The Future of Life Institute was less than a year old in the fall of 2014 when it invited this growing community to a private summit in Puerto Rico.21 Led by an MIT cosmologist and physicist named Max Tegmark, it aimed to create a meeting of the minds along the lines of the Asilomar conference,22 a seminal 1975 gathering where the world’s leading geneticists discussed whether their work—gene editing—would end up destroying humanity.
