Imagine A World
Claim This Podcastby Future of Life Institute
Podcast Overview
<p><strong>The year is 2045.</strong> Humanity is not extinct, nor living in a dystopia. It has averted climate disaster, major wars and the risks from advanced Artificial Intelligence. How? This was what we asked the entrants of our Worldbuilding Contest to imagine last year.</p><p>Our new podcast series digs deeper into the eight winning entries, their ideas and solutions, the diverse teams behind them and the challenges they faced. You might love some; others you might not choose to inhabit. FLI is not endorsing any one idea. Rather, we hope to grow the conversation about what futures people get excited about.</p><p>Ask yourself, with each episode, is this a world you’d want to live in? And if not, what would you prefer?</p><p><strong>Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.</strong></p><p>Explore the worldbuilds discussed in these episodes here: <a href="https://worldbuild.ai/winners">https://worldbuild.ai/winners</a></p><p>This podcast was produced by the Future of Life Institute. FLI is a non-profit that works to reduce large-scale risks from transformative technologies and promote the development and use of these technologies to benefit all life on Earth.</p>
Language
🇺🇲
Publishing Since
8/29/2023
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Recent Episodes
October 17, 2023
Imagine: What if AI advisors helped us make better decisions?
Are we doomed to a future of loneliness and unfulfilling online interactions? What if technology made us feel more connected instead? Imagine a World is a podcast exploring a range of plausible and positive futures with advanced AI, produced by the Future of Life Institute. We interview the creators of 8 diverse and thought provoking imagined futures that we received as part of the worldbuilding contest FLI ran last year In the eighth and final episode of Imagine A World we explore the fictional worldbuild titled 'Computing Counsel', one of the third place winners of FLI's worldbuilding contest. Guillaume Riesen talks to Mark L, one of the three members of the team behind 'Computing Counsel', a third-place winner of the FLI Worldbuilding Contest. Mark is a machine learning expert with a chemical engineering degree, as well as an amateur writer. His teammates are Patrick B, a mechanical engineer and graphic designer, and Natalia C, a biological anthropologist and amateur programmer. This world paints a vivid, nuanced picture of how emerging technologies shape society. We have advertisers competing with ad-filtering technologies and an escalating arms race that eventually puts an end to the internet as we know it. There is AI-generated art so personalized that it becomes addictive to some consumers, while others boycott media technologies altogether. And corporations begin to throw each other under the bus in an effort to redistribute the wealth of their competitors to their own customers. While these conflicts are messy, they generally end up empowering and enriching the lives of the people in this world. New kinds of AI systems give them better data, better advice, and eventually the opportunity for genuine relationships with the beings these tools have become. The impact of any technology on society is complex and multifaceted. This world does a great job of capturing that. Please note: This episode explores the ideas created as part of FLI's worldbuilding contest, and our hope is that this series sparks discussion about the kinds of futures we want. The ideas present in these imagined worlds and in our podcast are not to be taken as FLI endorsed positions. Explore this worldbuild: https://worldbuild.ai/computing-counsel The podcast is produced by the Future of Life Institute (FLI), a non-profit dedicated to guiding transformative technologies for humanity's benefit and reducing existential risks. If you would like to learn more, or are interested in collaborating with the teams featured in our episodes, please email worldbuild@futureoflife.org. You can find more about our work at www.futureoflife.org, or subscribe to our newsletter to get updates on all our projects. Media and Concepts referenced in the episode: Corpus Callosum - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_callosum Eliezer Yudkowsky on 'Superstimulation' - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Jq73GozjsuhdwMLEG/superstimuli-and-the-collapse-of-western-civilization Universal culture - https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/ Max Harms' Crystal Trilogy - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28678856-crystal-society UBI - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income Kim Stanley Robinson - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Stanley_Robinson
October 10, 2023
Imagine: What if narrow AI fractured our shared reality?
Let's imagine a future where AGI is developed but kept at a distance from practically impacting the world, while narrow AI remakes the world completely. Inequality sticks around and AI fractures society into separate media bubbles with irreconcilable perspectives. But it's not all bad. AI markedly improves the general quality of life, enhancing medicine and therapy, and those bubbles help to sustain their inhabitants. Can you get excited about a world with these tradeoffs? Imagine a World is a podcast exploring a range of plausible and positive futures with advanced AI, produced by the Future of Life Institute. We interview the creators of 8 diverse and thought provoking imagined futures that we received as part of the worldbuilding contest FLI ran last year. In the seventh episode of Imagine A World we explore a fictional worldbuild titled 'Hall of Mirrors', which was a third-place winner of FLI's worldbuilding contest. Michael Vasser joins Guillaume Reisen to discuss his imagined future, which he created with the help of Matija Franklin and Bryce Hidysmith. Vassar was formerly the president of the Singularity Institute, and co-founded Metamed; more recently he has worked on communication across political divisions. Franklin is a PhD student at UCL working on AI Ethics and Alignment. Finally, Hidysmith began in fashion design, passed through fortune-telling before winding up in finance and policy research, at places like Numerai, the Median Group, Bismarck Analysis, and Eco.com. Hall of Mirrors is a deeply unstable world where nothing is as it seems. The structures of power that we know today have eroded away, survived only by shells of expectation and appearance. People are isolated by perceptual bubbles and struggle to agree on what is real. This team put a lot of effort into creating a plausible, empirically grounded world, but their work is also notable for its irreverence and dark humor. In some ways, this world is kind of a caricature of the present. We see deeper isolation and polarization caused by media, and a proliferation of powerful but ultimately limited AI tools that further erode our sense of objective reality. A deep instability threatens. And yet, on a human level, things seem relatively calm. It turns out that the stories we tell ourselves about the world have a lot of inertia, and so do the ways we live our lives. Please note: This episode explores the ideas created as part of FLI's worldbuilding contest, and our hope is that this series sparks discussion about the kinds of futures we want. The ideas present in these imagined worlds and in our podcast are not to be taken as FLI endorsed positions. Explore this worldbuild: https://worldbuild.ai/hall-of-mirrors The podcast is produced by the Future of Life Institute (FLI), a non-profit dedicated to guiding transformative technologies for humanity's benefit and reducing existential risks. You can find more about our work at www.futureoflife.org, or subscribe to our newsletter to get updates on all our projects. Media referenced in the episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Confucianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Framed_Roger_Rabbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Smith https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Notebook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek%3A_The_Next_Generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-3PO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Baldwin
October 3, 2023
Imagine: What if AI enabled us to communicate with animals?
