Otto Barten
Otto’s background is in physics, wind turbine engineering, and climate activism, until he realized that existential risks might be an even bigger issue. Now, he is running the Dutch nonprofit Existential Risk Observatory, focusing on informing the public and governments, organizing events, and doing research on AI existential risk. He published in TIME Magazine and many media on AI existential risk.
Christopher Coenen
is a political scientist working in the strongly interdisciplinary field of technology assessment at the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (ITAS) within the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany. At KIT-ITAS, he heads the research group ‘Life, Innovation, Health and Technology’ and also conducts research on the history of transhumanist thought and its significance in the Anthropocene. He is editor of the journal ‘NanoEthics: Studies on New and Emerging Technologies’.
https://www.itas.kit.edu/english/staff_coenen_christopher.php
Didier Coeurnelle
Vice-Chairman of the French Transhumanist Association Technoprog, he campaigns for research into a much longer life in good health. He is co-president of the HEALES association.(Healthy Life Extension Society). He has published Et si on arrêtait de vieillir (2013) and, with Marc Roux, Technoprog. Le transhumanisme au service du progrès social. (2016).
Beatrice Erkers
At Foresight Institute, Beatrice Erkers, as COO and Director of Existential Hope, focuses on nurturing a scientific community dedicated to future-oriented technologies. She manages the Existential Hope group, encouraging thoughtful discussions on technology’s role in society. Beatrice also co-hosts the Existential Hope podcast and oversees its platform, fostering a space for collaborative exploration and ideas. Her work is centred around connecting people and ideas to shape a positive technological future.
James Hughes
is an American sociologist and bioethicist. He is the Executive Director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and is the associate provost for institutional research, assessment, and planning at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is the author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future (2004).
Lou de Kerhuelvez
Researcher and practitioner exploring alternative economic, justice, and political systems to legacy institutions in the context of the digital revolutions – systems able to meet the existential challenges of our time.
At Foresight Institute I build towards technology-enabled better futures, and connect and grow a decentralized scientific community advancing those goals.
Through Embassy Network and Feÿtopia, I support the growth of an intervowen network of place-based communities experimenting with new forms of governance and solidarity.
Pepijn Kip
Pepijn is an entrepreneur, technology expert and poet, with a background in psychology and philosophy.
For years he has advised the business community on innovation and new technologies. For the past three years, he has focused on artificial intelligence (AI) expertise in a prototyping studio.
Randal Koene
a Dutch neuroscientist, neuroengineer, and co-founder of carboncopies.org, an outreach and road mapping organization for advancing Substrate-Independent Minds (SIM). He first proposed the term and specific approach called whole brain emulation.
Jessica Lombard
Former commissioned officer in the French military, Jessica Lombard is a PhD in philosophy and a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair « Ethics, Technology and Humanities » (ETHICS EA-7446) of the Catholic University of Lille, France. She specialises in the fields of philosophy of technology, phenomenology and metaphysics. Her main studies entail the question concerning technology and technical objects; human nature and evolution; transhumanism and technical imaginaries. She recently published « French Philosophy of Technology and Technoscience: A Study on the Mode of Existence of Bio-objects », in the book « Canguilhem and Continental Philosophy of Biology », Springer edition.
Matthew J. Dennis
is an assistant professor in ethics of technology at TU Eindhoven. He specialises in the ethics of human enhancement, artificial intelligence, and the future of work. His current research focuses on how online content creation orientates the deployment of human enhancement technologies. Before starting at TU Eindhoven, he was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow at TU Delft (2019–21) and an Early Career Innovation Fellow at University of Warwick (2019).
Sandrine Ngatchou
is an activist for black person health reproductive, also radical, liberal and decolonial feminist. her regular Job is Cybersecurity Tech Lead. She undertooks an meaning reflection on the role of technology in Black life, particularly in the field of assisted reproduction techniques.
Brenda Ramokopelwa
is a Futurist with ethical referents, Keynote Speaker, and Award-Winning Risk and Governance professional with years’ experience in the financial sector. She is the CEO of the Transdisciplinary Agora for Future Discussion (TAFFD’s), a Global Think and DO Tank committed to building the gateway into and out of Africa and facilitating young futurists.
Marc Roux
is cofounder and chair, since 2009, of the French Transhumanist Association (AFT-Technoprog). He co-organized several TransVision (in 2014, 2017, 2022 and 2023).
He’s frequently consulted for academic studies, by Government institutions or companies and the media. He wrote, with Didier Coeurnelle, TECHNOPROG: transhumanism at the service of social progress (in french, FYP, 2016).
Anders Sandberg
is senior research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI), University of Oxford. His research at the centres on management of low-probability high-impact risks, societal and ethical issues surrounding human enhancement, estimating the capabilities of future technologies, and very long-range futures. In addition, he is research associate of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, the Center for the Study of Bioethics (Belgrade), and researcher at the Mimir Centre for Long Term Futures (Stockholm). Topics of particular interest include global catastrophic risk, existential risk, cognitive enhancement, collective intelligence, neuroethics, SETI, physical eschatology, and public policy.
Aimen Taimur
is a PhD Researcher at Tilburg University and is part of the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society (TILT). She is interested in the human rights regulation of emerging AI-based technologies particularly those which impact cognitive liberty and behavioural modelling. Her doctorate research aims to place human rights protections against the challenges posed by AI on the fundamental right to freely think and the preservation of natural mental faculties underpinning independent cognitive rationalization. She is also the recipient of the 2023 Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) ongoing doctoral dissertation award for her doctoral project.
Natasha Vita-More
is Ex. Dir. of Humanity+, Co-Founder of Women in Longevity Leadership, and Founder, Senior Faculty of the Center for Transhumanist Studies. She is known for co-founding the transhumanist movement, innovating the future body prototype with AI and nanorobotics, and achieving a scientific discovery in the persistence of long-term memory in biostasis. She is the co-editor and author of The Transhumanist Reader (2013) and Transhumanism: What is It? (2018). Natasha is featured in The New York Times, Vogue, Wired, and Newsweek magazines.
David Wood
David Wood is the chair of London Futurists and the lead designer of the Vital Syllabus educational initiative. He is also the Executive Director of the LEV (Longevity Escape Velocity) Foundation. He is the author of 8 books, including « The Singularity Principles », « Vital Foresight », « The Abolition of Aging », « Smartphones and Beyond », and « Sustainable Superabundance ». Previously, he spent 25 years as a pioneer of the mobile computing and smartphone industries, including co-founding Symbian in 1998.
Zita Smit
Zita is a (bilingual) Dutch poet and artist. Active as a performer since 2011, she is now doing a Master in Theater at Hogeschool Zuyd, focused on Artistic Research. Zita writes and performs eclectic installations of word and sound, with a philosophical approach to humanity; its curses and its possible cures.