Since 2011, anyone could have downloaded an open-source house design, cut out the parts and assemble it themselves. So why is building a new home still so hard?

In this episode, we talk with Indy Johar, founder of Dark Matter Labs. He argues that the real barriers are the hidden rules behind what gets built, like warranties and access to land, and his team is working to rewrite them.

We cover:

• What it really takes to give people the power to build their own furniture and homes
• Dark Matter Labs’ work with the Taiwan government to build a decentralized, digital identity system for its citizens
• The importance of keeping many possible futures open, and thinking at a very large scale to prevent things like climate change from closing off some paths
• How AI’s electricity demand could set off a chain reaction that ends up improving the way we produce energy
• How AI could help us reorganize society based on continuous learning instead of top-down control
• Why we should build AI that questions us instead of offering certainty

Chapters

00:00 Introduction

00:45 From open-source furniture to rewriting the rules behind it

03:56 How do you change the hidden rules behind society?

06:02 Why Indy stopped designing buildings and started building things

07:45 How do you cool the Arctic?

10:07 How to keep our options open as a civilization

12:55 How AI's hunger for energy could bring about an energy revolution

17:34 Are we building AI that commands, or AI that works alongside us?

19:00 What if AI questioned us instead of giving us answers?

20:33 Rethinking identity of people and ecosystems in Taiwan

23:31 Why Indy sees technology as an extension of nature

25:39 d/acc: why decentralizing power isn't enough

27:07 Who owns the carbon in your walls? The "boring revolution"

27:59 How can you join the boring revolution?

28:34 Should you start with experiments?

29:42 Open-source housing: an IKEA catalog for building a home

30:54 The most interesting projects by Dark Matter Labs

33:14 The best advice Indy ever received

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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We see elections as the foundation of our democracy, but Aristotle thought they create an oligarchy. In ancient Athens, democracy worked by choosing leaders among ordinary citizens by lottery. How could we revive this idea to improve today’s democratic systems?

In this episode, we speak with Jeremy Lent, tech CEO turned author, about the idea behind his new book Ecocivilization: how we can redesign our economy, democracy and technology so everyone can thrive.

We cover:

• Why, despite the many problems of our civilization, saying it’s “malfunctioning” isn’t accurate
• Why typical metrics of progress like GDP don’t provide a full picture of how people are actually doing
• How we can design a better society for everyone taking inspiration from how ecosystems work
• Ideas to improve our democratic systems, with real world examples
• How we could distribute wealth more widely, from ownership of companies to the benefits of AI

Chapters:

0:00 Cold open

1:00 How an internet CEO became an ecocivilization author

4:14 Is our civilization broken?

6:38 Has global capitalism really made life better for everyone?

9:11 What is ecocivilization?

13:52 Doughnut economics and citizens’ assemblies: rethinking the economy and democracy

20:24 How can technology help democracy? The Taiwan example

22:24 Is green growth possible? Planetary boundaries and Jevons paradox

30:03 Why is it so hard to change civilization? Lock-in and backcasting

37:01 How can we escape the AI race and multipolar traps?

42:43 How AI can be used to build a better world

49:45 What can young people do to make a difference?

51:34 Book and organization recommendations

53:35 The best advice Jeremy has ever received

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

Follow on X.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For 50,000 of generations, humans have passed civilization down to their children. We could be the first generation to hand its future to AIs instead. Should we? Or could the best AI be the kind that chooses to step back and leave some things to us?

In this episode we sit down with Stuart Russell, professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and co-author of the world's standard textbook on AI. He’s also a leading proponent of provably beneficial AI: systems that are safe by design because their only goal is to further human interests.

We talk about:

• How AI has changed over the past 50 years, from simple game-playing programs to today's large language models
• Why handing an AI a fixed objective becomes dangerous once it is more capable than us, and what a safer approach could look like
• How an AI might learn what we really want, even when we don't fully know ourselves
• How the race toward more powerful AI can still be steered somewhere safer
• What happens to human purpose as AI becomes more and more capable

Chapters:

0:00 Cold open

0:39 How AI has changed over the past 50 years, from chess to large language models

4:15 What is the standard model of AI and why does it fail?

12:08 What is provably beneficial AI?

17:49 Teaching AI to learn from humans, even when we make bad choices

20:11 How can we steer AI development in a safer direction?

28:01 International cooperation on AI safety

30:41 What a good AI future could look like

35:38 Protecting human purpose: should AI step back?

39:15 How young people can get involved in AI safety

40:47 Stuart Russell's best advice

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

Follow on X.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.