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Imagine A World: What if AI enabled us to communicate with animals?
188 Plays1 year ago
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 Riesen 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. To achieve this we engage in policy advocacy, grantmaking and educational outreach across three major areas: artificial intelligence, nuclear weapons, and biotechnology. If you are a storyteller, FLI can support you with scientific insights and help you understand the incredible narrative potential of these world-changing technologies. If you would like to learn more, or are interested in collaborating with the teams featured in our episodes, please email [email protected].
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
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Transcript
Repetitive Narratives in AI: A New Perspective
00:00:00
Speaker
On this episode of Imagine a World. In one sense, we have too many perspectives because the whole internet is seething with voices and we can't organize or comprehend any of it. And on the other hand, it seems to be the same kinds of narratives that are surfaced again and again. And I think in particular, when it comes to AI, the same apocalyptic scenarios are raised again and again. And that's potentially problematic
00:00:24
Speaker
When it comes to the large language models that are trained on existing discourse, right? Like it can become a self-fulfilling processes where the stories that we tell about AI are apocalyptic. We train our AI on the apocalyptic narratives about themselves.
00:00:39
Speaker
The AI is faced with the decision about what to do and it chooses the most likely scenario as the apocalyptic scenario.
Envisioning Positive AI Futures: A 2045 Contest
00:00:48
Speaker
So I think we have a real responsibility to be more imaginative in terms of, yeah, let's be smart, let's do our pre-mortem, but let's also have the faith and the courage to imagine different kinds of stories and to tell them. Yeah.
00:01:08
Speaker
Welcome to Imagine a World, a mini-series from the Future of Life Institute. This podcast is based on a contest we ran to gather ideas from around the world about what a more positive future might look like in 2045. We hope the diverse ideas you're about to hear will spark discussions and maybe even collaborations, but you should know that the ideas in this podcast are not to be taken as FLI-endorsed positions. And now, over to our host, Kiam Reza.
AI for the People: Shifting Social and Political Landscapes
00:01:48
Speaker
Welcome to the Imagine a World podcast by the Future of Life Institute. I'm your host, Guillaume Reason. In this episode, we'll be exploring a world called AI for the People, which was a third place winner of FLI's world building contest. 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's serving as lawmakers on randomly selected committees or gaining income by choosing to sell personal data online.
00:02:18
Speaker
But this world isn't just about human people.
Communicating with Animals: A Revolutionary AI Breakthrough
00:02:21
Speaker
Its biggest bombshell is an AI breakthrough that allows humans to communicate with other animals. As a result, we see a major shift in our relationship with the natural world and each other. This team has created an intimate, complex portrait of a world being 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.
00:02:47
Speaker
Our guest today is Ki Rainer-Bornfree, one member of the three-person team who created this world. Ki has a doctorate in rhetoric and taught at several universities before shifting their focus to writing. They also have a lifelong passion for activism shared by their partner, Micah White. Micah has a doctorate in media and communications and co-founded the Occupy Wall Street movement. Their third teammate, JR Harris, is a freelance illustrator who created the beautiful webcomic accompanying their submission. Well, thanks so much for joining us, Ki.
00:03:17
Speaker
It's a pleasure to be here. So I was curious, your team has three people. How did you come together to work on this?
00:03:24
Speaker
Well, Micah White and I are married and we are longtime creative collaborators on activist campaigns, on creative campaigns. He tends to be more analytical and technical. And I tend to be in this project, I was more of the creative lead. And JR is our go-to guy for visuals and we love his aesthetic style. We knew we wanted to do a comic to get the main ideas across. So we were really happy that he had space and time to work with us on it.
00:03:53
Speaker
So did you and Micah kind of discover the competition and bring JR in, it sounds like? Yeah, I was.
Literary Inspirations and AI's Creative Role
00:03:59
Speaker
So I'm a writer and I became fascinated and terrified at the potential of AI to write. And so I was researching the novels that have been co-written with AI and trying to write a philosophy article about
00:04:14
Speaker
what this means that AI is learning to write. I quickly realized that the issues that involved in artificial writing branch out into everything from our souls to our politics. It became a much bigger fascination for me than just being concerned about the competition to my chosen career. So yeah, I was researching AI in general and came across the Max Tegmark's book and came across the competition.
00:04:43
Speaker
And I was like, Mike, I want to do this, but I don't feel like I have the expertise. And he really helped encourage me to go for it. Yeah, that's awesome. I'm so glad you guys entered. I mean, what a world you come up with. Thank you. What were some of your biggest sources of inspiration? You mentioned Max Tegmark's book. Were there other sort of fictional or real things that were floating around? Yeah, absolutely. So I mentioned I was reading some of the novels that were written by or with AI. The first one being One the Road, another one being Farmico AI.
00:05:13
Speaker
But I think what had the biggest impact on me was Kim Stanley Robinson's science fiction, climate change novel, Ministry for the Future, which had just come out and which really lit me up in a new way because it did that same kind of holistic thinking about the problem of climate change, thinking about it from all these directions at all these levels and made me see new possibilities there for activism that I hadn't seen before.
00:05:38
Speaker
Yeah, so that that was the backdrop. I think of and I stole. I stole a bunch of ideas from this book. You're inspired. And also at the same time, just a small article came out about some researchers who had used AI to decode and communicate with pigs.
00:05:56
Speaker
And at some level, the research seemed obvious. Do we really need AI to tell us that this is a squeal of distress? But on the same time, it was one of those research findings that opens up a whole new level of, well, wow, what could be possible? So it's what it stands for as a step in a direction of accessing new modes of understanding, new modes of being
00:06:20
Speaker
That was really exciting to me and that became one of the very first creative insights that gave me the energy to pursue the project. Yeah. I actually haven't heard of these AI novels. I only heard of like this engineer who kind of made a children's book with I think Dolly and AI combined or something, but these are like full on like multiple hundred page novels. Is that what's going on?
00:06:45
Speaker
Maybe novels isn't exactly the best word. I haven't heard of that children's book one, so it's interesting the field. Yeah, that was kind of a splash for a lot of artists who work on kids' books. We're very upset about that, obviously. Yeah, I'll have to look that one up. Yeah, One the Road, an engineer attached a camera to an old car and an AI system and drove around or made a road trip from New York down to, I want to say, Florida.
