Corin Ism

Governance
futurist

Corin Ism’s journey into governance innovation started with global catastrophic risks. In the early 2000s, Ism became interested in AI alignment, concerns that expanded to include other global risks and resulted in Ism leveraging their convening capacity to build collaborations with for-purpose organisations and universities across the world. As pandemics and highly capable algorithms made their presence more widely and viscerally known, the Overton window for Ism’s work shifted, enabling an expansion of the efforts. Ism founded and chaired the Swedish branch of the Effective Altruism movement, ran the live-in-incubator Neurora, and helped integrate global risks into the curriculums of influential management schools – all efforts to identify exceptional talents across the Nordic region and pivot them towards AI safety. As Executive Director of the Global Challenges Foundation, Ism worked across the traditional think tank landscape, releasing reports and organising conferences and lobby efforts. However, as the speed of technological advancements kept escalating, conventional attempts at influence appeared disproportionate. Ism became increasingly interested in governance reforms on more fundamental levels. Rather than focusing solely on how to simply shield the social systems in place from major disruptions, Ism began exploring how emerging technologies could be used to organise more just and fulfilling societies.

When the opportunity came to run a competition to gather proposals for reforming the UN to better handle global risks, Ism jumped at the chance to lead the effort. The competition activated intellectuals and practitioners in more than 180 countries and encompassed global cosmopolitanists, world federalists, structural realists and advocates of virtual jurisdictions. Seeing this mapping of our era’s governance innovation proved a formative experience for Ism, who halted their conventional impact engagements to focus solely on researching the 21st-century governing toolkit. Together with a small group of trusted collaborators and a vaster closed-door network, Ism founded the Future of Governance Agency (FOGA). Here, Ism has spent the last six years exploring cybernetic systems, coding crowds, automated reputation scores, digital global commons and the impending prediction-over-repercussion paradigm. Through FOGA, Ism was able to act as principal investigator in a Mars analogue in the Himalayas, trying out governance designs in an extreme and isolated landscape, fueled by the idea that imagining governance on an unchartered territory can work as an intuition pump to reimagine governance on Earth as well.

The only outward-facing activities of FOGA have been occasional talks Ism has given to select groups, including leaders of central banks, C-suites, civil society leaders and other curated demographics where Ism has tested concepts and sharpened an ability to make the ostensibly difficult understandable. FOGA’s work and Ism’s life-long obsession with how technology intersects with power have now been synthesised into something that, for the first time, is geared to a wider audience. You can subscribe to updates to learn when this is finally unveiled. In parallel with the research and writings under the FOGA umbrella, Ism has collaborated with creatives to develop visual, literary and cinematic representations of what a movement could look like that would be capable of transitioning us from our current order into more just, safe and pleasurable societies. Some of this work is available at thenextaesthetic.art