About Robin Hanson will give a talk at Future Day 2025 on cultural drift. Abstract Humanity’s superpower is cultural evolution. Which still goes great for behaviors that can easily vary locally, like most tech and business practices. But modernity has plausibly broken our evolution of shared norms and values, as that needs natural selection of…
Do LLMs have metacognition? What happens when machines begin to “think about thinking”? At Future Day 2025, we hosted an in-depth discussion on metacognition in large language models (LLMs) – with insights from researcher Shun Yoshizawa, supervised by neuroscientist Dr Ken Mogi at Sony Computer Science Laboratories. Together, we explored the current state of metacognitive…
About Below is the abstract for Linda Glenn’s talk at Future Day 2025. In an era where artificial intelligence increasingly shapes our world, the challenge isn’t just developing more powerful systems, but ensuring they embody the wisdom necessary for true flourishing. This presentation explores how wisdom – distinct from pure intelligence – emerges from embodied…
About A talk at Future Day 2025 by James Hughes. We already can make deepfakes of ourselves and others. There is an issue of consent; ideally people should consent to have digital twins of themselves made, even if its your grandma. But if we start making digital twins of ourselves, which is already being done,…
Synopsis: The new cognitive capabilities in our machines were the result of a shift in the way wethink about problem solving. The shift is the most significant change in AI, ever, if not inscience as a whole. Machine Learning based systems are now successfully attackingboth simple and complex problems using these novel Methods. We are…
Synopsis: In this talk we articulate a positive vision of the future that is both viable given what we know, and also utterly radical in its implications. We introduce two key insights that, when taken together, synergize in powerful ways. Namely, (a) the long-tails of pleasure and pain, and (b) the correlation between wellbeing, productivity,…
Synopsis: The goal of Aligned AI is to implement scalable solutions to the alignment problem, and distribute these solutions to actors developing powerful transformative artificial intelligence. What is Alignment? Algorithms are shaping the present and will shape the future ever more strongly. It is crucially important that these powerful algorithms be aligned – that they…
This talk is part of the ‘Stepping Into the Future‘ conference. Synopsis: Along with many benefits of powerful machine learning methods comes significant challenges. For example, as content recommendation algorithms become increasingly competent at satisfying user preferences, they may also become more competent at manipulating human preferences, to make the preferences more easily satisfiable. These kinds of alignment…
Grand Futures – Thinking Truly Long Term. What are the limits of what advanced civilizations can achieve? What is the upper limit of value? Anders Sandberg speaks on existential hope about the far future and his upcoming book ‘Grand Futures: Thinking Truly Long Term‘, and how to be an optimist about the future. Synopsis: How…
A talk by David Pearce for the Stepping into the Future conference 2022. Synopsis: No sentient being in the evolutionary history of life has enjoyed good health as defined by the World Health Organization. The founding constitution of the World Health Organization commits the international community to a daringly ambitious conception of health: “a state…