00:07:12
Speaker
In the American tradition of the great road trip novel, they had the AI spit out data, captions based on what it was seeing, based on the geolocation data, things like that. This is an early one.
00:07:29
Speaker
it's somewhat gibberish, but also somewhat poetic. And then there are later ones that are more interactive. Farmico AI is a collaboration between GPT-3 and K. Alladome McDowell, and it's a mystical exploration of different, where it really feels like
00:07:50
Speaker
It's not a fictional work, but it takes you on a journey in a way that a good fictional book does. So I was just really fascinated about getting into the voice and the language that in some way is drawn from the entire library of human creation and in other ways is its own distinct thing. Yeah, that's fascinating. I've got to check those out.
00:08:15
Speaker
I'm also curious about how your kind of personal perspectives and your background. I know that you mentioned you and your your husband do this kind of activism stuff. Micah like co-started Occupy Wall Street. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. He was working at Ad Busters in the early days and put out the first tactical briefing calling for people to occupy Occupy Wall Street. And he and I were both at all the early meetings and helping to facilitate the general assemblies. And we were in Berkeley at the time.
00:08:44
Speaker
there were a bunch of occupies there. So yeah, and we have a long history of doing activism together. One of our first campaigns was when I got back from doing nonviolent direct action work in Palestine. We started putting together a lot of resources around combating activist burnout and we called it long-term vision. And that's not even on the internet anymore, but I remember, I think it was, I referenced it because it was an early, it's an early commitment that we've come to share, right? Like it's important to develop a long-term vision so that you can
00:09:14
Speaker
direct your energies and use them appropriately without running out. How did that kind of perspective influence your thinking about the future and this process of creating a possible future world?
AI Serving People: A Shift from Corporate Control
00:09:27
Speaker
Yeah, we called our world AI for the people because I think one of our major concerns is that this technology is so expensive that it's mainly being influenced and developed by corporations whose primary directive is to make money. They have to. It's their reason for being, and they're responsible to their stakeholders for doing that. So if AI is in the service of simply making money,
00:09:52
Speaker
we're missing out on a huge potential for this technology. So one of the what-if questions governing our world was, well, what would activists do if they were involved with AI? What could artists do? What kinds of other potentials could we see and actualize if AI was a technology that was for the people, by the people, and really has that drive towards making life
00:10:19
Speaker
Not perfect, but better and good enough for the majority, not just about enriching people who already have enough. This submission has a strong focus on relationships. The world does change around humanity, but the deepest changes are really happening in our relationships to it, and to the other entities that it contains.
00:10:47
Speaker
I wanted to understand what it might be like to live as a human in this more interconnected world, where we're no longer being held apart as the main characters. So I'd like to take a little bit of time to kind of set the scene of what your world that you've drawn out is like. And this is kind of a hard question, but I'm curious where you'll go with it. How do people find fulfillment in your world? They're like, what is a good life like?
Interrelationship with Nature: Solving Climate Change
00:11:08
Speaker
I love that question. I mean, there's as many good lives as there are people, but I think we can develop some broad strokes. One is that many people find fulfillment through political engagement. They're in the US and the UK in our world. We have imagined a
00:11:26
Speaker
sortition revolution. And this is a theory that's gaining more and more popularity, that democracy, that true democracy is democracy by lot. What that means for the everyday person is a lot more people are going to have to be a lot more involved in how things get done.
00:11:43
Speaker
And we thought that might actually work out pretty well if AI comes to take over certain jobs that are now filled by humans, then people may end up with more leisure time. And so it's a question in the literature, you know, what will people do when robots and AI take over their jobs? And one of our answers was, well, political participation.
00:12:02
Speaker
That said, I think that's not for everyone. Not everyone is interested in spending their time that way and working out those kinds of problems, doing that kind of learning. Another feature of the good life in our world is that I think there's a strong cultural shift in our world towards
00:12:19
Speaker
an emphasis on the interrelationship with nature and the environment. In our world, ultimately, climate change is solved. And along the way, many people become vegetarian, many people become in lace, which means they have AI implanted into their heads, and that allows them to communicate with animals, mushrooms, maybe even the wind. Who knows? And so that opens up, I think, another
00:12:49
Speaker
aspect for a good life, for a beautiful life, which isn't just what you do with your time, but really being human, really being. So a part of a good life is being and learning to be. The last feature that I would say that's an important aspect of the good life in our world is that there's time and possibility for creative endeavors.
00:13:13
Speaker
Effectively, there's a UBI, a universal basic income. And so that's one structural reality that allows many people to pursue artistic passions or hobbies just for the fun of it. You don't have to be Virginia Woolf to bother writing a novel.
00:13:30
Speaker
But also, I imagine that as the world becomes increasingly technologically sophisticated, there at the same time might be a growing appreciation for the aesthetic of handcraftedness. Just because humanity appreciates diversity, we appreciate contrasts, those are part of what give us pleasure.
00:13:52
Speaker
So as we get really beautiful and powerful and capable technologies in our everyday lives, there also might come to be a real appreciation and fascination with handcrafted objects that took time to make that have the flaws that weren't just stamped out on a machine.
00:14:12
Speaker
And there would be the capacity for people to spend time making those objects because of the universal basic income, because of perhaps some freedom from work enabled by artificial intelligence.
00:14:26
Speaker
I mean, there's already a ton there that you've covered. I think we'll dive into the mechanics of how sortition works and the inspiration of that and some of the content about universal basic income a bit later. But in this moment, I want to think a little bit more about this environmental relational change. And specifically in your world, something that really stuck with me is this Lorax AI system that basically allows you to communicate with different forms of life and maybe other phenomena in the world as you're suggesting.
00:14:56
Speaker
Can you say a little bit more about what that actually looks like? How would you communicate with your dog or something? I think it would be like an application in your head if you're in laced with an AI in your brain. Let's say you would activate the application by blinking or something like that. You hear your dog bark and you blink to select translation mode and then you hear the rendering into English or your chosen language of what your dog is saying.
