Our beautiful community has only grown and become stronger in 2021, and we are so excited to launch into 2022 together with all of you. One of our most exciting news for 2022 is that we will be hosting global in-person meetups in several locations around the world. Read more below or here to see if there are any meetups near where YOU live.
We also wanted to remind you that tomorrow is the last day to make a 2021 tax-deductible donation (fiat, crypto, stock) to fund beneficial development of science and technology that is too early or interdisciplinary to be supported via legacy institutions.
We really hope to welcome you into our community as a Foresight member, and please don’t hesitate to contact us to discuss questions and please remember to send us an email to let us know if you donated in stock or crypto so we can give you the welcome you deserve into our community.
Thank you on behalf of our staff, board, and volunteers. We wish you a very happy new year, and we can’t wait for what we will build together in 2022.
Foresight Biotechnology & Health Extension Group: This group of biotechnology experts, entrepreneurs, and investors focuses on advancing foundational progress on prevention and rejuvenation technologies to guarantee long healthy lives for humans.
Foresight Molecular Machines Group: This group of nanotechnology-focused scientists and funders advances progress on molecular machines and the creation of atomically precise applications in energy, medicine, and materials science.
Foresight Intelligent Cooperation Group: This group of experts in computer science, cryptography, AI, and related fields focuses on advancing applications that increase cooperation among human and emerging intelligences.
Foresight Neurotech Group: This group of neuroscience researchers, entrepreneurs, and allies work together on advancing beneficial short-term and long-term neurotechnology applications so that we can improve cognition.
Foresight Space Group: This group of researchers, entrepreneurs, and allies work together on advancing space technologies, from near-term applications to long-term exploration so that we can continue to expand outwards.
Foresight Existential Hope Group: This is a group of scientists, innovators, philosophers, and activists who come together to find new ways to inspire positive futures, and start to think more concretely about how we can get there.
Become part of the Foresight team! We are looking for a great science communicator to help our growing audience understand what our fellows and researchers are working on. Someone who can translate the technical work they do and share it with the public. For us, it is more important that you are familiar with our technical tracks and enthusiasm about the work of Foresight than it is that you have professional experience as a communications manager. Find out more and see how to apply here.
We are also looking to hire program leads for our technical groups on Longevity/Biotech, Molecular Machines/Nanotech, Neurotech/BCI/WBE, Decentralized Computing/Cryptography, and Space. For each domain, we want to know what is the state of the industry and what the next steps are. This process is informed by Foresight’s technical seminars in these domains, independent research, interviews, and crowdsourcing. We will be building graphical tech trees for each domain which will entail crowdsourcing and fundable challenges. Find more detailed info on these positions here.
Last but not least, we are also looking for someone Crypto & Web 3 Lead to help our institute expand into the Web 3 space. More about this role here.
See all our open positions here.
The auction of our first NFT drop is now over. This has been an experience full of learnings and a source of a great joy created by the enthusiasm of the audience for this project. We sold out all the artworks except for one! Thank you so to all who were part of this adventure. We are now preparing the upcoming developments and forthcoming drops and will enjoy having you all onboard. Let’s decentralize the way we fund science!
Let’s keep building bridges between science and art!
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Formula Nano: World’s smallest car race
An update from Formula Nano: Formula Nano is a scientific competition that aims to advance the way we design and test the performance of molecular machines. In this race, the cars are single molecules consisting of a few hundred atoms and the track is an atomically detailed metal surface that is only 100 nm long. No safety goggles needed, however, as this race takes place virtually on supercomputers running advanced molecular simulations. The goal is to come up with the best molecular design (nanocar) optimized to travel as quickly as possible on a particular surface. We believe learning how to design better nanocars is a small but important step towards the broader goal of learning how to build molecular scale machines or “nanomachines”. Inspired by the 2017 nanocar race, we wanted to computerize this competition to search for better nanomachines in the most time and resource efficient manner.
The contestants will submit their molecular designs and the submissions will be analyzed. We want this competition to be accessible to anyone and provide tutorials and open source software to design nanocars on our website. The results of the molecular simulations will be rendered and animations will be live streamed during the competition day. Commentators will walk us over the simulations and explain the science behind the scenes as the nanocars race on virtual tracks. The winners will be awarded monetary prizes and the winning molecular designs will be hosted in the Foresight NFT gallery. We are looking for funding and developer support to maintain our website, run molecular simulations and render animations of the results so we can organize this competition together.
Over the last 2.5 months, MIRI has been hosting chatroom conversations with various AI risk researchers. They are now posting the full logs from these conversations publicly, beginning with a dialogue between Eliezer Yudkowsky and Richard Ngo on alignment difficulty (cross-posted to the EA Forum, LessWrong, the AI Alignment Forum, and the MIRI Blog).
Their hope is that these transcripts will make it a lot clearer where MIRI and other EA/X-Risk organizations tend to disagree, and make conversation and convergence on these topics easier.
MIRI is looking for help building a large dataset for alignment research, with a $1.2M prize/grant pool. If you or someone you know might be interested, or you’d like to signal-boost this, they are excited to see more people take a stab at it.
What can we learn from biological and social systems about designing beneficial AI systems?
Principles of Intelligent Behavior in Biological and Social Systems (PIBBSS) aims to facilitate knowledge transfer with the goal of building human-aligned AI systems.In Summer 2022, the PIBBSS summer research fellowship will bring together researchers from fields studying complex and intelligent behavior in natural and social systems, such as evolutionary biology, neuroscience, linguistics, sociology, and more.
Over the course of 10-12 weeks, fellows will work on a project at the intersection of their own field and AI safety, under the mentorship of experienced AI alignment researchers. Application deadline: Jan 16th, 2022The program is organized in partnership with the Central for Theoretical Study at Charles University, the Swiss Existential Risk Initiative and the Stanford Existential Risks Initiative.
Learn more and apply here.
Become a supporting member (also accepting crypto) to fund fellows and co-design the program with us. All info on our website.
