The Future Virtual You: How Will Digital Twins and Afterselves Change Our Identities?
| | | |

The Future Virtual You: How Will Digital Twins and Afterselves Change Our Identities?

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,…

Future Day 2025
| |

Future Day 2025

Live from Japan! This time we have Future Day spanning 2 days -Feb 28th / March 1st! Why are nearly all our holidays focused on celebrating the past, or the cyclical processes of nature? Why not celebrate the amazing future we are collectively creating? Don’t miss this special Future Day 2025 event—where the future isn’t…

Panel: AGI Architectures & Trustworthy AGI
| | |

Panel: AGI Architectures & Trustworthy AGI

The state of the art deep learning models do not really embody understanding. This panel will focusing on AGI transparency, auditability and explainability.. differences btw causal understanding and prediction as well as surrounding practical / systemic / ethical issues. Can the blackbox problem be fully solved without machine understanding (the AI actually ‘understanding’ rather than…

Panel: Long Term Futures
| | |

Panel: Long Term Futures

Why should we prioritize improving the long-term future? Longtermism is an ethical stance motivates the reduction of existential risks such as nuclear war, engineered pandemics and emerging technologies like AI and nanotechnology. Sigal Samuel summarizes the key argument for longtermism as follows: “future people matter morally just as much as people alive today; (…) there…

Agency in an Age of Machines – Joscha Bach
| | |

Agency in an Age of Machines – Joscha Bach

This talk is part of the ‘Stepping Into the Future‘ conference. Synopsis: The arrival of homo sapiens on Earth amounted to a singularity for its ecosystems, a transition that dramatically changed the distribution and interaction of living species within a relatively short amount of time. Such transitions are not unprecedented during the evolution of life,…

Causal Incentives and Safe AGI – Tom Everitt
| |

Causal Incentives and Safe AGI – Tom Everitt

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…

Engineering Paradise – a panel w/ David Pearce, Mike Johnson & Andrés Gómez Emilsson
| | |

Engineering Paradise – a panel w/ David Pearce, Mike Johnson & Andrés Gómez Emilsson

This panel is part of the ‘Stepping Into the Future‘ conference. What is the most wonderful experience you have had in your life? Now imagine if every moment in your life could be as good as this experience, or even better. Other things being equal, wouldn’t it be nice if we had higher quality lives?…

Open-Ended vs. Closed-Minded Conceptions of Superintelligence
| | |

Open-Ended vs. Closed-Minded Conceptions of Superintelligence

This talk is part of the ‘Stepping Into the Future‘ conference. Abstract: Superintelligence, the next phase beyond today’s narrow AI and tomorrow’s AGI, almost intrinsically evades our attempts at detailed comprehension. Yet very different perspectives on superintelligence exist today and have concrete influence on thinking about matters ranging from AGI architectures to technology regulation.One paradigm…

Posthumanism and its Moral Imperatives – Pramod K. Nayar
| |

Posthumanism and its Moral Imperatives – Pramod K. Nayar

Synopsis: Octavia Butler’s fiction underscores heightened empathy as a possible feature of the future humans (who may be co-evolved with alien species, in Butler’s imagination). Yet, in Butler’s fiction, the morally enhanced beings ponder over the freedom they now possess. This talk, building on the view that ME requires multiple virtues (James Hughes), examines the linkage…

The End of Suffering – Genome Reform and the Future of Sentience – David Pearce
| | |

The End of Suffering – Genome Reform and the Future of Sentience – David Pearce

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…