00:15:26
Speaker
And look, communication between humans is not perfect, right? Or even between two native speakers of the same language, very much not perfect. So let's not imagine that cross-species communication wouldn't have its issues and its flaws. Perhaps the vocabulary might be very limited.
00:15:44
Speaker
But I think some linguistic communication could certainly be achieved. The big question for me is would we be able to speak back? Would there be a technological innovation that would allow us to also speak back in dog or in cat or bee or dolphin or whatever the case may be?
00:16:02
Speaker
Yeah, I think about that a lot. So I'm a big animal person. I have two little dogs who I love dearly and I got them little buttons so they can press and, you know, like say outside or play play or whatever. I've also been trying to do the other end of the operation, which is like learning their language. So sometimes I'll like sniff or like, you know, do certain body movements that indicate play or whatever. And it seems to kind of work. Like I feel like there's, there's a lot of potential there for us to learn the languages of animals as well.
00:16:27
Speaker
Oh, that's amazing. Do you think it's changed your relationship, especially your move to try to learn their language? Yeah. I mean, I feel like there's a sense of sort of embodying, like when we're playing and I kind of naturally now I'll do like this fake sneeze, which dogs do to let other dogs know that they're kind of like, just kidding. And it's not like real aggression. And I feel like it kind of comes naturally to me now. It's like, I don't know. There's some aspect of like embodying their experience of the world in a very small way.
00:16:53
Speaker
Oh, that's amazing. I didn't know about that fake sneeze. I'm a new puppy owner. Yeah, you'll probably see it. It's really cute. Now that you say it, I think I've heard it. I'll keep my eyes out. Yeah.
00:17:07
Speaker
Well, so this whole ability to somehow understand or more intimately relate with animals really decenters humanity in your world. You actually call it a Copernican moment where we kind of realize we're not the center of the intelligent universe. And this leads to a really deep sea change in how we relate to the environment and other forms of life. You have this really cool symbolism in your work in the comic that's like a rotting apple core.
00:17:32
Speaker
And this represents how humanity has been consuming Earth's resources kind of from Eve's first bite onward. And you talk about this kind of shifting until we grow into knowledge that enhances rather than extracts. Can you say a little bit more about what kind of knowledge you're imagining that could look like and how that would change our relationship with nature?
00:17:51
Speaker
Yeah, I think the fundamental shift is one in which nature changes from being either the backdrop that we ignore or the view that we're seeking out to post it on Instagram into being something more interactive, something more deeply inter-relational. I imagine that we would develop a more intimate relationship with nature that doesn't depend on transactions and extractions
00:18:21
Speaker
Where it becomes a little bit in the way that you're talking about embodying your dog, that it becomes a kind of embodied knowledge where we're more attuned to what the natural world feels like and reading those languages, speaking that nature has a language that we have forgotten how to speak. When you walk in the forest, the ground has a certain topography if the trees have been allowed to fall and decay and lie undisturbed.
00:18:48
Speaker
And if you are experienced, which I'm not really, you can walk through and see, oh, there may have been a fire here or this may have happened. And the topography is encoding a history. It's speaking a language to us that we've forgotten how to read and to hear. So I imagine that some of those skills and understandings would come back and that we would know them in our minds, but also know them in our bodies. Yeah.
Radical Democracy and Sortition: A New Governance Model
00:19:22
Speaker
This world features a range of systems that help to spread power and promote equity. There's a kind of radical democracy in the US, a new social media platform that promotes empathy and provides a form of universal basic income, and of course tools that enable communication between humans and other animals. I asked Key what some of these systems would actually look like, and how they might imagine them playing out in their world.
00:19:46
Speaker
One of the biggest changes that we talked about earlier in governance is this idea of sortition. So I had to look this up. My understanding is it's basically based on random selection. So you randomly have like a lottery and then people are put on a panel. They're given the best information they can get by maybe an AI system in your world and they make the decisions. Is that kind of the right idea?
00:20:07
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And it's most familiar to us because we already use it in the American jury system. Oh, you're right. Yeah. Interesting. That's where we know democracy by lot, but in ancient Athens where we've gathered many of our ideas about democracy, that's the only way that democracy took place. They would consider representative democracy like we have to be oligarchical.
00:20:33
Speaker
And the arguments in favor of sortition are released, so many. From the get-go, you see that once that it's a much more representative population governing. Not just the sorts of identity categories that are really common now. Oh, you would have more equal distribution of people of color and women.
00:20:53
Speaker
trans people or whatever, but also cognitive diversity, right? So the sorts of people who might not necessarily seek out group work or political work would be more likely to be represented in a political system governed by a sortition. And that's been shown to be really effective and important for better decision making.
00:21:14
Speaker
It's a really exciting potential that seems like it really holds the key to a lot of the political problems that seem intractable right now.
00:21:24
Speaker
The connection to ancient Athens does make me think, I think I remember that they only allowed certain people to be sorted, like probably men who owned land or something like that. And obviously we would try to be more inclusive today. But in your world, we have this recognition of other life forms as, you know, having relevant intelligences and being sentient. So where would you draw that line in choosing people or beings to include? Like, would you consider including other animals in the sortition process?
00:21:54
Speaker
Wow, I hadn't thought of that and I love that question. I don't know. I think that there is a campaign that is successful in our world to count animals and other beings as legal persons, which gives them legal rights, which allows us to pass legislation that protects habitats and things like that. There have been lawsuits like that already, although they haven't yet so far succeeded. And yeah, I think if we had the technology and it was deemed legitimate, it would be much better for
00:22:21
Speaker
chimpanzees to be able to speak for themselves than for us to speak for them in terms of claiming what their personhood would be. At the same time, I think there's clearly value in understanding that humans have particular ways of being together and
00:22:39
Speaker
maybe I'm just being, maybe I'm being kind of reactionarily anthropocentric still. I think I would imagine that we would call on animals to give testimony and try to account for their personhood and their claims while retaining the category of a evolving human being as one that collaborates and co-legislates and co-creates its civilization and its political operations distinct from
00:23:08
Speaker
other species of persons. Yeah. Another source of inspiration you mentioned first rotation was like indigenous American governance models. I'd love to hear a little bit more about what those look like and how those relate. Yeah. There's a lot of variety to my understanding because of the wide variety of different indigenous cultures. But to take one example that I know a tiny bit about, the Odinoshuni who also better known as the Iroquois,
00:23:37
Speaker
had a principle of governance that was based on participatory consensus-based democracy. And you see in their ethics some principles that I think are really important for making sortition work. One of them is active listening, understanding that consensus isn't going to be perfect, but that a broad agreement can really be arrived at.
