The FTX Foundation's Future Fund is a philanthropic fund making grants and investments to ambitious projects in order to improve humanity's long-term prospects.
We have a longlist of project ideas that we’d be excited to help launch.
We’re now announcing a prize for new project ideas to add to this longlist. If you submit an idea, and we like it enough to add to the website, we’ll pay you a prize of $5,000 (or more in exceptional cases). We’ll also attribute the idea to you on the website (unless you prefer to be anonymous).
All submissions must be received in the next week, i.e. by Monday, March 7, 2022.
We are excited about this prize for two main reasons:
- We would love to add great ideas to our list of projects.
- We are excited about experimenting with prizes to jumpstart creative ideas.
To participate, you can either
- Add your proposal as a comment to this post (one proposal per comment, please), or
- Fill in this form
Please write your project idea in the same format as the project ideas on our website. Here’s an example:
Early detection center
Biorisk and Recovery from Catastrophes
By the time we find out about novel pathogens, they’ve already spread far and wide, as we saw with Covid-19. Earlier detection would increase the amount of time we have to respond to biothreats. Moreover, existing systems are almost exclusively focused on known pathogens—we could do a lot better by creating pathogen-agnostic systems that can detect unknown pathogens. We’d like to see a system that collects samples from wastewater or travelers, for example, and then performs a full metagenomic scan for anything that could be dangerous
You can also provide further explanation, if you think the case for including your project idea will not be obvious to us on its face.
Some rules and fine print:
- You may submit refinements of ideas already on our website, but these might receive only a portion of the full prize.
- At our discretion, we will award partial prizes for submissions that are proposed by multiple people, or require additional work for us to make viable.
- At our discretion, we will award larger prizes for submissions that we really like.
- Prizes will be awarded at the sole discretion of the Future Fund.
We’re happy to answer questions, though it might take us a few days to respond due to other programs and content we're launching right now.
We’re excited to see what you come up with!
(Thanks to Owen Cotton-Barratt for helpful discussion and feedback.)
Prevent stable global totalitarian regimes through uncensorable broadcasts
Great Power Relations, Epistemic Institutions
Human civilization may get caught in a stable global totalitarian regime. Current and past totalitarian regimes have struggled with influences from the outside. So it may be critical to make sure now that future global totalitarian regimes will also have influences from the outside.
North Korea strikes me as a great example of a totalitarian regime straight out of 1984. Its systematic oppression of its citizens is so sophisticated that I could well imagine a world-wide regime of this sort to be stable for a very long time. Even as it exists today, it’s remarkably stable.
The main source of instability is that there’s a world all around North Korea, and especially right to its south, that works so much better in terms of welfare, justice, prospecity, growth, and various moral preferences that are widely shared in the rest of the world.
There may be other sources of instability – for example, I don’t currently understand why North Korea’s currency is inflated to worthlessness – but if not, then we, today, are to a hypothetical future global totalitarian state what the rest of the world is to North Korea.
Just like some organizations are trying to send leaflets with information about the outside world into North Korea, so we may need to try to send messages into the future just in case a totalitarian dystopia takes hold. These messages would need to be hard to censure and should not depend on people acting against their self-interest to distribute. (Information from most normal time capsules could easily be suppressed.) Maybe a satellite can be set on a course that takes it past earth every century and projects messages against the moon. This probably not the most cost-effective method, so I’d first like to think about approaches to this more. (From my blog.)
I’ve written this article about human rights in North Korea. Some parts are probably outdated now, but others are not, and the general lessons hold, I think.
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... (read more)All but very few of the citizens are isolated from all information from the outside, so that they have no way to know that the rest of world isn’t actually envious of the prosperity of North Korea and they aren’t under a constant threat from the US, and the south isn’t just US-occupied territory, etc. The only things that can weaken this information monopoly are phone networks from China that extend