Is the path to AI alignment through religion? Could AI one day have a soul? I sat down with Claude’s Priest, Father Brendan McGuire, for our Forecast 2050 Series to talk the biggest challenge of the present moment & how it will profoundly shape our future. Enjoy! TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 1:45 Becoming A Man of the Cloth 8:10 Smart AI Regulation 11:46 The Pope's Warning about Babel 19:10 AI & Forgiveness 27:26 Hugging Face Incident 31:56 Do AIs Have Souls? 40:06 Putting AI Doomerism In Perspective 44:20 Why Anthropic Asked the Church for Help 58:23 Recursive Self Improvement 1:02:23 Tolkien Morality vs Game of Thrones Brutality

Human-animal communication? Life on other planets? Alien priests? Once again back trying to bring a more eclectic discussion of the future to the internet with a new series of Forecast 2050. Thanks to David Gruber (@ProjectCETI), Gen. David Petraeus, Patrick McGee (@PatrickMcGee_), Yi-Ling Liu (@yilingliu95), Laura Kreidberg (@lkreidberg), (@mpi_astro), Walter Goodwin (@fractile_ai), Sir Robin Saxby, Francesco Sciortino (@proximafusion), Adrian Woolfson (@AdrianWoolfson), Frank Fukuyama (@FukuyamaFrancis), and Father Brendan McGuire for joining us. First episode with Father Brendan McGuire, Catholic Priest & External Advisor to Anthropic’s Claude Constitution, drops on Thursday. More to come!

Show Notes: finnmurphyirl.substack.com/p… Transcript: finnmurphyirl.substack.com/p… Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/7t2…

90% of clinical trials fail and it’s not for a lack of trying. We spend over a quarter trillion a year to solve the ailments that trouble you and your loved ones. But we haven’t figured out how to convert that spend into an improving hit rate in finding the drugs that change lives. So today a 28 year old with eczema has two choices: a steroid cream that wrecks her skin with long-term use, or a $37,000/year injection that only has a 50/50 chance of success. @viswacolluru looked at those numbers and figured there must be a better approach. The most successful drugs in history have come from nature. Aspirin, taken by 1 in 3 Americans daily, is from willow bark. Metformin, used by 500 million diabetics, is from a plant, Goat's Rue. Quinine from tree bark was first added to tonic water to mitigate malaria in pasty Europeans in the tropics. Half of all FDA-approved drugs are sourced from the natural world. So Viswa created Enveda to unlock the 99% of nature's chemistry that we haven’t been able to read until very recently, and went from seed to unicorn in 5 years doing it. It was really special to sit down with both Viswa and @pablolubroth at @enveda’s Boulder HQ for the Season 1 finale of Forecast 2050 to talk about the future of medicine. We discuss: - Why capital markets have been bad for patients. - Why insisting on understanding how drugs work in the body is actually slowing down drug discovery. - Why aging is not inevitable, and how to stop your body from killing you. - Why mental health will be the defining medical crisis of the next 25 years as the mindsugar of TikTok AI slop only gets more corrosive. youtu.be/C5mSD1eY7J0 Show Notes & Transcript in the comments👇

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The biggest issue facing young adults today? Housing & lack of community. The picket fences and idealistic social towns of the boomers are but a fever dream of the past. Having a garden AND room for 2.4 kids? You best hope you joined Anthropic in 2023. This is a failure of a half century of bungled policy holding back the original ultimate human technology. Cities. @devonzuegel thinks there is no reason the next great American city can’t be oriented to both families and founders, and she's hard at work 90 minutes north of SF proving it. For Episode 9 of Forecast 2050, I sat down with Devon of @esmeralda_inst to talk about harnessing urban planning as a powerful technological force for good, age-segregation in America and the impending population crisis, and why we need more incredible cities popping up across the country over the next 25 years. We discuss: - The American college system drives age-segregation and breaks up families. - How self-driving cars will transform cities by 2050. - The widening gulf between the physical and the digital, as it becomes increasingly harder to build in the real world and easier to do things in the digital one. - Why we need an alternative to the suburbs. - Chautauqua, the town once home to Thomas Edison’s family, as the inspiration behind the family-oriented builder community Devon is building with Esmeralda. youtu.be/_23ErA8FQz8

