Prices to rise again on the 30th September: lock your spot at Vision Weekend before prices increase

Don’t miss your chance to be a part of one of our Vision Weekends, our annual member festivals celebrated in two countries over two weekends. This is a golden opportunity to collaborate with leading minds in biotechnology, nanotechnology, neurotechnology, computing, and space. Break out of your tech silos and plan for a flourishing, long-term future together.

Vision Weekend France: 17-19 November
Vision Weekend USA: 1-3 December

Review the weekend agenda and confirmed participants here.

Vision Weekend France speakers include:

The clock is ticking! Spaces for these highly engaging weekends are filling up fast. The ticket prices for Vision Weekend France and Vision Weekend USA are set to increase after September 30th. This is your last call to secure your spot at the current price.

Don’t delay – book your tickets now and be a part of this transformative experience! Ticket prices will increase after September 30th, so get your tickets for Vision Weekend France or Vision Weekend USA today!

Molecular Systems Design Retrospective

Our Molecular Systems Design Workshop was a not-so-miniscule success! A huge thank you to everyone who joined us at The Institute on September 11th and 12th to explore the cutting-edge possibilities of molecular machines.

Check out the innovative Molecular Machine Architectures that emerged from the second day of collaboration:

Architecture 1: A molecular “printer” by Christian Schafmeister, Boris Fain, Jonathan Ackley, Lillian Chong, Tad Hogg, Adam Braunschweig

Architecture 2: A molecular “breadboard” by William Shih, Anastasia Ershova, Jacob Majikes, Fei Zhang, Shucong Li, Mandal N, Si-ping Han

Architecture 3: Molecular legos / solid phase synthesis of molecular machines by David Forrest, Yuanning Feng, Chris Wintersinger, Rachel Shi, Caleb Meredith, Bill Efcavitch

Architecture 4: Scanning-Tunneling Microscope / Atomic-Force Microscope based assembly by Mark Friedenbach, Brenda Rubenstein, Philip Moriarty, Iqbal Utama, HP, Eduardo Beltrame

Architecture 5A: Meta-protein 1D thing: META-C by Julian, Petr, Erik Benson, Carlos, Alexis Courbet, Haichao Wu, Jim S, Ted Kaehler

Architecture 5B: Small Molecule Approach by Zoe Ashbridge, Stefan Borsley, Irene Regeni, Marco Ovalle, Max Ledent

Keep your eyes on our Youtube channel for talk recordings and working group presentations!

👾 DeSci Berlin Rewind 👾

Earlier this month, we had a lively couple of days at DeSci Berlin on September 7th and 8th, hosting an engaging Xhope Salon and an insightful panel discussion on tech trees.

The panel discussion featured Lou de Kerhuelvez of Foresight Institute, Martin Karlsson from Coordinon Network, and Trent McConaghy from Ocean Protocol. The topic of discussion was “How tech trees can accelerate science and tech that’s too ambitious for legacy institutions to take on.”

Check out Foresight Institute’s own tech trees here to get a sense of how these can be used to chart the course of technological advancement.

We extend our thanks to all our attendees and speakers for making this event a success. Stay tuned for future xHope Salons where we’ll continue to dive deeper into the fascinating world of technology and its potential to shape our future!

Last Call for Norm Hardy Submissions – Apply by 9/30!

There’s just a few more days left to apply to the Norm Hardy Prize, administered by the Foresight Institute and sponsored by Agoric and Protocol Labs.

The long term goal of the Norm Hardy Prize is a set of design principles and tools that encourage developers to create interaction designs that make it easy for people to use secure systems securely.

We are inviting you to compete for the annual $10k prize. If you have insights or innovations pertaining to any of the following four criteria, we want to hear from you:

1. Actual implementation of a system
2. User studies of novel system
3. Theory of mind of the user
4. Sets of principles for user interaction design

The deadline for submissions is September 30th. Don’t miss this unique opportunity to contribute to the field of secure system design!

Update on AI Safety Grants

Since our launch a little over a month ago, we have received some highly promising applications for our AI Safety Grant program! We’re thankful for the effort and time put forward in all of the applications.

We have approved two grants:

1. Roland Pihlakas & Joel Pyykkö – Aintelope project
Support to work on the first version of Aintelope, a multi-agent cooperative framework which models human emotions to study value formation and alignment.

2. Keenan Pepper – Embedded Agency Playgrounds
Support for compute and to do empirical research in embedded agency playgrounds, write papers, and publish open source tools. A concrete research goal is to reproduce the results of “Robust Cooperation in the Prisoner’s Dilemma” but using trained transformer models instead of handwritten expressions of modal logic.

We continue to search for the most impactful projects in under-explored areas within AI Safety. We are looking to fund projects across the following three areas:

Neurotechnology, Whole Brain Emulation, and Lo-fi uploading for AI safety
Cryptography and Security approaches for Infosec and AI security
Safe Multipolar AI scenarios and Multi-Agent games

Submit your proposal today and watch the recording of the launch.

Neurotech: Rewiring the Future of Human Well-Being

Beatrice Erkers, Foresight COO, recently published this article where she delves into how neurotech, from brain-computer interfaces to neural implants, is shaping up to become a game-changer in healthcare, cognitive enhancement, and mental health sectors. It also explores the ethical considerations, potential risks, and future implications of this rapidly advancing field.

Allison Duettmann on Words That Count and Austin Next

Allison Duettmann, Foresight CEO, recently joined Winnie Nakiyingi on ‘Words That Count,’ a podcast that focuses on opportunities in STEM for African women. Check out the interview here.

