The Foresight Neurotech Tech Tree Project

During the past year I’ve had the pleasure to have worked on the Foresight Institute Neurotechnology Tech Tree project. This work has been in parallel to my work at IDUN Technologies in neuro earbud (in-ear EEG earbuds) product design and development and advancing neurotechnology outreach through NeuroTechX.

Neurotechnology is a broad field that has had a great deal of positive impact on society and has so much potential to impact and improve many aspects of our lives in the coming years and decades. The goal of the TechTree project is to make it easy to access and understand the Neurotech industry and landscape. I’ve been fortunate to work with excellent colleagues on the project lead by Maryna Polyakova 🇺🇦 including Russell Hanson and Sebastian Völkl. Thanks as well go to Allison Duettmann and Aaron King for leading the Tech Tree project at the Foresight Institute organization as well as the stakeholders and sponsors that gave feedback during the development process.

Neurotechnology TechTree

https://foresight.org/ext/ForesightNeurotechTree/

Neurotechnology TechTree Goals

The goal of the TechTree initiative at the Foresight Institute is to build technology trees for different domains including Neurotechnology, Molecular Machines, Space, Intelligent Cooperation, Longevity Biotech, and Existential Hope. These TechTrees can then be used by anyone from people outside of the fields to researchers, teachers, investors, startups, national funding bodies, and other stakeholders to understand and orient themselves in each field.

Neurotechnology Tree Structure

We focused on building a TechTree structure that connects different components of neurotechnology together and show a logical pathway for how parts connect to one another. The technology nodes in the tree can then connect to challenges we see and act as a discussion point for how to solve those large challenges like #Depression, #Dementia and #Alzheimer’s. Additionally broad trends in technology and goals for the future are included like #NeuroTwin, Whole Brain Emulation, Human Enhancement and also the Ethical Challenges that arise alongside technological advancements.

Supporting Decentralized Science

The Tech Tree project came along with the rise of the Decentralized Science movement. #DeSci is rapidly evolving but broadly focuses on building entities and structures to decentralize the key components of how science is done: funding, resources, IP ownership and knowledge publishing. There’s s tight integration of Web3 and blockchains in DeSci with Decentralized Autonomous Organization (#DAO) used to govern the contributions and leadership of how these complements are built and used. 

In the context of DeSci a Tech Tree can form a valuable component in directing funding and resources to specific parts of a technology landscape to improve the impact of funding and resources. DAOs like VitaDAO, AthenaDAO, Genomes.io and similar organizations can use Tech Trees to orient themselves in the tech landscape and understand how funding specific projects can have an impact on the goals of the DAO.

The TechTree is essential a knowledge graph or domain expertise layer. To aid in assessing impact, a next part of the evolution of TechTrees is the integration of Knowledge APIs to calculate and visualize the relative research focus and funding going into specific nodes.

Knowledge API Integration

When we presented the TechTree project at the DeSci workshop of ETH.Paris 2022 the question of scalability came up. In effect, is it efficient for a group of domain experts to map out a field, or would it be better to have a purely AI-based solution and infrastructure to go beyond the inherent human limits?

One way to move beyond our humans limits is to combine the structure of the TechTree with Knowledge APIs and AI for Break-through Prediction. Essentially, we looked at the feasibility of pulling in data from publication APIs of scientific journals and patents to characterize how individual nodes are being worked on in research communiques and by companies.

In a rudimentary way we could build out an architecture which looks at metrics like publications per year, and track the increase or decrease. It’s common in new fields for a few publications to come out that prove an idea works in the lab, and then it needs to be translated to a company to be built into a product and impact society. Publications will logically hit a peak and then level off, at which point we can assume that a part of the field has been reasonably well researched and understood. The relative increase in patents in an area will often go in parallel or follow to the research findings. 

Next Steps

What to learn more about the Neurotechnology TechTree, DeSci and the future? I gave a talk about this and more at DeSci Tokyo in April 2023. If you’re interested in using the TechTree or contributing please get in contact. We are currently working on writing up our work with the Neurotechnology TechTree in detail for publication.