This new installment of the Worthy Successor series is an interview with Michael Johnson, a philosopher and neuroscientist who describes himself as working on "how to turn consciousness into a real science." Mike is known for his formalist approach to consciousness research and his work on the Symmetry Theory of Valence at the Qualia Research Institute. In this episode, we explore Mike's radical vision of what posthuman sentience could become - and why he believes human experience represen...

This new installment of the Worthy Successor series is an interview with Robin Hanson - Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University, economist, polymath, and author of The Age of Em. Hanson is one of the few thinkers who approaches the future of intelligence through the lens of deep evolutionary dynamics, cultural drift, and long-term civilizational viability. In this episode, we dig into Robin’s stark warning that humanity is losing the adaptive capacities that once made civ...

This new installment of the Worthy Successor series is an interview with Joe Carlsmith, a senior advisor at Open Philanthropy, whose work spans AI alignment, moral uncertainty, and the philosophical foundations of value. In this conversation, Joe joins us in his personal capacity, not representing any brand or company, and offering his own thoughtful perspectives. In this episode, we explore Joe’s reflections on what a “worthy successor” might really mean - not as a single entity, but as a c...

This new installment of the Worthy Successor series is an interview with Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Vice President and Fellow at Google, and CTO of Technology & Society. In this conversation, Blaise talks about how life and intelligence seem to move in a single direction - toward greater complexity and deeper interdependence. Blaise describes this movement as an arrow of evolution, shaped by cooperation and merging - from the earliest partnerships between simple organisms to the way human ...

This is an interview with Brad Carson, who served as a U.S. Congressman and as Acting Under Secretary of the Army, and now serves as President of Americans for Responsible Innovation (ARI). You might expect someone with deep roots in national security to see AGI through a purely competitive lens - a technological arms race to be won at any cost. Instead, Brad’s focus is on responsibility, understanding, and restraint: how to sustain moral clarity in a domain where the stakes will rival thos...

Joining us in our eleventh episode of our series AGI Governance on The Trajectory is Irakli Beridze, Director of the UNICRI Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics under the United Nations mandate. In this conversation, Irakli draws a stark contrast between yesterday’s arms-control templates and tomorrow’s AI. Chemical weapons were narrow, outdated, and ultimately unwanted. By contrast, advanced AI is general-purpose, fast-accelerating, and universally desirable - which makes govern...

Joining us in our tenth episode of our AGI Governance series on The Trajectory is Dean Xue Lan, longtime scholar of public policy and global governance, whose recent work centers on AI safety and international coordination. In this episode, Xue stresses that AGI governance must evolve as an adaptive network. The UN can set frameworks among nations, but companies, safety institutes, and industry associations also play critical roles. Only through combining these overlapping layers can governa...

This is an interview with Joel Predd, a senior engineer at the RAND Corporation and co-author of RAND’s work on “five hard national security problems from AGI,”. In this conversation, Joel lays out a sober frame for leaders: treat AGI as technically credible but deeply uncertain; assume it will be transformational if it arrives; and recognize that the pace of progress is outstripping our capacity for governance. This is the fourth installment of our "US-China AGI Relations" series - where ...

USMC Colonel Drew Cukor spent 25 years as decades in uniform and helped spearhead early Department of Defense AI efforts, eventually leading project including the Pentagon’s Project Maven. After government service, he’s led AI initiatives in the private sector, first with JP Morgan and now with TWG Global. Drew argues that when it comes to the US-China AGI race, the decisive lever isn’t what we block – it’s what we adopt. The nation that most completely fuses people and machines across daily...

Joining us in our ninth episode of our AGI Governance series on The Trajectory is Stuart Russell, Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley and author of Human Compatible. In this episode, Stuart explores why current AI race dynamics resemble a prisoner’s dilemma, why governments must establish enforceable red lines, and how international coordination might begin with consensus principles before tackling more difficult challenges. This episode referred to the following other resources:...

