Neurotechnology Workshop – BCI, WBE & AGI

Neurotech Workshop

If feasible, breakthroughs in frontier neurotechnology, such as brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) and whole brain emulations (WBEs), could offer numerous benefits, including life-saving medical applications to insights into consciousness and human flourishing. Frontier neurotechnology may also offer promising approaches to tackle the threat of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) by providing tools for humans to better collaborate or compete with AI systems or by offering insights into how to build more human-like AGI.

Progress in BCIs and WBEs has historically been bottlenecked by the sheer challenging nature of the scientific problems involved, institutional constraints, academic straight jackets, and a lack of funder appetite to support sci-fi sounding goals. However, recent advances in AI have not only made frontier neurotechnology more urgent as possible AI defense strategy, but also rapidly opened up new routes for neurotech progress.

Foresight Institute’s annual neurotech workshop gathers those advancing the frontier of neurotechnology to create common knowledge about capabilities in the field, align on goals, and coordinate on solving outstanding bottlenecks. Participants include a tightly curated set of 60 leading scientists, builders, programmers, funders, and institutional allies.

Format

The workshop features brief talks by selected speakers, and an unconference-style working group session for project collaborations. It closes with project proposal presentations that are eligible for funding by Foresight’s grants, and may be considered by other funders present at the meeting. 

Your participation should offer new insights supporting your immediate work, lasting long-term collaborations on shared goals with leaders in the field, or the incubation of novel, fundable projects to drive progress at the frontier.

The workshop discussions are Chatham House Rule (don’t connect people to ideas when discussing them outside of this workshop), apart from some of the presentations which will be recorded.