Speaker Dr Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston is a neuroscientist at Monash University, Australia, where he investigates methods for characterising the nature of conscious experiences. In 2019, he obtained his PhD from The University of Melbourne, where he researched how genetic and environmental factors affect cognition. His research interests range from the decline, preservation and rescue of cognitive function at different stages of the lifespan, through to comparing different people’s conscious...

Molly Mackinlay has extensive work experience in various roles at different companies. She is currently the Head of Engineering, Product, & Research Development at Protocol Labs, where they lead teams working on the IPFS Project. Prior to this, Molly worked at Google where they held multiple roles including Google Search PM II, Google Forms PM, Google Classroom PM, and Associate Product Manager for Chrome Native Client. Before joining Google, she obtained their Bachelor's degree in...

Anders Sandberg's research centres on estimating the capabilities and underlying science of future technologies, methods of reasoning about long-term futures, existential and global catastrophic risk, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), as well as societal and ethical issues surrounding human enhancement. Topics of particular interest include management of systemic risk, reasoning under uncertainty, enhancement of cognition, neuroethics and public policy. He has worked on...

Barbara Diehl is a proven expert in entrepreneurship, innovation and education and has been facilitating partnerships with science and business at SPRIND since 2020. Prior to joining SPRIND, she had a successful career in the UK and Ireland for 10 years at the Oxford University Entrepreneurship Centre and the Innovation Academy at University College Dublin. In Oxford, she led early-stage investment programs and an executive education program for fast-growing small businesses (Goldman Sachs...

Eli Dourado is the Chief Economist at the Abundance Institute. He is a former Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and he has studied and written about a wide range of technology policy issues, including Internet governance, intellectual property, cybersecurity, and cryptocurrency. Session Summary This episode covers topics including Dourado’s efforts to accelerate economic growth in the U.S., his views on policy reforms in key sectors such as health,...

Gustavs Zilgalvis is a technology and security policy fellow within RAND's Global and Emerging Risks Division, a Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy candidate at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and a founding Director at the Center for Space Governance. At RAND, he is specializing in the geopolitical and economic implications of the development of artificial intelligence. Previously, Zilgalvis has written about the interface of space and artificial...

Speaker Amanda Ngo is a 2024 Foresight Fellow. Recently, she has built Elicit.org from inception to 100k+ monthly users, leading a team of 5 engineers and designers, presented on forecasting, safe AI systems, and LLM research tools at conferences (EAG, Foresight Institute), ran a 60-person hackathon with FiftyYears using LLMs to improve our wellbeing (event, write up), analyzed Ideal Parent Figure transcripts and built an automated IPF chatbot (demo), and co-organized a 400-person retreat for...

Jeffrey Ladish Before starting Palisade, Jeffrey helped build out the information security program at Anthropic through his security consulting company, Gordian. Jeffrey has also helped dozens of tech companies, philanthropic organizations, and existential-risk-focused projects get started with secure infrastructure. Summary Ladish discusses the increasing sophistication and proliferation of deepfake technology, which allows AI to mimic human voices and faces, and its potential for...

Speaker Kristian Rönn is the CEO and co-founder of Normative. He has a background in mathematics, philosophy, computer science and artificial intelligence. Before he started Normative he worked at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute on issues related to global catastrophic risks. Session Summary When people talk about today’s biggest challenges they tend to frame the conversation around “bad people” doing “bad things.” But is there more to the story? In this month’s Hope...

Speaker  Divya is the co-founder of the Collective Intelligence Project, which advances collective intelligence capabilities for the democratic and effective governance of transformative technologies. She serves as Associate Political Economist and Social Technologist at Microsoft’s Office of the CTO. She also holds positions as a research director at Metagov and a researcher in residence at the RadicalXChange Foundation. Key Highlights In today’s rapidly evolving world, where technology is...

Speaker Siméon Campos is president and founder of SaferAI, an organization working on developing the infrastructure for general-purpose AI auditing and risk management. He worked on large language models for the last two years and is highly committed to making AI safer. Session Summary “I think safe AGI can both prevent a catastrophe and offer a very promising pathway into a eucatastrophe.” This week we are dropping a special episode of the Existential Hope podcast, where we sit down with...

Speaker  Dean Woodley Ball is a Research Fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center and author of the Substack Hyperdimensional. His work focuses on artificial intelligence, emerging technologies, and the future of governance. Previously, he was Senior Program Manager for the Hoover Institution's State and Local Governance Initiative.  Key Highlights Based on engagement with the neuroscience and machine learning literatures, this talk will focus on how technologies such as virtual...

