A Lively Community

We went to Foresight Vision Weekend UK to showcase what’s in store. We found an open-minded community ready to change the world.

For many of us at e184, Foresight Vision Weekend UK felt like coming home.

The Foresight Institute has been bringing together futurists and scientists for forty years. This year, they reached out to partners like us to craft an event honoring those forty years of progress, and looking ahead to the next forty. We had worked with them before on a Neurotechnology workshop, but this would be something different. It was a chance to touch on more than just one aspect or research program, but instead to highlight progress across the full arc of human life. More than that, it was an opportunity to showcase what we are building at e184: a set of technologies focused on overcoming biology’s most long-standing limits.

The community met that showcase with aplomb. We were blown away by their passion, curiosity, and open-mindedness. Presenting to Foresight’s community of experts and dreamers, we saw our core values reflected back at us. This was a community that won’t let barriers stand in its way – one that cares deeply about getting things right and making a difference on the largest scales.

Hearing from experts across two days of talks, we found those values emphasized again and again. Foresight managed to draw on a worldwide community for the event: not just UK locals, but experts from the US and elsewhere. It was a fast-paced cavalcade of insights, both from established voices and eager newcomers.

The evening before the talks, a VIP gathering brought together sponsors, speakers, and the Fellows and Grantees supported by the Foresight Institute. A highlight of the evening was a rapid-fire series of introductions from the fellows, where each had one minute to describe what they’re building. Standouts of the evening included Ninon Masclef, an artist at MIT Media Lab who uses brain data from sleeping participants to make evocative images linked to dreams, Sven Truckenbrodt, who works on mapping the brain using expansion microscopy, Sobia Hamid, who talked about her work with Infinicell Bio building the groundwork for regenerative medicine, Alberto Privitera, who develops technologies linking quantum spin and light on molecular scales, and Léo Pio-Lopez, whose work at Tufts University’s Allen Center ties together cognition, the logic behind biological processes, and AI.

On Saturday, researchers in Emerging AI Paradigms talked about building new capabilities such as letting AI agents learn over time and embedding them into the world, and new approaches to ensure AI is used with safety and privacy in mind. Seeing the dialogue around safety in the AI community made us more optimistic about the dialogues to come in brain-computer interfaces and reproductive technologies, where key conversations are just beginning.

Our Life Unlimited track followed that morning, starting with a keynote by our Chief Operating Officer Marianna Krell on our core mission and the technologies we’re building. The following talks showcased the potential benefits of greater control of the fundamental building blocks of biology, especially for the challenge of increasing longevity, a subject where João Pedro de Magalhães’ talk was particularly exciting.

The session on Neurotechnology, Whole Brain Emulation, and BCI later in the day was a chance to catch up with old friends in the neurotech space and meet new faces. Sergey Stavisky’s talk stood out for showing the impressive level that speech decoding can now reach with implantable BCI systems, while Christopher Rozell’s talk showcased impressive progress for neurotechnology that treats depression. The last session of scheduled talks for the day was a mix of emerging technologies, from fusion and high-temperature superconductors to building with DNA strands and new approaches to thinking about what makes life special in the universe.

Sunday’s talks were, for the most part, more practical. The speakers in the Funding X and Pathways to Implementation tracks focused on the tricky challenges of how to build value and fund breakthrough research in a VC ecosystem focused on fast returns and distracted by hype. There were a number of encouraging funding models, showing that more people in this space are thinking hard about how to enable real progress.

Finally, the last track concerned a new theme of Foresight’s, Existential Hope in the Age of AI. This theme, of hope for the future, was especially well-suited to Foresight’s 40th anniversary. Christine Peterson, one of Foresight’s founders, talked about how the last forty years inspire her to look forward to the next forty, and described the wide range of emerging technologies whose development Foresight fosters. Anders Sandberg laid out a particularly inspiring vision, arguing that a Dyson swarm capable of capturing the energy of a star could be constructed in a surprisingly short amount of time, reasoning based on physical limits for self-replicating space probes. Others talked about efforts to support science going forward.

The passion at Vision Weekend UK was infectious. We’re enormously glad to have contributed to bringing so many talented, insightful people together, and profoundly grateful for the warm welcome and keen interest we found. It’s a community we’ll keep our eye on in future, looking forward to great things.