E Glen Weyl is one of the world’s most original thinkers at the intersection of artificial intelligence, economics, democracy, spirituality, and human flourishing. A Research Lead at Microsoft Research Catalyst Lab, bestselling co-author of Radical Markets, and co-author of Plurality, he is also the founder of the RadicalxChange Foundation, the Plurality Institute, the Faith, Family and Technology Network, and Microsoft Research’s Plural Technology Collaboratory. Across these efforts, Glen has spent his career challenging conventional assumptions about technology and society while exploring how human communities can thrive in an increasingly digital age.
Now, Glen is helping lead a new conversation about artificial intelligence—one that moves beyond the usual talk of technical capabilities and economic disruption to address deeper questions of meaning, ethics, wisdom, and collective purpose. He frames the choice ahead through an image he draws from across faith traditions: the Tower and the City. The Tower is the dream of a single machine intelligence rising alone, answerable to no one, surpassing human design and oversight. The City is something built family by family, trade by trade—many hands knit into something none could raise apart. Drawing on insights from economics, philosophy, religion, and social science, Glen argues that the future of AI cannot be understood solely through advances in machines. It requires a renewed understanding of humanity itself.
Central to Glen’s work is the provocative idea that the most important forms of “superintelligence” may not be artificial at all. They are the collective intelligences already among us—markets, democracies, scientific disciplines, and religious movements—systems that surpass any individual human mind not by detaching from humanity but by organizing and adapting human knowledge across generations. In this view, religions, civic organizations, and ethical frameworks represent some of humanity’s most sophisticated technologies for coordinating meaning, trust, cooperation, and moral responsibility. Intelligence, as both history and science suggest, is collective and interdependent rather than solitary and self-contained.
“This brief brings together a multifaith coalition to argue that the right of conscientious objection and religious liberty are at stake and that fundamental moral principles shared across all Abrahamic faiths, fundamental to the founding ideals of the United States, are at stake.“
Glen Weyl
As AI systems become increasingly powerful, Glen argues that society faces questions that are fundamentally spiritual as well as technological: What does it mean to be human? What forms of wisdom should guide innovation? How can technology strengthen rather than diminish human agency, dignity, and connection? Scale, he notes, answers only one question—how large a system can grow. Wisdom answers a different and harder one: whether the thing was worth building, and for whom. The deciding measure of an intelligence is not its height but how many kinds of life can flourish together under its influence.
His recent work calls for greater collaboration among technologists, ethicists, religious leaders, philosophers, and civic institutions, and he points to concrete proof that an integrated approach works. Taiwan’s digital democracy shows how participatory platforms can let citizens shape policy and resolve disputes collaboratively. Japan’s kaizen production miracle showed how empowering ordinary workers to understand their role in a larger system unlocks continuous improvement. Collectives like TeamLab demonstrate how AI can open entirely new aesthetic experiences when we let it stretch our notion of creativity rather than merely replicate existing forms. And in education, Glen distinguishes the “e-bikes for the mind” that help people accomplish more from the “stationary bikes for the mind” that keep human skills from atrophying—arguing we need both. Rather than treating these domains as separate, he sees them as essential partners in shaping an AI-enabled future that serves humanity’s highest aspirations.
A sought-after speaker around the world, Glen delivers thought-provoking presentations that reframe the conversation about artificial intelligence. Rather than asking how machines will surpass humanity, he asks how humanity can become wiser, more collaborative, and more self-aware through technology. The choice between the Tower and the City, he reminds audiences, is not made once; we make it every day in how we speak about technology, imagine it, build for it, and govern it. His talks offer a compelling vision of a future in which AI amplifies—not replaces—the uniquely human capacities for creativity, moral judgment, spiritual reflection, and collective intelligence.
E. Glen Weyl is the Founder and Research Lead of Microsoft Research Catalyst Lab (formely the Microsoft Research’s Plural Technology Collaboratory). He also co-founded and chairs the Plurality Institute, founded the RadicalxChange Foundation, and co-founded and co-chairs the Faith, Family and Technology Network.
