Allison Duettmann on Existential Hope, Talent, and Funding (Episode 4)

Transcript

[00:00:00] Intro

Jesse: Hello, welcome to Journeys with Jesse. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Allison Duettmann. She's the President and CEO of Foresight Institute, a research organization and nonprofit that supports the beneficial development of high impact technologies. She founded existentialhope.com, a platform to spread hope for and inspire action towards long-term human flourishing.

She's also co-initiated, the Longevity Prize and Award for Exceptional Longevity Research. Allison, welcome to the show.

Allison: Thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure. I can't wait for our discussion.

[00:00:58] Her early interest in cryonics

Jesse: Cool. So let's start with a personal question first. What's a fun thing you did as a child that was deemed weird by your peers?

Allison: Fun thing. Fun thing is difficult but maybe something that was deemed weird is that I was very early on interested in cryonics. Does that count?

Jesse: Yeah, that counts. So tell me more.

Allison: Well, really, I think since the first time I can actually like, remember thinking about like humanity's long-term potential and especially like, I guess also my own kind of like life trajectory I think I've become just really interested in extending life and extending human flourishing, both individually, but also generally for civilization as a whole.

Yeah, I was really interested in cryonics from a very early age on. When my dog died, when I was around 17 or 18, I did try to call Alco, which was then the main cryonics organization in town to see if they can just come over, pop over to Germany and freeze my dog. But obviously, There is a lot of prep that is required to actually like get this organized.

And that's when I realized the state of the art or maybe the lack of the state of the art of cryonics kind of like science and research and that was pretty terrifying actually. I thought it was much further along than it actually was because in Germany you tend to assume that just like the US has it figured out, but they kind of didn't.

[00:02:15] Foresight Institute

Jesse: Yeah, I, I can imagine that's probably like one of the early points where you are getting interested in the work in longevity research, and that ties into your current work at the Foresight Institute. So let's imagine a world without the Foresight Institute. What would the world be missing?

Allison: Well, I think it would be missing a lot of hope and scientific directed activism towards the future. There used to be at least a few hopeful organizations around but they were more philosophical.

And then there are lots of amazing scientific and technological organizations around. But I think they don't really have a long term kind of like aim and and ambitions and Foresight kind of has both like the sweet intersection between big hopes for the long-term future and nevertheless, a scientific background.

[00:02:59] Ethics of progress

Jesse: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Foresight Institute is advancing the development of new technologies to bring forth human progress, but I think that there's also a potential downside. So besides its massive upside, why do you think the pursuit of progress is more ethical than conserving what we've already got?

Allison: I don't think that they're in contradiction with each other. I think we need both. Because we've come so far that only enable us to even think about how we can take it further. So I think a, the progress that we've made so far is like, kind of like the necessary condition for us to even think about taking it further.

So I think it's really wonderful. I definitely don't mean to not appreciate the progress that we've made as a civilization so far. I think, you know, like whether or not you buy Pinker's thesis that violence has declined over time.

I do think that over time we are becoming much more empathetic. We are becoming much better at offering positive sum deals. Like rather than like really doing things through kind of coercion and violence. Over time, we are much better at raising the kind of like playing field for most people currently around.

 If you just look at our world and data like progress in health expectancy, progress in education, progress in many of the things that many people care about have, has really like substantially increased since the early days. And the great thing is that that's like a positive thing. That many people can care about whether or not they can have as many different values as they currently have, and I think we have a pretty value diverse civilization.

But nevertheless, I think more education and more health is good for whichever values you're actually trying to pursue at the end of the day. So I think it's, it's really wonderful. It only enables us to actually think it further. I think we finally have the technologies and the science required to even think about what it could look like to actually take this take this up a notch and create some of the wonderful futures that before were only barely imaginable, but that we now finally have the technologies to actually make real.

Jesse: Yeah, so I think there's also like this argument that we should steer our efforts more into democratizing or equalizing the progress we've already made across the world. So why specifically focus on the creation of novel technologies that raise the ceiling?

