Welcome to AI for a better world.

Today I'm delighted to be joined by Nick Mostrum, a distinguished philosopher and the founding director of the Future of Humanity

Institute at Oxford University.

Nick's new book, Deep Utopia, Life and Meaning in a Solved World, delves into profound questions

about the future of humanity in the face of advancing technology.

It's my pleasure to welcome Nick to our discussion today. Nick, welcome.

Glad to be here. Nick, as we look towards the future, there's immense potential for AI to tackle pressing global challenges.

Could you elaborate on how AI might be harnessed to address issues such as climate change, healthcare or poverty?

I think AI is really a general purpose technology, so one shouldn't think too much about which particular

area does it have applications in, but more as broadly the attempt to mechanize cognition,

just as we've mechanized a lot of physical labor with the invention of the steam engine and

internal combustion. And if you reflect on the wide range of tasks for which thinking can be useful,

then you sort of begin to appreciate the width of the potential areas where AI could be applied.

I think if we are talking about some of the different application domains that you mentioned,

AIs will be useful in material science and for trying to help

scientists make progress on clean energy research. We are developing better modeling systems for

analyzing molecular systems and you could imagine that being used for the next generation of solar

cell or for studying fusion containment. There are also sort of more low-key applications behind the scenes where AI can make various processes more efficient.

The main thing to be cautious about is to over-index on what AI is today and what it can do now.

It's very much a moving target.

And so, yes, there are a bunch of applications

we can see from chatyPt4 and other systems today, but remember just three or four years ago,

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