The Future of Life

By Future of Life Institute

Technology

What's The Future of Life about?

FLI catalyzes and supports research and initiatives for safeguarding life and developing optimistic visions of the future, including positive ways for humanity to steer its own course considering new technologies and challenges.

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Max Tegmark and the FLI Tea...

01.08.2021

Max Tegmark and members of the FLI core team come together to discuss favorite projects from 2020, what we've learned from the past year, and what we think is needed for existential risk reduction in 2021. Topics discussed in this ...

The Future of Life episodes:

01.08.2021 Max Tegmark and the FLI Team on 2020 and Existential Risk Reduction in the New Year Max Tegmark and members of the FLI core team come together to discuss favorite projects from 2020, what we've learned from the past year, and what we think is needed for existential risk reduction in 2021. Topics discussed in this ...
12.11.2020 Future of Life Award 2020: Saving 200,000,000 Lives by Eradicating Smallpox The recipients of the 2020 Future of Life Award, William Foege, Michael Burkinsky, and Victor Zhdanov Jr., join us on this episode of the FLI Podcast to recount the story of smallpox eradication, William Foege's and Victor Zhdanov Sr.'s involvement ...
12.02.2020 Sean Carroll on Consciousness, Physicalism, and the History of Intellectual Progress Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist at Caltech, joins us on this episode of the FLI Podcast to comb through the history of human thought, the strengths and weaknesses of various intellectual movements, and how we are to situate ourselves in the ...
11.17.2020 Mohamed Abdalla on Big Tech, Ethics-washing, and the Threat on Academic Integrity Mohamed Abdalla, PhD student at the University of Toronto, joins us to discuss how Big Tobacco and Big Tech work to manipulate public opinion and academic institutions in order to maximize profits and avoid regulation. Topics discussed in this episode ...
11.02.2020 Maria Arpa on the Power of Nonviolent Communication Maria Arpa, Executive Director of the Center for Nonviolent Communication, joins the FLI Podcast to share the ins and outs of the powerful needs-based framework of nonviolent communication. Topics discussed in this episode include: -What nonviolent communication (NVC) consists of ...
10.15.2020 Stephen Batchelor on Awakening, Embracing Existential Risk, and Secular Buddhism Stephen Batchelor, a Secular Buddhist teacher and former monk, joins the FLI Podcast to discuss the project of awakening, the facets of human nature which contribute to extinction risk, and how we might better embrace existential threats. Topics discussed in ...
09.30.2020 Kelly Wanser on Climate Change as a Possible Existential Threat Kelly Wanser from SilverLining joins us to discuss techniques for climate intervention to mitigate the impacts of human induced climate change. Topics discussed in this episode include: - The risks of climate change in the short-term - Tipping points and ...
09.16.2020 Andrew Critch on AI Research Considerations for Human Existential Safety In this episode of the AI Alignment Podcast, Andrew Critch joins us to discuss a recent paper he co-authored with David Krueger titled AI Research Considerations for Human Existential Safety. We explore a wide range of issues, from how the ...
09.03.2020 Iason Gabriel on Foundational Philosophical Questions in AI Alignment In the contemporary practice of many scientific disciplines, questions of values, norms, and political thought rarely explicitly enter the picture. In the realm of AI alignment, however, the normative and technical come together in an important and inseparable way. How ...
08.18.2020 Peter Railton on Moral Learning and Metaethics in AI Systems From a young age, humans are capable of developing moral competency and autonomy through experience. We begin life by constructing sophisticated moral representations of the world that allow for us to successfully navigate our way through complex social situations with ...
07.01.2020 Evan Hubinger on Inner Alignment, Outer Alignment, and Proposals for Building Safe Advanced AI It's well-established in the AI alignment literature what happens when an AI system learns or is given an objective that doesn't fully capture what we want. Human preferences and values are inevitably left out and the AI, likely being a ...
06.26.2020 Barker - Hedonic Recalibration (Mix) This is a mix by Barker, Berlin-based music producer, that was featured on our last podcast: Sam Barker and David Pearce on Art, Paradise Engineering, and Existential Hope (With Guest Mix). We hope that you'll find inspiration and well-being in ...
06.24.2020 Sam Barker and David Pearce on Art, Paradise Engineering, and Existential Hope (With Guest Mix) Sam Barker, a Berlin-based music producer, and David Pearce, philosopher and author of The Hedonistic Imperative, join us on a special episode of the FLI Podcast to spread some existential hope. Sam is the author of euphoric sound landscapes inspired ...
06.15.2020 Steven Pinker and Stuart Russell on the Foundations, Benefits, and Possible Existential Threat of AI Over the past several centuries, the human condition has been profoundly changed by the agricultural and industrial revolutions. With the creation and continued development of AI, we stand in the midst of an ongoing intelligence revolution that may prove far ...
06.01.2020 Sam Harris on Global Priorities, Existential Risk, and What Matters Most Human civilization increasingly has the potential both to improve the lives of everyone and to completely destroy everything. The proliferation of emerging technologies calls our attention to this never-before-seen power — and the need to cultivate the wisdom with which ...
