Hope Drop #33: Allison Duettmann & Beatrice Erkers | A Vision of Existential Hope for the New Year
"People are waking up to the idea that ambitious, positive progress isn’t just possible—it’s necessary. It’s go-time for humanity."
What if we could reimagine the future from a place of hope instead of fear?
In this special episode of the Existential Hope Podcast, Allison Duettmann and Beatrice Erkers turn the tables and interview each other instead of a guest, sharing candid insights into their journeys, hopes, and visions for humanity.
Together, they explore big concepts like moral circle expansion, how neurotech could deepen empathy (even with animals!), and why worldbuilding in 2045 can help us envision and create better futures today.
Prepare for the new year by diving into strategies for building a future worth striving for.
Allison and Beatrice’s Recommended Resources
Peter Singer's Moral Circle Expansion: Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress
Future of Life Institute (FLI): futureoflife.org
"The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch: The Beginning of Infinity
Wild Robot Movie and Book: The Wild Robot by Peter Brown
Vitalik Buterin's "Techno-Optimism" Blog Post: My Techno-Optimism
Engines of Creation by Eric Drexler: Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology
Foresight Institute: foresight.org
Netflix Series: "Alone": Alone
Entrepreneur First and Defensive Technologies Incubator: Entrepreneur First
Vision Weekend by Foresight Institute: Vision Weekend
A Vision for the Future: An Expansion of the Moral Circle
Beatrice’s eucatastrophe envisions a future where humanity expands its "moral circle" to include not just people worldwide but also animals and potentially other sentient beings. She imagines technologies like neurotech and AI enabling direct emotional sharing or communication across species, fostering deeper empathy and understanding. For example, if someone could feel an animal’s fear or communicate its needs, it might inspire greater compassion and action. While challenging, this moral shift could drive global cooperation and environmental stewardship, embodying hope for a more inclusive and interconnected future.
Xhope Library Recommendations
What To Expect From The Next Generation of BCIs - Sumner Norman. Seminar summarizing the state of the art and exploring the future of BCIs. Video
Fun Theory - Eliezer Yudkowsky. On why a future defined by advanced neurotechnology does not have to be boring. Forum/blog-post
Gaming the Future - Allison Duettmann, Mark S. Miller, Christine Peterson. Introduces a decentralized approach to advanced AI that focuses on improved problem-solving arising from the cooperation of individual agents. Book
What Success Looks Like – Marius Hobbhahn et al. Discusses scenarios and strategies for ensuring the safe development and deployment of transformative artificial intelligence (TAI), exploring different situations where AI alignment might or might not be an issue. Forum/blog-post
Community Updates
The world of tomorrow, Virginia Postrel
The future was once imagined as glamorous. Past futurists proposed experimental and bold solutions to grand challenges—domed cities to address overpopulation, high-speed transit networks to connect continents.
This essay asks why we’ve stopped dreaming at that scale.
Virginia Postrel argues that reclaiming an ambitious future first requires tackling the unglamorous barriers holding us back—outdated zoning laws, sluggish infrastructure, and regulatory gridlock. But fixing these isn’t enough. We must also break free from "default" thinking and dare to imagine boldly once again: building entirely new cities, advancing high-risk nuclear technologies, and creating experimental zones where innovation flourishes. Only by addressing both the practical and visionary challenges can we work towards the extraordinary futures we’ve forgotten how to dream.
NatureLM is the first large-scale audio-language model designed for analyzing animal sounds. Trained on a diverse dataset of bioacoustic archives, human speech, and music, it addresses bioacoustics tasks through natural language prompts and audio inputs. Capable of detecting and classifying thousands of species and vocalizations, including species it has never encountered, NatureLM demonstrates emergent abilities that push the boundaries of bioacoustic research. By enabling zero-shot tasks and refining species identification, it provides ethologists with unprecedented tools to study animal communication. Future developments could expand its applications to conservation, ecosystem monitoring, and deeper exploration of cross-species communication.
If you haven’t already seen it, we recommend taking a look at the winners of FLI’s Superintelligence Imagined, a contest for the best creative educational materials on superintelligence, its associated risks, and the implications of this technology for our world.
With one winner and five runners up, there’s a lots of (wonderful) creative content to look through.
In a landscape dominated by sci-fi dystopias like Terminator and Blade Runner, where robots often represent our collective doom, The Wild Robot offers a refreshing shift. This film portrays a robot not as a threat, but as a symbol of growth, survival, and connection. Its journey inspires a subtle but powerful message of hope in an increasingly automated world, suggesting that technology–when embraced with care–can bring out the best of humanity.
View now in cinemas or to rent on Youtube.
Explore more on Existentialhope.com.
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