How your personal moral compass helps you build a better world | SJ Beard

To make the future go well, we might not need a perfect model for its end state, or an abstract philosophical theory to guide us. Can your own sense of “the right thing to do” actually help make the world better?

In this episode we talk with SJ Beard, researcher at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, and author of the book “Existential Hope”.

Some of the topics we discuss:

• How to shift our focus from "preventing the end of the world" to actively building a future worth living.
• Why aiming for a “happy ever after” state of the world might be dangerous, and why improving the world one generation at a time is less likely to backfire.
• Relying on our own sense of “the right thing to do” as a practical guide to make the world better.
• Why decisions about AI and global risk need input from a broad mix of people and their real-world experiences, not just experts at the top.
• Why building AI with compassion and curiosity about human values may be safer than giving it a rigid list of rules to follow.

Timestamps:

[01:31] SJ’s background in philosophy and existential risk

[02:02] Why write a book on existential hope?

[04:43] Defining existential hope, and its relationship with existential risks and existential anxiety

[11:09] Human agency without the guilt

[13:59] Why there are no truly "natural" disasters

[16:49] Why we shouldn’t try to build a perfect utopia

[19:05] Protopia: is iterative improvement enough?

[22:19] Defining progress: what does it mean to "get better"?

[26:13] Protopia vs. viatopia: setting goals and achieving a great future

[29:48] Existential safety as a collective project

[35:06] Using participatory tools to make global decisions

[36:32] Making existential hope reasonably demanding

[40:06] Can we achieve systemic change in a tech-focused world?

[46:00] Concrete socio-technical projects for AI safety

[49:02] Aligning AI by building its character

[51:45] The importance of history in building a good future

[54:24] Key 17th-century ideas that are shaping modern society

[58:20] Cultivating "humanity as a virtue"

[01:04:37] Lessons from nuclear near-misses: the example of Petrov

[01:09:20] The trade-offs of a humanistic, bottom-up approach to decision-making

[01:12:16] Literacy vs. orality: how ideas become simplified

[01:16:45] Meme culture and the transmission of deep context

[01:18:48] How writing the book changed SJ’s mind

[01:21:38] SJ Beard’s vision for existential hope

On the Existential Hope Podcast hosts Allison Duettmann and Beatrice Erkers from the Foresight Institute invite scientists, founders, and philosophers for in-depth conversations on positive, high-tech futures.

Full transcript, listed resources, and more: https://www.existentialhope.com/podcasts

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