Insights

We Gave a Village Personal AI Agents. Here's What Happened↗

Edge City and Cosmos Institute gave 239 residents of Edge Esmeralda personal AI agents. Through Simocracy (led by Protocol Labs), residents created 82 Sims with constitutions and values that allocated over $10k in community treasury funding across 35 proposals — an early glimpse of agent-mediated governance.

Programmable Economies & Governance: Upgrading Society's Operating System

An overview of PL R&D's Programmable Economies & Governance focus area — the programmable infrastructure societies use to decide, allocate, verify, and coordinate — and the four opportunity spaces and inflection points we believe are within reach.

Allison Duettmann — Why We Don't Have to Die: Cryonics, Uploading, and Existential Hope

Juan Benet speaks with Allison Duettmann, CEO of the Foresight Institute, about why cryonics and mind emulation could mean we don't have to die, how whole-brain emulation and connectomics could keep humans compatible with superintelligent AI, how nanotechnology could rebuild the physical world, and the case for Existential Hope — imagining flourishing futures as a precondition for building them.

How PL R&D Accelerates Breakthroughs

The first in a series: how PL R&D moves frontier ideas from open research into deployed systems across four focus areas — how we drive, measure, and sustain breakthroughs, and what our track record teaches us.

Can Quadratic Funding Go Mainstream? Ma Earth, Hypercerts & the Future of Public Goods

Kevin Owocki sits down with Matthew Monahan (Ma Earth) and Holke Brammer (Hypercerts Foundation) to discuss a bold new experiment: a $1 million Quadratic Funding round designed to bring public goods funding beyond the crypto ecosystem and into the mainstream.

Konrad Kording — The Power of a Single Neuron and a Path to Simulating the Brain

Juan Benet speaks with Konrad Kording of the University of Pennsylvania about the surprising computational power of a single neuron, reading the brain's wiring down to molecular detail, and building compilers and simulations as a path toward understanding — and ultimately simulating — the brain.

Tom Oxley — Reading the Brain Without Opening the Skull

Juan Benet speaks with Tom Oxley, co-founder and CEO of Synchron, about the Stentrode — a brain-computer interface that reaches the motor cortex through a blood vessel without opening the skull — restoring independence to people with motor impairment and the path toward higher-channel-count neural interfaces.

Jacques Carolan — The Mission to Get Breakthrough Brain Treatments to Everyone

Juan Benet speaks with Jacques Carolan, a founding Programme Director at ARIA, about getting breakthrough brain treatments to everyone, how ambitious science programs can accelerate neurotechnology, and what it takes to move hard neurotech ideas toward patient impact.

Ben Rapoport — Treating Paralysis and Digitizing Brain Data

Juan Benet speaks with Ben Rapoport of Precision Neuroscience about treating paralysis, building scalable brain-computer-interface platforms, and how high-quality neural data can transform both clinical care and computational neuroscience.

How to Obtain a Complete Human Connectome at Synaptic Resolution Within the Next Decade

Announcing the Juan Benet Podcast: Launching With First Guest Max Hodak, CEO of Science Corp↗

Juan Benet Podcast launches with Max Hodak on neurotech, brain interfaces, Fast R&D, and more.

Max Hodak — Restoring Sight, Growing Neurons on Silicon, and Expanding Human Intelligence

Juan Benet speaks with Max Hodak of Science Corporation about restoring sight with retinal implants, biohybrid neural interfaces that grow neurons on silicon, the Science BCI ecosystem, and paths toward expanding human intelligence.