Vox Names Darden’s Anton Korinek to ‘Future Perfect 50’ List

They’re celebrated as innovators, thinkers and changemakers working to make the future a better place.

This year, University of Virginia Darden School of Business professor Anton Korinek is among the select honorees appearing on the “Future Perfect 50” list compiled by Vox Media. Korinek also serves as a UVA professor of economics.

This year’s Future Perfect 50 recognizes thinkers, activists and academics who are pursuing solutions to urgent challenges in areas including AI safety, global public health, and animal welfare.

“To change the future, we first have to imagine it,” Vox said in announcing the honorees. “From writers and movie directors to scientists and thinkers, the people we’ve selected have demonstrated the imagination to both warn us what could be to come, and steer us towards a better dawn.”

Korinek is one of eight highlighted for contributions to addressing the complexities – including the immense opportunities and accompanying societal threats – of the continued emergence of Artificial Intelligence. Vox said it “looked for people who brought clarity to those disagreements, designed policy that makes sense for this divided field, and did research that will hopefully eventually give us definitive answers.”

Korinek was recognized as one of the few economists who is thinking about the ramifications of artificial general intelligence, a level of sophistication at which AI would theoretically be capable of human-like cognitive functions. Some don’t believe that level of AI will ever occur, but Vox credits Korinek for thinking about the consequences, even if the odds are slim.

“The emergence of AGI will mark the end of the Industrial Age and usher in a new economic era,” Korinek writes in a recent working paper he produced for the Bureau of Economic Research.

Vox’s Future Perfect 50 summary highlights Korinek’s call for action that will ensure that AI-generated prosperity benefits all, and not only the few who happen to own shares in large AI companies, and for calling out the need to explore AGI’s potential threats to democracy.

“Better to come up with ideas now, rather than when it’s too late,” it says of Korinek’s thought leadership.

Other honorees in the AI segment included Ellie Pavlick, a Brown University computer scientist; Epoch AI Director Jaime Sevilla; Dan Hendrycks, director of the Center for AI Safety; and Sneha Revanur, founder of Encode Justice.

See the full Future Perfect 50 list at Vox.