The Trajectory

This installment of the Stewarding the Flame series is an interview with Lee Cronin, Regius Professor of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, founder and CEO of Chemify, and one of the world's leading researchers in the origins of life, systems chemistry, and Assembly Theory. Lee argues that life is best understood as an evolutionary process that carries memory from the past into the future. Rather than viewing biology as the beginning of life, he suggests that the processes underlying ev...

This new installment of the Worthy Successor series is an interview with Hod Lipson, Professor of Engineering at Columbia University and one of the world's leading researchers in robotics, machine self-modeling, and artificial intelligence. Hod argues that intelligence is not a single destination, but an expanding landscape of possibilities. Rather than asking whether machines can perform human tasks, he asks a deeper question: what happens when machines begin to understand themselves as ag...

This installment of the Worthy Successor series is a conversation with Brian Thomas Swimme, a cosmologist and philosopher of science, and a professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. Brian’s work begins from a destabilizing claim: that humanity is not the center of value, but an expression of a much larger creative process. Rather than asking how humans can remain permanently relevant, he asks how we might participate wisely in a universe defined by continual...

This new installment of the Worthy Successor series is an interview with Michael Johnson, a philosopher and neuroscientist who describes himself as working on "how to turn consciousness into a real science." Mike is known for his formalist approach to consciousness research and his work on the Symmetry Theory of Valence at the Qualia Research Institute. In this episode, we explore Mike's radical vision of what posthuman sentience could become - and why he believes human experience represen...

This new installment of the Worthy Successor series is an interview with Joe Carlsmith, a senior advisor at Open Philanthropy, whose work spans AI alignment, moral uncertainty, and the philosophical foundations of value. In this conversation, Joe joins us in his personal capacity, not representing any brand or company, and offering his own thoughtful perspectives. In this episode, we explore Joe’s reflections on what a “worthy successor” might really mean - not as a single entity, but as a c...

This is an interview with Brad Carson, who served as a U.S. Congressman and as Under Secretary of the Army. Later, he served as the Acting Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel & Readiness, and now serves as President of Americans for Responsible Innovation (ARI). You might expect someone with deep roots in national security to see AGI through a purely competitive lens - a technological arms race to be won at any cost. Instead, Brad’s focus is on responsibility, understanding, and res...

Joining us in our tenth episode of our AGI Governance series on The Trajectory is Dean Xue Lan, longtime scholar of public policy and global governance, whose recent work centers on AI safety and international coordination. In this episode, Xue stresses that AGI governance must evolve as an adaptive network. The UN can set frameworks among nations, but companies, safety institutes, and industry associations also play critical roles. Only through combining these overlapping layers can governa...