Show Notes
Eric Gilliam studies how organizations like Bell Labs, early MIT, and the Rockefeller Foundation helped drive scientific progress — and what made them unusually effective. In this conversation, we explore how those models worked, why many of them disappeared, and what it would take to bring them back. Eric explains why fast-moving, engineering-driven labs like BBN (which built the first nodes of the internet) may be essential to accelerating progress in fields like AI, biotech, and beyond. We also cover: Why most funders underuse applied history How systems engineers at Bell Labs identified billion-dollar problems What a $100M research organization should do differently What makes Eric hopeful about the future of meta-science Eric runs FreakTakes, a Substack focused on the organizational infrastructure of scientific progress. He’s a fellow at the Good Science Project and works with ARIA UK and Renaissance Philanthropy to support new models for R&D.
Full transcript, list of resources, and art piece: https://www.existentialhope.com/podcasts
Existential Hope was created to collect positive and possible scenarios for the future so that we can have more people commit to creating a brighter future, and to begin mapping out the main developments and challenges that need to be navigated to reach it. Existential Hope is a Foresight Institute project.
Hosted by Allison Duettmann and Beatrice Erkers
Follow Us: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Existential Hope Instagram
Explore every word spoken on this podcast through Fathom.fm. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from Foresight Institute Radio
This recording with João Pedro de Magalhães is from Vision Weekend UK 2026, held in London in June 2026. View the recording along with the slides on our YouTube channel.
This recording with Marius Hobbhahn is from Vision Weekend UK 2026, held in London in June 2026. View the recording along with the slides on our YouTube channel. Marius Hobbhahn is CEO and founder of Apollo Research, a London-based AI safety company that works with OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, Microsoft, and Amazon to evaluate dangerous capabilities in frontier AI systems. Before founding Apollo, he completed a PhD in machine learning and worked on AI forecasting at EpochAI. Apollo's product, Watcher, provides real-time oversight and control for AI coding agents.
This recording with Greg Wayne is from Vision Weekend UK 2026, held in London in June 2026. View the recording along with the slides on our YouTube channel. Greg Wayne is Director of Research at Google DeepMind, where he leads Project Astra, Google's research prototype for a universal AI assistant. His research combines neuroscience with AI systems design, focusing on memory, contextual grounding, and how agents can reason over time.
This recording with Andrew Trask is from the Foresight Institute Secure AI seminar series, hosted in April 2026. Andrew Trask is the founder of OpenMined and creator of PySyft, one of the most widely used frameworks for privacy-preserving machine learning. He has spent the last decade building technical infrastructure that allows AI systems to train on sensitive data without exposing it.
This recording with Taylor Tondelli is from Vision Weekend Puerto Rico 2026, held in February 2026. In this talk, Taylor argues that intelligence alone, whether human or AI, is not what drives innovation. Raw capability needs the right conditions: incentives, institutional scaffolding, and the diversity of thought that lets new ideas find their footing. The talk examines what those conditions look like and where they tend to break down.