This NFT is a concept taken from the Existential Hope-podcast, where we invite scientists to speak about their long-term visions of the future. One of the questions we always ask is for the scientist to provide an example of a potential eucatastrophe.

The phrase “eucatastrophe” was published in a paper from Future of Humanity Institute by Owen Cotton-Barratt and Toby Ord, to suggest that ”an existential eucatastrophe is an event which causes there to be much more expected value after the event than before.” I.e. the opposite of a catastrophe.

When we asked scientist Anthony Aguirre from the Future of Life Institute about a potential Eucatastrophe, he suggested that having widespread availability of personal AI assistants without self interest that empowers and assists individuals in achieving their goals could be an amazingly empowering event for humanity:

“Imagine a very powerful AI system that doesn't have self interest, that works for you personally in advancing your own goals and interests. This would empower individuals, and would use high powered information technologies for people rather than against them. It would be a personal assistant deluxe: A loyal AI assistant.

It would get to know you really well, and then help you achieve your goals. Rather than getting to know you really well so it can manipulate you like some other systems may do. The eucatastrophe would be to have widespread availability of these high powered, loyal AI assistants.”

Using art to visualize concepts can help inspire us, and make what seems abstract become real and clear in our minds. Therefore we have asked an artist to create an NFT based on this prompt from Anthony Aguirre’s suggested eucatastrophe.

The concept of this art piece is a textual artwork which plays with the code of reading and recognition as an important piece for AI development.