How can 3.8 billion years of evolution inform the development of AI?
AI x Evolution is a standing forum hosted by The Leakey Foundation that brings together the people building new intelligent, adaptive systems with the scientists who study the original systems. Through private dinners, salons, and lectures, we convene AI builders and evolutionary scientists to explore what evolution can teach us about the design, testing, safe deployment, and societal role of AI.
This initiative is first and foremost an invitation to join a conversation:
- For AI researchers, it’s an invitation to partner with evolutionary scientists to broaden how we think about designing intelligence and behavior.
- For tech leaders and investors, it provides rare access to the world’s top scientists and thinkers who can reframe how AI gets built.
- For evolutionary scientists and anthropologists, it’s an opportunity to shape one of humanity’s defining technologies with grounded insights from biological anthropology.
Interested in convening your own gathering of AI leaders and evolutionary scientists? We’d love to talk.
Why The Leakey Foundation?
The Leakey Foundation has spent over 55 years funding discoveries that shape our understanding of what it means to be human. Our deep ties with evolutionary researchers, a growing Silicon Valley network, and experience assembling cross-disciplinary groups, like our Survival program, make The Leakey Foundation uniquely positioned to facilitate this conversation with the depth and rigor this moment requires.
Featured scientists
Our gatherings feature leading evolutionary scientists, including:
Dr. Richard Wrangham (Harvard University) is one of the world’s foremost primatologists and evolutionary biologists, whose research on violence, cooperation, and self-domestication has informed our understanding of how humans became the species we are. His work on fire as a technology that fundamentally changed human biology and social behavior is directly relevant to questions about how transformative technologies shape the species that create them.
Dr. Robert Boyd (Arizona State University) is a founder of cultural evolution theory, whose work explains how humans learn, cooperate at scale, and develop the shared norms that hold complex societies together. His research on how cultural information spreads and evolves speaks directly to questions about how AI systems might develop and enforce rules of behavior.