Allison: I don't mean to say that it's not useful to also really have spread the technological progress that we've made further. Like I think that this is one saying that. The future of us are already here. It's just not evenly distributed. And you know that that's true at many extents. But I also think that with more technological programs, we also enable the ability for more people to engage in these positive sum dynamics and to participate in the civilization of project that we have going on and to increase access to that.

And so I think the two, again, I think are not really in contradiction with each other. There's a lot to say about preserving what we already have and how far we've already come. That's really wonderful and very, very, I think necessary, right? This kind of like yeah, conservatism to some extent of all the progress that we've made so far and not really like figuring it out how we can make the world more antifragile is extremely important. And at the same time, , I don't think that should distract from a few more people trying to reach for the stars. Literally and figuratively. And and I think ultimately it's up to the individual person, right?

 There will be ultimately like an, I think an ideal future. Those that kind of like, you know, stay on earth and really preserve what we've got so far and what we've built so far. And really like. Preserve this pristine garden of of Earth. And then there may be those that like, are exploring entirely new worlds either in space or different, let's say like you know, computer enabled virtual environments.

And I think both are useful, right? And I think ultimately the universe, I hope has enough space for all of these individual interests to flourish without one detracting from the other very much.

[00:06:51] Existential Hope

Jesse: Yeah, I do agree that both go hand in hand and probably focusing on the creation of novel technologies does a lot to further increase the access to the existing technologies. So you've founded Existential Hope. What's the story behind starting it and why does the world need a positive narrative of the future.

Allison: I started it from this like notion. I remember I was in, in London at the time and studying. And I was studying a philosophy of science with a particular focus on AI safety. That was 10 years ago. When I did my master of science like thesis, and I remember already then like really worrying about existential risk because life seemed to me amazing.

I think the cost of potential civilization seemed to be amazing. And then kind of like worrying about, or like figuring out for the first time that this may not be something that. It's, we can just take for granted, but that there may actually be existential risk that can kind of like shut the whole thing down, was really terrifying.

So I really tried to focus on like one of the I think then kind like promise that seemed to me most pressing, which was ai but through that kind of like the collateral was I didn't myself become quite a doomer but like I at least read like a lot of doomy literature.

Like last one was already like kind of a thing then and. . And, and, and there was just a lot of writing about like how, you know, we may really inevitably go extinct. Like there was a lot of kind of like fermi paradox and so forth. Anyway, I dove pretty deep in the most of doomer literature and I think then over time in general, there was this kind of cultural wave of like people feeling pretty powerless in the face of thinking about what they could contribute to the future. And then I had this one moment where I discovered Foresight on the internet randomly by doing research for my thesis at the time, and I couldn't believe it. Like there were people out there in 1986, which was when Foresight was founded in the Bay Area that were deeply optimistic about the future.

They were working on pretty ambitious technologies much before they were as possible as they are now. And they had this like pretty, I think, proactive attitude also towards accounting for the risks. So they were really thinking about the risks of technologies as part of a necessary strategy to like make them real in kind of like in a pretty pragmatic way.

They had these ambitious technological goals, nevertheless, not being poly about the risks. And they were kind of like working in this pretty pragmatic way on advancing technology and accounting for risk along the way. Anyway, I was really inspired by that and I, I thought it couldn't be possible that people were like, You know, so optimistic about the future.

I had like really rarely ever seen that in such a practical way. Obviously, like there was a lot of transhumanist literature and so forth out there, but it all seemed a bit dated. I got super inspired by this and then I did a deep dive basically into just like roaming around the internet, figuring out all of the positive literature that I could find about either specific technologies but also generally positive sci-fi.

There has been this asymmetry that. Like many of the positive visions that we had about the future, they're either pretty dated or like, you know, they just don't really feel right right now. we've just kind of been like dragging our feet at creating like modern visions.

Of what positive futures could look like if we don't wipe ourself out. And meanwhile, I think every day in our general media, we are bombarded with things like Black Mirror and, and so forth that, that are pretty compelling near and short term like negative dystopian sci-fis. And so I think there's this asymmetry and I really do believe that ultimately we can't really build what we can't imagine. Christine Peterson, one of our Foresight's co-founders, she said it really well one day. There's a reason why you're not supposed to park your car on the side of the road because people end up driving where they're looking. And so if we only ever look at like all of the like potential negative effects of technology, then I think we kind of like helplessly almost create them by, you know, creating these pretty adversarial dynamics and may actually bring them about.

