Foresight Institute Radio

How does our human future look in the very long-term? What dramatic changes will we see in ‘meat space’ & cyber space via neurotech? Samo Burja: He is a Research Fellow at the Long Now Foundation where he studies how institutions can endure for centuries and millennia.  He writes and speaks on history, institutions, and strategy with a focus on exceptional leaders that create new social and po...

“I coined the word ’eucatastrophe’: the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears...this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made.” —JRR Tolkien Avoiding existential catastrophe is a critical necessity, but so is avoiding stasis and locking in the existentially wasteful status quo.  Cotton-Barratt and Ord used Tolkien’s t...

“I’m an active self-experimenter. I have a body, I might as well use it since it’s getting older.”  Reason is the founder and writer of Fight Aging, a leading voice in the rejuvenation of biotechnology and patient advocacy communities for more than fifteen years. He is also co-founder and CEO of Repair Biotechnologies This episode is a Q&A on all things related to how we can fight and prevent...

“There is no physical law that can limit our life like longevity. And this is what motivates us to reach radical life extension.” Dr. Emil Kendziorra is a founder and CEO at Tomorrow Biostasis GmbH based in Berlin, Germany and President of the Board of a nonprofit research foundation in Switzerland. He has a strong background in medicine, cancer research and entrepreneurship. Aschwin de Wolf is on...

“It looks like we could have an enormously bright future ahead of us, so we really need to worry about not going extinct now.” Anders is a research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, where he focuses on management of low-probability high-impact risks, estimating the capabilities of future technologies, and very long-range futures. Topics of particular interest include global catastrophic...

This episode is a Q&A on longevity investing with Sergey Young from Longevity Vision Fund and Neil Littman from Bioverge. Sergey Young is a longevity investor and visionary with a mission to extend the healthy lifespans of 1 billion people. He is the founder of the $100M Longevity Vision Fund—one of the few funds specializing exclusively in longevity and helping to accelerate longevity breakth...

What possibilities can there be for advanced civilizations within the realm of physics? What is the black hole solution? And what do astronomers spend a lot of time worrying about?  In this Holiday Special episode of the podcast Creon Levit, Director of R&D at planet Labs, interviews physicist Adam Brown. Adam is a theoretical physicist at Stanford University, interested in early universe cosm...

“In the mid 90s, we had a vision of smart contracting well before the invention of blockchain.” Mark S. Miller is a pioneer of Agoric (market-based secure distributed) computing and smart contracts, an architect of the Xanadu hypertext publishing system, a former Google research scientist, and a senior fellow of the Foresight Institute. Dean Tribble co-designed the negotiation process and contract...

“It’s not just about slowing aging down or stopping it, it’s about bringing yourself back to a younger biological age, which is effectively age reversal.” Daniel Ives, founder of Shift Bioscience, introduces their transcriptomic driver clock which enables them to identify putative drug targets for safer cellular rejuvenation, which might avoid the challenges coupled to therapeutic use of Yamanaka...

Our civilization is made up of countless individuals and pieces of material technology, which come together to form institutions and interdependent systems of logistics, development and production. These institutions and systems then store the knowledge required for their own renewal and growth. Samo Burja is a sociologist and the founder of Bismarck Analysis, a firm that analyzes institutions, fr...

“We want to create a system where incentives for prediction are transparent and clear to make good predictions. Furthermore, we want these predictions to be integrated into a consensus that we could all use and rely on if we weren't specialists in the topic.” - Robin Hanson Today we will discuss prediction markets and the problems they may help solve. We’ll hear a brief introduction of what P...

“The mission of our lab is to make a new life form. We want to digitize chemistry, we want to build chemical computers.” Lee Cronin ,  a professor at the University of Glasgow, was born in the UK and was fascinated with science and technology from an early age getting his first computer and chemistry set when he was 8 years old.  In this episode, he explains the Chemputer – a universally programma...

