What does it mean to keep wisdom ahead of rapidly advancing technology? In this episode of Today’s Conversation, Max Tegmark, professor and AI researcher at MIT and co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, explores the urgent question of how society can ensure artificial intelligence empowers — rather than endangers — human flourishing.

In this episode, Max Tegmark joins NAE President Walter Kim to unpack the profound opportunities and alarming risks posed by AI. Drawing on vivid analogies, historical lessons and real-world examples, they examine why the stakes for wisdom, foresight and moral courage have never been higher.

In their conversation, they discuss:

  • Why wisdom must stay ahead of technology’s power — and what happens when it doesn’t;
  • How past successes in safety engineering, like airbags and the FDA, offer a roadmap for responsible AI development;
  • The urgent need for faith communities to raise AI as a moral issue, not just a technical one; and
  • How re-centering the conversation on stewardship and responsibility can shift priorities toward the common good.

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Read a Portion of the Transcript

Walter: What kind of principles can we keep in mind to ensure that wisdom has any hope in keeping up with the technology?

Max: That's a really great question, Walter. So there are two principles that can really help us here. First of all, when technology developed slower and the consequences were not so bad that we could never recover from them, we quite successfully used the strategy again of just learning from mistakes to win this wisdom race. We invented the car. A lot of tragedies happened. And then we invented the seatbelt and the airbag and the traffic light and all sorts of other things.

When technology is so powerful, even one mistake is unacceptable. We have to shift away from that philosophy to instead of being reactive, be proactive.... When NASA sent people to the moon, they spent a lot of time thinking through everything that could go wrong when you put three dudes on top of explosive fuel tanks and sent them somewhere where no one could help. Was that boomerism? Was that Luddite scaremongering? No, that was what they called safety engineering. Exactly the safety engineering that's made this moon mission successful.

And that's exactly the positive philosophy I'm talking about here, too. You take a bunch of smart people and you have them think through all the things that might go wrong, and then you change your tech a little bit so that it doesn't. And we've done it with the moon mission. We've done it countless other things. We can do it again here very successfully with AI. Now, the second idea I want to bring up is...

Max Tegmark

Max Tegmark is a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his research spans cosmology, artificial intelligence and the nature of consciousness and reality. He is co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit focused on steering transformative technologies such as AI and biotechnology toward benefiting humanity, and he serves as the scientific director of the Foundational Questions Institute. He is the author of over 200 publications and the books, “Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality” and “Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.” A native of Stockholm, Tegmark holds a B.A. in economics and a B.S. in physics from the Royal Institute of Technology. He also holds an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California – Berkeley.

Walter Kim

Walter Kim became the president of the National Association of Evangelicals in January 2020. He previously served as a pastor at Boston’s historic Park Street Church and at churches in Vancouver, Canada and Charlottesville, Virginia, as well as a campus chaplain at Yale University. He preaches, writes and engages in collaborative leadership to connect the Bible to the intellectual and cultural issues of the day. He regularly teaches in conferences and classrooms; addresses faith concerns with elected officials and public institutions; and provides theological and cultural commentary to leading news outlets. He serves on the boards of Christianity Today and World Relief and consults with a wide range of organizations. Kim received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, his M.Div. from Regent College in Vancouver, and his B.A. from Northwestern University.