Interview with Adam Phillipson
SEED has enjoyed a whole host of external partnerships and advisory sessions with preeminent thinkers and practitioners in a wide variety of fields. We’re happy to cover these exciting collaborations here and thought there was no better place to start than with Adam Phillipson, long listed on our website as an ‘Advisor’, his bio text speaks for itself: ‘With a background in physics and a roving mind, we’re happy to have Adam on our side, assisting with research and theoretical advice on almost all aspects of our project! He’s like a walking Wikipedia!’ As we revamp our blog and websites, we thought we’d ask Adam what he’s been up to since we last spoke.
JOHN: Some of your earliest articles and essays for SEED date back to 2017 or 2018, it’s great to have you back collaborating and advising us. What’s your current set up like, where are you and what are you doing?
ADAM: I’m currently in Italy as I’m visiting the art Biennale in Venice, which is always so mind enhancing and eye opening. I like art but don’t know much about it, Venice is like a supernova where you get to catch up with cross section of the world’s best art practitioners. After this, I fly to the UK for emergency meeting with my old friend Nick Bostrom to hear his plans for what comes next, now that Oxford have affectively closed down his Future of Humanity Institute.
JOHN: Yeah I was going to ask you about that. The FHI was a big inspiration for you, I know that. Are you sad it’s closing, Bostrom has had a rocky few years.
ADAM: There’s been many aspects of Nick and the Institute’s work that I categorically disavow if not outright condemn. There are other aspects, an imaginative response to our relationship to the planet for example, and our effective ignorance to the future of AI and AGI (artificial general intelligence) that do interest me. Somehow I think the celebrity endorsements are indicative, in almost all media coverage of Oxford’s decision, the name Elon Musk comes up. I know Elon, he’s a swell guy: but it’s like he’s a false flag for the real deal, which if you ask me is hiding in the shadows — or rather in plain sight.
JOHN: Can you elaborate? That sounds a tad conspiratorial.
ADAM: (Laughing) Sure, I appreciate it that. And believe I don’t wish to throw any petrol on the conspiracy fires burning. We have had quite enough of that, thank you very much. After all, I’m a scientist. So empirically, what am I talking about? The creation of a runaway artificial general intelligence will probably happen in a small way, in a computer science lab, far out of the limelight. Also Neuralink: I think this is by and far Elon’s biggest and greatest work. Forget Tesla shares, or whatever he’s putting on Twitter or x or whatever its called. Our brains are the rockets that will get us to Mars. And beyond. We know so little about how our consciousness works. Each of us has a galaxy of stars and their exoplanets firing inside our skulls. I and colleagues like Al Hasani at NLM wish to better access that anthro-cosmic beauty.
JOHN: We want to feature Al Hasani on here too in the future.
ADAM: You absolutely should. What your friend Larry Lessig is doing for politics, Arash is doing for mind interfacing. SEED after all is about simulating life and societies, how better to understand each one of us than through our ability to relate to one another!
JOHN: So what can we expect you to be sharing with us in the future? What are you excited about?
ADAM: Gosh there’s so much! In every direction, not least AI, there’s just so much to be excited about! Just before Venice for example I was in London at one of my favourite places, The Royal Society for an event and lecture series, and had my mind titillated by the idea that our very foundation for how we model the cosmos and universe is wrong. It was co-organised by Professor James Binney who I believe you had on your podcast The Life Cycle. I mean let me just read out the description of the event: ‘Is the universe simple enough to be adequately described by the standard ΛCDM cosmological model which assumes the isotropic and homogeneous Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker metric? Tensions have emerged between the values of cosmological parameters estimated in different ways. Do these tensions signal that our model is too simple? Could a more sophisticated model account for the data without invoking a Cosmological Constant?’
JOHN: Sounds pretty interesting alright. Look forward to your summary.
ADAM: Oh my god, if you could see all my scribbles and notes! I need my AI assistant to summarise and help me decipher them asap. But yes, let’s be in touch soon.
JOHN: Thanks Adam. Arrivederci.
ADAM: Ciao!
John Holten is Director of Narrative and Editorial Content at Klang Games and occasional contributor to this Medium page.
Adam Philipson is a polymath with a background in physics and software development, who merges his years of experiences in Silicon Valley to NTNU (Trondheim) and contributes his expertise in AI, terraforming, and transhumanism to multiple projects including SEED. He is an occasional contributor to this Medium page.
