Athena Aktipis is the Founding Director of the Cooperative Futures Institute and Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University. Her research spans evolutionary biology, psychology, cancer biology, and cooperation science, exploring the principles that enable cooperation to emerge and persist across systems—from cells and organisms to human societies and artificial intelligence. She is the author of The Cheating Cell and a leading voice on applying cooperation science to today’s global challenges.

As humanity enters an era shaped by increasingly powerful AI systems, Aktipis argues that the science of cooperation offers a roadmap for creating technologies and institutions that help people flourish together. David Sloan Wilson and Athena Aktipis explore what cooperation science can teach us about AI, how cooperation emerges across biological and social systems, and how those insights can help us build technologies and institutions that better serve humanity.

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This episode is from the podcast, Evolving Alignment.

Evolving Alignment explores one of the central questions of our time: How can humanity and artificial intelligence coevolve in ways that enhance cooperation, creativity, and human flourishing?

Hosted by evolutionary scientist David Sloan Wilson, each episode features leading thinkers from fields including evolutionary biology, cultural evolution, artificial intelligence, economics, psychology, philosophy, complexity science, and the social sciences. Rather than focusing on the narrow technical challenge of aligning AI systems with human interests, these conversations examine the broader evolutionary processes that have enabled living systems to solve problems of cooperation at ever higher levels of complexity, producing increasingly sophisticated forms of biological and cultural organization.

Can we learn from the deep history of evolution to shape a future in which humans and AI cooperate rather than compete, and develop new forms of collective intelligence we can only begin to imagine today? Evolving Alignment brings together many of the world’s leading researchers to explore these questions—and to consider how the choices we make today may influence the future evolution of intelligence itself.

Evolving Alignment is presented by Human Energy, a catalytic hub for evolving collective consciousness. ‍Learn more about Human Energy here, https://www.humanenergy.io/about