Foresight Fellow Special | Amanda Ngo: Innovating With AI for Wellbeing
“Imagine waking up every day in a state of flow, where all the knots and fears are replaced with a deep sense of ease and joy.”
This week we are dropping another special episode of the Existential Hope podcast, featuring Amanda Ngo, a Foresight Institute Existential Hope fellow specializing in AI innovation for wellbeing. Amanda speaks about her work on leveraging AI to enhance human flourishing, sharing insights on the latest advancements and their potential impacts.
Amanda’s Recommended Resources
Amanda’s Sunrise App: Amanda's AI tool designed to guide people through healing modalities. Sign up for the waitlist at mysunrise.app.
Internal Family Systems (IFS): A therapeutic approach that involves identifying and interacting with different parts of oneself to achieve emotional healing.
Somatic Work: Techniques focused on body awareness and physical sensations to promote healing.
Collective Intelligence Project: Effective, decentralized, and agentic decision-making across individuals and communities to produce best-case outcomes for the collective.
Meaning Alignment Institute: Another organization working towards ensuring AI systems support human flourishing.
Amanda’s Vision for the Future: AI Therapy for Increased Wellbeing
Amanda envisions a eucatastrophe characterized by abundance and playfulness, where advanced AI systems help individuals achieve a heightened state of well-being. These AI systems would be equipped with the collective knowledge of healers, guides, and therapists, capable of understanding and responding to individuals' emotional and physical needs. By breaking down traditional therapeutic approaches into their core components, these systems could offer personalized support tailored to each person's unique journey. This vision involves creating AI that can provide the precise emotional and physical guidance needed to help individuals thrive.
About the art
This art piece was created with the help of Dall–E 3.
Library Recommendations
Ten Percent Happier - Podcast. Science-focused interviews and exercises on meditation.
The Strange Order of Things - Antonio Damasio. On how emotions are essential for all living organisms, the formation of our culture, and a force toward life.
Artificial Intelligence, Values, and Alignment - Iason Gabriel. On AI Alignment but discusses the problem of different people with different values, and how Contractualism, Rights, Rawl’s Veil of Ignorance, or Social Choice Theory may help us reach overlapping consensus.
A Beautiful Question- Frank Wilczek. Uses the history of science, from Plato to quantum physics to answer the question if the world embodies beautiful ideas and what, if anything, this means for reality.
About the Foresight Fellowship on Existential Hope
The Foresight Fellowship is a one-year program committed to giving change-makers the support to accelerate their bold ideas into the future. The mission is to catalyze collaboration among leading young scientists, engineers, and innovators who work to advance technologies for the benefit of life.
Learn more about our work at existentialhope.com.