Kristian Rönn – The Darwinian Trap – Future Day 2025
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About
Kristian Rönn will give a presentation at Future Day 2025, discussing his insightful and timely book ‘The Darwinian Trap – The Hidden Evolutionary Forces that Shape Our World (And Threaten Our Future)’
He will discuss macroeconomics & Game theoretic Imagineering: avoiding the minefields of the tragedy of the commons in the hope that we can stave off the onslaught of Darwinian Demons, and ultimately find some nash equilibrium of fairness for all humanity, sentient AI an non-human animals.
About The Darwinian Trap
A provocative exploration of how humans are wired to seek short-term success at the expense of long-term survival—an evolutionary “glitch” that explains everything from toxic workplaces to climate change
“Essential reading . . . a lively, ultimately hopeful examination of how incentivizing the wrong values and actions has led to some of our most intractable problems.”—Eric Ries, New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup
When people talk about today’s biggest challenges—pollution, misinformation, artificial intelligence, inept CEOs, and politicians—they tend to frame the conversation around “bad people” doing “bad things.” But is there more to the story?
Humans, it turns out, are intrinsically wired to seek short-term success at the expense of long-term prosperity. Kristian Rönn, an entrepreneur formerly affiliated with the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, calls these deeply rooted impulses “Darwinian demons.” These forces, a by-product of natural selection, can lead us to act in shortsighted ways that harm others—and even imperil our survival as a species. If this evolutionary glitch is left unchecked, the consequences will grow in magnitude as the power of technology accelerates.
In this eye-opening work, Rönn shows that we must learn to cooperate in new ways if we are to escape these evolutionary traps in our daily lives and solve our biggest existential threats. Evolution may be to blame for the trap—but humans need not fall for it. Our salvation, he writes, will involve the creation of new systems that understand, track, and manage what humankind values most.
Bold, brilliant, and ultimately optimistic, The Darwinian Trap gives readers a powerful new lens on our world and its problems, and invites us to rethink our priorities for the sake of generations to come.
Start time
| JST UTC+09 | AEDT UTC+10 | PST UTC-08 | EST UTC-05 | GMT UTC+0 |
| Feb 27th 11:00 | Feb 27th 13:00 | Feb 28th 18:00 | Feb 28th 21:00 | March 1st 02:00 |
How to join
For active participation (asking questions etc) join via these links: day 1 & day 2 to get the appropriate link. Also see the Facebook event. If just lurking, you can tune in via this Riverside streaming link, or try YouTube (unstable).
The book can be purchased here on Amazon, or here via Penguin Random House.
Kristian Rönn is the CEO and co-founder of Normative, a software tool for sustainability accounting. He has a background in mathematics, philosophy, computer science, and artificial intelligence. Before he started Normative, he worked at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute on issues related to global catastrophic risks.
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