“Why is property law so different from contract law? Normally, when two parties buy or sell something, it doesn't have a huge negative effect on everyone else.“ Kate Sills is a software engineer with an interest in economics and law. She has been a columnist for the Cato Institute and was previously a board member of the Tezos Commons Foundation. She graduated from the University of Californi...

“I look at these assistants that we have today which are very primitive like Siri, Alexa and Google. But it's really interesting, because they represent a phase change in operating systems.” Peter Norvig is a Director of Research at Google Inc. Previously he was head of Google’s core search algorithms group, and of NASA Ames’s Computational Sciences Division, making him NASA’s senior computer...

"Can we make journalism that is safe to write and safe to read? Can we have publishing that is along the lines of the original visions of the internet?" How can we improve the reliability and privacy of our internet today? Brewster Kahle is an American computer engineer and Internet entrepreneur , and advocate of universal access to all knowledge. Kahle founded the Internet Archive and A...

“The goal is to work on coordinated research programs that are a little bit too research for startups and too engineering coordination heavy for academia.” Adam Marblestone is a Schmidt Futures Innovation Fellow and a Senior Fellow with the Federation of American Scientists. He was a research scientist at Google DeepMind, was the Chief Strategy Officer of the brain-computer interface company Kerne...

“There's heaps of futures open to humanity. Some of these futures would be constrained to earth, some might involve other planets, star systems or galaxies.” Toby Ord is a Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at Oxford University. His work focuses on the big picture questions facing humanity. What are the most important issues of our time? How can we best address them? His current research is...

Mark S. Miller discusses civilization as relevant superintelligence, the importance and neglectedness of cybersecurity, and decentralized approaches to AI safety.   Even if we don't know yet how to align Artificial General Intelligences with our goals, we do have experience in aligning organizations with our goals. Some argue corporations are in fact Artificial Intelligences - legally at leas...

“The reality is some people would like to be uploaded and live in cyberspace.” Meatspace and cyberspace often conflict. But how can we make the best out of both of them? This episode features Christine Peterson, she is Co-founder and former President of Foresight Institute. She lectures and writes about nanotechnology, AI, and longevity. She advises the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Glo...

What are AI DAO’s? Why are they interesting? How can brain computer interfaces help humans? And what challenges will we face when we move into space?  All of these questions and more are being answered in this episode that was recorded live at the first ever Foresight gathering in Europe, Berlin. The panel consists of:  Jessy Kate Schingler, Open Lunar Peter Schlecht, BrainGrade Trent McConaghy, O...

Why does signing up to cryonics today make sense? What are people not getting about longevity? And how can the crypto community and the longevity community work together?  All of these questions and more are being answered in this episode that was recorded live at the first ever Foresight gathering in Europe, Berlin. The panel consists of: Dr. Ole Mensching, Apollo VC Tyler Golato, VitaDAO Paul Ko...

“If we get to a post-scarcity society, with much greater levels of well being and really long lives, settling space, etc., that means we have a lot to look forward to when it comes to the future!” Anders Sandberg is a Foresight Senior Fellow and a Research Associate at the Future of Humanity Institute from the University of Oxford. Sandberg’s research at FHI centers on the management of low-probab...

“We use this sort of de novo protein design, to design brand new proteins that block viruses such as the Coronavirus from entering cells.” David Baker is the director of the Institute for Protein Design, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, the Henrietta and Aubrey Davis Endowed Professor in Biochemistry, and an adjunct professor of genome sciences, bioengineering, chemical engineering,...

“Humans are the only species that understand that they are aging and dying. So we try to avoid thinking about aging and we are now starting to think about prevention.” Alex Zhavoronkov, Ph. D., is the founder and Chief Longevity Officer of Deep Longevity, Inc, a global company developing a broad range of artificial intelligence-based biomarkers of aging and longevity. He is also the CEO and Founde...

“We are here representing the field of the science of aging. And we think that this is a historical day for us, because we're going to offer something that will be paradigm changing.” Dr. Nir Barzilai is the director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the Director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Human Aging Research. In this episo...