The UK in 2050. If you listen to the SF bubble you'd think it's well on the way to being a failed state. But things are cooking and Britannia won't go gentle into the night. @matthewclifford & @soundboy think there is no branch of the tech tree from which the UK could not plausibly produce the next trillion-dollar company. On this episode of Forecast 2050 Matt, the cofounder of @join_ef and Ian, co-founder of @pluralplatform we talk about what Britain's resurgence could look like over the next 25 years. - Europe's risk aversion is a bigger threat than American superiority. - Career politicians won’t survive in the new multipolar world. - Why the pro-growth movement is losing the culture war — and how to win it back. - How Britain could win the AI Age by 2050. youtu.be/cD3UtHVr99o

YouTube: youtu.be/bV5-5oYRYSc Stardust Publication #1 on Safety: stardustsolutions.com/scienc… Stardust Publication #2 on Ethics: stardustsolutions.com/guidin… Show Notes: finnmurphyirl.substack.com/p… Transcript: finnmurphyirl.substack.com/p… Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/6iY… Apple Podcasts: apple.co/3Qre7Bj

Yanai Yedvab has a plan to dim the sun to save our world. Will we need to use it? Extreme weather events are increasing in frequency and global temperature trends moving in one direction. The challenge of decarbonisation? It takes time and it costs money. Can we buy that time to build the political will to pull it off by deploying technology to cool things in the interim? After working as a nuclear physicist for the Israeli government for nearly three decades, Yanai co-founded Stardust, a company working on solar reflective technology to give us the decades we need to make this transition. For Episode 7 of the Forecast 2050, I sat down with Yanai on the occasion of Stardust’s recent publication of two groundbreaking papers to talk about some inconvenient truths, and Yanai’s radical optimism for the next 25 years in spite of them. We discuss: - Why the energy transition will take 50-70 years — and why we can't afford to wait. - How dispersing reflective particles in the upper atmosphere can stabilize global temperatures. - What the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo taught us about solar geoengineering. - The Montreal Protocol as a masterclass in planetary-scale environmental diplomacy. - How Stardust's clinical trials approach makes geoengineering safe. - How the data Stardust collects could unlock quantum leaps in weather prediction - Why unlimited ambition — not incrementalism — is what will actually save the world Chapters: 00:00 Intro 01:10 From Nuclear Physics to The Climate Crisis 04:01 The Failure of Climate Activism 05:28 How Solar Reflective Technology Works 09:12 The 1991 Eruption of Mount Pinatubo 12:01 The Montreal Protocol and How to Negotiate in a World at War 16:03 Buying Time: Weaning off Fossil Fuels Will Take 50-70 Years 18:55 Data Centers, Fission, and Fusion 19:59 Preparing for Emergencies the Israeli Way 23:40 Radical Transparency: The Only Way To Gain Trust 27:05 Persuading the Policymakers 33:05 Unlimited Ambition is What Will Save the World 35:10 Stardust Will Unlock Quantum Leaps in Weather Prediction 36:54 Stardust in 2050 40:20 Why Stardust Has to Be a Private Company 45:32 Optimism for the Future is Rational Show Notes, Transcript, and Links to the Stardust Papers in the comments👇

YouTube: youtu.be/0VFzGbcxzAA Show Notes: finnmurphyirl.substack.com/p… Transcript: finnmurphyirl.substack.com/p… Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/3LO… Apple Podcasts: apple.co/41pvXHd

