2025 Augmentation Residency
Rhizome futurism
The 2025 Augmentation Summer Residency is a 2-month hacker accelerator for top AI & hardware talent in Cambridge, MA to build the next personal AI interfaces for a safe and open future.
The cohort will bring together ~20 highly skilled philosopher-builders from diverse backgrounds, including founders, researchers, engineers, technical designers, and students from top institutions worldwide, living and working together in multiple hacker houses.
The Augmentation Residency provides a platform for open experimentation. Residents collaborate on projects that align with the Augmentation Lab's mission of building open systems that protect users from malicious intentions and exploitation, instead enhancing transparency and well-being.
They also receive access to physical resources, potential co-founders, and a tailored educational program for living with AI in the 21st century.
Final dates: 15 June - 25 August 2025
Location: Cambridge, MA
Applications are now open: https://tally.so/r/woxXNV
Join our Discord: discord.gg/46KxVDtr57
Supported by
We are moving towards a future of human-machine symbiosis
Human augmentation spans cognitive enhancement, physical extension, and immersive worlds. From brain-computer interfaces that transform emotional states into visual experiences, to robotic limbs controlled by eye movements, to natural language-driven XR environments - the potential to extend human capability is vast.
But these entangled technologies raise profound philosophical and ecological questions. How do we cultivate systems that genuinely enhance collective human experience without creating new hierarchies or disrupting the delicate balance of agency?
The 2025 Augmentation Residency cultivates non-hierarchical, rhizomatic augmentation technologies that expand collaborative capabilities while nurturing the ecological balance between human autonomy, technological agency, and communal wellbeing.
Technical learning
The Augmentation Residency will be supported by an educational framework for transdisciplinary, AI-centric learning and product development.
Residents will be afforded opportunities for mentorship/learning in human-machine symbiosis, miniaturized electronics, local and open-source LLMs, multi-agent simulations, edge computing, and secure/decentralized data ownership mechanisms.
Rhizomatic Augmentation: Interwoven Extensions of Self
Rhizomatic augmentation is an operational philosophy for engineering novel human-machine symbiosis. We posit that true augmentation—and the intelligence it fosters—arises not from monolithic, centrally-designed systems, but from the dynamic interplay of autonomous, yet deeply interconnected, individual agents. Our ~20 residents are these agents: philosopher-builders architecting personalized augmentations that function as evolvable, modular extensions of their own cognitive and sensory apparatus.
These are not siloed projects. Each cohort is designed for porous interoperability, forming a high-bandwidth, peer-to-peer network. Data, insights, and even functional primitives are exchanged and integrated in real-time. Individual adaptations rapidly propagate and compound. Think less "app store," more "mycelial network" – knowledge accrues through connection and co-evolution, allowing for the emergent discovery of complex, system-level capabilities unpredictable from individual components alone.
We embrace multiplicity over singularity, favoring adaptive prototypes that can branch and evolve over rigid, predetermined solutions. As builders of distributed futures, we recognize that true innovation occurs at the intersection points between individuals, technologies, and environments - not in isolation. Our approach values the wisdom of the present ecological moment while nurturing the conditions for emergent futures.
Residency outputs
MVPs for products, papers, patents, designs, and digital content.
-
Hardware products - with a particular push for neuromorphic hardware
-
AI infrastructure; e.g., multi-agent systems with functionally infinite context windows
-
AI infrastructure software; e.g., modular building blocks for building local LLMs on embedded devices
-
Data storage/ownership architectures; e.g., Interplanetary File System for personal data
-
Integrated hardware-software AI wearables for specific applications; e.g., consumer AI wearables for people with learning disabilities
-
Whitepapers; e.g., on creating collective intelligences from stigmergic systems
We anticipate and support startups, crowdsourced products, papers, patents, designs, essays, and digital media to emerge from our residency. We aim to provide each outcome domain with our expertise and resources during and after the residency.
2023 Augmentation Residency
Our previous residency was a 2.5-month long program for 8 creative technologists in San Francisco.
Following the residency, our participants have founded neurotech companies, joined engineering teams at Apple, Cradle Healthcare ($48 mio), and Osmo AI ($8.5 mio), and started graduate positions at the MIT Media Lab.
A case study on the 2023 Augmentation Residency was presented at CHI 2024 in Hawaii.
Contact
If you are interested in supporting the Augmentation Residency, please reach out to us at contact@augmentationlab.org.