Anyway, so I think there's at least something to be said for kind of like creating an alternative and like actually looking to as to where we do wanna be going. So it started off as this kind of like just collection and index of positive resources about the future.

Then a bunch of other people started contributing. Now there are specific positive future scenarios that were built with a variety of different, like positive thinkers from technologists to scientists to philosophers. We have like a monthly podcast in which we interview people on their positive visions for the future.

And so it became a movement because people are hungry for this, but it's still kind of difficult to actually like, imagine what positive futures could look like. We need more training in that, and so I think there's a lot more people required to do this well.

Jesse: Amazing. Yeah, I do agree. I think it's very important to layout this optimistic future in order to create it and it's very much needed in current society. Could you imagine bringing the concept of existential hope into popular culture?

Allison: I think that would be awesome. I should also say that this concept wasn't developed by me I came across it, it was an academic concept, so it was a paper written by Toby Ord and Owen Cotton Barrett for at the Future of Humanity Institute. And they basically had it as a pretty academic concept.

 They juxtaposed it against the concept of existential risk. If an existential catastrophe would be something after which the expected value of the universe would be much lower than it currently is, than in an existential hope event or like a eucatastrophe would be an event after which the expected value of the universe would be much higher than it currently is.

And I think Toby Ord's one example of this, for example, is the creation of life. Life was like this deeply eucatastrophic event. Since reading that, obviously it's been a relatively academic paper and eucatastrophe is not like an ideal term for this because it's still bounces around with catastrophe.

It's very difficult to pronounce. And so we have been trying to like popularize the whole concept a little bit just by, we had a bounty out there to come up with better terms for eucatastrophe. One was like civilizational wing but there were many others too.

So we've been trying to just kind of like make this concept a little bit more palatable. Ultimately the best way to do that really is by creating scenarios that are not too utopian and like too naive, where there's still kind of like some struggle along the way to get there. But making these futures like ultimately exciting and novel, one thing that I think is missing a bit from the media, it's like these more intricate, well thought out, positive scenarios, which are not a hedonistic utopia or like a kind of like Wall-E situation.

We really need to get a bit more creative. And there was this really wonderful competition recently from the Future of Life Institute. And there was a contest for people to develop an AI timeline, I think it was to 2040 or 2045 of a positive AI future. And they built a very concrete specific time and almost yearly with specific technological predictions. Not only ai, but like how AI would also affect like biotechnology and, and so forth. And then in, in addition to the timeline, they created two stories in the life of a person or like a creature living in this 2045 world with advanced ai that was positive.

And they also created an art piece. And so I was a judge in this contest and some of the submissions were absolutely amazing. We need much, much more than that. Ultimately if we create stories that are compelling enough, or like at least like little narrative devices, we could really potentially get Hollywood or more like people that are a bit more skilled at the actual execution of this, interested in this.

And I think people are hungry for it. It's just a little bit harder to make positive stories than negative stories because, you know, like a normal story, story arc always has a big challenge. And then this kind of like turnaround point or something. But, so we need to, we need to think a bit differently about this, ultimately it can totally be done.

 A best example of like a really deeply, kind of terrifying story that gets across the importance, for example of longevity is the fable of the Dragon-Tyrant by Nick Bostrom, which compares Death with a Dragon that always kinda like every year demands. And demands prey and, and fed with with people dying.

I encourage people to check it out. I imagine something like this, but done in a perhaps more positive framing, but we need a better way to communicate like just what the future could have in store to the general population so that they can actually get excited and and help contribute.

Because I think most of the time when you ask people that are doing really ambitious projects, What got them excited or what got them first interested. They usually reference sci-fi, you know, they reference a media piece like, you know, that is still what gets people interested in this. So I think we need to just put it on the plate again for the general population.