05.15.2020 FLI Podcast: On the Future of Computation, Synthetic Biology, and Life with George Church Progress in synthetic biology and genetic engineering promise to bring advancements in human health sciences by curing disease, augmenting human capabilities, and even reversing aging. At the same time, such technology could be used to unleash novel diseases and biological ...
04.30.2020 FLI Podcast: On Superforecasting with Robert de Neufville Essential to our assessment of risk and ability to plan for the future is our understanding of the probability of certain events occurring. If we can estimate the likelihood of risks, then we can evaluate their relative importance and apply ...
04.15.2020 AIAP: An Overview of Technical AI Alignment in 2018 and 2019 with Buck Shlegeris and Rohin Shah Just a year ago we released a two part episode titled An Overview of Technical AI Alignment with Rohin Shah. That conversation provided details on the views of central AI alignment research organizations and many of the ongoing research efforts ...
04.09.2020 FLI Podcast: Lessons from COVID-19 with Emilia Javorsky and Anthony Aguirre The global spread of COVID-19 has put tremendous stress on humanity’s social, political, and economic systems. The breakdowns triggered by this sudden stress indicate areas where national and global systems are fragile, and where preventative and preparedness measures may be ...
04.01.2020 FLI Podcast: The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity with Toby Ord Toby Ord’s “The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity" has emerged as a new cornerstone text in the field of existential risk. The book presents the foundations and recent developments of this budding field from an accessible vantage ...
03.16.2020 AIAP: On Lethal Autonomous Weapons with Paul Scharre Lethal autonomous weapons represent the novel miniaturization and integration of modern AI and robotics technologies for military use. This emerging technology thus represents a potentially critical inflection point in the development of AI governance. Whether we allow AI to make ...
02.28.2020 FLI Podcast: Distributing the Benefits of AI via the Windfall Clause with Cullen O'Keefe As with the agricultural and industrial revolutions before it, the intelligence revolution currently underway will unlock new degrees and kinds of abundance. Powerful forms of AI will likely generate never-before-seen levels of wealth, raising critical questions about its beneficiaries. Will ...
02.18.2020 AIAP: On the Long-term Importance of Current AI Policy with Nicolas Moës and Jared Brown From Max Tegmark's Life 3.0 to Stuart Russell's Human Compatible and Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence, much has been written and said about the long-term risks of powerful AI systems. When considering concrete actions one can take to help mitigate these risks, ...
01.31.2020 FLI Podcast: Identity, Information & the Nature of Reality with Anthony Aguirre Our perceptions of reality are based on the physics of interactions ranging from millimeters to miles in scale. But when it comes to the very small and the very massive, our intuitions often fail us. Given the extent to which ...
01.16.2020 AIAP: Identity and the AI Revolution with David Pearce and Andrés Gómez Emilsson In the 1984 book Reasons and Persons, philosopher Derek Parfit asks the reader to consider the following scenario: You step into a teleportation machine that scans your complete atomic structure, annihilates you, and then relays that atomic information to Mars ...
12.31.2019 On Consciousness, Morality, Effective Altruism & Myth with Yuval Noah Harari & Max Tegmark Neither Yuval Noah Harari nor Max Tegmark need much in the way of introduction. Both are avant-garde thinkers at the forefront of 21st century discourse around science, technology, society and humanity’s future. This conversation represents a rare opportunity for two ...
12.28.2019 FLI Podcast: Existential Hope in 2020 and Beyond with the FLI Team As 2019 is coming to an end and the opportunities of 2020 begin to emerge, it's a great time to reflect on the past year and our reasons for hope in the year to come. We spend much of our ...
12.16.2019 AIAP: On DeepMind, AI Safety, and Recursive Reward Modeling with Jan Leike Jan Leike is a senior research scientist who leads the agent alignment team at DeepMind. His is one of three teams within their technical AGI group; each team focuses on different aspects of ensuring advanced AI systems are aligned and ...
12.02.2019 FLI Podcast: The Psychology of Existential Risk and Effective Altruism with Stefan Schubert We could all be more altruistic and effective in our service of others, but what exactly is it that's stopping us? What are the biases and cognitive failures that prevent us from properly acting in service of existential risks, statistically ...
11.27.2019 Not Cool Epilogue: A Climate Conversation In this brief epilogue, Ariel reflects on what she's learned during the making of Not Cool, and the actions she'll be taking going forward.
11.26.2019 Not Cool Ep 26: Naomi Oreskes on trusting climate science It’s the Not Cool series finale, and by now we’ve heard from climate scientists, meteorologists, physicists, psychologists, epidemiologists and ecologists. We’ve gotten expert opinions on everything from mitigation and adaptation to security, policy and finance. Today, we’re tackling one final ...
11.21.2019 Not Cool Ep 25: Mario Molina on climate action Most Americans believe in climate change — yet far too few are taking part in climate action. Many aren't even sure what effective climate action should look like. On Not Cool episode 25, Ariel is joined by Mario Molina, Executive ...
11.19.2019 Not Cool Ep 24: Ellen Quigley and Natalie Jones on defunding the fossil fuel industry Defunding the fossil fuel industry is one of the biggest factors in addressing climate change and lowering carbon emissions. But with international financing and powerful lobbyists on their side, fossil fuel companies often seem out of public reach. On Not ...
