Background

D. Scott Phoenix is an American technology entrepreneur and venture capitalist who publicly argues that humans should merge with AI, with brain-computer interfaces as the route. He co-founded Vicarious, the artificial intelligence research company building core principles in the brain to create human-like AI. Vicarious raised approximately $250 million from investors including Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg before being acquired by Alphabet in 2022. Phoenix is currently a Partner at Fifty Years, a deep tech pre-seed and seed-stage venture capital firm based in San Francisco, and an investor in or adviser to hard-tech start-ups including the BCI company Science Corporation.

TED 2026 framing

Phoenix’s TED2026 talk in Vancouver, “Why humans should merge with AI” (April 2026), predicted that people will adopt brain implants the way they adopted smartphones: “Someone you work with will get it first. And you’ll hold out for a while, the way you did with the smartphone. But eventually, you won’t.” He added that “the advantages of integration will be hard to compete with” and described the moment as “the cusp of the next major transition, the merger of humans and AI.”

Phoenix’s broader strategic argument is that humans must integrate with AI to remain relevant in a world of superhuman artificial intelligence.

Politico feature

Politico Magazine’s 15 May 2026 feature “Silicon Valley Wants to Put a Chip in Your Brain”, by Calder McHugh, opened with Phoenix’s TED remarks and used them to introduce Silicon Valley’s wider interest in merging humans with AI, set against the push for neural data privacy laws.

Strategic position

Phoenix is a prominent public advocate of the human-AI merger framing in the BCI category. His positioning is structurally different from clinical-stage BCI executives (who are commercialising therapeutic devices for specific patient populations) and from the broader AI infrastructure community (which is building computational systems without explicit BCI integration plans).