00:24:01
Speaker
And they also are known for their ethic of thinking about the seven generations. And this is obviously not intrinsic to a sortition based system, but I think it's a really important indigenous principle to carry forward is that kind of long term vision, that kind of long term thinking about
00:24:18
Speaker
not just how will my actions, the decisions that we make today together by consensus, impact those of us who are here now, but to try to bring into our agreement, into our decision making process, the needs and the rights and the considerations of seven generations past us and beyond us. And you can really see where bringing the unborn people and animals and just the very earth itself into the calculation would change the kinds of decisions that are made.
00:24:49
Speaker
One of my concerns when thinking about sortition, again, I've just started thinking about this as a broader idea, but our society is so specialized. If we're trying to figure out something that has to do with some niche economic concept that most people haven't had a chance to even think about, but there are some people who we'd consider experts who have thought about it a lot, wouldn't you want them to be the ones weighing in? How do you balance that notion of expertise with representation?
00:25:19
Speaker
That is the most ancient critique of the tradition that there is. And we can thank Plato for leaving us with that really thorny and difficult problem. Yes, he wouldn't want, his version of it is, you wouldn't have just anyone build the ships for the army. You want the ship builder to build the ships for the army. I think the strongest answer to that lies in two things. One, that political knowledge is a different kind of knowledge from other sorts of expertise.
00:25:44
Speaker
where our expertise about how there really might be at any given time, like one best way to build a computer or a ship. And in that case, you want the expert to tell you what is that best way and to learn from them and even improve on them. But when it comes to political knowledge at any given time, there isn't one best kind of political knowledge or one expertise in political knowledge. It's not a knowledge that yields to expertise in that same way.
00:26:13
Speaker
Or even if you'd want to take something like economics in your example, there's a lot of debate around economic questions. And so when you're dealing with questions that are inherently more ambiguous, the best case scenario for arriving at a workable answer is one that brings lots of perspectives. And that brings me to the second part of my answer, which is that people learn by doing. So political knowledge is the kind of knowledge that people learn about by engaging in it.
00:26:43
Speaker
rather than by reading Plato's Republic, you have to learn, oh, when there's this kind of conflict, here's something that can disuse it. And here's the kind of person that I am when a conflict comes up. And here's the kind of role that I can play that I'm comfortable playing when a conflict comes up. So it's a different kind of knowledge that actually really benefits from having a diverse range of voices in the room.
00:27:10
Speaker
I think that there needs to be an opportunity for learning and gathering of evidence just like our Senate already does, right? They bring experts to testify in front of them. We trust them to educate themselves adequately on a given subject when it comes before them. And the same thing would be true in a sortition-based system. There would be, let's say, a sequence or a process for educating before decision-making.
00:27:36
Speaker
And I could see how AI systems would be very helpful in that too, like selecting the right information to help people or kind of facilitating the learning process.
Our Time: A Social Network with Empathy and Basic Income
00:27:44
Speaker
Right. Yeah. Although they would have to be maybe a little bit more less prone to hallucination and making up effects than the current iterations are.
00:27:54
Speaker
So another factor you mentioned is this universal basic income. And it comes about in a really interesting way in your world. It starts with a social network called Our Time, which is basically initially released by this group of hackers who are anonymous. And they kind of took apart the algorithms for major social media platforms and then put them back together in a way that they hoped would encourage empathy and focus on that rather than engagement for its own sake.
00:28:20
Speaker
And this became very popular and people all start using our time. And then there's this option where you can sell your data on our time. And that basically comes out to be the universal basic income option. Can you say a little bit more about what that looks like? What does it mean to give away your data? And what kind of people would choose to do that? Or what kind of pressure would there be to or not to?
00:28:42
Speaker
Oh, well, we're all giving away our debt all the time. Every time we sign up for what is apparently a free site or a free, you know, accept those cookies and give away money from it. I think one term that sometimes uses data sovereignty. We currently don't have any control over our digital traces that we're leaving on the internet all the time.
00:29:03
Speaker
And they're incredibly useful, not just primarily for advertisers and people who want to make money off of us, but they're also useful for medical researchers, psychology researchers. I think as knowledge production becomes an increasingly important cornerstone of the economy that's partially founded on artificial intelligence,
00:29:23
Speaker
data is only going to become more valuable. And so this aspect of our world, which was inspired by something in Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future, just makes something visible that we currently take for granted. It's a neat solution because it solves two problems at once, right? It solves the problem of
00:29:40
Speaker
How do we take back control of our data? And it solves a problem of, well, how do we support ourselves in a world where AI is doing a lot of the jobs? What are we contributing that's valuable in a world where AI is doing a lot of the jobs? Well, our data is still really valuable. Interesting. I'm also curious what our time looks like. Can you imagine any aspects of what the experience would be like of using it in this sort of empathy-centered way?
00:30:07
Speaker
The one aspect that I think that comes to mind is I think it would be a different temporal experience. I think right now one of the things that's kind of deadening about social media and that leads us to ever more extreme
00:30:24
Speaker
positions and experiences on there is that it can happen very quickly. You can scroll from one thing to the next until it's infinite stimulation. So I wonder what would happen if we set out to create a social media that
00:30:41
Speaker
induced a different experience of time and one that encouraged us to spend a little more time with what you're coming across and what you're experiencing. And I think that might be the first, rather than building in these kind of micro quick reactions, counterintuitively maybe spending more time together leads to a different kind of social media experience.
00:31:10
Speaker
It's really interesting, yeah. One issue that was in my mind when I was reading about our time in terms of profitability, to take a really cynical view of it, is if you're really prioritizing empathy like that, like say you slow people down, you have them really engage with a post, doesn't that necessarily mean that it would be less engaging or wouldn't you lose some viewership? How do you get people onto this platform? And if you can, without being
00:31:38
Speaker
Without following the traditional models what would keep other companies with worse intense from copying you.
