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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Announcing the Future Forum - Apply Now, published by isaakfreeman on July 6, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. We are excited to announce the Future Forum, an experimental 4-day conference taking place Aug 4-7 in San Francisco. We want to gather promising people from across communities interested in the long-term future of humanity, introduce them to each other, reflect on transformative technologies and their far-reaching consequences (upside and downside risks), and then we hope to generate new promising and thoughtful projects across this cross-community ecosystem. We expect around 250 attendees. We’re putting special emphasis on mingling EA and Silicon Valley tech. We think that Silicon Valley contains promising talent that does or could work on pressing problems with agency and ambition, but that it could also benefit from EA-inspired thoughtfulness about impact and downside risks of working on transformative technologies. On the flip side, we believe EA could generally benefit from more agency and ambition (judicious ambition). We think agency and ambition are best fostered by curated exposure to high-agency individuals, ideally resulting in not just acute inspiration but also more long-term influences on personal trajectories, such as inspiring friends or mentors. Other communities which will be represented or somewhat involved include Emergent Ventures, Rationalism, Longevity, Crypto, Space, among others. Generally, the Future Forum will be an in-person-only event, with no virtual component and no talks being recorded. The Event While the vast majority of the event is explicitly focused on 1-1s and small group conversations, we have a few speakers who will hold brief talks (~30min max) about topics they care about and give participants common topics to talk about with others. We’ve gotten strong buy-in from many of the communities we hope to bring together for Future Forum, and our current speaker line-up is: Holden Karnofsky from Open Philanthropy Anders Sandberg from FHI Daniela Amodei from Anthropic Patrick Collison from Stripe Ed Boyden from MIT/HHMI Tamara Winter from Stripe Press Jason Crawford from Roots of Progress Grant Sanderson (3Blue1Brown) Allison Duettmann from Foresight Institute Sam Altman from OpenAI Celine Halioua from Loyal (Please be aware that this line-up is likely to evolve further, with more additions from across communities.) Future Forum runs from August 4th-7th, which is the weekend after EAG San Francisco (EAG’s applications close on July 14th). In addition to EAG SF, there are some other major events and a general concentration of EAs happening in this 2-week time span in the Bay Area, so it might be generally good to come to the Bay around this time. What we hope to do We want to positively influence the trajectory of transformative technologies by: Identifying promising individuals in adjacent communities and providing resources for them to work on important issues With a focus on the tenet that a disproportionate part of positive progress is driven by few outsized-impact individuals, and thus focussing on potential outsized-impact individuals at the main event and their following career trajectories - e.g. here, or as a principle not dissimilar to hit-based philanthropy. An example of a community we want to be more in touch with: Many Emergent Ventures grantees seem very promising to do impactful work but might have not interacted with the conventional EA ecosystem by both not having been exposed to the ideas and people much. A specific example of what it might look like to find a promising individual and accelerate them towards working on a thoughtful, impactful project - ideally one with very asymmetric robust high upside and low downside potential (Asymmetry): the search for superbunker project leads. After identifying ...