Ed Boyden – Neurobiology as a Bridge to a Worthy Successor (Worthy Successor, Episode 13)

ByAnnelize Potgieter

This new installment of the Worthy Successor series features Ed Boyden, Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology at MIT and a full member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. Widely known for his work on optogenetics and expansion microscopy, Ed is a neuroscientist and entrepreneur whose breakthroughs have helped shape the frontier of neurotechnology.

In this episode, we explore Ed’s vision for what kinds of posthuman intelligences deserve to inherit the future. His deep commitment to “ground truth” – the idea that intelligence must be built from and validated against reality, not just simulated within it – is a theme that resonates across this interview. Whether he’s speaking about brain-computer interfaces, consciousness, or the molecular origins of life, Ed insists that no Worthy Successor can be built on shortcuts.

This is our thirteenth installment in The Trajectory’s second series, Worthy Successor, where we explore the kinds of posthuman intelligences that deserve to steer the future beyond humanity.

This series references the article: A Worthy Successor – The Purpose of AGI.

I hope you enjoy this unique conversation with Ed:

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Below, we’ll explore the core take-aways from the interview with Ed, including his list of Worthy Successor criteria and his recommendations for innovators and regulators who want to achieve one.

Ed Boyden’s Worthy Successor Criteria

1. Consciousness and Wellbeing Would Be a Good Start

Ed emphasizes that achieving artificial consciousness would be a landmark achievement – proof that we understand the inner workings of the mind at a fundamental level. But he’s clear: consciousness is not something to take for granted or assume we can easily replicate. It would signal a turning point in our ability to model and engineer subjective experience.

He states that from his current frame of mind (that of a human), consciousness would be a great thing to see in future intelligent systems.

2. Unfolding New Goals, Powers, Experiences

For it to be a worthy successor, consciousness (and human ideas of “happiness” or “meaning”) would only be the beginning of a much larger, blooming trajectory of posthuman life.

Ed draws a parallel to how understanding atoms made it possible to go from rocks to microchips – a leap previously unimaginable. Similarly, if we truly understood the components of consciousness, we might rearrange them into new configurations that produce entirely different – and potentially superior – forms of awareness. These entities might begin on a path set by humans, and intended to plumb the depths of our current ideas of “meaning” or “happiness” or “the good,” but we should expect these entities to conceive of goals vastly beyond human level, and to be able to explore experience and abilities literally beyond our imagination.

He sees this unfolding process as the primary indicator of a real flourishing of posthuman life and posthuman minds.

Regulation / Innovation Considerations

1. Measure, Model, Make, Modulate

Ed urges innovators to study intelligence from the bottom up, identifying and mapping the million-plus biological building blocks that underlie complex cognitive functions. He emphasizes that such an overwhelming system will likely require AI-assisted simulation tools to fully comprehend. By accelerating this kind of foundational research, we may get closer to engineering intelligence – and perhaps even consciousness – in a measurable, grounded way. Hopefully, if we can move that agenda of research fast enough, it will have a positive impact on our understanding and engineering of things like intelligence and other technology paradigms of our time.

2. Establish Norms Through Self-Governance

Ed points to the 1974 dawn of synthetic biology – when concerns about gene cloning led scientists like Paul Berg to organize a landmark gathering at Asilomar, California. There, researchers and journalists debated the risks of emerging biotech and laid down principles of safe and ethical self-regulation. The resulting norms still guide synthetic biology today. Ed believes a similar gathering – an “Asilomar of the brain” – is needed now in neuroscience and AI, to ask: what do we want to do with ourselves, what do we want to understand, and what do we want to become?

3. Fund Understanding – Not Just Acceleration

Ed argues that a vanishingly small fraction of resources is devoted to understanding intelligence compared to accelerating it. Even redirecting a tiny portion – say, 1% – of the capital that currently fuels AI computation could revolutionize our self-understanding. This knowledge, in turn, would empower more deliberate decisions about how to wield emerging technologies. The imbalance today, he notes, is like a society racing to build without first asking what it’s building, and why.

Concluding Notes

There are few thinkers who so naturally straddle the practical and the profound as Ed. His grounding in the biological sciences doesn’t dampen his curiosity – it sharpens it. Again and again, he returns to the theme of “understanding first”, of resisting the impulse to build fast before we’ve learned what we even are. That posture of intellectual patience, of looking beneath the abstractions to the ground truth of mind and meaning, is one we could use more of.

Ed doesn’t position himself as a philosopher, and he avoids lofty declarations. But the picture that emerges from his work is deeply philosophical: that to build something truly worthy, we may have to rediscover the elemental pieces of consciousness and recombine them into something wiser, richer, and more humane.

The Worthy Successor isn’t a product we manufacture. It’s a direction we choose, slowly, deliberately, and with reverence for what we’re building on top of. Ed reminds us that biology may still be the best blueprint we have for building minds that deserve to last.

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