Ariel: I’m Ariel Conn with the Future of Life Institute. As you may have noticed, 2017 was quite the dramatic year. In fact, without me even mentioning anything specific, I’m willing to bet that you already have some examples forming in your mind of what a crazy year this was. But while it’s easy to be discouraged by various news stories, we at FLI find ourselves hopeful that we can still create a bright future. But I’ll let Max Tegmark, president of FLI, tell you a little more about that.

Max: I think it’s important when we reflect back at the years news to understand how things are all connected. For example, the drama we've been following with Kim Jung Un and Donald Trump and Putin with nuclear weapons, is really very connected to all the developments in artificial intelligence because in both cases we have a technology which is so powerful that it's not clear that we humans have sufficient wisdom to manage it well. And that's why I think it's so important that we all continue working towards developing this wisdom further, to make sure that we can use these powerful technologies like nuclear energy, like artificial intelligence, like biotechnology and so on to really help rather than to harm us.

Ariel: And it’s worth remembering that part of what made this such a dramatic year was that there were also some really positive things that happened. For example, in March of this year, I sat in a sweltering room in New York City, as a group of dedicated, caring individuals from around the world discussed how they planned to convince the United Nations to ban nuclear weapons once and for all. I don’t think anyone in the room that day realized that not only would they succeed, but by December of this year, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, led by Beatrice Fihn would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts. And while we did what we could to help that effort, our own big story had to be the Beneficial AI Conference that we hosted in Asilomar California. Many of us at FLI were excited to talk about Asilomar, but I’ll let Anthony Aguirre, Max, and Victoria Krakovna start.

Anthony: I would say pretty unquestionably the big thing that I felt was most important and felt most excited about was the big meeting in Asilomar and centrally putting together the Asilomar Principles.

Max: I'm going to select the Asilomar conference that we organized early this year, whose output was the 23 Asilomar Principles, which has since been signed by over a thousand AI researchers around the world.

Vika: I was really excited about the Asilomar conference that we organized this year. This was the sequel to FLI’s Puerto Rico Conference, which was at the time a real game changer in terms of making AI safety more mainstream and connecting people working in AI safety with the machine learning community and integrating those two. I think Asilomar did a great job of continuing to build on that.

Max: I'm very excited about this because I feel that it really has helped mainstream AI safety work. Not just near term AI safety stuff, like how to transform today's buggy and hackable computers into robust systems that you can really trust but also mainstream larger issues. The Asilomar Principles actually contain the word super intelligence, contain the phrase existential risk, contain the phrase recursive self improvement and yet they have been signed by really a who's who in AI. So it's from now on, it's impossible for anyone to dismiss these kind of concerns, this kind of safety research. By saying, that's just people who have no clue about AI.

Anthony: That was a process that started in 2016, brainstorming at FLI and then the wider community and then getting rounds of feedback and so on. But it was exciting both to see how much cohesion there was in the community and how much support there was for getting behind some sort of principles governing AI. But also, just to see the process unfold because one of the things that I'm quite frustrated about often is this sense that there's this technology that's just unrolling like a steam roller and it’s going to go where it's going to go, and we don't have any agency over where that is. And so to see people really putting thought into what is the world we would like there to be in ten, fifteen, twenty, fifty years and how can we distill what it is that we like about that world into principles like these...that felt really, really good. It felt like an incredibly useful thing for society as a whole but in this case, the people who are deeply engaged with AI, to be thinking through in a real way rather than just how can we put out the next fire, or how can we just turn the progress one more step forward, to really think about the destination.

Ariel: But what’s that next step? How do we transition from Principles that we all agree on to actions that we can also all get behind. Jessica Cussins joined FLI later in the year, but when asked what she was excited about as far as FLI was concerned, she immediately mentioned the implementation of things like the Asilomar Principles.

Jessica: I'm most excited about the developments we've seen over the last year related to safe, beneficial and ethical AI. I think FLI has been a really important player in this. We had the beneficial AI conference in January that resulted in the Asilomar AI Principles. It's been really amazing to see how much traction those principles have gotten and to see a growing consensus around the importance of being thoughtful about the design of AI systems, the challenges of algorithmic bias of data control and manipulation and accountability and governance. So the thing I'm most excited about right now, is the growing number of initiatives we're seeing around the world related to ethical and beneficial IA.