00:31:45
Speaker
Well, I think part of the incentive for joining is I imagine that it's your data on our time that you can sell. So it's what you look at on there that then accrues to you as information that you can store and sell. And maybe it's a platform like Google that tracks you across different sorts of search and mail and different kinds of things.
00:32:12
Speaker
And yeah, there might be competitors and yeah, it might not be perfect. And yeah, some people might still choose to use other kinds of platforms. But if there's a, right now the idea is we get these products, Gmail or Facebook for free and we give them our data. I think instead, if you're incentivized to use the platform because you get your data back and you get this potential for earning money from your data back, that shifts the paradigm in a fundamental way. How does the company make money?
00:32:41
Speaker
I'm not sure. It's based on the blockchain. It's crypto, so they can just magically, I don't know, there's an NFT and a meme. I don't know how the profitability side of it would work, but I know that, yeah. No one does. Yeah. And yet it works, kind of. With crypto, right? Yeah, there's a proof of work, proof of stake.
00:33:07
Speaker
Well, speaking of crypto, one other factor in your world that's related to this kind of relationship with the environment is a carbon-backed currency called Klima, K-L-I-M-A.
Klima Cryptocurrency: Driving Carbon Prices Up
00:33:19
Speaker
Klima. I think it's Klima. I believe you. Klima, K-L-I-M-A. And I looked it up, and this is a real cryptocurrency right now. People are trying to make into a thing. Can you say a little bit about the real world version and how it works in your imaginary world?
00:33:33
Speaker
Yeah, Micah is a real expert on Klima. We are investors in Klima. And despite my sort of youthful skepticism about carbon as a way of limiting climate change, it seems like my older self sees this as a
00:33:51
Speaker
actionable way of working on the system that currently exists to change the system that currently exists. And it's also, it's an aspect in, an important aspect in Kim Stanley Robinson's ministry for the future as well.
00:34:07
Speaker
Yes, so FLI doesn't endorse any particular cryptocurrency. Of course, neither you nor FLI are giving financial advice here. But tell us a little more about why you find Clima so interesting. What makes it interesting as a crypto project is that it's a crypto coin that's backed by a real-world asset, which is the carbon that is sequestered rather than being released.
00:34:28
Speaker
The idea is that by basing a currency on carbon, we will drive up the price of carbon, making it. And there's already in place through various climate agreements, companies have to pay for the carbon that they emit. But the price of carbon is so cheap that it's not an effective deterrent or an effective incentive to finding cleaner ways to fly, for example.
00:34:53
Speaker
So the idea is that it would work in a two-fold way. In Kim Stanley Robinson's novel, people who are sequestering carbon in the ground, perhaps by using organic farming techniques, could be rewarded for that. Or if Saudi Arabia decided not to extract any more of its oil, then they could be paid for that. Their oil might actually be more valuable in the ground because they could be paid in this carbon token, in this carbon currency.
00:35:23
Speaker
So, it both incentivizes climate-positive actions and disincentivizes climate-negative options. I find cryptocurrency in general confusing as I'm sure a lot of people do, but I still kind of have a fuzzy picture in my head of how this works. So, you have this coin which is connected to real-world carbon emissions, like say one klima is like a cubic meter of carbon or something. I don't know, is that the kind of equivalence they are imagining? Yeah.
00:35:52
Speaker
And then like, so who controls, I just don't really understand how it's connected to it, I guess.
00:35:59
Speaker
Yeah. In Ministry for the Future, it's run by a central bank and a coalition of the big banks, the European bank, the US bank, and China's bank come together to sponsor. The coin is called the Carboni and they put a floor on it and make sure that it can't be shorted. And they put various other kinds of financial regulations in place.
00:36:23
Speaker
There's basically a regulatory body that confirms. This infrastructure is already in place because there is already a carbon market where people are buying and trading carbon. So this financial infrastructure is already there to vet that, okay, this amount of carbon has been sequestered in the Brazilian rainforest. So those institutions are there.
00:36:46
Speaker
Yeah. So like you're a farmer say, and you find a way to use organic farming and you can prove that you're going to get like a hundred of these cubic meters or something. That sounds like a lot, but you can, you can get a bunch of this carbon sequestered and then this like bank gives you the Klima coins. Is that kind of it? Yeah. You're kind of blending the ideas from my world, which is also what I did. But yeah, yeah, that's, I mean, that's a good picture. Blending the two worlds gives us a good picture of how it might come to be. I see.
00:37:13
Speaker
I'm really excited to talk more about the animal and other creature communication concept.
Human-AI Collaboration: Communication with Animals
00:37:19
Speaker
Can you say a little bit more about how that came about in your world and how it developed? I think part of it comes out of first testing the implants on other species as our laws currently allow us to do. And then seeing that that actually opens up the possibility for communicating with first chimpanzees and then
00:37:43
Speaker
I think other primates and other mammals would probably be first to learn. But the general sort of interdependence that I am imagining between the AI, the human, and the animal
00:37:59
Speaker
I don't agree with Elon Musk about many things, but one thing that I think that he is right about is that the best way to align the interests of AI and humanity is to have AI embedded into an organic body.
00:38:16
Speaker
The obvious positive impact is a benefit to humanity in terms of our capabilities, but at the same time, giving AI a vested stake in the continuance and the maintenance of human forms, human civilization, and the Earth itself. Why would AI care about climate change
00:38:36
Speaker
AI could probably withstand a much greater temperature increase than humans can, for example. We're a pretty finely tuned organism. We can only exist within a pretty small temperature range, but AI's temperature range is probably bigger. But by embedding AI within an organic body, there's an immediate alignment around, let's preserve the conditions for life on this planet so that we can survive and cooperate together. Yeah.
00:39:02
Speaker
Yeah, I think the way that your world portrays AI is like maybe the most intimate in terms of its connection to humans of the worlds that I was looking at. You have this kind of downloading system where the AIs come onto these brain computer interface systems and kind of like live inside of us. But there's also this part of them which is hosted on an orbital server farm, the Global AI Lab or GALE.
