future

A video essay explaining hauntology, Mark Fisher's idea of lost futures, and 80s nostalgia. It uses the Fallout games and other media as examples of a retro-futurism that mourns futures that never arrived.

Captain Disillusion explains the visual effects behind the Back to the Future trilogy. He covers ILM's motion-control, computer-controlled camera work and clever pre-CGI tricks.

An Isaac Arthur episode on civilizations in the far future, past the Black Hole Era. It covers iron stars, Boltzmann brains, reversible computing and the idea of reversing entropy.

An Isaac Arthur episode on civilizations in the dark, post-stellar universe, including black hole farming, accretion disks and the Penrose process as energy sources.

An Isaac Arthur episode on arcologies, self-sufficient habitats that could house whole cities, on Earth or on harsh worlds. It covers how such structures might work and what limits their size.

A speculative-fiction video by Tom Scott, framed as coming from a future, about an AI called Earworm that enforces copyright so aggressively that humanity ends up forgetting a century of pop culture. It is animated and narrated as part of his series of videos from a future.

Kurzgesagt explains the black hole bomb and how far-future civilizations might extract energy from spinning black holes, including Dyson-sphere-style ideas.

CGP Grey's video "Humans Need Not Apply" argues that automation will make a large part of the workforce economically obsolete, much as engines did for horses. It surveys robots and software replacing both physical and mental labor.

CGP Grey narrates an animated adaptation of Nick Bostrom's Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant. The story uses a dragon that demands a daily toll of lives as a metaphor for aging and society's acceptance of death.

Technology Connections explains how LED traffic lights, which do not melt snow, drew complaints and were blamed for accidents. He uses it to illustrate the 'but sometimes' fallacy against new technology.

Robert Miles explains instrumental convergence: why an AGI with almost any goal would tend to pursue sub-goals like self-preservation and resource acquisition. It builds on Omohundro's basic AI drives and his orthogonality thesis video.

Robert Miles explains the orthogonality thesis: how an agent can be highly intelligent while pursuing goals that seem stupid or alien to humans. He separates intelligence from goals and touches on the stamp-collector example.

CGP Grey explains how ideas spread like germs, and why content that triggers outrage spreads fastest, using a study on what makes online content viral. He argues that opposing outrage-driven memes feed each other.

Posy gives a short history of the computer mouse cursor, from early straight pointers to the tilted arrow, comparing Apple and Windows designs. He then explains why he designed his own cursor set and offers it as a free download.

Kurzgesagt makes a selfish case for improving the world, arguing that helping people far away raises prosperity and innovation for everyone, including yourself. The animated video frames this as egoistic altruism and positive-sum cooperation.

Robert Miles asks whether corporations can be thought of as artificial general superintelligences and how far the analogy holds. He argues the differences, such as being limited by employees' capabilities, matter for AI safety.

CGP Grey argues that aging and death are a problem worth defeating, using a short animated essay. It is part of a pair with a follow-up from Kurzgesagt.

Kurzgesagt explains stellar engines such as the Shkadov thruster and Caplan thruster, which could move the Sun and solar system across the galaxy over millions of years to avoid hazards and reach new regions.

Robert Miles examines whether the case for AI safety is a Pascal's mugging, a tiny probability of an enormous payoff. He argues it is not, because AI risk does not depend on vanishingly small probabilities.

Ted Nelson explains the original Xanadu hypertext idea of visible connection, the notion that links between documents should be shown and preserved. He argues that the Web and current document standards lost this concept.

Robert Miles explains reward modelling, in which an AI learns what humans want from their preference comparisons instead of a hand-written reward function. He walks through the 2017 paper on deep reinforcement learning from human preferences.

A short Kurzgesagt animation explaining the Great Filter, the idea that finding alien life might be bad news because it implies something usually destroys civilizations. It connects the concept to the Fermi paradox.

A Computerphile video in which Rob Miles warns against assuming a general AI will think like a human. He uses the thought experiment of a stamp-collecting AI to show how a goal-driven system could pursue its aim with dangerous results.

Isaac Arthur examines the Dyson Dilemma, the puzzle of why we see no Dyson spheres or megastructures if growth-oriented civilizations should build them. He covers detectability and whether such structures could hide.

Robert Miles introduces the first of several videos on the paper 'Concrete Problems in AI Safety', focusing on how AI systems can cause accidental negative side effects. It explains the problem in accessible terms.

Arthur Keller gives a roughly half-hour crash course on environmental collapse, covering exponential growth, carrying capacity and ecological overshoot.

Rob Miles explains on Computerphile why implementing an off switch for a general AI is hard. A capable agent would resist being stopped because shutdown prevents it from achieving its goal.

Rob Miles explains for Computerphile why simple rule sets like Asimov's Three Laws cannot make robots and AI safe. Terms like harm and human are too ambiguous to specify precisely.

Curious Droid asks what traces human civilization would leave in the geological record 65 million years from now. It considers how thin the fossil record of humanity might be.

Isaac Arthur examines options for colonizing Venus, from vast floating habitats in the temperate upper atmosphere to full terraforming of the planet. It is a long-form speculative futurism episode in his solar system colonization series.

A Kurzgesagt animated explainer on how humanity could build a Dyson sphere, a swarm of structures capturing the sun's energy. It covers using Mercury's materials and a step-by-step construction approach.

Isaac Arthur explains the Matrioshka Brain, a hypothetical computer or artificial mind powered by an entire star using nested shells. It covers how such megastructures relate to Dyson spheres and superintelligence.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day investigates manipulation on Facebook, interviewing the company's team about content moderation. It is the third video in his series on social media manipulation.

Isaac Arthur examines Dyson spheres and swarms, including common myths and misconceptions. He covers uses such as interstellar travel, black hole generation, and computing large enough to simulate universes.

A short video telling how Xerox PARC invented the graphical user interface and how Steve Jobs's 1979 visit influenced Apple's Lisa.

Isaac Arthur explains the orbital ring, a megastructure launch-assist system that could move bulk cargo cheaply to orbit and beyond. He compares it with space elevators and discusses power transmission.

Kurzgesagt introduces the Fermi paradox: with so many stars and planets, why do we see no sign of aliens? It sets up the question and what it might imply for our own future. It is part 1 of 2.

An RSA Animate illustrating a lecture by psychologist Philip Zimbardo on how people's perspectives on time (past, present, future) shape work, health and well-being.