Imagine: What if global challenges led to a more centralized world?

Sep 12, 2023

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What if we had one advanced AI system for the entire world? Would this lead to a world 'beyond' nation states - and do we want this?

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 third episode of Imagine A World, we explore the fictional worldbuild titled 'Core Central'.

How does a team of seven academics agree on one cohesive worldbuild? That's a question the team behind 'Core Central' had to figure out as they went along. The results speak for themselves: this worldbuild came joint second-place in the FLI Worldbuilding Contest, and its realistic sense of multipolarity and messiness reflect positively its organic formulation. The team settled on one core, centralized AGI system as the governance model for their entire world. This eventually moves their world 'beyond' nation states. Could this really work?

In this episode of 'Imagine a World', Guillaume Riesen speaks to John Burden and Henry Shevlin, representing the team that created 'Core Central', one of the second-place winners in the FLI Worldbuilding Contest. The full team includes seven members, three of whom (Henry, John and Beba Cibralic) are researchers at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge, and five of whom (Jessica Bland, Lara Mani, Clarissa Rios Rojas, Catherine Richards and John) work with the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, also at Cambridge University.

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 imagined world: https://worldbuild.ai/core-central

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. If you would like to learn more, or are interested in collaborating with the teams featured in our episodes, please email worldbuild@futureoflife.org.

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 Concepts referenced in the episode:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(TV_series) https://www.vox.com/authors/kelsey-piper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratitude_journal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mind-of-an-octopus/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_workspace_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_hand_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_(Simmons_novel)