Otherwise, they, they would just not go there.

[00:15:32] Talent facilitation environments

Jesse: Yeah, totally agree. I think it probably starts very early on in childhood or Higher education. So let's, let's speak a bit more about talent facilitation environments. What are essential elements in those environments? I think belief and support and peers and resources, do you agree with these four points or do you have different thoughts?

Allison: Yeah, I mean, I think in your proposal, for example, for the recent competition, I think you really nailed a few of the core principles of like what I think makes people really shine. And what makes them learn fast? So just looking at like what worked well, for example, Foresight has a fellowship in biotechnology, neurotechnology nanotechnology, decentralized computing and space.

We are now in the seventh year of this fellowship. And we also have a senior fellowship. And so a senior fellows are those people that have been around with us for a long time. Some, some even since our inception, since 1986. One thing that at least has worked locally for us, and I don't know how well replicable that is, but it's like creating like an intergenerational cohort.

And so the fact that we have not only our senior fellows, not only our like general fellows, which are usually like in the, you know, PhD postdoc age roughly. But now since this year, we also have a prodigy fellowship. Because we actually received a ton of applications of people that were underage under 21.

And we didn't know that because we had a blinded review and afterwards we're just like, oh damn, those folks are really young. They were like 14. And from just reading the application, I thought they were like, I don't know, 35 or something. You know, I have like found a companies da, da, da, and. Anyway, I was super inspired by this and so now we have kind of like, just by coincidence, this kind of cohort of people that are like everything from, I guess like 65 to 14.

And they interact with each other all the time at Foresight, and they find those interactions the most valuable ones because oftentimes people that are now in their senior age, they really like, they've come a long way. They know exactly the kind of like technology boom and bust cycles that you have to go through.

You know, like for example, technology, ai. Longevity. Those were all technologies that already had a hype, like, you know, 30, 40 years ago their first hype and then nothing really happened. People got like, you know, a little bit disillusioned. There were like a few kind of like institutional, political kind of like factors that contributed to it.

And now those technologies that are picking up again. And for many people that are now working on these technologies, it seems like it's the first kind of like hype. . But I think like for them also understanding that there may be another S curve or like another slowdown along the way and just, you know, having a long breath and learning from people that have been around for the first boom and bust.

 What failed, what could they do better? What's different now? I think there's so much kind of to learn from this intergenerationality. The second thing that I think is really unique, at least about like our environment now, and again, I don't know how much replicable that is, is multidisciplinarity.

 We have arbitrarily, especially academia have arbitrarily like sliced progress into specific departments. But much of the progress, if you think about it, actually happens at the intersection. Of specific scientific fields, and I think unless we look there we won't really get there because.

It's very uncomfortable for someone who's like a, like specialized in chemistry, for example, to also have to figure out what's new in biotechnology. Especially if they're a specialist and like, like an extreme expert in one area, it's very. Kind of difficult to be a new and like an early starter.

Again, an entirely different scientific field. And so you need to kind of bring them other technological areas that could potentially of value for their progress on a silver plate and really kind of like, you know, facilitate more coordination across different technological areas. And I think that's what we do relatively well at Foresight. So I, I would say that we're not like the main. Kind of like leading organization in each of these individual fields. Like let's say there are better organizations and longevity biotech, if you just focus about that. But I think what we can help provide and what I found be useful is creating more of this interdisciplinarity and like really helping people understand why other fields could be useful for them.

And I think ultimately like this, kind of like more thinking in terms of long-term goals rather than thinking in terms of like, Existing kind of straight jackets of departments and what you can do within them is I think a pretty useful way to think about progress. But it's also something that like is uncomfortable and needs to be retrained because it's not really a thing that academia encourages.

Jesse: I found the intergenerational cohort aspect very interesting. Is it more like a peer dynamic or is it more like a mentorship dynamic? Can you expand a little bit on that?

Allison: I guess it started as a mentorship dynamic and became a peer dynamic because like many of our senior folks, like really just treasure, like all the progress that's happening now. One example, Mark Miller, he's one of our senior fellows, and he has been around since our early days.

