A Futurist's Take on Longevity, Cryonics, Optimism & DeSci | Allison Duettmann

Welcome to Episode Nr. 5 of the DeSci Podcast! In this Episode, Allison Duettmann, President and CEO of Foresight Institute tells us how she got into futurism, why people are so pessimistic about the future, how Foresight chose the most important things to work on, Allison's positive visions of the future for humanity, what are Tech Trees and more! We hope you enjoy!  

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Timestamps: 

0:00 - Nanobots & Cryonics
0:27 - Allison & Foresight Intro
1:29 - How Allison got into futurism
4:36 - Positive visions of the future for humanity and raising reality to meet your expectations
8:16 - Optimism 11:52 - Why people are so pessimistic about the future
16:58 - Areas where people are too optimistic
19:12 - Foresight - how they found the most important things to work on (referring to decentralized computing, molecular machines, biotech for health extension, neurotech and space tech)
20:30 - Decentralized Computing
22:00 - Biotechnology for rejuvenation, longevity & cryonics
22:58 - Molecular and Nanotechnology
24:18 - Neurotechnology
26:01 - Spacetech
26:42 - What are Tech Trees?
32:27 - Surprising/Technological Bottlenecks
34:38 - Areas of Overlap between Tech Trees
38:40 - The unlock that DeSci Provides for Allison's work at Foresight
43:24 - Vetting people for domain expertise to participate in DeSci
46:52 - The Longevity Prize
50:00 - What excites Allison the most in DeSci and the technologies Foresight covers  
52:55 - How to get involved at Foresight 

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Links mentioned:  

Balaji on Tech Trees: https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1456163613857570821?s=20&t=XP1sJ8gBEKNw-V7fPHsNpw
Starships & Tokens (The Map) by Trent McConaghy https://medium.com/@trentmc0/starships-and-tokens-d8c32728a24b
Aaron King: Longevity Tech Tree: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg9Jpk2dLQM&t=164s 

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Notable quotes from Allison: 

"I got interested in Technologies through a wish for a longer happier life for myself and for civilization."  

"Despite the fact that life has been improving pretty steadily over the last hundreds of thousands of years, our realization that it has been has not been steadily adjusting. Most of the time if you ask around people think that things are getting worse, that violence is increasing, and pretty substantial societal flaws are increasing and so I think it doesn't often match with the actual improvement in living conditions that many of us were fortunate enough to receive over the past few hundred thousand years."   

"A positive outlook I think starts with a gratitude for how far we've come and just realizing what our ancestors put forth and how much they paid forward for us to get to where we are."  

"Rather than having this more default vision on the future of what would the path be in which we all self-destruct (which is certainly a morbid fantasy) which is easier to think about and somehow weirdly more attractive to our human minds actually, rather asking the other question of what would it mean to actively put a foundation in place in which we could build wonderful worlds."  

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