Weyl has collaborated closely with pioneering technologists, including Audrey Tang (digital democracy pioneer), Jaron Lanier (virtual reality inventor), and Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum founder).
He co-authored the influential book Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just
Society:
named Economist Book of the Year in 2018, and co-wrote Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul,; among the most downloaded papers ever on SSRN.
He also was first author of the
first fully open-source, democratically governed book, ⿻ 數位 Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy
and executive-produced the acclaimed short documentary “Good Enough Ancestor.”
Widely published in prestigious academic journals and popular media, Weyl has been recognized as one of blockchain’s most influential figures by CoinDesk, one of technology’s leading visionaries by WIRED and Bloomberg Businessweek and is the first technologist to receive any major award for international religious freedom (the International Religious Freedom Secretariat Peacebuilder
Award).
A Princeton graduate, he completed his undergraduate studies as Valedictorian in 2007 and earned a PhD in economics in 2008.
For too long, technology and faith have been at loggerheads in the West. Yet today this situation is more untenable than ever. Politically, technology needs faith to bridge the gap to social legitimacy and political acceptance. Socially, faith is the most critical and neglected challenge of inclusion for the industry. Geopolitically, faith is central to democratic countries winning the fight for tech supremacy against our atheistic rivals. Economically, faith is a massively underdeveloped market.
Drawing on the contrasting experience of religion-technology cooperation in Asia and on his experience of organizing the growing collaboration between the two in the West, Glen Weyl speaks to how the technology sector can thrive in a religious world and a country undergoing a religious revival.
At the end of the Second World War, Franklin Roosevelt’s science advisor called on us to explore the endless frontiers of science and technology. Today, democracy is embattled and decaying around the world because it has become arrogant and static. We want the seriousness and intimacy of a town hall, at the scale of the globe. We want participation organized around the problems we face, not lines drawn on a map. We aspire to accelerate building while engaging more stakeholders at the same time. We need to include nature, future generations and ancient wisdom in our collective decisions. All of this has long been beyond the scope of most government systems, but technology is increasingly challenging these limits. From Taiwan to Brazil and Japan to Finland, political movements, local governments, distributed autonomous organizations and video games are all experimenting with new forms of digital democracy that have the potential to revolutionize citizen participation and redefine the best practices of self-government.
AI carries twin and seemingly contradictory threats: of destroying the social fabric through omnipresent and persuasive deception and of concentrating power in a “singularity” of model creators or models themselves.
These two threats are narrowing the corridor in which plural (free and democratic) societies can thrive. To avoid this Scylla and Charybdis, we must harness these tools to proactively widen that corridor, a strategy that has been labeled “Plurality” by its leading practitioner, Taiwan’s Digital Minister Audrey Tang who has made that country the light to the free world.
Drawing on his forthcoming book jointly with her, Glen will show you how to harness Plurality to improve health, fuel productivity and create a richer media environment, all by harnessing while contributing to human diversity and cooperation through digital technology.
Who decides what technology builds toward? It’s not engineers or policymakers. It’s culture.
Drawing on the Plurality movement, a global effort to make technology and democracy radically cooperative, this talk makes the case that culture isn’t a side effect of social change. It’s the driver.
Culture as Sandbox. New ways of living together are hard to adopt when they feel threatening. Culture makes them feel like play. From video games to Monopoly, cultural spaces let us experiment with cooperation and conflict in ways that are inviting rather than frightening.
Culture as Target. Art bridges worlds that politics can’t. Through works like the Lorax, Ar(t)mistice, and Violeta, art builds empathy across difference and reconnects us to nature and other forms of life, expanding our sense of who we’re responsible to.
Culture as Vision. Technologists build toward futures they can imagine, and culture is what shapes those imaginations. Science fiction has steered technology more than most engineers would admit, for better (Star Trek, EPCOT) and for worse (Snow Crash). Want a different future? Tell different stories.
