About
Professor Anna Goldsworthy is a pianist, writer and academic. She is Dean of the Elder Conservatorium of Music and School of Performing Arts at the University of Adelaide, and Artistic Director-designate of the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM). An award-winning author and performer, her recent Quarterly Essay, 'The God We Made: the Threat an Promise of Artificial Intelligence' examines the impact of artificial intelligence on art, education and human creativity, bringing a distinctive interdisciplinary perspective to contemporary debates.
Speaking at AI Safety Forum 2026
Recursive Self-Improvement: When AI Builds Itself
Anthropic recently reported that AI is already accelerating its own development: more than 80% of the code the company ships is now written by its models. Pushed far enough, that trend points to systems capable of designing and training their own successors with little human input: recursive self-improvement. Is that a distant dream, an emerging reality, or an imminent danger? This panel brings together differing views to debate how close we actually are, what would have to be true for the loop to close, and what it would mean for safety, governance, and human oversight if it did.
In conversation: Anna Goldsworthy on "The God We Made: The Threat and Promise of AI"
How will we be changed by the rise of artificial intelligence? In her recent Quarterly Essay "The God We Made", Anna Goldsworthy argues that AI is a rupture forcing us to confront what it is to be human, raising new existential, social and ethical risks while asking what remains irreplaceable in us. Anna joins Liam Carroll, an AI safety researcher at the Gradient Institute, in conversation about these questions.