@bryan_johnson might actually be on the most righteous mission of them all. The only way to save the current social contract & prevent runaway healthcare spending is to extend healthy lifespan far beyond where it sits today. So that the 80 year olds of tomorrow are like the 40 year olds of today. @CJHandmer thinks that human civilization has barely gotten started and that between solving aging and speeding to the stars we have a LOT to look forward to. For Episode 6 of the Forecast Series, I sat down with Casey at the @TerraformIndies HQ to talk about the technologies that will completely reshape society by 2050. We discuss: - China's dominance in solar deployment should be a wake-up call for the West. - Antimatter is the best rocket fuel candidate to make humans multi-planetary and interstellar. - Longevity science is the only solution to plummeting birthrates across the planet. - The melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is way more dangerous than previously anticipated. - World governments are lying to us about their population sizes. Chapters: 00:00 Intro 00:53 The Solar Revolution 03:43 AI is a Supersonic Tsunami 06:00 Civilization Is Just Getting Started 08:46 Intelligent Life in the Universe 12:03 The $40 Trillion Ticket to Space: Antimatter 20:57 Space Exploration by 2050 22:09 Mitigating The Climate Catastrophe 27:53 Terraforming Mars vs Terraforming Venus 35:00 Solving the Birthrate Crisis: Humans Will Become Like The Elves in LOTR and Live Indefinitely 42:07 China Is Losing Sleep Over Their Problems As Much as We Are 44:46 Governments Are Lying About Their Population Sizes 46:11 The 2050 Moonshots That Will Save The World 52:45 Easter Egg :) Extended Show Notes & Transcript in the comments👇

NATO? Gone. The UN? Useless. Taiwan? Coercively unified with China. The future of global relations is being shaped before our eyes today in Iran. But are we too focused on the now to see the bigger picture? I sat down with the former UK Foreign Secretary, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, to talk about the next 25 years of conflict and diplomacy, and how to navigate a world where nobody cares about the old rules anymore. His stark warnings for the years ahead: The death of soft power Taiwan being much more important than Iran for Western security The potential NATO collapse by 2050 A 2050 world without America at the helm Sir Malcolm’s escapades with Gorbachev and the CCP Chapters: 00:00 Intro 01:05 Why Politicians Can’t Predict the Future 03:37 The Power of Double Agents in Spycraft 04:38 Social Media Diplomacy Was Inevitable 12:46 Soft Power is Dead 16:25 The Cult of Youth in Global Leadership 18:54 The West Must Think Long-Term to Survive 27:43 Technological Innovation Will Hurt Old People 30:58 The Chinese Will Eat Their Rich 38:11 Meeting Gorbachev and His Philosopher Wife 44:32 There Are No Good Guys and Bad Guys 46:46 Ukraine will Freeze Up like Korea, Kashmir, and Cyprus 47:55 Taiwan is More Important than Iran 53:23 How Smaller Countries Operate without Pax Americana 55:09 “The Chinese and the Russians Cannot Believe Their Luck” - on NATO Collapse 59:59 America May Not Be the Main Character in the Future Show Notes & Transcript in the comments👇

The genetic lottery is over, and yet no one is having kids. In the latest Forecast 2050 episode, @noor_siddiqui_, Founder & CEO of @OrchidInc, is building and envisioning a world where embryo screening and artificial wombs could become the default way humans reproduce in 25 years. We discuss: - The genetics revolution happening right now - Causes of plummeting birthrates - The moonshot nobody wants to fund: artificial wombs - Genetic enhancements to upgrade humanity - What goes wrong when old people run the world, and how to fix it Chapters: 00:00 Intro 00:50 Rolling the Dice No More: The Embryo Screening Revolution 05:27 Artificial Wombs Are the Tech Challenge of Our Time 07:47 Why Aren't We Having Kids? 17:03 The Broken Generational Contract 18:56 Nature Beats Out Nurture 21:45 AI & Genetic Technology Could Give Us Superhuman Powers 30:54 Noor’s Plan for 2050 37:10 What We Lose When Old People Run Everything Extended Show Notes & Transcript in the comments👇