Ellimist conducts R&D to accelerate innovation that scales elegance rather than fragility.
We support venture funds, philanthropies, government agencies, and for-profit and non-profit organizations to understand the power and ethical fault lines of civilizationally pivotal applications of advanced computation.
Current and past projects include novel approaches to neurotech ethics, applying resilience metrics to ecosystem management, and operationalizing definitions of wisdom from psychology and cognitive science to assess the quality of AI decision making.
Work with us to learn how pivotal applications of advanced computation could change your investment, policy, or product goals.
Custom projects can include:
- risk analysis
- model performance evaluation
- literature and domain expert surveys
- product strategy
- policy design and advocacy
- coalition and field building
- internal education
Ellimist is an R&D institute in service of a wiser global human civilization, one that reaches deeply into the past, present, and future to empower life and accelerate novelty.
Ellimist takes its name from a character in a children’s science fantasy series. In the story, Ellimist’s home world is destroyed, which launches him through a series of catastrophic encounters with hostile enemies, each leading him to having increasing power and grappling with what to do with it.
Ellimist begins as a gamer, playing civilization-style simulation games in which single moves affect the destinies of species over millennia. After his home world is destroyed he becomes the leader of his surviving species, wandering and looking for a new home. Later, and now alone, he constructs an extended ship/body which is simultaneously machine and organic. Finally, he accidentally falls into a black hole, giving him the ability to influence the underlying structure of space and time itself.
At every stage Ellimist works to promote life, creativity, novelty, and freedom, while his enemies seek to control life autocratically, or simply to destroy it.
This is fantasy, but the themes in Ellimist’s journey resonate with the challenges humanity faces today:
