Our mission is to place the mind as a central priority in human affairs. To carry out this mission, we research both human and machine mindware.
However, our mission extends beyond research. We also take action to save minds, which sometimes simply means saving lives.
In early 2020, as it became clear that millions of lives were threatened by SARS-CoV-2, we decided to focus our efforts on an open-source design of a vaccine that would be easy to produce and easy to administer. We thus created a new entity, the Rapid Deployment Vaccine Collaborative (RaDVaC). Future pandemics continue to be a global threat, and RaDVaC will continue to focus on the development of open-source vaccine development platforms.
As the current pandemic winds down, we are focusing on launching a number of other Mind First initiatives. One of the most important is our engagement with the topic of machine intelligence. As our essay “Response to Yudkowsky…” makes clear, we believe that well-established principles of evolutionary biology can provide a foundation to devise methods of designing and training intelligent machines that could dramatically reduce the risks currently in the public discourse. Indeed, synthetic intelligence, created in the right way, could help mitigate the risks that humanity poses to itself and to all life on Earth.