Michael Muthukrishna with David Sloan Wilson - Evolving Alignment Podcast

Michael Muthukrishna is Professor of Economic Psychology at New York University & London School of Economics. His research spans cultural evolution, psychology, economics, and artificial intelligence, exploring how culture transformed our species into a uniquely cooperative form of collective intelligence. He is the author of A Theory of Everyone, which argues that understanding the evolutionary principles underlying human societies is essential to meeting the challenges of the twenty-first century.   Human intelligence did not evolve in isolation—it emerged through culture, cooperation, and the accumulation of knowledge across generations. David Sloan Wilson and Michael Muthukrishna discuss how cultural evolution created the “collective brain,” why these evolutionary processes matter more than ever in the age of AI, and how understanding them can help guide humanity through the major transition now underway. ---  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