Does the world need another Future of Humanity Institute?

We still need radical and boundary-transcending research and thinking around the future of humanity in a technologically complex age

Image: Midjourney

On April 16 2024, the University of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute closed its doors for the last time. Since it was established in 2005, the Institute has become known for exploring radical ideas around humanity’s future in a technologically complex world. But it’s also attracted its fair share of controversy. And this, it seems, was partly to blame for FHI’s demise.

I must confess to having mixed feelings about FHI closing. I’ve long been skeptical of the thinking and ideas coming out of the Institute, and the outsized impact these have had in some quarters. And yet for all the questionable ideas and troubling ideologies FHI has become associated with, I would argue that there’s never been a greater need for far-sighted and transdisciplinary thinking around how to ensure human flourishing in the face of increasingly transformative technological advances.

I first met the Future of Humanity Institute’s founder, Nick Bostrom, in 2008 — just three years after FHI was established. At the time the Institute was part of Oxford’s James Martin 21st Century School (now simply the Oxford Martin School). I was in town as James Martin bequeathed another exceedingly large gift to the university.

Nick and I had a pleasant enough dinner together. But I left Oxford somewhat disconcerted by his ideas. We spent much of our time talking about nanotechnology and the philosophical and existential threats it presented. Nick’s thinking about nanotechnology — which drew from Eric Drexler’s concepts of atomically precise manufacturing and self-assembling nanobots — jarred with mine. But where we seriously parted company was on the concept of perpetual motion — something that came up in the context of self-replicating nanoscale machines.

To the physicist in me, claiming that perpetual motion is possible is as fanciful as believing the earth is flat. But to Bostrom — a philosopher — this was not an issue.

We were discussing whether limitless self replication defied the second law of thermodynamics. And as part of this, the idea of machines that continue to operate with no external power source — and yet make stuff — came up. It’s not quite the classical form of a perpetual motion machine, but it’s close.

To Nick, the science of how the world works — including the second law of thermodynamics — was irrelevant compared to the philosophical elegance of the ideas he was exploring, to the extent that he was dismissive of thinking to the contrary.

A few years later I had the same concerns as I read Nick’s book Superintelligence. The arguments made in it seemed to fly in the face of how the universe works, and placed a far greater emphasis on philosophical speculation than practical reality.

And herein lies the nub of many of my conflicted feelings about FHI.

On one hand, the Future of Human Initiative has been the source of ideas that have grabbed the attention of influential people around the world, even though they’re often deeply speculative. I’d include superintelligence here, as well as thinking around longtermism and effective altruism.

These are all ideas that have spread through society like wildfire, and have deeply influenced the thinking of prominent movers and shakers. They’ve fueled Silicon Valley’s “tech bro” culture, and have influenced entrepreneurs that include Elon Musk, Sam Altman and, famously, the discredited founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried.

In some cases these ideas have been underpinned by beliefs that many would find objectionable. In 2023 for instance, Émile Torres published an account of an email from 1996 indicating Bostrom believed IQ is correlated with skin color. And there have been other indications that thinking amongst FHI members has been grounded in a “pragmatic rationalism” that claims to favor science over social norms, and yet is intellectually precarious.

Thinking that reflects a disdain for society as it strives to protect humanity is likely part of why the institute ended up closing — although the official reason was academic politics (one has to wonder though whether a little less disdain might of been helpful here as well).

Then we have the other hand.

For all my concerns over FHI’s ideas and underlying philosophies, the Institute was effective in pushing the bounds of thinking in ways that transcended disciplines, and that reflect an increasing need in today’s technologically advanced world.

Reading the final report from the Institute compiled by Anders Sandberg, you get a glimpse of what made FHI unique. The report provides a rather rose-tinted perspective on the history and impact of the Future of Humanity Institute — and Sandberg readily admits to it being biased and incomplete in his preamble. But it still shows just how successful FHI was in extending thinking and conversations around the future of humanity in a world where technology is transforming what is possible at lightning speed and on a global scale.

There are, of course, other organizations around the world that are working in similar areas. The University of Cambridge-based Center for the Study of Existential Risk for instance, and initiatives like the Foresight Institute and the Berggruen Institute. Yet few of these have the breadth of vision or the audacity of thought that were the hallmark of FHI.

And this leaves me with a question: Does the closing of FHI leave a vacuum that needs to be filled?

From my perspective the answer is a strong yes, but with some rather large caveats.

As I’ve written before, humanity is at a tipping point in its history where the past is a poor predictor of the future, and where the confluence of accelerating technological innovation, an increasingly connected society, and hard planetary boundaries, are placing us on a knife edge between futures where we flourish, and those where we do not.

To successfully navigate the complex landscape between where we are now and the futures we aspire to, we will collectively need new thinking, new ideas, new insights, new models, and new ways of doing things. These will need to break with past thinking and push against established boundaries. And they’ll need to be unshackled by convention — whether academic, intellectual, or practice-based.

At the same time new thinking and insights will need to be grounded in humility, social relevance and connectedness, and an awareness that future-building is a collaborative effort — not something that should be left to an elite group of thinkers and innovators.

Nothing currently exists that quite matches this. Even the Future of Humanity Institute fell short here. Yet it’s hard to imagine that humanity will thrive in a technologically complex future without new boundary spanning thinking.

So do we need another Future of Humanity Institute? I believe that we need something to meet a growing need here — but it needs to be something that builds on the positive things that FHI achieved, while learning from its mistakes.

Here I would argue that there’s a need for initiatives that are firmly rooted in public universities, and yet have the ability to transcend some of the disciplinary barriers and limited vision that sometimes plagues these.

My reasoning is threefold:

First, public universities lie at the nexus of multiple stakeholders and constituencies — and at a level and with a level of accountability that does not exist in private universities, corporations, government or other organizations.

In principle public universities serve the public good while engaging with businesses, policy makers, civil society, thought leaders, and other communities, across multiple scales. At the same time they are grounded in a tradition of academic freedom that allows them to support and foster thinking that far surpasses the conventional and the short-term.

Second, public universities play a unique role in equipping the next generation to be effective and empowered builders of the future. Through undergraduate courses and degree programs they are potentially transformational in fostering understanding and skills that will be critical to ensuring continued human flourishing. And this extends to secondary degrees, whether they are focused on developing professional skills, creating new knowledge, or pushing the bounds of understanding.

And third, there is the potential within public universities — although it is admittedly nascent in many — to draw on cutting edge thinking and research that cuts across disciplinary boundaries and allows far-sighted explorations that are grounded in rigorous scholarship and yet push past the limits of what is currently known or understood.

There are, of course, institutional barriers to succeeding here — as FHI discovered to its cost. There remain deep-rooted norms around what constitutes success in academia — some of which fly in the face of intellectual innovation. And there’s a tendency to reward scholars on the basis of the size of the grants they pull in and the papers they publish, rather than the depth and quality of their thinking, research, and impact.

Yet with a focus on serving the public good and a will to innovate and transcend convention — from researchers and scholars as well as the institutions they’re a part of — there are opportunities here to succeed where FHI did not. Not by trying to recreate the Future of Humanity Institute, but by moving beyond it to build the foundations of understanding that will help ensure human flourishing decades and centuries into the future.

The reality is that we need radical and boundary-transcending research and thinking around the future of humanity more than ever, and there is a vacuum that needs to be filled here.

The question is, are we able to fill it in ways that are inclusive, grounded in reality, and public-serving, while having the audacity to imagine futures beyond what what is readily conceivable?

I hope we are.