Summit · Exponential Visions
The 2025 Human Augmentation Summit was a gathering of creators — from innovative startups and global companies to policy experts to independent researchers and artists — all shaping the future of the human condition.
It took place on August 23, 2025, at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, MA: a full-day summit exploring the frontiers of human potential.
The day
Exponential Visions was a full day of keynotes, panels, a startup showcase, the Augmentation Residency showcase and an exhibition across four rooms of the MIT Media Lab. In the words of the summit deck: “A place where people can exhibit, connect, and present.” Areas of exhibited work included:
Intelligence
AI & Cognitive Augmentation
Embodiment
Cyborgism, Sensors & Bio-Interfaces
Biology
Longevity, Genetics, Biotech
Networks
Digital Civilization & Collective Intelligence
Governance
Power, Norms, and Control of Tech
Economics
Inequality, Progress, and Future of Work
Worldviews
Spiritual, Ethical & Civilizational Frames
Design & Ventures
Making it Real
Complexity
Planetary Intelligence & Simulated Futures
Consciousness
Subjectivity, Psychedelics, and Mind Design
Program
Times come from the organizers' run-of-show: the plan for the day, with a few changes made as it ran. Several sessions ran longer than their slots. Linked items jump to the talk below.
08:30–09:00
09:40–10:14
10:14–10:34
10:34–11:24
11:40–12:30
Stage Hall
Exhibition Hall
12:30–13:15
13:20–15:05
15:05–15:20
15:20–16:05
16:00–18:00
Stage Hall
Auditorium
Exhibition Hall
18:00–19:00
19:00–00:00
Recordings
35 videos, grouped by session. Each one loads from YouTube only when you press play. The images are frames from the recordings, cropped and color-corrected; the Live Hypnosis Session has none.
09:40–10:14
The summit opens at the MIT Media Lab: a welcome and the day's theme, then introductions from its three hosts, Augmentation Lab, ekkolápto and Pulse.
Length: 4:30Dünya Baradari, Aida Baradari, Irtiza Aftab
Length: 10:02Dünya Baradari (Augmentation Lab)
Length: 4:50Addy Cha (ekkolápto)
Length: 11:43Pedro Henrich (Pulse)
10:14–10:34
Length: 6:48Alma Jam (MIT Media Lab)
How the MIT Media Lab's graduate program works, and what makes an application stand out.
Length: 13:31Prof. Hiroshi Ishii (MIT Media Lab)
A counterweight to a room full of techno-optimism: what we may lose with every augmentation.
10:34–11:24
Length: 13:05Doğa Yücel (Harvard Medical School)
What it means to study aging, according to the people who study it, and why it might be solvable.
Length: 24:57Michael Ringel (Life Biosciences)
Three claims about longevity science: it is the way forward, its value is enormous, and partial epigenetic reprogramming is the technology to get there.
Length: 7:05Elen Capri
Longevity science does little good if nobody outside the lab can follow it. On getting it out of the papers and into people's lives.
11:40–12:30
Length: 1:12Pedro Henrich (Pulse)
The format and the rules of the startup showcase: five minutes per company, and no mercy on the timer.
Length: 5:07Juliette Humer (MuseBio)
A stem cell supplier and biobank built on menstrual blood, a source of stem cells that is almost always thrown away.
Length: 4:30Rochelle Shen (Eternas.clinic)
A network clinic that aims to bring therapies to market in months rather than years by working across jurisdictions.
Length: 4:38Pedro Henrich (CLAi)
Programmable digital selves: own your data, give your LLM context, and sell access to your digital twin.
Length: 5:09James Sinka (BIO Protocol)
The case for decentralized, on-chain science, in five minutes.
Length: 4:47Daniel Van Zant (Sylvum AI)
A graph-based knowledge engine for language models, with an architecture borrowed from fungal networks.
13:20–15:05
Length: 21:27Prof. Pat Pataranutaporn (MIT Media Lab)
On being augmented already, and on designing AI for human flourishing: wisdom, wonder and well-being.
Length: 26:29Dr. Nataliya Kosmyna (MIT Media Lab)
Intelligence with and without a body, told through scenes from science fiction and the research that already exists behind each one.
Length: 53:18Ken Liu, Prof. Juliet Schor, Greg Epstein, Alice Cai (moderator)
A novelist, an economist and a humanist chaplain on what happens to work, and to meaning, after AI.
15:20–16:05
Length: 11:19Dünya Baradari (Augmentation Lab)
What the 2025 Augmentation Residency was: 24 builders in three houses for ten weeks.
Length: 2:41Olivia Zheng
Wearable headpieces that read emotion from muscle signals and show it to the person you are talking to.
Project page: Somatic Bloom
Length: 0:31Alistair Pernigo (MIT Media Lab)
Record a smell, then reproduce it anywhere.
Project page: Olfactory Sensing
Length: 2:58Parth Raghav (Vibecheck)
Not another dating app: matchmaking where your friends swipe on your behalf.
Project page: Vibecheck
Length: 6:55Mateo, Anushhka, Lars (Monks with Macbooks)
An experimental art collective presents three projects: AugTwins, SatieLang and Future Humans.
Project page: Monks with Macbooks
Length: 3:18Yuvraj Virk (CodeProse)
AI writes code faster than people can understand it. An IDE built to close that comprehension gap.
Project page: CodeProse
Length: 1:59Iban Sadowski (Engagic)
Making city council agendas readable, for hundreds of local governments.
Project page: Engagic
Length: 2:02Iban Sadowski, presenting for Michelle (Akiya Collective)
A nonprofit that revitalizes abandoned houses in rural Japan, and a design studio for social spatial technologies.
Project page: Akiya Collective
Length: 3:05Ilya Gulko (Thy Will)
If meditation is listening, prayer is speaking: a tool for learning to pray.
Project page: Thy Will
Length: 3:18Tiberiu Țoca (AlphaCAD)
Next-token prediction for engineering design, a field where foundation models still have little spatial reasoning.
Project page: AlphaCAD
Length: 2:02Aida Baradari & Alice Cai (SUBSTANCE)
A recommendation engine built on what you want when you are aware, not on what keeps you scrolling.
Project page: SUBSTANCE
Length: 3:17Alif Jakir (Superintelligent.group)
Human-AI swarms, so you stop pasting one AI tool's output into another.
Project page: Superintelligent.group
Length: 2:24Pranav Vadde
A simulated Mars rover that plans its own path with a neuromorphic algorithm.
Project page: Control Systems for Space Rovers
Length: 2:31Irtiza Aftab
Mixed reality interfaces that generate themselves around where you look.
Project page: XR Control16:00–18:00
Albert Nerenberg
A working hypnotist argues that there is a state of consciousness science has never named, then demonstrates hypnosis on stage.
19:00–00:00
Length: 1:03:55Trey Goff, Harry Gandhi, Addy Cha, Sam Rowe (moderator)
Próspera, the 1517 Fund and ekkolápto on what research outside universities needs: money, community and legitimacy.
Length: 1:03:47Stephen Wolfram, Addy Cha (host)
An hour of questions from the host and the audience: bigger brains, why machine learning works, consciousness and the ruliad.
2025 Human Augmentation Summit
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