AI safety pioneer Roman Yampolskiy believes that artificial intelligence presents a challenge unlike anything humanity has ever faced. He says we have just one chance to get it right. A single AI model can cause an existential crisis, and there are already more than 500,000 open source AI models available. In his view, the AI arms race is creating an infinite range of possibilities for catastrophe. Roman returns to The Futurists to share perspectives from his new book, AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable, delivering a devastating critique of the current state of safety in AI and an urgent call to action.

Tech entrepreneur Byron Reese has a pragmatic approach to the future. He has launched several startup companies, exiting three via M&A and two via IPO. He’s also the author of several books, including his newest, Agora. Byron spoke to the Futurists about superintelligence, collective intelligence, super organisms, and emergence. What can human organizations learn from bee hives? The conflict between AI Doomers and the Accelerationists. Why humanity is going to be all right!

Anders Sorman-Nilsson is a Swedish futurist living in Australia, but he believes that humanity is on the cusp of a new renaissance where humanity finds purpose beyond consumption and market profit. He calls out human systems that are coming to a natural conclusion due to this emerging thinking, including the damage that fossil fuel companies and others have done to our ecosystem in the name of profits. Ultimately, Anders is an optimist but he thinks that human behavior and technological leaps and bounds don't necessarily align, but it's navigating the conflict between our long-held traditions, global conflicts, and climate disasters, along with our rapidly advancing technical capabilities that will define humanity for centuries to come. We get deep on this one...

Jim Rutt solves complex future problems by taking action. When we say complex, we mean very complex!. A pioneer of networked society since 1980, Jim launched the world’s first online community, and later led Network Solutions and the Santa Fe Institute. In this episode of the Futurists, the discussion moves fluidly from theory to practice as Jim explains his Game B initiative with colorful language and fresh insight. Topics include: complexity science, applied artificial intelligence, the importance of the number zero, the failures of governance mechanisms, the doom loop of money-on-money return, and why we need a system that is focused on optimizing human wellbeing within planetary limits.