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This week, Allison Duettmann announced that she was stepping down from her role as President and CEO of the Foresight Institute, after leading the organization for a decade.

Before the announcement went out, I spoke with her about her work, and what future building looks like on an organizational scale.

Allison Duettmann is philosopher, futurist, and former President and CEO of the Foresight Institute, an organization that has spent forty years exploring how emerging technologies might shape the long-term future of humanity.
Allison joined Foresight in 2015 and spent the next decade leading its work across some of the most ambitious—and sometimes speculative—frontiers of scientific and technological development, including artificial intelligence, molecular nanotechnology, longevity biotechnology, neurotechnology, and space exploration. Just recently, she announced that she was stepping down from her leadership role and joining the organization’s Board of Directors.

Allison holds a master’s degree in Philosophy and Public Policy from the London School of Economics, where she focused on the philosophy of artificial intelligence. Her work brings together questions that are often treated separately: what technology might make possible, what kinds of futures we ought to pursue, and how we might begin building those futures today.

She’s also been instrumental in developing Existential Hope, a philosophical and practical initiative that asks us to think beyond the language of existential risk. Much of our contemporary conversation about advanced technology focuses on what could go catastrophically wrong. Existential Hope asks a different, but equally important question: What if things went extraordinarily right?

But that question invites others. How do we distinguish ambitious technological visions from wishful thinking? What happens when the promise of progress collides with questions of inequality, power, and finite resources? And can a philosophy organized around technological possibility also help us decide which technologies should never be built?

Today, Allison and I explore the philosophy of hope, the promise and politics of human longevity, the relationship between technological ambition and intellectual rigor, and what it might mean to take seriously the possibility of a future worth wanting.

This episode was produced by Jack Lucas Chang.