11.15.2019 AIAP: Machine Ethics and AI Governance with Wendell Wallach Wendell Wallach has been at the forefront of contemporary emerging technology issues for decades now. As an interdisciplinary thinker, he has engaged at the intersections of ethics, governance, AI, bioethics, robotics, and philosophy since the beginning formulations of what we ...
11.15.2019 Not Cool Ep 23: Brian Toon on nuclear winter: the other climate change Though climate change and global warming are often used synonymously, there’s a different kind of climate change that also deserves attention: nuclear winter. A period of extreme global cooling that would likely follow a major nuclear exchange, nuclear winter is ...
11.13.2019 Not Cool Ep 22: Cullen Hendrix on climate change and armed conflict Right before civil war broke out in 2011, Syria experienced a historic five-year drought. This particular drought, which exacerbated economic and political insecurity within the country, may or may not have been caused by climate change. But as climate change ...
11.07.2019 Not Cool Ep 21: Libby Jewett on ocean acidification The increase of CO2 in the atmosphere is doing more than just warming the planet and threatening the lives of many terrestrial species. A large percentage of that carbon is actually reabsorbed by the oceans, causing a phenomenon known as ...
11.06.2019 Not Cool Ep 20: Deborah Lawrence on deforestation This summer, the world watched in near-universal horror as thousands of square miles of rainforest went up in flames. But what exactly makes forests so precious — and deforestation so costly? On the 20th episode of Not Cool, Ariel explores ...
10.31.2019 FLI Podcast: Cosmological Koans: A Journey to the Heart of Physical Reality with Anthony Aguirre There exist many facts about the nature of reality which stand at odds with our commonly held intuitions and experiences of the world. Ultimately, there is a relativity of the simultaneity of events and there is no universal "now." Are ...
10.31.2019 Not Cool Ep 19: Ilissa Ocko on non-carbon causes of climate change Carbon emissions account for about 50% of warming, yet carbon overwhelmingly dominates the climate change discussion. On Episode 19 of Not Cool, Ariel is joined by Ilissa Ocko for a closer look at the non-carbon causes of climate change — ...
10.30.2019 Not Cool Ep 18: Glen Peters on the carbon budget and global carbon emissions In many ways, the global carbon budget is like any other budget. There’s a maximum amount we can spend, and it must be allocated to various countries and various needs. But how do we determine how much carbon each country ...
10.24.2019 Not Cool Ep 17: Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning, part 2 It’s time to get creative in the fight against climate change, and machine learning can help us do that. Not Cool episode 17 continues our discussion of “Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning,” a nearly 100 page report co-authored by ...
10.22.2019 Not Cool Ep 16: Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning, part 1 How can artificial intelligence, and specifically machine learning, be used to combat climate change? In an ambitious recent report, machine learning researchers provided a detailed overview of the ways that their work can be applied to both climate mitigation and ...
10.17.2019 Not Cool Ep 15: Astrid Caldas on equitable climate adaptation Despite the global scale of the climate crisis, its impacts will vary drastically at the local level. Not Cool Episode 15 looks at the unique struggles facing different communities — both human and non-human — and the importance of equity ...
10.15.2019 Not Cool Ep 14: Filippo Berardi on carbon finance and the economics of climate change As the world nears the warming limit set forth by international agreement, carbon emissions have become a costly commodity. Not Cool episode 14 examines the rapidly expanding domain of carbon finance, along with the wider economic implications of the changing ...
10.10.2019 Not Cool Ep 13: Val Kapos on ecosystem-based adaptation What is ecosystem-based adaptation, and why should we be implementing it? The thirteenth episode of Not Cool explores how we can conserve, restore, and manage natural ecosystems in ways that also help us adapt to the impacts of climate change. ...
10.08.2019 AIAP: Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control with Stuart Russell Stuart Russell is one of AI's true pioneers and has been at the forefront of the field for decades. His expertise and forward thinking have culminated in his newest work, Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control. The ...
10.08.2019 Not Cool Ep 12: Kris Ebi on climate change, human health, and social stability We know that climate change has serious implications for human health, including the spread of vector-borne disease and the global increase of malnutrition. What we don’t yet know is how expansive these health issues could become or how these problems ...
10.03.2019 Not Cool Ep 11: Jakob Zscheischler on climate-driven compound weather events While a single extreme weather event can wreak considerable havoc, it's becoming increasingly clear that such events often don't occur in isolation. Not Cool Episode 11 focuses on compound weather events: what they are, why they’re dangerous, and how we've ...
10.01.2019 Not Cool Ep 10: Stephanie Herring on extreme weather events and climate change attribution One of the most obvious markers of climate change has been the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events in recent years. In the tenth episode of Not Cool, Ariel takes a closer look at the research linking climate ...

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