In this episode of the Existential Hope Podcast, Beatrice Erkers is joined by David Duvenaud, Associate Professor at the University of Toronto and former researcher at Anthropic.
We discuss David’s work on post-AGI civilizational equilibria and the widely discussed paper Gradual Disempowerment. David reflects on why liberalism may not hold up in a world where humans are no longer needed, how UBI could be Goodharted into absurdity, and what it would take to design institutions that protect humans even when incentives don’t.
We also cover:
- Forecasting the long-term future using LLMs trained on historical data
- Robin Hanson’s idea of futarchy (governance by prediction markets)
- Asymmetrical but beneficial relationships between humans and AI
- Uploading, cultural legacies, and the possibility of “worthy successors”
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