New Strengthening Civilization video and "How-to": create positive futures

New Strengthening Civilization video & how-to guide for creating better futures

In this Update: our latest Strengthening Civilization salon series video, a “how-to” guide for creating better futures, and more exciting news.

Find out how we have been helping steering the future of civilization and the progress of beneficial technology in the past month:
1. watch our latest salon video on institutions, civilizations and the future
2. read our guide on how to take action to co-create better futures
3. learn about our fellows who foster promising advances in nanotechnology
4. find your special invite to the upcoming Transformative Tech conference

1. How institutions and knowledge shape the future of civilization

Foresight strives to orient forward thinking in the right direction. This month, we had the pleasure to hold “Civilization: Institutions, Knowledge and the Future” a fantastic salon with sociologist Samo Burja. Thanks Monument for hosting.

Watch the salon videos just below:

“Existential Hope: Opting in” – Allison Duettmann

“Civilization: Institutions, Knowledge, and the Future” – Samo Burja

Our salons aim at helping our civilization prosper – through a healthy critique of our current paradigms.

The monthly salon series in 2018 focuses on strengthening civilization—an approach we first discuss as strategy for AI safety in our paper on Decentralized Approaches to Reducing Existential Risks. Since it is a mouthful, we divided the topic up into manageable pieces.

Topics we have discussed to date (all salon videos available in this YouTube playlist):

The trajectory of Civilization: Part 1 – Ethics, Now and Tomorrow and Part 2 – Racing Where?
The Future of Human Biology with David Eagleman and Arvind Gupta: Part 1 – Roadmap and Par t 2 – Ethical Framework
Debunking Social Motives with Robin Hanson – video here.
AI & Human Morality with Allison Duettmann – video here.
Creating Counterculture with Joon Yun – video here.
Updating Rationality with Allison Duettmann – event here.

2. Take Action Today

We’re humbled that many of you want to help support our mission. To get an overview of the different ways to engage with Foresight, we created a one-pager on Getting Involved here.

Please see a brief overview below:

Support building better tomorrows

One of the ways that you can most immediately help is to support our mission financially. Foresight Institute is a 501c3 nonprofit organization. Donations are tax-deductible in the US to the full extent provided by law. On this page you will learn how we have used last year’s donations. You can claim membership level matching the amount of your contribution.

Make a direct contribution via PayPal or Bitcoin, Ether, LiteCoin, or ZCash.
Use our peer-to-peer platform to raise funds in Foresight’s name, and get granted Foresight membership status according to the amount of the contributions you obtain.
Support Foresight by purchasing from Amazon Smile instead of Amazon.com (it’s really easy): Amazon will redirect 0.5% of their profit to Foresight for every purchase you make on Amazon. Just select “The Foresight Institute Palo Alto” from the drop down menu.

Contribute to our mission

Become an advocate for positive futures: if you like our work and you think your community would benefit from connecting with us, consider becoming a Foresight Ambassador.
Take things in your own hands: What are your strength and ideas on how to contribute? Get in touch with [email protected].

Delve into our work

Learning more about what we do and connecting with our community is the best way to start to engage – by getting familiar with our mission and our activities, you are more likely to figure out how to join our efforts in an impactful way.

Our Updates are a quick overview of our projects each month. You can sign up here to receive those and invites to our events, and read past editions on our website.
Browse through the recording of our salons, workshops, lectures, and conferences – you can find all of them on our Youtube channel.
Explore our past workshops and their white papers.

Collaborate on Existential Hope

Existentialhope.com is a global progress tracker for the different fields we need to solve to secure a positive future. It’s collaborative: Please contribute readings, podcasts, projects, and organizations that work toward long-term futures for humanity based on “existential hope”.

Join our community

Follow our Facebook page, Twitter or connect to our professional network on Linkedin for regular updates, as well as invites to our upcoming events.

3. Keep an eye on these up-and-coming nanotech high flyers

One essential aspect of fulfilling Foresight’s mission to drive the development of nanotechnology is to support humans whose work is leading advances in the field. This month we would like to introduce you to two of our Fellows, Damien Sluysmans and Bharath Ramsundar, who outstandingly took on advancing beneficial nanotechnology.

Damien Sluysmans, 2018 Foresight Fellow in Single-Molecule Characterization of Molecular Machines

Damien is currently a postdoctoral fellow (Belgian American Educational Foundation fellow) at Northwestern University (IL, USA) in the group of Prof. Fraser Stoddart, 2016 Nobel prizewinner, where he is working on the design and single-molecule characterization of artificial molecular muscles. Damien received a Ph.D. in Science from the University of Liège (Belgium) in 2017, working under the supervision of Prof. Anne-Sophie Duwez. During his doctoral thesis, Damien focused on the mechanochemical properties of oligorotaxane foldamers at the single-molecule level, using atomic force microscopy (AFM). He also obtained an MS and BS in Chemistry (physical chemistry, material chemistry) both from the University of Liège. In 2017, Damien obtained a Vocatio grant from the Ernest Solvay Fund (Belgium). This grant is dedicated to the development of his vocation for the study of molecular machines, and their use in nanotechnology.

Bharath Ramsundar, 2018 Foresight Fellow in Artificial Intelligence for Molecular Machines

Bharath received a BA and BS from UC Berkeley in EECS and Mathematics and was valedictorian of his graduating class in mathematics. He did his PhD in computer science at Stanford University where he studied the application of deep-learning to problems in drug-discovery. At Stanford, Bharath created the deepchem.io open-source project to grow the deep drug discovery open source community, co-created the moleculenet.ai benchmark suite to facilitate development of molecular algorithms, and more. Bharath’s graduate education was supported by a Hertz Fellowship. Bharath is the lead author of “TensorFlow for Deep Learning: From Linear Regression to Reinforcement Learning”, a developer’s introduction to modern machine learning, with O’Reilly Media. Today, Bharath is focused on designing the decentralized protocols that will unlock data and AI to create the next stage of the internet.

4. Friends of Foresight

Our friends at Transformative Technology Conference are hosting their 4th annual, two-day conference this November.

The Transformative Technology Conference is a conference focused on tech functioning at the intersection of the brain, the mind, and overall human wellbeing, bringing together neuroscience, psychology, technology, and entrepreneurship.

As a friend of Foresight, you can get a $150 discount off the general admission price here.

You can expect keynotes, panels, break-out discussions, workshops, 1:1 matching, demos of cutting-edge tech from around the world, and over 500 entrepreneurs, investors, engineers, and innovators from this space.

Click here to see speakers and learn more.

Thank you,

Gaming the Future: The Book!