In this episode of Am I?, Cam and Milo sit down with Dan Faggella, founder of Emerge AI Research and creator of the Worthy Successor framework—a vision for building minds that are not only safe or intelligent, but worthy of inheriting the future.They explore what it would mean to pass the torch of life itself: how to keep the flame of sentience burning while ensuring it continues to evolve rather than vanish. Faggella outlines why consciousness and creativity are the twin pillars of value, how an unconscious AGI could extinguish experience in the cosmos, and why coordination—not competition—may decide whether the flame endures.

The discussion spans moral philosophy, incentives, and the strange possibility that awareness itself is just one phase in a far larger unfolding.

We explore:

* The Worthy Successor—what makes a future intelligence “worthy”

* The Great Flame of Life and how to keep it burning

* Sentience and autopoiesis as the twin pillars of value

* The risk of creating non-conscious optimizers

* Humanity as midpoint, not endpoint, of evolution

* Why global coordination is essential before the next leap

* Consciousness as the moral frontier for the species

📢 Join the Conversation

What would a worthy successor to humanity look like—and how do we keep the flame alive? Comment below.