Our Vision Weekends are the annual member festivals of Foresight Institute. Held in two countries, over two weekends, top talent across biotechnology, nanotechnology, neurotechnology, computing, and space are encouraged to burst their tech silos, and plan for flourishing long-term futures together.
Get your early-bird tickets for Vision Weekend France or Vision Weekend USA today.
The Feynman Prizes are named in honor of the physicist Richard Feynman. In 1959, Feynman gave a talk titled ‘There’s Plenty Of Room At The Bottom’, which is considered by many industry advocates to have inspired the field of nanotechnology itself.
With the Feynman Prizes, Foresight Institute wishes to recognize recent and brilliant achievements that contribute deeply to the field of Nanotechnology.
Nominations are now open for this year’s award. Please nominate yourself or someone you think should be awarded here.
Due to the location, we have limited capacity for this workshop. At this stage we only have a handful of tickets left. If you or your organization have the capacity to offer sponsorship, please contact [email protected].
The Foresight Fellowship is a one-year program committed to giving change-makers the support to accelerate their bold ideas into the future. Our mission is to catalyze collaboration among leading young scientists, engineers, and innovators who work to advance technologies for the benefit of life.
If you’d like to nominate anyone or apply for the 2024 Foresight Fellowship, please do so here.
Congratulations to our fellow Anastasia Ershova and collaborators Dionis Minev and Chris Wintersinger for making it onto the cover of Nature Nanotechnology! Their article, From DNA slats to cell-sized rugs, is listed here.
Roman Yampolskiy, University of Louisville, recently published his article titled “How to Escape from the Simulation” on Seeds of Science. In it, he asks the questions “Can we hack the simulation?” More formally the question could be phrased as: Could generally intelligent agents placed in virtual environments find a way to jailbreak out of them? Check it out here.
Dr. Mariam Elabry, Bronic, has recently published a paper titled “Towards cyber-biosecurity by design: an experimental approach to the Internet-of-Medical-Things design and development” in Crime Science Journal
Join Mariam in London on Thursday, May 18th for Biosecurity Artivism: Activating Change for a Better World. RSVP here.
Guido Putignano, a 2023 Foresight Fellow, recently made it onto the Forbes 30 under 30 list.
Cryopets, founded by 2022 Foresight Fellow Kai Micah Mills, is developing whole-body cryopreservation for pets will soon be able to take on their first cases. Join the waitlist at https://cryopets.com.
Yes, Gaming the Future is now on audiobook! Listen here.
Opportunities for bright futures enabled by bio, nano, and AI are now within our reach. But technological proliferation also brings risks that threaten the very existence of civilization. Explore strategies, tools, and technologies for enabling voluntary cooperation across a diversity of intelligences.
The Biomarkers of Aging Consortium is a group of scholars and practitioners developing, validating, and implementing biomarkers of aging and longevity. Our academic members are affiliated with the leading research institutes and groups in the field of aging. Our practitioners are at the forefront of research and development in the longevity industry.
Check out the first meeting here: https://foresight.org/summary/v-gladyshev-m-moqri-v-sebastiano-quantifying-aging
Get involved today: https://www.agingconsortium.org/
Left: Xhope Salon at the Embassy in San Francsico on March 22nd
Right: Our 2nd NYC Salon on March 15th
Here is a highlight reel of some of the fantastic presentations we had in our monthly seminar groups during the last few months. Visit our seminar page to dive deeper.
Joao Pedro de Megalhaes | The Scientific Quest for Immortality
People have always sought eternal life and everlasting youth, thus far without success. Recent technological breakthroughs have given strength to the idea that a cure for human aging can eventually be developed. In this talk, Joao discusses the latest advances in aging therapies and the prospects of curing human aging. If aging is unlikely to be controlled or cured within the foreseeable future, the only scientific avenue to eternal life is via cryopreservation.
Neurotech Special: WBE & AGI Virtual Seminar Meeting
The Neurotech Special: Whole Brain Emulation and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) Virtual Meeting Seminar is a groundbreaking event that brings together leading researchers, engineers, and entrepreneurs to discuss the latest advances in whole brain emulation (WBE) and its implications for AGI. This seminar aims to explore the technical, ethical, and societal challenges that emerge as we venture into the realm of replicating and augmenting human intelligence.
Chris Eliasmith | How to Build a Brain
this talk, Chris describes how it has more than doubled in size, to 6.3 million neurons, 20 billionconnections, and significantly increased in functionality.
Foresight Mentorship with Jaan Tallinn
This interactive and insightful talk includes an overview of Jaan’s impressive career, from co-founding groundbreaking technologies to his current work in AI safety and existential risk research.
Sander Wezenberg | Artificial Molecular Machines Operating in the Lipid Bilayer
Many of Nature’s protein receptors and machines operate within the lipid bilayer membrane and exploit environmental stimuli, as well as concentration and potential gradients, to operate and perform their task. Their malfunctioning has been associated to serious diseases, such as cystic fibrosis. Molecular chemists therefore pursue the creation of artificial membrane-embedded systems that imitate the function of proteins and hence, in the future could be interfaced with biology.