He was an early cypher punk on the cypherpunk mailing list. He gave a talk, I think in 1990 something called computer security as the future of law in which him and Nick Szabo in the audience, like one of the earliest smart contract inventers really talk about many of the things that we now kind of take for granted.

So that back then, right, like in 1990, I think it was some, something like that, on 1994, they talked about smart contracts. They talked about voluntary associations on the internet. And so pretty much what we have now is network states, they talked about. And the importance of computer security.

They talked about kind of decentralized corporation across humans and AIs through computer security. I guess like technological. , but enabled by computer security laws. And I think that is still something that's undervalued, like the security aspects of ai actually.

Anyway, so this kind of talk foreshadowed a bunch of the kind of like existing crypto commerce applications and solutions. And so the other day, you know, I asked Mark, I was like, well, back in the days you talked about, you know, most of the stuff that is now gradually coming online, really, you know, and that people are now really working on.

And I asked him are you bitter about this at all? Because, you know it often seems that people that are working on these technologies think that, they're doing something entirely novel. And don't really check that actually people like 20, 30 years ago have had these ideas already.

What Mark said was really inspiring. He was like, no, I'm so delighted. I'm delighted to live in a world. And to live in a time where many of the things that I could only dream about are gradually becoming real. And they're obviously becoming real much differently than he had envisioned, but nevertheless, many of the ingredients are there.

And so I think for people that have been around for the early days, it's also really, really inspiring to be around others who are now really actively working on making their dreams come true. And for them to kind of be a part of it and shape it in useful ways. And so I, I found that to be at least just really interesting to see from the outside.

 If you look at many of the early ideas they're now more relevant than ever. Like even things like in the early engines of Creation, which was the book that led to Foresight's foundation. There was a discussion, for example, about active shields and those would be like decentralized defense fabrics.

So currently, if we think about existential risk, we often think about the fact that we have decentralized technological development and that's pretty dangerous. And instead we should have this kind of top down. Perhaps approach to like, ultimately monitor all the bio labs and then have this enforcement layer.

And I think that's also a pretty big risk. This kind of like top-down single, whether it's an AI or like a government that can like, monitor and, and like ultimately defend against all the risks that we're so worried about. I think we need something in the middle like this, kind of like a more decentralized multipolar checks and balances, perhaps encrypted monitoring layer that can monitor for specific risks we are worried about, but do so in a way that it's still kinda like decentralized and mutually accountable rather than it just being one top-down player. And those concepts were already kind of come up with in like 1986, you know, and now people are gradually trying to figure out for AI regulation, for example.

How do you do it? We can't just have totally decentralized progress. We can't really have a top down kind of approach to regulating it downward. And I think many of these ideas that we're trying to do something really in innovative in the middle I think are now more relevant than ever.

And so whenever I go back into our archives, I'm still always flabbergasted by how relevant these ideas are. So it's, it's been interesting.

[00:23:54] Foresight Fellowships

Jesse: Cool. I was wondering in current systems, aspiring researchers, they are supposed to rise through the ranks of academia before decades before contributing to significant research. What are some steps that are actually necessary to pursue research at the frontier? You spoke about quite a few prodigies that are applying to your fellowships. How do the foresight fellowships fit into that? Are they more like a meta layer or are they really pushing them forward to the frontier?

Allison: Well, it's a great question. The fellowship has evolved a little bit, so currently it's still a supportive program. For example, like we don't expect people to contribute to research that we think is important. We literally just try to kind of snatch people up.

That we already think are doing amazing work. We have a call with them and then we send them a list of people that we think they should be talking to and give them that we've been around for 35 plus years in various different technological areas, including biotechnology, nanotechnology, newer technology space, decentralized computing you name it.

We usually have a few people that at least they should be talking to. And that's a mix usually between more senior people in their field or potential philanthropists or potential investors or potential entrepreneurs that have done something similar to them. A weird way to say what we do is we kind of like operate like a science and tech Tinder

We really try to matchmake people with other folks who could really help them along. So far at least we haven't. . We have given some, some grants as well, but we've usually focused on matchmaking. I'm usually just matchmaking, trying to make introductions for people that may be useful.