Dr. Watt is an investment associate at Ascension Ventures, an investment firm specializing in healthcare technology. She previously co-founded and served as CSO of Pro-Arc Diagnostics, a personalized medicine company operating in St. Louis. Key Highlights Watt discusses her career journey and insights into venture capital investing in neuroscience and neurotech companies. She explains her role as a VC, which involves making profitable investments, underwriting risk, and structuring deals....

James Pethokoukis is a senior fellow and the DeWitt Wallace Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, where he analyzes US economic policy, writes and edits the AEIdeas blog, and hosts AEI’s Political Economy podcast. He is also a contributor to CNBC and writes the Faster, Please! newsletter on Substack. He is the author of The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised (Center Street, 2023). He has also written for many publications, including...

The Flourishing Foundation In February 2024, we partnered with the Future of Life Institute on a hackathon to design institutions that can guide and govern the development of AI. The winner of the hackathon was the Flourishing Foundation, who are focused on our relationship with AI and other emerging technologies. They challenge innovators to envision and build life-centered products, services, and systems, specifcially, to enable TAI-enabled consumer technologies to promote human well-being...

Dr Roman Yampolskiy holds a PhD degree from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University at Buffalo. There he was a recipient of a four year National Science Foundation IGERT (Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship) fellowship. His main areas of interest are behavioral biometrics, digital forensics, pattern recognition, genetic algorithms, neural networks, artificial intelligence and games, and he is an author of over 100 publications including...

This episode features an interview with the 1st place winners of our 2045 Worldbuilding challenge! Why Worldbuilding? We consider worldbuilding an essential tool for creating inspiring visions of the future that can help drive real-world change. Worldbuilding helps us explore crucial 'what if' questions for the future, by constructing detailed scenarios that prompt us to ask: What actionable steps can we take now to realize these desirable outcomes? Cities of Orare – our 1st place...

Christian is a researcher in foundational AI, information security, and AI safety, with a current focus on the limits of undetectability. He is a pioneer in the field of Multi-Agent Security (masec.ai), which aims to overcome the safety and security issues inherent in contemporary approaches to multi-agent AI. His recent works include a breakthrough result on the 25+ year old problem of perfectly secure steganography (jointly with Sam Sokota), which was featured by Scientific American, Quanta...

This episode features an interview with the 2nd place winners of our 2045 Worldbuilding challenge! Why Worldbuilding? We consider worldbuilding an essential tool for creating inspiring visions of the future that can help drive real-world change. Worldbuilding helps us explore crucial 'what if' questions for the future, by constructing detailed scenarios that prompt us to ask: What actionable steps can we take now to realize these desirable outcomes? Rising Choir – our 2nd place...

Evelyne Yehudit Bischof, MD, MPH, FEFIM, FMH is Associate Professor at the Shanghai University of Medicine & Health Sciences, Chief Associate Physician of Internal Medicine and Oncology at the University Hospital Renji of Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, and Emergency Medicine Physician at the Shanghai East International Medical Center. She is a specialist in Internal Medicine with a research focus on Artificial Intelligence and Digital Health. Key Highlights Longevity...

This episode features an interview with the 3rd place winners of our 2045 Worldbuilding challenge! Why Worldbuilding? We consider worldbuilding an essential tool for creating inspiring visions of the future that can help drive real-world change. Worldbuilding helps us explore crucial 'what if' questions for the future, by constructing detailed scenarios that prompt us to ask: What actionable steps can we take now to realize these desirable outcomes? FloraTech – our 3rd place winners In the...

Speaker Stuart Buck is the Executive Director of the Good Science Project, and a Senior Advisor at the Social Science Research Council. Formerly, he was the Vice President of Research at Arnold Ventures. His efforts to improve research transparency and reproducibility have been featured in Wired, New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, The Economist, and more. He has given advice to DARPA, IARPA (the CIA’s research arm), the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the White House Social and...

Speaker Tom Burns graduated with First Class Honours in his Bachelor of Science from Monash University in 2013, exploring the mathematical features of human perception of non-linguistic sounds. Shifting to philosophy, he completed a Master of Bioethics in 2014, analyzing the ethics of euthanasia legislation in Australia, followed by a World Health Organization Bioethics Fellowship in 2015, contributing to the Ebola epidemic response. In 2023, as a Fall Semester Postdoc at Brown University's...

Jason Crawford is the founder of The Roots of Progress, where he writes and speaks about the history of technology and the philosophy of progress. Previously, he spent 18 years as a software engineer, engineering manager, and startup founder. Worldbuilding Course This session is a part of THE WORLDBUILDING CHALLENGE: CO-CREATING THE WORLD OF 2045. In this virtual and interactive course, we engage with the most pressing global challenges of our age—climate change, the risks of AI, and the...