Sara Imari Walker

It'll be alien biology that we evolve in the lab.

And I actually think this is how we're going to make first contact with alien life because I think we won't recognize it unless we understand what it is.

I think there's ethical concerns right along the way, and I don't know that I know immediate answers to those.

This is the part where it's a little existentially traumatic to work on these kind of problems.

So I have a friend that's a philosopher, Ben Bratton, and he says the best kind of ideas are the ones that are equally really exciting and horrifying.

And like you want to work on those ideas because you don't know what it's like future is going to be.

And I tend to be on the optimistic side.

I think we need to solve this problem because I think we have this sort of existential crisis in some sense that humanity is facing because we don't understand what we are.

We don't understand what our technologies are doing.

We don't understand what our long term future holds.

We don't even understand all the life around us on this planet.

So we solve that problem.

I think that the lens through which we will look at the kind of ethical things that you're talking about will be radically different because the knowledge itself will have transformed us.

So I can't even anticipate what those kind of dialogues are going to be like.

Imagine if like instead of just wondering about cephalopods and plants and stuff in this conversation, we actually had a fundamental understanding.

of what it is to be other life forms and life as a, you know, as part of the fundamental structure of reality and like participatory in actually like what the universe builds.

And you have that kind of understanding.

I think it radically changes the way that we conceptualize who we are and what we're doing.

And I don't, you know, I don't know what that looks like.

Yeah, I think we're flying blind in those areas, though, really, especially AI.