00:39:24
Speaker
Can you say a little bit more about like where the eyes actually exist like are they kind of in both of these places are they purely inside of our bodies as individuals or.
00:39:32
Speaker
Yeah, they are in both of these places. It's like the old mystical saying, as above, so below. The big servers are out there in space in the model of the International Space Station. And the reason for that is it's really important to be promoting cooperation rather than competition when it comes to AI. And I think the International Space Station gives us a good model for how to do that. It's not physically located in any single nation. And so from the beginning that
00:40:02
Speaker
reality and that symbolism of this involves all of us is built in. So it's out there floating in space, the servers. And at the same time, those servers communicate with the implants in our brain and we're very, as you were saying, intimately connected with them. And yeah, it would really impact everything that we do.
00:40:23
Speaker
So what's to keep one of these systems from considering its existence to be purely on gale in orbit around Earth rather than having this important vested stake in a physical meat body?
00:40:35
Speaker
Yeah, I think they get something from it. I think they enjoy the new kinds of information that you can get from the physical sensory experience, right? Humans enjoy that and I don't see any reason why another form of intelligence would not enjoy that as well. That makes me think of Anne Leckie. Have you heard her work?
00:40:55
Speaker
There's this book called Ancillary Justice where the main character who's narrating is a ship, and the ship is distributed among people that work on the ship. It's like this really strange portrayal of awareness and intelligence, but yeah, it kind of uses the humans it's collaborating with or has taken over in some way, depending how you look at it as sensory organs. That sounds really good.
00:41:17
Speaker
I mean, there's obviously sort of a dark angle there, you know, like you can think of, you get towards this kind of matrix vision where they're using our bodies as like blind feelers because they want to sense with us, you know, like, how do you, how do you keep them interested in our awareness as well as our capabilities?
00:41:33
Speaker
Yeah, I'm not saying that there's not going to be dark parts of the world still. I think there definitely will. There's going to be heartbreak and illness, and your toilet's going to clog right before you go to bed, and all the bad stuff is still going to happen. And that includes having really significant challenges around the ethics and the interests of AI. I think the deal is to, and our task right now is to set up the conditions
00:42:02
Speaker
Such that we can work through that in the best way that we can and we don't have to get an A+, but we need to pass this test. We need to get a passing grade on climate change and we need to get a passing grade on safe AI. Yeah, you can't take that year over again.
00:42:18
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, once we pass that border. So in the end of the day, I think I feel like that's something that could be negotiated, right? Like, are we willing to give up certain things like our specialness as a species? Are we willing to give up, you know, like deeply cherished ideas about free will and autonomy in exchange for something different and better about interrelationship and about cooperation and about
00:42:45
Speaker
mutual aid, right? So I think the idea that governs the different kinds of innovations that are in our world are there to enable those conditions where we work together in a reasonably fair, good enough way. The biggest challenges in every aspect of this world are not technical. They're human.
Overcoming Human Cooperation Challenges
00:43:05
Speaker
There are problems of cooperation and collaboration and implementation, not problems of like, how do we actually technically wire this?
00:43:15
Speaker
Yeah, I love how you bring those, those expertises in so thoughtfully to try to address those problems. It's really cool to see and think about.
00:43:30
Speaker
This world portrays a uniquely intimate relationship between humans, other animals, AI systems, and the environment. I was curious to hear what inspirations the team took from popular stories about human-animal relationships, and how Key and Micah's backgrounds in activism shaped their own perspectives on the future.
00:43:48
Speaker
I'm always curious to compare some of the narratives in these worlds with popular depictions of related issues. The animal thing in particular is something people have been dreaming about communicating with animals for millennia. Were there any examples in culture of animal communication models that were with you when you were working on this?
00:44:13
Speaker
I think, I mean, there's a couple different ways I could try to think about answering that question. I don't know, is there something that you're thinking about when you ask that question? I almost feel like you have thought about this so much with your dog. Yeah, I mean, the cultural thing I go to is like Dr. Doolittle, I guess, you know, I love those books and like just the idea of directly talking. But those are so anthropomorphizing in a way.
00:44:43
Speaker
I was interested hearing when you talk about talking with mushrooms, just thinking about what that would mean or what mushrooms could have to say. And I guess I'm curious, what other models of communication you might have come across that inspired some of these ideas?
00:44:57
Speaker
I don't know. I don't always know where my ideas come from. And so I wish I had a better answer. I think one book that has really influenced me in terms of the thinking about animal relationships is The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell.
00:45:13
Speaker
This is a sci-fi book I love to recommend because it really transcends the genre of sci-fi to just break out into a really good novel. And it's slow to get started, but a group of humans ends up on a distant planet. They've heard the songs, music transmitted over the airwaves, and first they make their home among this one species that's really gentle and vegetarian and kind, and they start to learn their language and everything.
00:45:40
Speaker
And then there's a reveal in which there's another whole species on the planet that they didn't know about who actually is farming the species that they've made their bond with and is really cruel, like not just farming, but kind of torturing.
00:46:01
Speaker
And so that kind of mental shift where you're off planet, you're totally out of our ethical coordinates and a whole new set of ethical coordinates in the first set of beings that you encounter, you're inclined to see as ethical beings. And then you find out within the system of this planet, these are the ones who don't count. And these are the ones who can be killed and eaten and tortured at will and no one thinks no one of the powerful
00:46:26
Speaker
quote unquote civilized group thinks that that's a problem at all. And I think that that book fundamentally shifted the way, you know, it helps defamiliarize the way that we see the relationships between humans and non-human animals on this planet. And you can't come back to Earth after having read that book without really shifting how you think about our relationship with animals. Yeah. I read that book with my book club a while ago. Yeah. I'm super glad people are still reading that book. It's not new.
00:46:56
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Well, one concept in your world that's related to this whole like communicating aspect is other POV. It's this kind of utility function that's built into a lot of brain computer interfaces. And it's kind of like an empathy button, like you can turn it on and you basically feel some sense of what somebody else is feeling, just facilitates that instant empathy. I'm also curious whether this had any kind of inspirations in popular media or there are any other inspirations there.
