London Futurists's video: Humanity before and after AI

What does the future of humanity look like with rapidly developing AI and AGI on the horizon? What does the future look like for any civilization on the eve of radical-self modification and introduction of transformative AI? Many thousands of bloggers worldwide have been spurred to write new articles in the wake of growing public interest and concern about the capabilities and misdeeds of generative AI. These articles vary greatly in terms of how deeply they grasp the possibilities and threats that lie ahead. Standing out from this crowd, one person who is particularly well informed and thoughtful about these developments is the speaker at this London Futurists webinar, Pawel Pachniewski. Pawel is a Dutch entrepreneur and interdisciplinary researcher, operating in the Netherlands, United States, Poland, and previously China. His main interests are artificial general intelligence, foundational issues in science and philosophy, cognitive science in particular. Pawel was previously the CTO of a real estate and education company in Poland where he led engineering projects from AI-driven serious gaming and simulations, to autonomous AI building management panels, for which he won grants in the millions. He is the founder of game studio Frying Jelly, which uses generative AI for live content in its games, and Schemetics, focused on providing natural AI assistance to humanity and cutting edge AI R&D. He has a blog called Mental Contractions, https://mentalcontractions.substack.com/, where he writes about how to enhance, extend and explore existence as safely as possible. You can follow Pawel on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/pwlot. Themes raised in the webinar included "the hard problem of metaphysics", "the phantom cognit", and "the intersubjectivity collapse", along with the existential risks arising. You'll also hear about degrees of intelligence, degrees of consciousness, and degrees of will (agency). Pawel also shares his timeline for the arrival of AGI ("extremely likely" by 2030) and 'pseudo-AGI" (2023). The webinar was introduced and moderated by David Wood, Chair of London Futurists. For more information about this event, see https://www.meetup.com/london-futurists/events/291717948/