This week on The Hope Axis, I’m joined by Emmett Shear to talk about AI, hope, and how we should actually think about the future. Emmett is the co-founder and former CEO of Twitch, former interim CEO of OpenAI, and now the co-founder and CEO of Softmax. We discuss why AI inspires so much fear, what it really is capable of, and where hope still shows up. Hope you enjoy.

For the full transcript of our conversation, click here:  https://drive.google.com/file/d/10qooWrDB9Nr_0MgKy_kkpd1XMo_2gMN0/view?usp=drive_link

Important Links:  

X (Twitter) – https://x.com/eshear?lang=en 

Wikipedia –  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Shear   

Softmax – https://softmax.com/about 

LinkedIn –    https://www.linkedin.com/in/emmettshear 

Show Notes:

(0:00:00) Introduction  

(0:03:00) AI and The Humanities  

(0:06:29) Reframing "The Essence", or "The Core" of Things  

(0:13:01) Why People Want to Work on AI  

(0:20:13) Kant As The Grandfather of AI  

(0:23:57) Thomas Aquinas, Informing Onto The Boundary  

(0:29:41) Back To Teleological Thinking  

(0:31:44) Art As Imprinting One's Soul On An Object  

(0:35:00) "Real" and "Fake" Interiority, AI's Nature Without Nurture

(0:41:46) AI & Art  

(0:54:40) A Village of AI  

(1:01:58) The Risk of Human Extinction  

(1:08:47) AI Slop, Human Experience & Taste  

(1:12:22) The Beauty, The Good, and The True as Temporal Coarse-Grainings  

(1:18:08) Collective Aliveness of The Biosphere  

(1:24:05) Problems Too Big For Individuals, But Not Too Big For Humanity

Books, Essays & References Mentioned:

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Will Die — Eliezer Yudkowsky

Superintelligence — Nick Bostrom

Thomas Aquinas (informatio; origin of “information”)

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Immanuel Kant

Takens’ Embedding Theorem

Homotopy / homotopic stability

Groupoids (one-, two-, three-, infinity-groupoid)

AGI (Artificial General Intelligence)

Optimizers & goal-binding

Telos vs goals

Taste vs skill

Beauty, Truth, and the Good

Learning systems & dynamic systems

The biosphere / Gaia hypothesis

Collective intelligence

Speed as risk factor in AI systems