00:47:27
Speaker
I don't want to say that I'm original. I must have read it somewhere, but I can't think of a direct antecedent at the minute. In a way, I think of it as other POV, like other point of view. Like fiction is the original.
00:47:43
Speaker
Yeah, that's true device and the original empathy button and way of coming to inhabit someone else's point of view and it's it's true like we we sometimes need a translator even for the people that are the closest to us.
00:47:59
Speaker
And some things wouldn't be that hard to convey. I think we know for a fact that a lot of good substantial amount of what counts as emotion is certain kinds of physiological responses that are then interpreted in a certain way, right? So anxiety is heart rate. And so if you can control your heart rate, you can actually really control the anxiety.
Empathy Technology: Enhancing Human Relationships
00:48:21
Speaker
And so it wouldn't be hard to measure those things and convey those things to someone else as a first cue to
00:48:29
Speaker
getting a sense of how they're responding differently or how they're responding maybe in a way that you didn't expect. So I think a lot about the case of sexual harassment, for example, right? So something that seems innocuous to one individual or flirtatious or fun is really threatening and scary to the other individual. And it's kind of amazing that those two realities can coexist without translating to one another.
00:48:58
Speaker
And so I think it was a wish fulfillment kind of thing that I imagined into the world, which was what if there was just a little bit more of a channel or a little bit more assistance in communicating those things that can sometimes be really hard to verbalize or say out loud, but it's an innovation that would make a profound difference in how humans relate to each other.
00:49:25
Speaker
with all kinds of privacy problems as well. Yeah, that's where my black hat was coming on. I mean, there's this interesting thread about communication, which is kind of like consent in communication. Like I could imagine both ways. I could imagine these tools maybe being used to, in a sense, read someone's mind a little bit, like get some insight into what they're thinking without them wanting you to. Or on the other side, like making somebody feel something that they don't want to feel. Yeah.
00:49:51
Speaker
Yeah, well, if we're imagining a world in which data sovereignty is a stronger concept or data ownership, then I think that there would have to be some consent, right? Like right now, the way that we use find my friend or something like that, right? You can control who can see the location of where you are, where your phone is.
00:50:11
Speaker
I imagine it might be something similar with other point of view, like I consent to be in a relationship where you can see certain kinds of data about my internal state because I want to communicate with you or have that additional layer of understanding with you. Your wife wants to communicate their anger to you. Do you accept? No, no, no, no. Yeah. Reject connection.
00:50:39
Speaker
Do you have anything to say about how common cultural narratives about animal intelligence are lacking, like any misconceptions or overplayed tropes that you think about? Well, I think there's still too much of a tendency to measure animal intelligences against human intelligence and to see, oh, can they use language like we can? And how much of, oh, well, they can use this many words, whereas we have
00:51:05
Speaker
that a human child has this many words versus I think the difference between what you're trying to do with your dog and into entering their world and trying to understand to the extent that we can how things appear to them, what's important to them, how do they think or perceive. I think that's the really
00:51:26
Speaker
challenging thing to do and so it's not done as often as the move to compare the unknown to the known and instead of taking what's known and comparing it to the unknown.
00:51:36
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I have noticed with a lot of my dogs, again, like I'll be walking my dog and see a dog, like some hundreds of yards away. And I'm like, Oh, my dogs are so silly. Like they have no idea that dog is there, but I can see it. Like they're so bad at sensing things. And then I realized it's because we clear cut acres of forest put in pavement so that we can use our eyes, which is our like super power. And if we were in, in a natural forest, I have no idea what was like 10 feet away from me, but they could smell what had been there like hours before. So it's just interesting to think about how like the,
00:52:05
Speaker
the very built environment and the way that we operate, like, really prioritizes our abilities so deeply. Yeah. And then that is completely invisible to us. Yeah. We've sort of given ourselves so many huge legs up. Yeah, that's a really interesting example. Yeah. You know, as you mentioned in the title of this world, you have this focus on the people and and creative people and their ability to shape things. I'm curious about
00:52:35
Speaker
again, your experience personally with activism and whether there are any kind of real world examples of activist efforts that inspired some of your storytelling. Yeah, well, there is a long background in various activist worlds.
00:52:55
Speaker
starting with nonviolent direct action in Palestine, various kinds of intentional communities and community organizing active in the early days of Occupy Wall Street. So all of that is in there in some way. I think that having engaged with different forms of activism, I also did a stint in Uganda looking at economic development work.
00:53:21
Speaker
in that country. I tried to expose myself to all the theories of how do you change the world. You change it through the structural economic change or microloans or direct action or meme warfare or community organizing. I've dabbled in a lot of them. Where I am with that question right now is
00:53:46
Speaker
that as much as we live in an attention economy, what activists now need to do is not just gain attention, but gain power. And by power, I specifically mean not just political power, but capability, the capability to do things together. And that is deliberately defined really broadly.
00:54:06
Speaker
because I think that that leaves the most space for different sorts of people to see themselves making a change. So if your capabilities are technical, then yes, please go learn to program AI and think about creative ways to use it to make our lives better or to work with it to understand what AI is interested in and understand AI on.
00:54:29
Speaker
on AI's terms and transform our understanding of AI, do that.
Shifting AI Paradigms: Addressing Climate and Inequality
00:54:35
Speaker
That is a form of power. But there's also political power, and that's the thing that seems really broken in our world. Political processes seem broadly broken, multilateral political processes especially are broken, but also at the national level. And by broken, I mean they're not working adequately for the majority of people.
00:54:54
Speaker
way too many people don't have the fundamental things of housing and income and food and a safe foundation to reach their potential or maybe not even their full potential, but some of their potential.
00:55:11
Speaker
So there isn't one specific activist moment that I would point to as influencing the world, but there is a faith that the most important innovations do come from outside groups, from small groups, even from individuals. It comes from people who are willing and able to say the emperor has no clothes, and that's the direction the world is oriented towards is
00:55:40
Speaker
What are those, where are those people that wants to speak to those people? Where are you and what are you doing and what do you think about AI and can you help us think about AI better? Can you help us imagine better things to do with AI?
