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 Anna Yelizarova from the Future of Life Institute about a potential Eucatastrophe, she 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: “To me, a eucatastrophe is not just something very good happening out of the blue. It's in storytelling: Everything is at the brink of collapse. Things are about to end very badly for all the characters we care deeply about. And then suddenly, there's a knight in shining armor with an army that comes and saves us. I think that's what Tolkien was referring to as a eucatastrophe.

Thinking about how this storytelling tool would look in relation to AI, it would be a lot of people that are fed up with their needs not being met by society, frictions building up, and perhaps even some agreement is breached. Then the eucatastrophe is an event that addresses the needs of the people who are complaining.

So the eucatastrophe would be an event where we collectively agree that enough is enough. Where we break out of this paradigm and become bigger people in a scenario where nobody would expect this to happen. Where you're pleasantly surprised and we put a stop to the machinery and agree on more ethical practices around the proceeds of AI.” 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 Anna’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.