Worldbuilding AI Futures, Explore AI’s impact, learn futures tools, and build your own 2035 scenario—no technical background needed.
Course 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.
