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
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):
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
Foresight Institute
