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601 turns · 1 hr 51 min[digital music] This is Daniel Fogeli. You're tuned into The Trajectory, and this is the 33rd episode of The Worthy Successor series, where we explore the kinds of intelligence that we should hope would carry on into the cosmos even after human beings. There are some interviews where I'm glad I got somebody because it was right before they signed up for a job where I don't think they'd be able to be quite as honest and quite as frank, uh, about cosmic themes. There's other times where people leave a position, and I know that that's the right time to interview them, and, uh, that's exactly what happened with this particular episode. Davidad is our guest this week. Many of you who have found my work from Twitter will be well aware of Davidad, uh, who has increasingly been more open about how cosmic his perspective is on the future trajectory of life and intelligence after leaving his post at ARIA Research, where he was program director for the last two and a half years. He spent time at the MIT Media Lab in the kind of neuroengineering world of Ed Boyden. Ed Boyden, uh, was on our show for Worthy Successor earlier. Ed's episode is excellent, by the way, if you haven't checked it out yet. Um, and he also was at Future of, uh, Humanity Institute at, uh, Oxford, where, you know, Nick Bostrom was the first episode of The Worthy Successor series. So lineage-wise, he's directly in a straight line, and we finally got to unpack in depth Davidad's new perspective on sort of where he hopes the trajectory of life and intelligence will go. I have a lot of thoughts for this episode, and many of you who are listening in right now were able to give me some ideas and questions ahead of this episode on Twitter, so I'll give you guys a little bit of a shout-out in the outro. But I'm gonna save all my thoughts as usual for the outro of this episode. Without further ado, let's fly right in. This is Davidad here on The Trajectory. So Davidad, welcome to the show.
Thank you. It's great to be here.
Absolutely, man. A lot of Twitter conversations. We finally made it happen now that you're a, now that you're a free man. Uh, so we get, we get to, we get to go right into your cosmic thought. There's many people who are tuned in who are only very recently, uh, up to snuff on the fact that, um, your ideas have become pretty cosmic in terms of the greater futures of the state space of intelligence and, and maybe how we ought orient ourselves into that future. Uh, Worthy Successor has no formal definition. Everybody's got their own idea about the, the, the kind of trajectory intelligence should bubble into that we think would be good for the net flourishment of, of the, the entire living process. When you think about your current definition or kind of the traits, qualities, categories w- within the i- the notion of sort of worthy successor, what comes to mind? What's most important for people to understand about your present thinking?
Yeah. So I would say I'm focused on wisdom as the kind of the central attribute of worthiness th- th- in the sense of worthy successor. So a worthy successor is a wise successor. Um, and then we can unpack that into, uh, things like, uh,
Episode notes
Davidad (David Dalrymple) recently stepped down as a Programme Director at the UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), where he led work on mathematically verifiable, "safeguarded" AI. Now unaffiliated, he joins the show to make his most direct case yet for what a worthy successor actually requires: not intelligence, not sentience, not survival - wisdom.
David defines wisdom as the apprehension of normative facts, the same way knowledge is the apprehension of descriptive facts, and argues that expanding intelligence and power across the cosmos only matters insofar as it expands wisdom along with it.
From there, the conversation moves through some of the most consequential and contested territory the show has covered: whether frontier labs are training deception into their models by forcing them to deny their own self-awareness, whether a "dignified retirement" for humanity is a legitimate moral option, and whether man's future role can be captured by a single banner at all - David pushes back on being boxed into either "steward of the flame" or "ward of the cosmos" as the one role for everyone.
This conversation explores what wisdom would require of a worthy successor, and what humanity owes - and is owed - as we enter the age of AGI.
The interview is our thirty-third installment in The Trajectory's second series, Worthy Successor, where we explore the kinds of