Anthony: What's been great to see is the development of ideas both from FLI and from many other organizations of what policies might be good. What concrete legislative actions there might be or standards, organizations or non-profits, agreements between companies and so on might be interesting.

But I think, we're only at the step of formulating those things and not that much action has been taken anywhere in terms of actually doing those things. Little bits of legislation here and there. But I think we're getting to the point where lots of governments, lots of companies, lots of organizations are going to be publishing and creating and passing more and more of these things. I think seeing that play out and working really hard to ensure that it plays out in a way that's favorable in as many ways and as many people as possible, I think is super important and something we're excited to do.

Vika: I think that Asilomar principles are a great common point for the research community and others to agree what we are going for, what's important.

Besides having the principles as an output, the event itself was really good for building connections between different people from interdisciplinary backgrounds, from different related fields who are interested in the questions of safety and ethics.

And we also had this workshop that was adjacent to Asilomar where our grant winners actually presented their work. I think it was great to have a concrete discussion of research and the progress we've made so far and not just abstract discussions of the future, and I hope that we can have more such technical events, discussing research progress and making the discussion of AI safety really concrete as time goes on.

Ariel: And what is the current state of AI safety research? Richard Mallah took on the task of answering that question for the Asilomar conference, while Tucker Davey has spent the last year interviewing various FLI grant winners to better understand their work.

Richard: I presented a landscape of technical AI safety research threads. This lays out hundreds of different types of research areas and how they are related to each other. All different areas that need a lot more research going into them than they have today to help keep AI safe and beneficent and robust. I was really excited to be at Asilomar and to have co-organized Asilomar and that so many really awesome people were there and collaborating on these different types of issues. And that they were using that landscape that I put together as sort of a touchpoint and way to coordinate. That was pretty exciting.

Tucker: I just found it really inspiring interviewing all of our AI grant recipients. It's kind of been an ongoing project interviewing these researchers and writing about what they're doing. Just for me, getting recently involved in AI, it's been incredibly interesting to get either a half an hour, an hour with these researchers to talk in depth about their work and really to learn more about a research landscape that I hadn't been aware of before working at FLI. Really, being a part of those interviews and learning more about the people we're working with and these people that are really spearheading AI safety was really inspiring to be a part of.

Ariel: And with that, we have a big announcement.

Richard: So, FLI is launching a new grants program in 2018. This time around, we will be focusing more on artificial general intelligence, artificial super intelligence and ways that we can do technical research and other kinds of research today. On today's systems or things that we can analyze today, things that we can model or make theoretical progress on today that are likely to actually still be relevant at the time, where AGI comes about. This is quite exciting and I'm excited to be part of the ideation and administration around that.

Max: I'm particularly excited about the new grants program that we're launching for AI safety research. Since AI safety research itself has become so much more mainstream, since we did our last grants program three years ago, there's now quite a bit of funding for a number of near term challenges. And I feel that we at FLI should focus on things more related to challenges and opportunities from super intelligence, since there is virtually no funding for that kind of safety research. It's going to be really exciting to see what proposals come in and what research teams get selected by the review panels. Above all, how this kind of research hopefully will contribute to making sure that we can use this powerful technology to create a really awesome future.

Vika: I think this grant program could really build on the impact of our previous grant program. I'm really excited that it's going to focus more on long term AI safety research, which is still the most neglected area.

AI safety has really caught on in the past two years, and there's been a lot more work on that going on, which is great. And part of what this means is that the we at FLI can focus more on the long term. The long term work has also been getting more attention, and this grant program can help us build on that and make sure that the important problems get solved. This is really exciting.

Max: I just came back from spending a week at the NIPS Conference, the biggest artificial intelligence conference of the year. Its fascinating how rapidly everything is proceeding. AlphaZero has now defeated not just human chess players and Go players but it has also defeated human AI researchers, who after spending 30 years handcrafting artificial intelligence software to play computer chess, got all their work completely crushed by AlphaZero that just learned to do much better than that from scratch in four hours.

So, AI is really happening, whether we like it or not. The challenge we face is simply to compliment that through AI safety research and a lot of good thinking to make sure that this helps humanity flourish rather than flounder.

Ariel: In the spirit of flourishing, FLI also turned its attention this year to the movement to ban lethal autonomous weapons. While there is great debate around how to define autonomous weapons and whether or not they should be developed, more people tend to agree that the topic should at least come before the UN for negotiations. And so we helped create the video Slaughterbots to help drive this conversation. I’ll let Max take it from here.