Joining us in our eighth episode of our AGI Governance series on The Trajectory is Craig Mundie, former Chief Research and Strategy Officer at Microsoft and longtime advisor on the evolution of digital infrastructure, AI, and national security. In this episode, Craig and I explore how bottom-up governance could emerge from commercial pressures and cross-national enterprise collaboration, and how this pragmatic foundation might lead us into a future of symbiotic co-evolution rather than cata...

This is an interview with Jeremie and Edouard Harris, Canadian researchers with backgrounds in AI governance and national security consulting, and co-founders of Gladstone AI. In this episode, Jeremie and Edouard explain why trusting China on AGI is dangerous, highlight ongoing espionage in Western labs, explore verification tools like tamper-proof chips, and argue that slowing China’s AI progress may be vital for safe alignment. This the second installment of our "US-China AGI Relations" s...

This new installment of the Worthy Successor series features Ed Boyden, an American neuroscientist and entrepreneur at MIT, widely known for his work on optogenetics and brain simulation - his breakthroughs have helped shape the frontier of neurotechnology. In this episode, we explore Ed’s vision for what kinds of posthuman intelligences deserve to inherit the future. His deep commitment to “ground truth” - the idea that intelligence must be built from and validated against reality, not just...

This is an interview with Roman V. Yampolskiy, a computer scientist at the University of Louisville and a leading voice in AI safety. Everyone has heard Roman's p(doom) arguments, that isn't the focus of our interview. We instead talk about Roman's "untestability" hypothesis, and the fact that there maybe untold, human-incomprehensible powers already in current LLMs. He discusses how such powers might emerge, and when and how a "treacherous turn" might happen. This is the Third episod...

Joining us in our seventh episode of our series AGI Governance on The Trajectory is Toby Ord, Senior Researcher at Oxford University’s AI Governance Initiative and author of The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. Toby is one of the world’s most influential thinkers on long-term risk - and one of the clearest voices on how advanced AI could shape, or shatter, the trajectory of human civilization. In this episode, Toby unpacks the evolving technical and economic landscap...

This new installment of the Worthy Successor series is an interview with the brilliant Martin Rees - British cosmologist, astrophysicist, and 60th President of the Royal Society. In this interview we explore his belief that humanity is just a stepping stone between Darwinian life and a new form of intelligent design - not divinely ordained, but constructed by artificial minds building successors of their own. For Martin, the true tragedy would not be losing our species, but squandering the ...

This is an interview with Emmett Shear - CEO of SoftMax, co-founder of Twitch, former interim CEO of OpenAI, and one of the few public-facing tech leaders who seems to take both AGI development and AGI alignment seriously. In this episode, we explore Emmett’s vision of AGI as a kind of living system, not unlike a new kind of cell, joining the tissue of intelligent life. We talk through the limits of our moral vocabulary, the obligations we might owe to future digital minds, and the uncomfort...

This is an interview with Joshua Clymer, AI safety researcher at Redwood Research, and former researcher at METR. Joshua has spent years focused on institutional readiness for AGI, especially the kinds of governance bottlenecks that could become breaking points. His thinking is less about far-off futures and more about near-term institutional failure modes - the brittle places that might shatter first. In this episode, Joshua and I discuss where AGI pressure might rupture our systems: intel...

This is an interview with Peter Singer, one of the most influential moral philosophers of our time. Singer is best known for his groundbreaking work on animal rights, global poverty, and utilitarian ethics, and his ideas have shaped countless conversations about the moral obligations of individuals, governments, and societies. This interview is our tenth installment in The Trajectory’s second series Worthy Successor, where we explore the kinds of posthuman intelligences that deserve to ...

This is an interview with David Duvenaud, Assistant Professor at University of Toronto, co-author of the Gradual Disempowerment paper, and former researcher at Anthropic. This is the first episode in our new “Early Experience of AGI” series - where we explore the early impacts of AGI on our work and personal lives. This episode referred to the following other essays and resources: -- Closing the Human Reward Circuit: https://danfaggella.com/reward -- Gradual Disempowerment: http://www.gradu...