VISION WEEKEND PROGRAM
Envisioning a Grand Future
Saturday, Dec 1, 9 am – 6 pm @The Laundry, SF
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Come prepared, pick the technology track you’d like to steer and join intimate strategy groups to advance your track toward grand futures. Tracks include AI, cyberspace, blockchains, health technologies, bio & nanotechnologies, neurotechnologies, and space technologies, chaired by experts in the technology field. See the strategists for each track below.
To generate grand futures, each strategy group will envision three different 30-year scenarios for their technology: 1) Dystopia, 2) Utopia, and 3) Existential Hope Scenario.
First, you’ll envision a dystopian, and a utopian scenario for your technology track. Armed with those corner scenarios, you’ll generate a third scenario, an Existential Hope scenario, that navigates away from dystopian scenarios toward utopian scenarios.
Questions you’ll tackle to envision the scenarios:
Setting the stage: For each technology scenario, what are the effects on other technologies, society, politics, economics, and ecology?
Crucial considerations: What assumptions are you making, that, if proven wrong, would change your scenarios fundamentally? What are the greatest agreements/ disagreements, and controversies in your group? What black swans may influence your scenarios?
And action: What can we do to steer technology toward the Existential Hope scenario? You’ll generate desirable goals for the next 1, 15, 30 years – with odds to make them bettable.
Speaker & Foresight Patron Gathering
Saturday, 7 pm – late @Gil’s Clock Tower, SF
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You’ll have plenty of social time to connect with our excellent speaker line-up in person, catch up with old friends, and make new ones.
If you want to make sure you catch the speakers 1-1, and if networking and community is a major goal this weekend, consider joining Saturday night’s Foresight Speaker & Patron Gathering. Vision Weekend speakers and Foresight Patrons are invited for a very special gathering at an exceptional location: Gil’s Clocktower. We’ll unite for dinner, drinks, delicacies, delights and discussions on how to create futures of Existential Hope together. Mingle with speakers, Foresight team and fellow patrons to debrief Saturday, preview Sunday, and derive action items for our community for the coming year and beyond.
Choose the Patron membership option on the ticket page, which grants you access to the gathering and includes access to all of Vision Weekend.
From Roadmap to Reality
Sunday, Dec 2, 9 am – 6 pm @The Internet Archive, SF
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You won’t be able to catch all tracks on Saturday, but that’s what Sunday is for: We’ll mix AI, cyberspace, blockchains, bio & nanotechnologies, neurotech, health technologies, and space together, distill interdependencies between the fields, conflicts among technology goals, and promises of joining forces:
Track chairs will present the Dystopia, Utopia, and Existential Hope scenario for their track to be challenged by synthesists and audience. Finally, we’ll compare scenarios among different tracks to determine how different technology goals contradict, weaken, or accelerate each other.
We’ll revisit Saturday’s questions:
Crucial considerations: Do other technology tracks require you to revise your assumptions such that your technology scenarios fundamentally change? Do other tracks’ scenarios resolve or strengthen the greatest agreements/disagreements, and controversies in your group? Do other tracks have black swans that may affect your technology goals also?
And action: Do other tracks influence your goals for 1, 5, 15 years and the odds that you place on them? How do other tracks influence your plan to action?
Strategists and Synthesists include, but are not limited to:
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Anders Sandberg, Senior Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute
Mary Lou Jepsen, Founder and CEO of Open Water
Aubrey de Grey, Chief Science Officer and Co-Founder of SENS Research Foundation
Brewster Kahle, Founder of the Internet Archive
Anthony Aguirre, Foundational Questions Institute, Future of Life Institute, Metaculus
Mark S. Miller, Chief Scientist at Agoric Computing
Nathana Sharma, Faculty at Singularity University
Joon Yun, President of Palo Alto Investors, Founder of Longevity Prize
Peter Eckersley, Director of Research for the Partnership on AI(PAI)
Sonya Mann, Zcash Foundation
> ALL STRATEGISTS and SYNTHESISTS HERE <<
See you there, and let’s build a Grand Future together!