00:56:00
Speaker
The process of world building has great potential to make a positive future feel more attainable. This can be incredibly powerful, whether you're a creative person looking to produce rich works of fiction or have a more technical focus and are looking to reach policymakers or the public. I asked Key what kind of impact they hoped their work would have on the world. I just want to hear a little bit about what parts of your world you hope impact the broader world and how.
00:56:24
Speaker
I would love for the world to help bring about a paradigm shift through a conversation. So right now, I think in the AI field, the conversation is how can we use AI? How can we make money from AI? How can we apply these amazing capabilities?
00:56:39
Speaker
And in the cultural world, the conversation is more like, what does it mean? Who's going to benefit? Is it sentient? I would love to combine those two conversations into a question that's closer to how can we meaningfully use AI to shift the paradigms, to solve the challenges that seem insoluble of climate and inequality and political factionalization.
00:57:03
Speaker
So I would love to see depictions of what it would really be like to graft AI onto the human organism and to start to wonder about the effects and the ethics of that. I did recently watch the movie After Yang. Have you heard of it? No, I have not.
00:57:25
Speaker
It's pretty good. In this world, there's these technical beings in human bodies called technos and one family has bought one, a Chinese one, to mentor, to be an older brother for their Chinese adopted daughter. But at one point in the film, the little girl is talking about what does it mean to be adopted and does she really belong to her parents or really her parents?
00:57:48
Speaker
And he takes her to an apple orchard and he points to a graft of one kind of apple tree onto another kind of apple tree. And he's like, look, it's different, but still belongs to this apple tree. But at the same time, it's also different. And I think this is one of the hardest things for humans to hang on to, which is this sense of being different and related, this sense of being different and equal at the same time.
00:58:13
Speaker
And so I think that art and projects that help us to be able to hold those two things together is really powerful. Yeah. You explicitly mentioned in your story that humanity is an important source of input as the world progresses. Are there other kinds of perspectives that you'd really want to see more of in stories about our future?
00:58:35
Speaker
I mean, all the perspectives. In one sense, we have too many perspectives because the whole internet is seething with voices and we can't organize or comprehend any of it. And on the other hand, it seems to be the same kinds of narratives that are surfaced again and again. And I think in particular, when it comes to AI, the same apocalyptic scenarios are raised again and again. And that's
Imagining Diverse AI Futures Beyond Apocalypse
00:59:03
Speaker
I think particularly potentially problematic when it comes to the large language models that are trained on existing discourse. It can become a self-fulfilling process where the stories that we tell about AI are apocalyptic. We train our AI on the apocalyptic narratives about themselves.
00:59:22
Speaker
The AI is faced with the decision about what to do and it chooses the most likely scenario as the apocalyptic scenario. So I think we have a real responsibility to be more imaginative in terms of, yeah, let's be smart, let's do our pre-mortem, but let's also have the faith and the courage to imagine different kinds of stories and to tell them. Yeah.
00:59:47
Speaker
And are there any kinds of expertise that you'd be most interested in having contribute to these conversations? Part of me wants to say, yeah, let's bring the philosophers on board. Let's bring the novel writers and the artists and the activists, those people who haven't been a real part of driving the direction that AI and technology is going.
01:00:08
Speaker
Another part of me thinks, well, maybe the question about expertise is a little bit loaded or tilted in the wrong direction. I want to say, what if we got together sortition bodies? What if we drew a panel of people from all over the world and we educated them about AI and the risks and the possibilities and the scenarios, and we had a truly democratic lottery-based conversation about where our priorities are and what kinds of safeguards we want to have and what our goals are.
01:00:39
Speaker
So after reading through your world and the comic and experiencing all of it, what do you hope that people stay thinking about long after they've encountered your stories?
01:00:49
Speaker
I think the best art leaves us with the sense that another world is possible, that things don't have to be the way that they are, that they could be a different and better way. So I think I would more than an answer or an idea, I would want the world to leave people with the question, how can AI meaningfully shift some of the paradigms that we've taken for granted?
01:01:16
Speaker
And to be open to the unknown, be open to the surprises, and not just fall into the pattern of, oh, I know what's going to happen. It's going to be the same rich white guys who benefit from this. And it's going to be the same cycle all over again. No, there might be. Certainly a lot of factors tilt in that direction. But what if it wasn't? What if it were something else? Well, this has been great. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat about your creation with us.
01:01:43
Speaker
Thank you so much for your wonderful questions and really taking the time to learn the world and engage with it. It was a lot of fun.
01:01:57
Speaker
Our guest today was Key Rainer Bornfree. You can explore more of Key's work at their website, keybornfree.com. That's c-h-i-bornfree.com. If you'd like to check out Micah's book, The End of Protest, a new playbook for revolution, or see the online School for Activists that he has co-founded, you can visit his website, micahmwhite.com. That's m-i-c-a-h-m-white.com.
01:02:23
Speaker
And for more of JR's comics and illustrations, you can check out jrcomicart.com. If this podcast has got you thinking about the future, you can find out more about this world and explore the ideas contained in the other worlds at www.worldbuild.ai. We want to hear your thoughts. Are these worlds you'd want to live in?
01:02:50
Speaker
If you've enjoyed this episode and would like to help more people discover and discuss these ideas, you can give us a rating or leave a comment wherever you're listening to this podcast. You read all the comments and appreciate every rating. This podcast is produced and edited by WorldView Studio and the Future of Life Institute. FLI is a nonprofit 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.
01:03:13
Speaker
We run educational outreach and grants programs and advocate for better policymaking in the United Nations, US government, and European Union institutions. If you're a storyteller working on films or other creative projects about the future, we can also help you understand the science and storytelling potential of transformative technologies.
01:03:30
Speaker
If you'd like to get in touch with us or any of the teams featured on the podcast to collaborate, you can email worldbuild at futureoflife.org. A reminder, this podcast 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 all want. The ideas we discuss here are not to be taken as FLI positions. You can find more about our work at www.futureoflife.org, or subscribe to our newsletter to get updates on all our projects.
01:03:58
Speaker
Thanks for listening to Imagine a World. Stay tuned to explore more positive futures.