And so that has usually proven the most useful, I think, for people just as matchmaking function. But that being said, we are currently gearing up to also give out internal in-house grants. Mostly focused on AI and like security and ai. Whole brain emulation for AI safety and so forth, like in more kind of like strange areas, I guess.

And so I will let you know how that goes, but that's not been within our wheelhouse so far, it's easier to connect people that can fund our fellows with the fellows directly rather than like us kind of like intermediately managing the money. But nevertheless, now we do it a little bit differently, probably soon.

 Apart from that one thing that they have always found most useful, apart from just talking individually to mentors, is in each of these areas that I mentioned, like in each of these technologies, we have annual technical workshops where we invite all of our fellows travel paid to a workshop in that field.

So for example the one that I'm hosting on Monday and Tuesday is for whole brain emulations for AI safety. It's gonna be in Oxford. And we are inviting basically our newer tech fellows and a bunch of AI safety people including funders, including more senior folks and so forth to kind of like just spend two days.

It's always the kind of same format to kind of like create this third space where they can work on the long-term goals of the technologies that they usually don't have an incentive to work on in academic settings or even in startup settings. And so I think creating these like carved out spaces where people are brought together and highly curated across topics of common interest that are very difficult for them to kind of like carve out space for in their normal academic and institutional constraints.

I think they found that also really useful because that's ultimately, especially if you are like one researcher in an area, but you care about a long term goal that also requires other fields to make progress on. You don't really know how to find these people, you know, and because we are at the intersection of technologies, we have a little bit of a better bird's eye view. We can do the curating function a little bit better and bring our fellows together with people that usually I think they wouldn't really have met. And for that, I think these beautiful long-term collaborations kind of like get going. For example, we had a fellow, Patrick Mellow.

Who was really interested in geo-engineering and like long-term perspectives on climate change. He gave a talk about that at a faucet event. Met Matty Hall who was, I think back then said Open AI or Y Combinator. And they started this company then together based on his talk Living Carbon. You know, they raised money from, I think there was 30 million I think in the last round or something.

They had a really good good head start together. They're a wonderful team. And I think those more tricky connections to make we do try to hold space for that and so far it's, it's working relatively well.

It's just hard to really follow up on that because sometimes those things only happen like five years later or something, you know? I think that interdisciplinarity is important. One thing that is very difficult still is that most people, especially in academia, are totally strapped into this really incredible publish or peril dynamic where they need to apply for funding.

Funding is given to very specific problems. Usually within one kind of like developmental focus or like one topic area. These grants are usually prioritizing incremental progress over like really long-term goals, just because then you can publish a new result and you can actually say that the grant was successful rather than doing the more high risk, high reward, multidisciplinary collaborations.

It's really difficult. Academia I mean, it's amazing what, what still comes out of it at the end of the day. I'm very impressed. But you know, just talking to the people that that are in Yeah, in these. In these academic silos, it's just difficult to, they, they all have an appetite for making, like progress on big goals, but it's hard to do in the current system.

It's, it's difficult.

[00:29:14] Motivations of charitable funding

Jesse: Yeah. So what would you say motivates charitable funding such as grants or the creation of fellowships? Why do donors contribute?

Allison: I hope that I can channel our donors here a little bit. Nevertheless, you know, I'm not in a position to do some myself, so take this with a grain of salt. But usually when I talk to them I mean it's all very different. They all have kind of like specific goals. But many of them still care about the vision.

So Foresight was founded on The Visions Laid out in Engines of Creation, which is this book that Eric Drexler authored on the long-term potential of molecular nanotechnology in addition to ai. Having incredible impacts on longevity, on space development, on energy, on climate. Basically like a really wonderful future enabled by this fusion of AI and nanotech.

Now, that's what got people really inspired, and that's ultimately what created the shelling point around all of these technologies for Foresight. Many people that, you know, I talk to in our community still are inspired by this long-term. Really ambitious version of a positive future enabled by technology.

