I just saw that Future Perfect have a new feature. I found it really inspiring so I thought I’d share it here. It is the Future Perfect 50: The scientists, thinkers, scholars, writers, and activists building a more perfect future.
There are some wonderful profiles of people that will be familiar to many Forum readers, like Leah Garcés’ work with farmers, Lucia Coulter and Jack Rafferty’s work on Lead Elimination and Kevin Esvelt’s Gene Drive research.
But there are a host of inspiring people and stories I’ve never heard before, like Setusko Thurlow’s anti-nuclear weapon work, Joy Buolamwini’s algorithmic justice campaign, and Olga Kikou’s fight for a ban on all caged farming in the EU.
I do feel like having people who are very strongly pushing the state of AGI forward and who are major contributors to existential risk via their actions in that space (most notably Demis Hassabis) on that list, while also rewarding people who are trying to reduce existential risk by putting them on that list, sure makes me feel like the list isn’t generated via a very consistent set of criteria.
I also more broadly feel sad that one would put AI capabilities research on this list, given that I think it’s quite bad for the world.