Our mission - Future of Life Institute

Appropriate Measures — Real Life

Changing the tech we use is not enough to mitigate the environmental and social harm of mass technology

Preprints and Papers Come to Life at FORCE2026

The future of interactive preprints and papers were on display at the FORCE2026 conference in Singapore, and here I discuss what was presented and what the future of "living figures" might hold

Intent-Based Architecture and Their Risks - Paradigm

Paradigm is a frontier technology investment firm that builds and invests in crypto, AI, robotics, and across new frontiers from the earliest stages.

The Ground Truth Institute

Could we engineer scientific revolutions, then spin out radical improvements to everyday life?

Inside the AI Index: 12 Takeaways from the 2026 Report | Stanford HAI

The annual report reveals a field hitting breakthrough capabilities while raising urgent questions about environmental costs, transparency, and who benefits from the technology.

Inventing New Nature

Defining the Protocol Institute's research mission

An End-to-End View of AI Safety

In this blog, Rachel Coldicutt OBE, Executive Director, Careful Industries discusses our newly published literature review on the safe adoption of artificial intelligence in engineered systems.

Investing in resilient infrastructure to safeguard scientific knowledge

Political threats to scientific data demand coordinated, resilient open infrastructure — IOI is helping build it.

Opinion | These A.I. Policies Will Hurt Our Business. We Should Do Them Anyway.

The risks posed by A.I. are too great to forgo any regulation, even for those who stand to gain tremendously from the technology’s rise.

The Year of the Software Factory

We are building LifeBuild, a personal operating system for your life where AI agents help you draft projects, prioritize your commitments, and stay on top of what matters—from health to relationships to finances and beyond. This Lab Notebook chronicles our explorations.

OpenAI debuts a life sciences AI model, entering crowd of tech giants selling to pharma

OpenAI became the latest tech giant to launch a life sciences-focused AI offering, aiming to build a biopharma business.

Is Life Just Different? | Quanta Magazine

The idea of ‘biological agency’ — that life devises its own goals and behaves accordingly — complicates our understanding of what it means to be alive. But does it serve a scientific purpose?

AI Safety Is a Narrative Problem · Special Issue 5: Grappling With the Generative AI Revolution

This op-ed explores power and narrative dynamics around AI. Drawing on pop-culture references, the professional experiences of the author and examples from 2023’s “Great AI Safety Hype Roadshow,” this piece draws on the literary criticism technique of practical criticism to consider how speeches and announcements from both Silicon Valley executives and research scientists to interrogate the media-friendly nature of p(doom) discourse—which focuses on the existential risks of AI (PauseAI, 2023)—and its likely consequences. The complexities of AI and its numerous social impacts can be difficult for even the most expert analyst to unpack. In spite of this, the potential of “existential threats” has successfully cut through to become a mainstay of mainstream media coverage over the last year. This piece will make the case that this is an effective narrative conceit that has achieved a number of ends that traditional science communication tends to find difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. Firstly, it is easy to understand. Simplification of this nature—that removes jargon and complexity and focuses on a single outcome—is much easier to fit on a TV rolling news ticker or on the cover of a tabloid newspaper than more well-balanced, representative opinions. Secondly, it inherits prior assumptions from well-known dramatic forms. P(doom) plays to stories familiar from Greek tragedy through to Marvel movies, in which lone male heroes battle ineluctable forces. Thirdly, it is imbued with urgency and so becomes difficult to ignore.

Home - FLI Worldbuilding Contest

It is frequently practiced by creative writers and scriptwriters, providing the context and backdrop for stories that take place in future, fantasy or alternative realities. Worldbuilding is a tool that can help us explore possible futures for our own world. It helps us better understand what sorts of worlds we may find more or less desirable, and how we might get to there. World builds don’t always have to be grounded in reality, but for our worldbuilding contest we asked contestants to make their imagined worlds plausible and aspirational. To better understand the constraints and ground rules that were used for this contest, visit the Rules page prior to exploring the worlds.