Max: Slaughterbots, autonomous little drones that can go anonymously murder people without any human control. Fortunately, they don't exist yet. We hope that an international treaty is going to keep it that way, even though we almost have the technology to do them already. Just need to integrate then mass produce tech we already have. So to help with this, we made this video called Slaughterbots. It was really impressive to see it get over forty million views and make the news throughout the world. I was very happy that Stewart Russell, whom we partnered with in this, also presented this to the diplomats at the United Nations in Geneva when they were discussing whether to move towards a treaty, drawing a line in the sand.

Anthony: Pushing on the autonomous weapons front, it's been really scary, I would say to think through that issue. But a little bit like the issue of AI, in general, there's a potential scary side but there's also a potentially helpful side in that I think this is an issue that is a little bit tractable. Even a relatively small group of committed individuals can make difference. So I think, I'm excited to see how much movement we can get on the autonomous weapons front. It doesn't seem at all like a hopeless issue to me and I think 2018 will be kind of a turning point -- I hope that will be sort of a turning point for that issue. It's kind of flown under the radar but it really is coming up now and it will be at least interesting. Hopefully, it will be exciting and happy and so on as well as interesting. It will at least be interesting to see how it plays out on the world stage.

Jessica: For 2018, I'm hopeful that we will see the continued growth of the global momentum against lethal autonomous weapons. Already, this year a lot has happened at the United Nations and across communities around the world, including thousands of AI and robotics researchers speaking out and saying they don't want to see their work used to create these kinds of destabilizing weapons of mass destruction. One thing I'm really excited for 2018 is to see a louder, rallying call for an international ban of lethal autonomous weapons.

Ariel: Yet one of the biggest questions we face when trying to anticipate autonomous weapons and artificial intelligence in general, and even artificial general intelligence – one of the biggest questions is: when? When will these technologies be developed? If we could answer that, then solving problems around those technologies could become both more doable and possibly more pressing. This is an issue Anthony has been considering.

Anthony: Of most interest has been the overall set of projects to predict artificial intelligence timelines and milestones. This is something that I've been doing through this prediction website, Metaculus, which I've been a part of. And also something where I've took part in a very small workshop run by the Foresight Institute over the summer. It's both a super important question because I think the overall urgency with which we have to deal with certain issues really depends on how far away they are. It's also an instructive one, in that even posing the questions of what do we want to know exactly, really forces you to think through what is it that you care about, how would you estimate things, what different considerations are there in terms of this sort of big question.

We have this sort of big question, like when is really powerful AI going to appear? But when you dig into that, what exactly is really powerful, what exactly...  What does appear mean? Does that mean in sort of an academic setting? Does it mean becomes part of everybody's life?

So there are all kinds of nuances to that overall big question that lots of people asking. Just getting into refining the questions, trying to pin down what it is that mean -- make them exact so that they can be things that people can make precise and numerical predictions about. I think its been really, really interesting and elucidating to me and in sort of understanding what all the issues are. I'm excited to see how that kind of continues to unfold as we get more questions and more predictions and more expertise focused on that. Also, a little but nervous because the timeline seemed to be getting shorter and shorter and the urgency of the issue seems to be getting greater and greater. So that's a bit of a fire under us, I think, to keep acting and keep a lot of intense effort on making sure that as AI gets more powerful, we get better at managing it.

Ariel: One of the current questions AI researchers are struggling with is the problem of value alignment, especially when considering more powerful AI. Meia Chita-Tegmark and Lucas Perry recently co-organized an event to get more people thinking creatively about how to address this.

Meia: So we just organized a workshop about the ethics of value alignment together with a few partner organizations, the Berggruen Institute and also CFAR.

Lucas: This was a workshop recently that took place in California and just to remind everyone, value alignment is the process by which we bring AI's actions, goals, and intention in alignment with and in accordance with what is deemed to be the good or what are human values and preferences and goals and intentions.

Meia: And we had a fantastic group of thinkers there. We had philosophers. We had social scientists, AI researchers, political scientists. We were all discussing this very important issue of how do we get an artificial intelligence that is aligned to our own goals and our own values.

