Foresight Institute's January Newsletter - Foresight Institute
Announcing our 2024 Worldbuilding Course!
This virtual and interactive course will engage with the most pressing global challenges of our age—climate change, the risks of AI, and the complex ethical questions arising in the wake of new technologies. The aim is to sharpen participants’ awareness and equip them to apply their skills to these significant and urgent issues.
We will explore how AI, along with other emerging technologies and sciences, will shape our future. As a participant, you’ll craft detailed and sophisticated visions of the world in 2045, with a special focus on integrating AI into our worldbuilds.
This includes looking into the economic frameworks, institutions, and societal values that will support them. You’ll also gain proficiency in critical and strategic thinking methodologies, such as red teaming and forecasting.
Dates and time: Starting February 14, 2024, 6 pm UTC
Sessions: 8 weekly sessions
Location: Remote, across Zoom
Our mentors for this course include:
Please see our website for a full curriculum, more information and resources to read, and to apply.
2024 Foresight Fellowship
We are very proud to announce our 2024 Foresight Fellows! This year, we are supporting 43 Fellows across our six technical tracks.
If you are interested in applying for next year’s cohort, please visit our website.
Have you applied to join our 2024 Technical Workshops?
Applications are open for our upcoming technical workshops across 2024. Each event is a unique opportunity to delve into groundbreaking topics, collaborate with leading minds, and contribute to shaping the future in critical areas of technology and science.
AGI: Cryptography, Security & Multipolar Scenarios Workshop
(May 14-15, The Institute, San Francisco)Neurotech, BCI and WBE for Safe AI Workshop (May 21-22, Lighthaven Berkeley)
Longevity Frontiers Workshop (July 28 – 29, Stanford)
Space Frontiers Workshop (September 20-21, Chabot Space Center, Bay Area)
Molecular Manufacturing Architectures Workshop (dates and location tbd.)
As we embark on an ambitious year filled with transformative workshops, we invite you to join us as a sponsor. Your support plays a pivotal role in bringing together bright minds and fostering groundbreaking ideas across our six technical focus areas – longevity biotech, nanotech, neurotech, intelligent cooperation, space, and Existential Hope.
Why Sponsor:
Support Emerging Talent: Allow junior attendees to participate via subsidies, and support Foresight Fellows to attend on travel subsidies, enabling them to share their innovative projects and advance their careers.
Drive Scientific Progress: Contribute to funding the science of the future, advancing areas too ambitious for traditional institutions.
Networking Opportunities: Connect with top researchers, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders in various fields.
Personal Longevity Group:
Beyond supporting our community, your donation may come with various perks. One such perk is the invitation to our Personal Longevity Group. This is an exclusive community of individuals who are passionate about exploring cutting-edge treatments and practices that can slow, and eventually reverse, personal aging. Meeting monthly, the group offers rich opportunities for discussions and insights from industry experts. To explore the different ways you can support, please review our donation tiers.
Contact for Sponsorship:
For more details and to discuss workshop sponsorship opportunities, please contact niamh@foresight.org.
We are expanding our team and currently have four open positions, starting as soon as possible.
Pro-social Agent Engineer (project, new)
Applications are also open for:
Executive and Communications Assistant to Chief of Innovation and Strategy (Full-Time)
Fundraising Manager (Full-Time)
These roles offer unique opportunities to contribute to our mission and work alongside a dedicated and dynamic team.
More information on each position and to submit your application.
We are excited to welcome new members to our team and to continue our journey of innovation and progress. Join us in making 2024 an impactful year!
Gus Docker, Future of Life Institute, on the Existential Hope Podcast
In this episode of the Existential Hope Podcast, we’re joined by Gus Docker from the Future of Life Institute. Topics discussed include a deep dive into ethical frameworks, mitigating existential risks of AI, potential positive turning points in our future, and difficulties we may encounter along the way.
On difficulties, he discusses our lack of ability to imagine wider technological change, especially in future utopias, likening the disparity between our current lives and those in the (not-so-distant) far future to the gap between life in the Stone Age and life today.
However, Gus remains excited about the future, especially about technologies that will allow people to sample experiences from others and to try different conscious states and see what they’re like, creating a world more open to diverse experiences. Finally, on thinking of a “eucatastrophe”, Gus envisions a major positive shift in mental health, where individuals easily manage and enhance their mental well-being, harmonizing happiness and productivity, thus contributing to societal welfare.
Listen here: https://www.existentialhope.com/podcasts
Attending TransVision 2024!
