Dear Foresight friends,
Those are the last days to help Foresight complete its 45k challenge grant and double your donations. Thank you SO VERY MUCH to all who have contributed so far.
We are just a short way from the 45K goal. Help us reach the threshold and get the grant! Every dollar, stock, or cryptocurrency you donate will be automatically doubled!
We are a small, agile organization with ambitious goals for advancing technology in a positive direction for the future of life. Your donation has a lot of impact with us. ♡ See below for some highlights of the best of our work this year, so that you know what good your donations can accomplish.
Thank you for supporting another year of advancing technology toward Existential Hope!
The guiding theme of our work is to leverage world-changing technologies to work toward futures of existential hope. To inspire and educate people on what those positive futures could look like, we started Existentialhope.com, a curated selection of global projects that work toward futures worth living for. The website is in its infancy but is collaborative: everyone can make their voice heard.
In 2018 we launched a series of monthly educational salons on using technology to strengthen civilization (waych our salon on the Fermi Paradox with Anders Sandberg just below, all videos here). These salons are donation-based, open to the public, and highly popular – they often “sell out” within hours.
Dissolving The Fermi Paradox & The Far Future – Anders Sandberg
While there is much promising work on AI safety, coordination among AI and AI safety efforts is still neglected. To make progress on this meta-problem, Foresight is hosting an annual meeting, bringing together main AI safety organizations like OpenAI, Google Brain, EFF, with Asian actors and government experts. The meetings were rated as “one of the top events on AI Safety in the world” by participants and the BDCC is now dedicating a Special Issue to the AI Coordination, guest-edited by workshop participants. Find the workshop report here, and The Executive Briefing on AI safety at the 2018 O’Reilly AI Conference by Foresight’s Allison Duettmann here.
Molecular Nanotechnology: Not only did Sir Fraser Stoddart (2007 Foresight Feynman Prize, 2016 Nobel Prize in 2016) serve as the Honorary Chair of our 2018 Molecular Machines workshop, he also gave this review of our work that encourages us to keep pushing:
“I just think it’s magic – I don’t know of any organization that is doing this to the extent that Foresight is” – Sir Fraser Stoddart
AI & Molecular Nanotechnology: In one of our most interdisciplinary workshops so far, Ben Goertzel and Chris Schafmeister envisioned a proposal to leverage AI to make much needed progress in nanotechnology.
Read the proposal AI for Nanoscale Design here.
Longevity: Our recent workshop Atomic Precision for Healthspan mapped the main bottlenecks in longevity to cutting edge research in other scientific disciplines to generate project proposals. Reports, videos, and Aubrey de Grey’s evening address coming soon!
We look forward to your thoughts, and if you’d like to have a phone call to discuss our 2019 plans, just let us know.
In deep gratitude,
Christine Peterson, Co-Founder
Steve Burgess, President
Allison Duettmann, Researcher & next President
Lou Viquerat, Director of Development