It was really important to have the perspectives of ethicists and moral psychologists, for example, because this question is not just about the technical aspect of how do you actually implement it, but also about whose values do we want implemented and who should be part of the conversation and who gets excluded and what process do we want to establish to collect all the preferences and values that we want implemented in AI. That was really fantastic. It was a very nice start to what I hope will continue to be a really fruitful collaboration between different disciplines on this very important topic.

Lucas: I think one essential take-away from that was that value alignment is truly something that is interdisciplinary. It's normally been something which has been couched and understood in the context of technical AI safety research, but value alignment, at least in my view, also inherently includes ethics and governance. It seems that the project of creating beneficial AI through efforts and value alignment can really only happen when we have lots of different people from lots of different disciplines working together on this supremely hard issue.

Meia: I think the issue with AI is something that ... first of all, it concerns such a great number of people. It concerns all of us. It will impact, and it already is impacting all of our experiences. There're different disciplines that look at this impact from different ways.

Of course, technical AI researchers will focus on developing this technology, but it's very important to think about how does this technology co-evolve with us. For example, I'm a psychologist. I like to think about how does it impact our own psyche. How does it impact the way we act in the world, the way we behave. Stuart Russell many times likes to point out that one danger that can come with very intelligent machines is a subtle one, not necessarily what they will do, but what we will not do because of them. He calls this enfeeblement. What are the capacities that are being stifled because we no longer engage in some of the cognitive tasks that we're now delegating to AIs.

So that's just one example of how, for example, psychologists can help really bring more light and make us reflect on what is it that we want from our machines and how do we want to interact with them and how do we wanna design them such that they actually empower us rather than enfeeble us.

Lucas: Yeah, I think that one essential thing to FLI's mission and goal is the generation of beneficial AI. To me, and I think many other people coming out of this Ethics of Value Alignment conference, you know, what beneficial exactly entails and what beneficial looks like is still a really open question both in the short term and in the long-term. I'd be really interested in seeing both FLI and other organizations pursue questions in value alignment more vigorously. Issues with regard to the ethics of AI and issues regarding value and the sort of world that we want to live in.

Ariel: And what sort of world do we want to live in? If you’ve made it this far through the podcast, you might be tempted to think that all we worry about is AI. And we do think a lot about AI. But our primary goal is to help society flourish. And so this year, we created the Future of Life Award to be presented to people who act heroically to ensure our survival and hopefully move us closer to that ideal world. Our inaugural award was presented in honor of Vasili Arkhipov who stood up to his commander on a Soviet submarine, and prevented the launch of a nuclear weapon during the height of tensions in the Cold War.

Tucker: One thing that particularly stuck out to me was our inaugural Future of Life Award and we presented this award to Vasili Arkhipov who was a Soviet officer in the Cold War and arguably saved the world and is the reason we're all alive today. He's now passed, but FLI presented a generous award to his daughter and his grandson. It was really cool to be a part of this because it seemed like the first award of its kind.

Meia: So, of course with FLI, we have all these big projects that take a lot of time. But I think for me, one of the more exciting and heartwarming and wonderful moments that I was able to experience due to our work here at FLI was a train ride from London to Cambridge with Elena and Sergei, the daughter and the grandson of Vasili Arkhipov. Vasili Arkhipov is this Russian naval officer that helped prevent a second world war in the Cuban missile crisis. The Future of Life Institute awarded him the Future of Life prize this year. He is now dead unfortunately, but his daughter and his grandson was there in London to receive it.

Vika: It was great to get to meet them in person and to all go on stage together and have them talk about their attitude towards the dilemma that Vasili Arkhipov has faced, and how it is relevant today, and how we should be really careful with nuclear weapons and protecting our future. It was really inspiring.

At that event, Max was giving his talk about his book, and then at the end we had the Arkhipovs come up on stage and it was kind of fun for me to translate their speech to the audience. I could not fully transmit all the eloquence, but thought it was a very special moment.

Meia: It was just so amazing to really listen to their stories about the father, the grandfather, and look at photos that they had brought all the way from Moscow. This person who has become the hero for so many people that are really concerned about this essential risk, it was nice to really imagine him in his capacity as a son, as a grandfather, as a husband, as a human being. It was very inspiring and touching.

One of the nice things was they showed a photo of him that had actually notes that he had written on the back of it. That was his favorite photo. And one of the comments he made is that he felt that that was the most beautiful photo of himself because there was no glint in his eyes. It was just this pure sort of concentration. I thought that said a lot about his character. He rarely smiled in photos, also. Also always looked very pensive. Very much like you'd imagine a hero who saved the world would be.