They don't really know how else to bring it about because they, yeah, like academia for example, if you're, even if you're trying to fund an a project in academia, oftentimes the organizations take 30 to sometimes 60% of the funding. If I were to donate to a university, they literally, that is the cut that Harvard takes, I think 30 to 60%.

 It really depends on the department, I think. But that's insane, you know, and so we try to keep the overhead as low as possible on our end. yeah, people are, are inspired by ambitious visions for the future. They don't really know how else to support them because normal academic environments that could potentially work on these long-term problems, take a big cut, and they're not really kind of carved out to push for on these long-term goals that often require across university collaboration. And so they try to incentivize us to look for these people, bring them together in these like extra institutional settings and try to just encourage them along the way.

So I think that's mostly what motivates them. Many people also very deeply care about the risks. Oftentimes when you care about technological risks you know, it's difficult to actually figure out like, you know, where to contribute. I think effective altruism, for example, is a great like you know, option here.

But many of the people that I think are contributing to us that have a risk focus, they think that often risks can be addressed well through building technologies in a differentially safety enhancing way. And so they have a very kind of tech native view on the world.

And so they, you know, try to really encourage us as a nonprofit to push for safety and security enhancing technologies over unguided technological progress. That's maybe a channeling. I don't mean to say that we're the only organization in town.

There's a lot of other fantastic organizations that do this really blue sky scientific thinking really well. There's convergent research, which is spinning out a bunch of like fros like focus research organizations that tackle these long-term problems. There's speculative technologies. It's a new project as well that is also trying to fund really ambitious, long-term scientific goals.

So there are more and more organizations like this popping up that actually have ambitious scientific goals in mind. But there's still too few, you know, like we, we need more. We absolutely need more!

[00:32:29] The Longevity Prize

Jesse: Is that also part of why you co-initiated the longevity price? Or why do you crowdsource research funding, is there a market gap?

Allison: Yeah. There's a fewer prizes, for example, like XPRIZE is something that really try to put a lot of money behind very ambitious scientific goals, but I think that, you know, you also need to somehow steer progress along the way. Right?

 Sometimes it's really useful to have something that is actually like a little bit more incremental in the sense that you can win a prize more often and like to actually open up a field like these very ambitious prizes will only be born by people that have already been in the field for a long, long time.

And so what we've tried to do with the Longevity Prize and basically VitaDAO put a proposal in for like Bitcoin crowdfunding that through Vitalik and a few other really wonderful folks actually got a ton of interest. And then they contacted us if we wanna collaborate with them on the project.

Because we have a relatively, I think, good longevity network. And then Methuselah Foundation also joined. And so it's been this kind of like totally patchwork project across organizations to just support longevity research and not only like the super high end goals that take you years and years to achieve for which like a prize money is often not enough.

You know, also need stable follow on funding and so forth. But rather what it's trying to do is like open up the space for new proposals in the longevity space. Because if you think about longevity, like. I now, there's so much interest in the area that really has not been there before.

 I remember when we did our longevity conferences seven years ago, we did them in a, I think it was like a families or like a, yeah, like a kind of like weekend club next to a squash court. And they were like maybe 30 people that were diehard longevity contributors.

And now, recently there's just been a huge kind of amount of people streaming into the field like. There was Altos Labs that was funded like, you know, pretty well and there's retro bio. That is a really wonderful effort. Apollo VC is a longevity VC that only focuses on longevity with a pretty big kind of like cushion, but I think what's missing is that people are looking for like, novel solutions.

And so we are just trying to, through smaller prizes, but very kind of like regular low overhead prizes, trying to incentivize more people to contribute to the field. To give new ideas to like, know, like just push, push the envelope off the kind of like strange parts of the field forward.

And I think that's what these crowdfunding prizes are good for. And I think doing that regularly and really creating a community around those prizes is, is something that's useful. We do the same with the Feynman prize for nanotechnology that we give once a year since 1991. And now we have a new price that is coming up this year for computer security and we are probably collaborating with a similar prize for space technologies with Patrick Finley, one of our space fellows for like proposal lenders. And so I think prizes are nice if they don't require lots of overhead and if they encourage more people to get into the field that may not otherwise have done so.

