Worldbuilding AI Futures
Requirements
- No technical knowledge is required. The course is designed for anyone who wants to understand these ideas and their impact.
Description
As artificial intelligence advances, so do the stakes for our shared future. This course is for anyone who wants to move beyond doom-driven headlines and explore grounded, imaginative, and actionable possibilities for life with AI.
In this self-paced, interactive course, you'll use worldbuilding to explore how AI and other transformative technologies might shape society, governance, and everyday life in 2035. Through structured activities, expert insights, and guided reflection, you'll develop your own vision of a future that's both ambitious and responsible.
Along the way, you’ll learn tools used by futurists and policymakers—like scenario planning, stress-testing, and backcasting—to help you think more clearly about what’s coming and how to navigate it.
Rather than focusing only on what could go wrong, this course helps you imagine what might go right—and how we might get there.
By the end of the course, you’ll have:
A future scenario of your own design, grounded in today’s realities
A better understanding of how technologies, values, and systems interact
A practical framework for engaging with the future of AI
The option to share your vision with the Existential Hope community
You don’t need a technical background—just curiosity!
Guest contributors include:
Anousheh Ansari – CEO, XPRIZE; First Private Female Astronaut
Helen Toner – Director of Strategy, CSET; Former OpenAI Board Member
Anthony Aguirre – Co-founder, Future of Life Institute
Hannah Ritchie – Lead Researcher, Our World in Data; Author, Not the End of the World
Ada Palmer – Historian & Science Fiction Author
Glen Weyl – Microsoft Research; Founder, RadicalxChange
Christine Peterson – Co-founder, Foresight Institute
Anders Sandberg – Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford
Anton Korinek – University of Virginia; Brookings Institution
Robert Lempert – Senior Scientist, RAND
Gary Ackerman – Threat researcher, University at Albany
Siri Helle – Psychologist and Author
This course is part of the Existential Hope program at Foresight Institute, supported by the Future of Life Institute.
Who this course is for:
- Those who’ve started wondering how AI might shape their work, field, or future.
- People who feel curious—but maybe a bit overwhelmed—by all the talk about AI and what comes next.
- Anyone looking for a thoughtful, creative way to explore futures without needing technical expertise.
- Those who want to imagine not just what could go wrong—but what might go right.
Instructor
- 4.5 Instructor Rating
- 59 Reviews
- 922 Students
- 1 Course
Beatrice Erkers is Director of the Existential Hope program at Foresight Institute, a nonprofit focused on accelerating technologies for flourishing futures.
She leads community-building and educational initiatives around future-facing fields such as artificial intelligence, neurotechnology, and nanotech — all through the lens of positive futures.
This course, Worldbuilding Futures with AI, is part of the Existential Hope program: an effort to help individuals and communities think more clearly, creatively, and constructively about what could go right.
Learn more on the Existential Hope-platform or subscribe to the Foresight Institute newsletter.