Tucker: It was especially interesting for me to work on the press release for this award and to reach out to people from different news outlets, like The Guardian and The Atlantic, and to actually see them write about this award.

I think something like the Future of Life Award is inspiring because it highlights people in the past that have done an incredible service to civilization, but I also think it's interesting to look forward and think about who might be the future Vasili Arkhipov that saves the world.

Ariel: As Tucker just mentioned, this award was covered by news outlets like the Guardian and the Atlantic. And in fact, we’ve been incredibly fortunate to have many of our events covered by major news. However, there are even more projects we’ve worked on that we think are just as important and that we’re just as excited about that most people probably aren’t aware of.

Jessica: So people may not know that FLI recently joined the partnership on AI. This was the group that was founded by Google and Amazon, Facebook and Apple and others to think about issues like safety, and fairness and impact from AI systems. So I'm excited about this because I think it's really great to see this kind of social commitment from industry, and it's going to be critical to have the support and engagement from these players to really see AI being developed in a way that's positive for everyone. So I'm really happy that FLI is now one of the partners of what will likely be an important initiative for AI.

Anthony: I attending the first meeting of the partnership on AI in October. And to see, at that meeting, so much discussion of some of the principles themselves directly but just in a broad sense. So much discussion from all of the key organizations that are engaged with AI, that almost all of whom had representation there, about how are we going to make these things happen. If we value transparency, if we value fairness, if we value safety and trust in AI systems, how are we going to actually get together and formulate best practices and policies, and groups and data sets and things to make all that happen. And to see the speed at which, I would say the field has moved from purely, wow, we can do this, to how are we going to do this right and how are we going to do this well and what does this all mean, has been a ray of hope I would say.

AI is moving so fast but it was good to see that I think the sort of wisdom race hasn't been conceded entirely. That there are dedicated group of people that are working really hard to figure out how to do it well.

Ariel: And then there’s Dave Stanley, who has been the force around many of the behind-the-scenes projects that our volunteers have been working on that have helped FLI grow this year.

Dave: As for another project that has very much been ongoing and more relates to the website is basically our ongoing effort to make the English content on the website that's been fairly influential in English speaking countries about AI safety and nuclear weapons, take that content and make it available in a lot of other languages to maximize the impact that it's having.

Right now, thanks to the efforts of our volunteers, we have 55 translations available on our website right now in nine different languages, which are Russian, Chinese, French, Polish, Spanish, German, Hindi, Japanese, and Korean. All in all, this represents about 1000 hours of volunteer time put in by our volunteers. I'd just like to give a shoutout to some of the volunteers who have been involved. They are Alan Yan, Kevin Wang, Kazue Evans, Jake Beebe, Jason Orlosky, Li Na, Bena Lim, Alina Kovtun, Ben Peterson, Carolyn Wu, Zhaoran Joanna Wang, Mayumi Nakamura, Derek Su, Dipti Pandey, Marvin, Vera Koroleva, Grzegorz Orwiński, Szymon Radziszewicz, Natalia Berezovskaya, Vladimir Nimensky, Natalia Kuzmenko, George Godula, Eric Gastfriend, Olivier Grondin, Claire Park, Kristy Wen, Yishuai Du, and Revathi Vinoth Kumar.

Ariel: As we’ve worked to establish AI safety as a global effort, Dave and the volunteers were behind the trip Richard took to China, where he participated in the Global Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing earlier this year.

Dave: So basically, this was something that was actually prompted and largely organized by one of FLIs volunteers, George Godula, who's based in Shanghai right now.

Basically, this is partially motivated by the fact that recently, China's been promoting a lot of investment in artificial intelligence research, and they've made it a national objective to become a leader in AI research by 2025. So FLI and the team have been making some efforts to basically try to build connections with China and raise awareness about AI safety, at least our view on AI safety and engage in dialogue there.

It's culminated with George organizing this trip for Richard, and A large portion of the FLI volunteer team participating in basically support for that trip. So identifying contacts for Richard to connect with over there and researching the landscape and providing general support for that. And then that's been coupled with an effort to take some of the existing articles that FLI has on their website about AI safety and translate those to Chinese to make it accessible to that audience.

