Unlocking Cyber-Physical Potential
We need your input on scaling trust to the physical world. Reach out to trust@ilikethefuture.com.
Dear friend of SoTA,
The Society for Technological Advancement has been selected by the Advanced Research + Invention Agency to help develop the Trust Everything, Everywhere opportunity space. The outputs will shape ARIA’s Scaling Trust programme, an R&D agenda funded with up to £50 million.
SoTA exists to cultivate optimism about technoscientific progress and build capacity for it to happen. As we look towards 2026, we believe one of the most critical untapped tech trees lies at the intersection of AI and the physical world.
AI is increasingly embedded throughout the machinery of our civilisation and agents are reducing transaction costs – the frictions in finding, negotiating, and enforcing agreements. However, we are yet to realise AI’s full potential due to bottlenecks in how it can be deployed and scaled in our physical reality.
This could unlock a future where agents act as trusted representatives, cheaply mobilising and verifying cyber-physical interactions on our behalf. This future requires silent trust infrastructure. Without it, we risk a world of poisoned world models, unaligned or malicious swarms, and AI cartelisation.
We are particularly interested in high-stakes, latency-critical contexts. How we safely and securely integrate agents, especially under adversarial constraints, will be fundamental to new cyber-physical interactions that could unlock trillion-pound industries (just as the internet did for our £19-trillion digital economy). And if our critical infrastructure is to benefit from trusted AI and follow-on adoption at scale, the security primitives must be developed now.
SoTA Needs Your Input
We are currently in the discovery phase with Alex Obadia and ARIA’s Scaling Trust team. SoTA is seeking to identify and aggregate exceptional talent across:
Multi-agent coordination
Embodied intelligence/robotics
Verifiable/smart manufacturing
Cyber-physical & distributed systems security
Cryptography (physical, programmable/generative & nature-inspired)
AI & multi-agent security (e.g., secret collusion & steganographic communication research)
… Any other fields applicable to unlocking cyber-physical potential
Our ambition is to create a permanent community of interest and practice around this opportunity, and to host a hackathon in the spring. In the meantime, we’re keen to hear what you’re building in this space or how your work could help scale trust to cyber-physical interactions.
If you can contribute, please contact us on trust@ilikethefuture.com.
Yours,
Jamie, Oliver & Matvey