Also check out this amazing interview with Allison, Seemay Chou, and Vincent Weisser on the Austin Next Podcast: Decentralized Science and the Future of Discovery.

September Fellowship Updates

2023 Foresight Fellow Lewis Hammond of Cooperative AI Foundation is excited to announce two great opportunities to get stuck in doing some cutting edge research on multi-agent safety:

1) Together with Google DeepMind and MIT, we are running a major cooperative AI contest as part of NeurIPS 2023. We’re offering $10,000 in prizes, $50,000 in compute support (applications due tomorrow!), $10,000 in travel grants, and co-authorship of a report for NeurIPS 2024. The Melting Pot Contest challenges researchers to push the boundaries of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) for mixed-motive cooperation using Google DeepMind’s cutting-edge Melting Pot environment suite. Submissions are due by November 10th!

2) Next weekend (September 29th – October 1st) we will be working with Apart Research to run a two-day hackathon on multi-agent safety. Participants will be tasked with investigating and demoing multi-agent failure modes in the context of advanced AI. Successful teams will receive part of the $2,000 prize pool and be invited to co-author a major new report on multi-agent safety alongside researchers from Google DeepMind, Oxford, Harvard, MILA, CMU, UC Berkeley, Cambridge, among others. This report is due to be circulated in the run-up to the UK’s AI Safety Summit.

Iqbal Utama recently published a review article in MRS Bulletin: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1557/s43577-023-00584-7. The article comprehensively reviews the architecture of mixed-dimensional nanomaterials for applications in quantum photonic technologies. The article also discusses near-term opportunities for using molecular functionalization to modify the behavior of 2-dimensional nanomaterials for quantum emitter applications.

He was also awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the International Institute of Nanotechnology (IIN), with a 1-year term starting in September 2023. The fellowship includes funding for a stipend, research supplies, and a travel grant. The IIN is a global hub of excellence, uniting over $1 billion in nanotechnology research, education, and supporting infrastructure.

Tessa Alexanian recently launched a newsletter giving regular updates from organizations attempting to reduce global catastrophic biological risks [GCBRs].

Sign up here: https://gcbrupdates.substack.com/p/org-updates-august-2023

Alexander Fedintsev will be joining the company Elastin Biosciences as Director of Research. We have successfully completed a series of experiments in Oxford which identified a drug combination that increased 5x tropoelastin expression in vitro and significantly changed mechanical properties of the aorta of mice in vivo. Read more about it here.

Nell Watson is releasing a book on AI Ethics and AI Safety called Taming the Machine coming out in March. It’s available for pre-order already!

September Seminar Presentations

Here is a highlight reel of some of the fantastic presentations we had in our monthly seminar groups during September. Visit our seminar page to dive deeper.

Konrad Kording | Causal Perturbations to Whole Brain Emulate C. Elegans

Being able to simulate a nervous system is clearly one of the salient goals of systems neuroscience. Being able to do so we need two things: a parts list and a functional description of the neurons. In this talk, Kording sketches what exactly it will take to simulate a complete nervous system: the nervous system of C. elegans.

Shuntaro Amano | Synthesis and Analysis of Autonomous Molecular Motors

Autonomous molecular machines continue to operate as long as the energy source is present (e.g. light, chemical fuels), and can perform work progressively. They are of paramount importance for future nanotechnology, but only a limited number of synthetic examples have been realized to date.

In this talk, Shuntaro presents his recent achievements that address the above issues. In the first project, we realized a chemically driven autonomous molecular pump, which keeps taking up macrocycles by harnessing the energy of chemical fuels.

Thomas Duffield | Aging as a Failure of Epigenetic Repair Fidelity

Aging is a complex phenomenon, and deciphering the underlying causes and effects has posed significant challenges. In this presentation we highlight informatic traits of the epigenetic system that make it a singular candidate for the root cause of aging.

Simon Dürr | Designing stable Metalloproteins using Deep Learning

Metal ions are essential cofactors for many proteins including enzymes. However it has been difficult to design metalloproteins due to the complicated electronic structure of metals using e.g Rosetta.
With the advent of deep learning based approaches we now have the tools at our disposal to adequately deal with metalloproteins.

Ghada Almashaqbeh | Unclonable Polymers and Their Cryptographic Applications

We propose a mechanism for generating and manipulating protein polymers to obtain a new type of consumable storage that exhibits intriguing cryptographic “self-destruct” properties, assuming the hardness of certain polymer-sequencing problems.

Career Counseling with Christine Peterson

Christine Peterson is Co-founder and former President of Foresight Institute. She lectures and writes about nanotechnology, AI, and longevity. She is co-author of Unbounding the Future: the Nanotechnology Revolution (Morrow, also free online) and Leaping the Abyss: Putting Group Genius to Work (knOwhere Press, also free online)

Foresight AI Safety Grant & Computer Security Prize Launch

Please visit https://foresight.org/norm-hardy-prize/ for more info and to submit your proposal.

Community Updates

AI @ IA : Research in the Age of Artificial Intelligence!

Join the Internet Archive on Thursday, October 12th to see how the Internet Archive is using AI to build new capabilities into our library, and how students and scholars all over the world use the Archive’s’ petabytes of data to inform their own research. RSVP here.

Get your tickets for Bay Area Longevity Week

The Bay Area Longevity Week is taking place Dec. 1-6th! Events will include Foresight Vision Weekend, the Biomarkers of Aging Consortium, and Longevity Global’s Summit at the Buck.

Donate and become part of our community

As an active part of our community of talented scientists and technologists who expand the limit of our civilization’s capabilities, you will be at the forefront of our research, and our intriguing network.

Gaming the Future: The Book!

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