What if AI allowed us to communicate with animals? Could interspecies communication lead to new levels of empathy? How might communicating with animals lead humans to reimagine our place in the natural world? Imagine a World is a podcast exploring a range of plausible and positive futures with advanced AI, produced by the Future of Life Institute. We interview the creators of 8 diverse and thought provoking imagined futures that we received as part of the worldbuilding contest FLI ran last year. In the sixth episode of Imagine A World we explore the fictional worldbuild titled 'AI for the People', a third place winner of the worldbuilding contest. Our host Guillaume Reisen welcomes Chi Rainer Bornfree, part of this three-person worldbuilding team alongside her husband Micah White, and their collaborator, J.R. Harris. Chi has a PhD in Rhetoric from UC Berkeley and has taught at Bard, Princeton, and NY State Correctional facilities, in the meantime writing fiction, essays, letters, and more. Micah, best-known as the co-creator of the 'Occupy Wall Street' movement and the author of 'The End of Protest', now focuses primarily on the social potential of cryptocurrencies, while Harris is a freelance illustrator and comic artist. The name 'AI for the People' does a great job of capturing this team's activist perspective and their commitment to empowerment. They imagine social and political shifts that bring power back into the hands of individuals, whether that means serving as lawmakers on randomly selected committees, or gaining income by choosing to sell their personal data online. But this world isn't just about human people. Its biggest bombshell is an AI breakthrough that allows humans to communicate with other animals. What follows is an existential reconsideration of humanity's place in the universe. This team has created an intimate, complex portrait of a world shared by multiple parties: AIs, humans, other animals, and the environment itself. As these entities find their way forward together, their goals become enmeshed and their boundaries increasingly blurred. Please note: This episode explores the ideas created as part of FLI's worldbuilding contest, and our hope is that this series sparks discussion about the kinds of futures we want. The ideas present in these imagined worlds and in our podcast are not to be taken as FLI endorsed positions. Explore this worldbuild: https://worldbuild.ai/ai-for-the-people The podcast is produced by the Future of Life Institute (FLI), a non-profit dedicated to guiding transformative technologies for humanity's benefit and reducing existential risks. If you would like to learn more, or are interested in collaborating with the teams featured in our episodes, please email worldbuild@futureoflife.org. You can find more about our work at www.futureoflife.org, or subscribe to our newsletter to get updates on all our projects Media and resources referenced in the episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_3.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1_the_Road https://ignota.org/products/pharmako-ai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-scientists-are-using-ai-to-talk-to-animals/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ship_Who_Sang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sparrow_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Yang
9 total episodes available
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Frequently asked questions
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- What is Imagine A World?
<p><strong>The year is 2045.</strong> Humanity is not extinct, nor living in a dystopia. It has averted climate disaster, major wars and the risks from advanced Artificial Intelligence. How? This was what we asked the entrants of our Worldbuilding Contest to imagine last year.</p><p>Our new podcast series digs deeper into the eight winning entries, their ideas and solutions, the diverse teams behind them and the challenges they faced. You might love some; others you might not choose to inhabit. FLI is not endorsing any one idea. Rather, we hope to grow the conversation about what futures people get excited about.</p><p>Ask yourself, with each episode, is this a world you’d want to live in? And if not, what would you prefer?</p><p><strong>Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.</strong></p><p>Explore the worldbuilds discussed in these episodes here: <a href="https://worldbuild.ai/winners">https://worldbuild.ai/winners</a></p><p>This podcast was produced by the Future of Life Institute. FLI is a non-profit that works to reduce large-scale risks from transformative technologies and promote the development and use of these technologies to benefit all life on Earth.</p> - How often does this podcast release new episodes?
This podcast updates daily.
- Where can I listen to this podcast?
This podcast is available on 4 platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. You can also use the RSS feed directly.
- Does this podcast accept guests?
Yes, this podcast regularly features guests.
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