[00:35:21] Raising aspirations

Jesse: Let's circle back to the beginning where we were speaking about raising aspirations in order to create a more optimistic future. If you had the chance to make it happen systemically, what would be your first step in order to raise aspirations individually and collectively?

Allison: Well, I think like at least what works for me is a thought experiment, I guess. I once actually asked myself this because I realized that I spend a lot of time, like basically, most of my waking hours working at Foresight, working for Foresight, working on these ambitious science and tech initiatives trying to avoid risks from technologies. And I was like, wow, man, is this all worth it? Am I just kind of tricking myself and at the end of the day I will be 80 and perhaps at the end of my life and realize that we didn't reach longevity escape velocity and many of the technologies that we were pushing for maybe didn't come to fruition.

Maybe there's even an existential risk that really has the potential to wiping us out. I care so much about these technologies and at the end of the day I may think, well, it may have just been. Not a distraction, but at least like a kind of like dream or like, almost like a religious pursuit.

And instead, maybe I should have just spent more time with my family and friends and explore the world. So I, I definitely do sometimes think about that, but then I ask myself the opposite question of now let's imagine I would give up on these more long term kind of existential hope visions and technologies. Then I figure out soon enough that an existential risk is likely or that something terrible happens in the world or that a specific technology could have made it over the cusp if only a few more people had tried hard and like stuck with it. And I think that would be a worse world.

 If I decided not to contribute because I think the chances are low of success and then I figured out at the end maybe I could have contributed. I think that's a worse world than if I try to contribute and ultimately fail. Once you see the opportunity cost and you then, you know, think it's still worthwhile trying to make a difference then I think you have no space anymore to complain how unlikely all of this stuff is because you've just accepted it's pretty unlikely. But nevertheless, the alternative is worse. And not everyone makes that decision. But I think once you kind of make that, then I think you can really go ahead pretty optimistically about the work that is still left to, to be done. 

 The best part about this whole thing is that you know, at the end of the day, the work itself is super rewarding. I think many people that work on these long-term scientific challenges and trying to really improve the world find it useful because that work is really fun. You make fantastic friends and meet really wonderful people along the way. And so I think if there's anything to be said to like raise people's aspirations that I remember when I was in Germany and couldn't really imagine what my life would be because I had these high hopes for the future and like thought we would just never get there and I would definitely have no chance to contribute since I was in Hamburg in a little tiny suburb.

 I somehow made my way to San Francisco and it just turned my life from black and white into color. And I think just meeting these people that care about the same things that are incredibly, like, humbling, smart, caring and just really trying to do this for the right reasons.

I think has been like probably the biggest things that changed my life so far. If you wanna perhaps change your aspirations, I would say find a community of like-minded people. It's now easier than ever to go on the internet, find blogs like LessWrong, find communities where you can contribute. Even just Reddit. I have a whole list of index on existential hope about other groups and communities that are thinking really positively about the future. You don't necessarily need to move anymore to a different place. There's now so much like that you can just kind of discover just by being part of an internet community, or just a Twitter community.

But there's so many ways now to find your tribe and other people that deeply care that I think it's very difficult to not have higher aspirations if everyone around you is kind of like pulling you with them, you know? And I think that's ultimately the most rewarding things, like doing things that you think are intrinsically meaningful in a community of like-minded people has been definitely I think a pretty big game changer for me.

And, and I really salute you for trying to engineer these types of communities and experiences better. I thought that your proposal was really well adapted to do actually Exactly that. And I think ultimately, yes, we need a lot of education, but what actually drives people is, I think, the intrinsic motivation that these things are possible and then the support that you get offered by the community if things get hard.

And so I think to the extent that, that your proposal is really trying to push that forward, I think it's exactly in the right spot of things that could potentially be successful.

Jesse: Thank you. That's a perfect note to finish on being optimistic, finding your community intentionally and profiting from the mimetic forces that drive you in the right direction. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It was a great pleasure to talk to you today.

Allison: Very much likewise. It was a ton of fun. Thanks a lot.