it just produce moral-sounding answers? Wendell Wallach, co-author of Moral Machines, joins me to discuss machine ethics, moral motivation, AI governance, and why controlling AI may not be enough. Wendell Wallach is one of the foundational voices in AI ethics and machine ethics, best known as co-author…
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…
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…
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…
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…
“AI as a moral hypothesis generator” – with David Enoch. AI may be useful to help generate moral hypotheses using pattern recognition to find deep ethical patterns (meta-patterns) invisible to humans or hard to see – proposing new moral ideas or testing existing ones within varieties of ethical frameworks like utilitarianism or deontology, acting as…
In a blinded Moral Turing Test, people rated GPT-4’s moral answers higher than humans’ across most measures – yet they could still tell it was AI. Are we priming the public to over-trust machine morality? Interview with Dr Eyal Aharoni, Ph.D. – Associate Professor of Psychology, Philosophy, and Neuroscience Georgia State University Attributions toward artificial…
Halloween special: a scary futures tier list that is spooky in theme & sobering in content. This tier list isn’t scientific, it isn’t the final say, it doesn’t exhaustively include all doomsday risks – its a bit of a gimmick, and a fun intuition pump. Anders Sandberg is a neuroscientist and futurist well known for…