Mike Safyan | SmallSat Launch Market Review and Challenges/Opportunities
Mike Safyan, Planet’s VP of Launch, discusses the state of the SmallSat launch industry, including rideshares, ISS deployments, dedicated nanolaunch, and space tugs. The discussion also covers more exotic launch approaches such as kinetic launch, and the potential impact of SpaceX’s Starship.
Divya Siddarth | Collective Intelligence for Collective Progress
In today’s rapidly evolving world, where technology is at the forefront of progress, the need for effective collaboration between humans and artificial intelligence is more crucial than ever. In this engaging and thought-provoking talk, we will explore the concept of collective intelligence and discuss how it can be harnessed to drive collective progress in various domains, including science, technology, and social innovation.
Joseph Mascaro | The Evolution of Space Technology: From Spin-offs to Exaptation
Joe Mascaro discusses transfer of innovations from one segment to another; these “exaptations” in technology occur when an innovation, designed to solve a problem, becomes important in solving a different problem. Originally defined in the context of evolutionary biology, exaptation may be one of the most important outcomes of space exploration and space-based Earth observation science.
Matt Kaeberlein | Companion Animals in Geroscience: Challenges and Opportunities
Age is the greatest risk factor for most major causes of death and disability in developed nations. Although many aspects of aging are shared, the rate and order of various functional declines and onset of disease can vary greatly among individuals. The mechanisms underlying individual trajectories of aging are influenced by a complex combination of genes, environment and lifestyle that remains poorly understood.
Dick Broer | Liquid Crystal Amplification of Molecular Motor Dynamics to Tangible Dynamics
In our work molecular motors are molecules that change conformation or orientation upon activation by an external trigger, usually light or electricity. Their activation energies enable reversible morphing or polarization, which preferably occurs in a continuous, oscillatory manner. By combining them with liquid crystals or liquid crystal polymer networks we amplify their modulations from molecular dimensions to effects that can be seen, can be felt or can perform mechanical actions of relevance for our macroscopic world.
Reason, Fight Aging | Towards Biotechnology to Finally Defeat Cholesterol
Cholesterol is presented as much an enemy as a friend in this look at how direct clearance of localized excess cholesterol outperforms other strategies in a number of important medical conditions.
Ana Maria Cuervo | Targeting Selective Autophagy in Aging and Age-related Diseases
In this talk, Dr. Ana Maria Cuervo describes her recent findings on the molecular regulators of CMA, the novel physiological regulatory functions identified for this process, the consequences of the functional decline of this type of autophagy with age and some of our current efforts to enhance CMA activity in vivo in the context of different age-related diseases.
Bryan Johnson | Blueprint Rejuvenation Athlete
Bryan Johnson and Allison Duettmann discuss Kernel, BluePrint, and the Rejuvenation Olympics. Bryan shares the connection between the projects, the principles that made BluePrint a success for him, surprising findings he encountered, why it’s vegan, and how to do an MVP version of the program. They discuss how Bryan is planning on scaling rejuvenation efforts via the rejuvenation olympics, and how both BluePrint, and the Rejuvenation Olympics fit into his larger plan of updating humanity via self reflection, evolving ourselves, new economic incentives, embracing AI, a global immune system, working on hard problems, and updating our belief systems. The seminar finishes with an audience Q&A.
C. Schafmeister | Hardware and Software of a Critical Path to Bottom-up Molecular Nanotechnology
Spiroligomers are a powerful platform technology that enables the creation of artificially-designed, large molecules with diverse applications. These molecules can be used as therapeutics by binding to specific proteins, as catalysts that convert inexpensive raw materials into high-value products, and ultimately as the building blocks of molecular machines.
Natalie Dullerud | CaPC – Confidential and Private Collaborative Learning
In this talk, Natalie describes Confidential and Private Collaborative (CaPC) Learning, a recently published framework that allows entities to collaborate via privacy-preserving mechanisms in order to improve their own local models and maintain data privacy, from both a cryptographic and differentially private definition.
Basile Wicky | Designing De Novo Interactomes for Biomolecular Computations
Basile Wicky is currently a postdoc at the Institute for Protein Design (UW) in the group of David Baker where he works on developing deep learning methods for designing protein assemblies.
Steven Byrnes, Astera Institute | Challenges for Safe and Beneficial Brain Like AGI
Sooner or later, researchers will probably figure out how to run brain-like algorithms on computer chips. When they do, computers will be able to understand the world, build and share knowledge, collaborate, figure things out, get things done, invent new tools and technologies to solve their problems, etc.—less like today’s AI, more like inviting a new intelligent species onto our planet. So how do we make sure that it’s a new intelligent species that we actually want to share the planet with? How do we make sure that they want to share the planet with us?
As an active part of our community of talented scientists and technologists who expand the limit of what civilisation is capable of doing, you will be at the forefront of our research, and intriguing network.
The Serendipity Collective is creating a platform to explore the potential for a future reimagined. We are not looking to solve the problems of today or tomorrow. Instead, we are building a platform that allows futuristic ideas, agnostic to an application, an opportunity to mature, envision, dream up, and not merely disrupt the status quo—but to transcend the limits of our imagination.