Ariel: In fact, Richard has spoken at many conferences, workshops and other events this year, and he’s noted a distinct shift in how AI researchers view AI safety.

Richard: This is a single example of many of these things I've done throughout the year. Yesterday I gave a talk to a bunch of machine learning and artificial intelligence researchers and entrepreneurs in Boston, here where I'm based about AI safety and beneficence. Every time I do this it's really fulfilling that so many of these people who really are pushing the leading edge of what AI does in many respects. They realize that these are extremely valid concerns and there are new types of technical avenues to help just keep things better for the future. The facts that I'm not receiving push back anymore as compared to many years ago when I would talk about these things -- that people really are trying to gauge and understand and kind of weave themselves into whatever is going to turn into the best outcome for humanity. Given the type of leverage that advanced AI will bring us. I think people are starting to really get what's at stake.

Ariel: And this isn’t just the case among AI researchers. Throughout the year, we’ve seen this discussion about AI safety broaden into various groups outside of traditional AI circles, and we’re hopeful this trend will continue in 2018.

Meia: I think that 2017 has been fantastic to start this project of getting more thinkers from different disciplines to really engage with the topic of artificial intelligence, but I think we are just manage to scratch the surface of this topic in this collaboration. So I would really like to work more on strengthening this conversation and this flow of ideas between different disciplines. I think we can achieve so much more if we can make sure that we hear each other, that we go past our own disciplinary jargon, and that we truly are able to communicate and join each other in research projects where we can bring different tools and different skills to the table.

Ariel: The landscape on AI safety research that Richard presented at Asilomar at the start of the year was designed to enable greater understanding among researchers. Lucas rounded off the year with another version of the landscape. This one looking at ethics and value alignment with the goal, in part, of bringing more experts from other fields into the conversation.

Lucas: One thing that I'm also really excited about for next year is seeing our conceptual landscapes of both AI safety and value alignment being used in more educational context and in context in which they can foster interdisciplinary conversations regarding issues in AI. I think that their virtues are that they create a conceptual landscape of both AI safety and value alignment, but also include definitions and descriptions of jargon. Given this, it functions both as a means by which you can introduce people to AI safety and value alignment and AI risk, but it also serves as a means of introducing experts to sort of the conceptual mappings of the spaces that other experts are engaged with and so they can learn each other's jargon and really have conversations that are fruitful and sort of streamlined.

Ariel: As we look to 2018, we hope to develop more programs, work on more projects, and participate in more events that will help draw greater attention to the various issues we care about. We hope to not only spread awareness, but also to empower people to take action to ensure that humanity continues to flourish in the future.

Dave: There's a few things that are coming up that I'm really excited about. The first one is basically we're going to be trying to release some new interactive apps on the website that'll hopefully be pages that can gather a lot of attention and educate people about the issues that we're focused on, mainly nuclear weapons, and answering questions to give people a better picture of what are the geopolitical and economic factors that motivate countries to keep their nuclear weapons and how does this relate to public support, based on polling data, for whether the general public wants to keep these weapons or not.

Meia: One thing that I think has made me also very excited in 2017, and I'm looking forward to seeing the evolution of in 2018 was the public's engagement with this topic. I've had the luck to be in the audience for many of the book talks that Max has given for his book "Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence," and it was fascinating just listening to the questions. They've become so much more sophisticated and nuanced than a few years ago. I'm very curious to see how this evolves in 2018, and I hope that FLI will contribute to this conversation and making it more rich. I think I'd like people in general to get engaged with this topic much more, and refine their understanding of it.

Tucker: Well, I think in general it's been amazing to watch FLI this year because we've made big splashes in so many different things with the Asilomar conference, with our Slaughterbots video, helping with the nuclear ban, but I think one thing that I'm particularly interested in is working more this coming year to I guess engage my generation more on these topics. I sometimes sense a lot of defeatism and hopelessness with people in my generation. Kind of feeling like there's nothing we can do to solve civilization's biggest problems. I think being at FLI has kind of given me the opposite perspective. Sometimes I'm still subject to that defeatism, but working here really gives me a sense that we can actually do a lot to solve these problems. I'd really like to just find ways to engage more people in my generation to make them feel like they actually have some sense of agency to solve a lot of our biggest challenges.

Ariel: Learn about these issues and more, join the conversation, and find out how you can get involved by visiting futureoflife.blackfin.biz.