Beatrice Erkers, our COO and director of the Existential Hope program, discussed Navigating Our Future with Existential Hope, and Lou de Kerhuelvez dived deep into AI with her talk – AI Alignment: Challenges & Hope, at the TransVision 2024.
Foresight Fellow Updates
Congratulations to Lin Du, who collaborated to publish the recent paper, An implantable, wireless, battery-free system for tactile pressure sensing, which has been published in Microsystems & Nanoengineering.
Scott Emmons, alongside Edmund Mills, Shiye Su, and Stuart Russell, released an arXiv preprint, ALMANACS: A Simulatability Benchmark for Language Model Explainability.
While many explainability methods have been developed, they are typically evaluated on bespoke tasks, preventing an apples-to-apples comparison. To help fill this gap, they present ALMANACS, a language model explainability benchmark. ALMANACS scores explainability methods on simulatability, i.e., how well the explanations improve behavior prediction on new inputs. They conclude that despite modest successes in prior work, developing an explanation method that aids simulatability in ALMANACS remains an open challenge.
Congratulations to Sam Jardine who has participated in the UK Government’s closed-door conference on Future Space Threats at Wiston House.
Attending in their capacity as an Open Lunar Foundation Affiliate and 2023 Research Fellow, they had the chance to help inform future UK and partners policy surrounding particularly competition and cooperation in space.
levtina Evgrafova been working on building a matching and collaborative platform called RESEARCHPRENEURS. This platform is designed to facilitate collaboration between applied researchers and businesses, fostering a space where they can co-create innovations together.
Adrian Matysek has decided to join Prof. David Sabatini’s lab. Prof. Sabatini is renowned for his discovery of mTOR signaling and currently shares his lab between Prague and Boston, having previously been associated with MIT.
His current work with Prof. Sabatini is focused on developing new aging models and understanding the mechanisms underlying cell senescence, aiming to target these processes with innovative therapeutics.
January Seminar Presentations
Stephen Fielden | Controlled Fusion of Polymer Nanoparticles
Stephen Fielden is a researcher in functional nanotechnology and has published several research papers in this area during his PhD and postdoctoral studies.
Calen Ryan | CALERIE Trials: Long-term Caloric Restriction on DNA methylation of Biological Aging
Dr. Ryan is an Associate Research Scientist in the Columbia Aging Center Geroscience Core at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University.
Shady El Damaty | Zero Knowledge Games in Cybernetic Epistemology
Shady El Damaty, Ph.D., is a co-founder at Holonym, a zero-knowledge identity protocol for producing private proofs of verified credentials, and founded OpSci, a non-profit developing tooling for web-native open science practice.
Edwin Kite | How can we warm Mars?
Edwin Kite is an associate professor of planetary science at the University of Chicago and a Participating Scientist on the Mars Curiosity rover.
Community Updates
The PIBBSS Fellowship: What can we learn from biological and social systems about designing safe and beneficial AI systems?
The PIBBSS Fellowship is a 3-month, fully funded program where fellows work on a project at the intersection of their own field and AI safety, under the mentorship of experienced AI alignment researchers. The program is centrally aimed at Ph.D. or Postdoctoral researchers from fields studying complex and intelligent behavior in natural and social systems, such as evolutionary biology, neuroscience, dynamical systems theory, economic/political/legal theory, and more.
Learn more and apply here: https://www.pibbss.ai/fellowship
Application deadline: 4th February, 2024.
Contact: contact@pibbss.ai
Biomarkers of Aging Consortium: Challenge and Open-source Toolset
They are hosting a 2024-2025 Challenge series, where participants will be asked to predict chronological age, mortality, and multi-morbidity, with total awards of $200k+. Join the Challenge!
Their Biolearn platform enables easy and versatile analyses of biomarkers of aging data. It provides tools to easily load data from publicly available sources like the Gene Expression Omnibus, National Health and Nutrition Examimation Survey, and the Framingham Heart Study.
1517 are launching the Flux Capacitor
They fund researchers with up to $100k to to work on revolutionary science outside of academia – without the 20-page grant proposals, prying committee meetings, or the pressure to publish.
Deadline: February 23rd! Apply today.
Donate and become part of our community
As an active part of our community of talented scientists and technologists who expand the limit of our civilization’s capabilities, you will be at the forefront of our research, and our intriguing network.
Foresight Institute is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, so your donation is tax-deductible in the US as permitted by law. Our tax ID number is 77-0119168.