Neurotechnology: Opportunities and Challenges by Milan Cvitkovic | Devcon SEA

[Music] because you've had three talks so far okay cool right so K my name is Neeve I am from foresight Institute I'm chief of innovation there uh and I care a lot about whole brain emulation so we are a nonprofit in San Francisco we're a 501c3 uh and we were co-founded by Eric Drexler uh who's the god father of nanotechnology and Christine peton who coined the term open source uh we're 40 years old we're currently an allw woman team uh and we're looking to accelerate whole brain emulation so we have five key Focus areas nanotech neurotech biotech space Tech and computation with an overarching track called existential hope in which we hope to build out flourishing Futures as chief of innovation and strategy I oversee the fellowships the prizes and the grants and I also build Out Future programs to of which we will be discussing here today one is a lowii whole brain emulation Mouse brain prize which we'll be launching next year as well as our whole brain emulation fast GRS and grand prize uh because we are looking to accelerate this field dramatically uh so what is whole brain emulation you've heard about it from Juan but essentially it's the uploading of the brain onto the platform why do we want to do this because with the you know short timelines we think that this is a really great way that we might be able to coordinate and cooperate uh rather than just yeah evolving essentially uh with AIS which is what we want to do uh we also know that neurotech is super cool uh and that it's going to help us with modern day science uh and Medicine cognitive enhancement space Tech who doesn't want to jump in a spaceship right now and travel 2 million light years away I do I think it's kind of sad that I'm limited to my own physical being right now uh and I think also that that uh whole brain emulation is possibly going to help us uh with better understanding Consciousness uh obviously just like whole brain emulation has never been done before the human brain has never been mapped before Consciousness itself has also never really been defined uh properly so we've got a lot to cover and this is why it really is the New Frontier uh so I joined foresight two years ago one of the first projects that I really built out was our first whole brain emulation Workshop this here was a pretty big deal uh because it was the very first in the world and what we did is we brought together the original authors of uh the road map and asked them alongside AI alignment researchers and neuroscientists like why is this stagnated the report was written 20 years ago what's happened uh is this still relevant and what bottlenecks do we need to overcome the biggest thing for them was money uh and it was also because money is really hard to get when there's a lot of stigma involved with whole brain emulation it's kind of seen as a little bit weird a little a little bit icky even though as we've just listed there's a lot of benefits to actually exploring this and so that's what I can do and that's what I how I can help them as you can see here uh it's it's blowing up at foresight our community is like three times bigger than it has been and just keeps growing we actually have to reject a bunch of people which is pretty sad to do from a workshop we are already giving out with our AI safety grants um money to help people that are working um in our neurotech for a so a safer AI with neurotech these are some of our Gres I don't know if you haven't read yet but Mark posted on Les wrong it's very very good so please take the time to read it and this is caln's first whole brain emulation wet lab uh for Mouse brains pretty big deal because it's the very first in Europe and we help fund that with that so we are doing all that we can to progress things and we're building out as we go uh why is our community worth somewhat supporting because they're pretty cool and they're pretty good at what they do and they're all radical Moon shot uh so we've now had two Nobel Prize winners come out of our fireman prizes uh as you can see we've got sir Fraser St out here he submitted an essay the exact same essay nine years later W went on to win a Nobel Prize and then this year we also had Nick Baker uh win a Nobel Prize with the same work that he submitted 20 years earlier so a little bit more of a long game there but we're with him all the way uh and as you might see Jean Hub who's a pretty big deal in longevity the amaranth Foundation named his work uh one of the cornerstones and it's about essentially replacement therapies for aging brain tissue uh so we're all on the CP there uh great fellows uh including some of our core Community I see Michael Andre's in the audience he's working on hi-fi approaches to Mouse brains at the moment he's very good at Hardware so you know chat to him if you're interested please do I've got some incredible fellows this guy here Akash is working in India using wearables uh to better understand scent which is pretty unmapped at the moment uh but also these bcis are directly uh capturing EEG data uh and training AI so that we have better diagnostic tooling uh for cancer uh which is pretty cool uh sna Norman is uh working on ultrasound for bcis with his technology and this his frro not only has he mapped uh the human brain as best as it has been yet with ultrasound he's also managed to turn uh ultrasound which is normally like the size of a fridge uh into a teeny tiny chip which is this size and two weeks ago I stood in my living room with this chip and found my own heart valve beating on my own TV screen with it which is pretty huge I mean this is kind of what happens when you start exploring things because you start seeing how Innovation can just like fly and that's pretty great for Humanity uh so there are a lot of enabling Technologies already pushing toward W whole brain emulation if you haven't seen yet we've just mapped the uh fruit fly brain for the first time that's 138,000 neurons which is a pretty big deal uh you should watch the video on science if you haven't already so that's why we think it's possible we are launching next year a mouse brain lowii emulation prize uh that will be a million dollars a that incentivizes researchers to start working in this field uh it also just yeah it just helps progress things all together we think uh the timeline for this to be one is 2 to three years but actually uh simply through you know like positive competition uh this might be one sooner than that which would be even greater because when we're looking at shortening uh timelines we need to do all that we can to find progress and so that's what's happening there uh we are hoping to launch a whole brain emulation fast grants and grand prize so similar to metaculus Grants and the co fast grants we know that we can stimulate an industry this way we can help people with their pre R&D proof so that they can then go to the VCS with the proof and actually get the money to build it out but we need a little bit help first and so that's where we're hoping to lean in and be able to actually create space for this uh and obviously like $20 million is like the minimum uh that we're working with right now uh if we can grow that further then we can obviously like help more people and accelerate this even further so that's like a big deal for us also a $20 million prize uh for whole brain emulation of a human brain is definitely going to get people up in atam uh so that's what we think so come chat to me cuz I know that we're pretty short on time sorry if I went a little bit long uh if you'd like to know more about what we're doing and also want to get involved with whole brain emulation there are a lot of risks but we do want to do it the right way and we think we have the community and the means to to be that uh yeah thank you [Applause]