October: Longevity Workshop report, Feynman Prize, job openings & more - Foresight Institute

Oct 31, 2022

We don’t want to spook you, but October is officially over, and we’re gearing up for many wonderful and flourishing end of year celebrations. We wanted to share with you some of our highlights, and keep you in the loop with some of the exciting events coming up!

2022 Feynman Prize Winners

We are pleased to share with you the prestigious 2022 Feynman Prize Winners:

Sergei V. Kalinin of the University of Tennessee receives the 2022 Foresight Institute Feynman Prize for Experimental work
James R. Chelikowsky from the University of Texas receives the 2022 Foresight Institute Feynman Prize for Theory
Dr. Emanuele Penocchio is announced as the 2022 winner for the Distinguished Student Prize

About the Feynman Prizes:

The prizes in Theory and Experiment are named in honor of pioneer physicist Richard Feynman for the construction of atomically-precise products through the use of productive nanosystems. Foresight Institute also announces its Distinguished Student Award, recognizing an individual whose work is considered notable in advancing the development and understanding of nanotechnology. More info on Feynman Prize here.

Longevity Workshop Recordings & Report

Recordings from our 2022 Longevity Prizes,Tools & Tech Trees workshop are now public. This two-day event invited Foresight’s Biotech & Health Extension Group’s top researchers, entrepreneurs, and funders to highlight undervalued areas for progress. Find the playlist here.

A scientific overview of the field, based on a longevity technology tree, was followed by brief keynote presentations highlighting outstanding challenges. In plenaries and smaller groups, participants collected, categorized, and refined questions of common interest, and proposed approaches for solving them. Our 2022 Longevity Workshop Report summarizes the resulting proposals and highlights the seminar videos available.

Read 2022 Longevity Workshop Report

Designing Molecular Machines Workshop Recordings

Recordings from our 2022 Designing Molecular Machines Workshop are now public. This two-day workshop invited a select group of specialists in software and simulation to apply their skills to help those tackling the challenges of constructing atomically-precise 3D structures, including pathways using chemistry, applied physics, biochemistry, molecular biology, and engineering. Find the playlist here.

Keynote presentations on open challenges in molecular machines and on advances in software tools were followed by working groups to determine opportunities for progress.

Vision Weekends FR & US

Our Vision Weekends are the annual member festivals of Foresight Institute. Held in two countries, over two weekends, top talent across biotechnology, nanotechnology, neurotechnology, computing, and space are encouraged to burst their tech silos, and plan for flourishing long-term futures.

Vision Weekend Europe | November 18-20: at Chateau du Feÿ, Villecien, a laboratory for the future disguised as a stunning 17th century castle, 90 minutes outside of Paris.

Vision Weekend US | December 2 – 4: at the Internet Archive in San Francisco and Sunday’s afternoon sessions at the Bird House Villa in the Berkeley Hills.

Buy tickets here

New Seminar Summaries!

New seminars out of our Biotech, and Intelligent Cooperation & Molecular Machines groups:

Gaming the Future Pre-order

Gaming the Future: Technologies for Intelligent Voluntary Cooperation is available for pre-order!

Authored by Foresight’s very own Allison Duettmann, Mark S. Miller, and Christine Peterson, this book gives you, the player, the technologies to securely cooperate with fellow human and AI players in advancing our civilizational game.

There are a few curious features about this book: to inform the ideas in the book, we invited core technology developers to give a keynote seminar on their work. These talks, for instance with Tyler Cowen, Robin Hanson, Peter Norvig, or Daniel Ellsberg are recorded and available on our Youtube channel. We also published a Substack version of the book, including a monthly book club for core supporters, and bounties paying subscribers to contribute additional resources.

Order your copy, or read the interactive Substack book, here.

On October 26th, Foresight’s Allison Duettmann joined Athena DAO to discuss collaborative research organizations, followed by a Q & A. Give the recording of the Twitter space here.

This BBC article by Richard Fisher explores the Tolkenian origin, meaning, and modern day use of “eucatastrophe.” Read until the end to find mention of Foresight’s efforts in crowdsourcing a new term for eucatastophe.

Let’s all look forward to moments when humanity’s prospects suddenly improve!

Allison joined The DeSci Podcast by Molecule DAO to discuss how she got into futurism, why people are so pessimistic about the future, how Foresight choses the most important things to work on, her visions of the future for humanity, Tech Trees and more! Give it a listen here.

Held fully online and hosted by Max Unfried and Eleanor Sheekey, the second VitaDAO Crypto meets Longevity Symposium will feature talks from longevity researchers and cryptocurrency experts. Allison is introduced at 7:30:00 in the recording here.

Want a glimpse into the future? LabWeek22’s Breakthroughs in Computing speaker series kicked off with Protocol Labs founder Juan Benet in conversation with Allison on where computing can take us. Watch “Biotech, Neurotech and More” here.

This article by Foresight’s Beatrice Erkers explores the meaning behind longtermism, a bit of history on our work, Existential Hope, and – most importantly – how you can be actively hopeful for the future.

Existential Hope Drop

Are we alone in the universe? What could a future for humans in space look like? And what would Creon Levit’s advice to Elon Musk be if he wants to start a self-sufficient mass colony there? This Hope Drop features Creon Levit, chief technologist and director of R&D at Planet Labs. Creon discusses his vision for the future, his experience working with NASA & Planet Labs, natural systems technologies, regenerative agriculture and more.

We worked with the artist Anosh to visualize Creon’s vision. Anosh is a leading creative at BETC and a member of the Existential Hope Gallery. In this piece, he is working with AI-based tools to create a dialogue between the vision of a super machine and an artist.

Visit the Existential Hope website to find the podcast interview, the NFT, and a $250 storytelling bounty. https://www.existentialhope.com/gallery

Open Positions

Foresight Executive Assistant

Foresight is hiring! We’re looking for a great executive assistant to help our growing team with the important administrative work needed for the organization to succeed. This is an operations supporting role, where the assistant will primarily execute on administrative work to support our project leads. More information on requirements, benefits and responsibilities can be found here.

Remote Rust Programmer

Digital Contract Design (DCD) is managing and helping fund an open source project allowing one to unilaterally prevent a deepfake of one’s speech actions. Its working name is “WordSig”, and it was conceived in a culture-hacking mindset by Andrew Critch, one of your fellow Foresight members who cares about digital security in the face of advanced AI disruptions. Andrew describes the project in these slides.

DCD is hiring a Rust programmer who works as a remote independent contractor and leads others in delivering this app on the iOS, Android, web browser, and desktop platforms. Rate is competitive considering relevant experience, starting at $125 and extending to $200+ per hour. Please reply to <jobs@contract.design>.

Events

We had a very succesful Crypto, Security & AI Workshop! The goal of the workshop is to advance cooperation at the intersection of cryptography, security, and AI. This intersection is nascent but we think it could be of fundamental importance for beneficial long-term futures. Top presentations include Juan Benet, Filecoin: Cryptography Tools for Paretotopia, Remco, Worldcoin: Privacy-preserving Proof of Personhood, Amanda Ngo, Ought: Automating Complex Reasoning, and Mark S. Miller: Computational Markets & Agoric Systems.

Foresight’s Beatrice Erkers, Lou de K, and Aleksandra Smilek were at Devcon in Bogota! Devcon is an intensive introduction for new Ethereum explorers, a global family reunion for those already a part of our ecosystem, and a source of energy and creativity for all. Foresight Team held “Existential Hope and DeSci for Sci-fi futures” at Devconnect. Stay tuned for recordings!