Our topic in this episode is investing in AI, so we're delighted to have as our guest John Cassidy, a Partner at Kindred Capital, a UK-based venture capital firm. Before he became an investment professional, John co-founded CCG.ai, a precision oncology company which exited to Dante Labs in 2019. We discuss how the investment landscape is being transformed by the possibilities enabled by generative AI . Selected follow-ups: https://kindredcapital.vc/ https://cradle.bio/ https://scarletcomply...
Aug 02, 2023•40 min•Season 1Ep. 50
Our guest in this episode is Jeremy Kahn, a senior writer at Fortune Magazine, based in the UK. He writes about artificial intelligence and other disruptive technologies, from quantum computing to augmented reality. Previously he was at Bloomberg for eight years, again writing mostly about technology, and in moving to Fortune he was returning to his journalistic roots, as he started his career there in 1997, when he was based in New York. David and Calum invited Jeremy onto the show because they...
Jul 26, 2023•36 min•Season 1Ep. 49
An intriguing possibility created by the exponential growth in the power of our technology is that within the lifetimes of people already born, death might become optional. Show co-hosts Calum and David are both excited about this idea, but our excitement is as nothing compared to the exuberant enthusiasm of our guest in this episode, José Cordeiro. José was born in Venezuela, to parents who fled Franco’s dictatorship in Spain. He has closed the circle, by returning to Spain (via the USA) while ...
Jul 19, 2023•33 min•Season 1Ep. 48
Our guest in this episode is Shamus Rae. Shamus is the co-founder of Engine B, a startup which aims to expedite the digitisation of the professional services industry (in particular the accounting and legal professions) and level the playing field, so that small companies can compete with larger ones. It is supported by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (the ICAEW) and the main audit firms. Shamus was ideally placed to launch Engine B, having spent 13 years as a partner...
Jul 12, 2023•37 min•Season 1Ep. 47
In this episode our guest is David Giron, the Director at what is arguably one of the world's most innovative educational initiatives, Codam College in Amsterdam. David was previously the head of studies at Codam's famous parent school 42 in Paris, and he has now spent 10 years putting into practice the somewhat revolutionary ideas of the 42 network. We ask David about what he has learned during these ten years, but we're especially interested in his views on how the world of educ...
Jul 06, 2023•34 min•Season 1Ep. 46
Alex Zhavoronkov is our first guest to make a repeat appearance, having first joined us in episode 12, last November. We are delighted to welcome him back, because he is doing some of the most important work on the planet, and he has some important news. In 2014, Alex founded Insilico Medicine, a drug discovery company which uses artificial intelligence to identify novel targets and novel molecules for pharmaceutical companies. Insilico now has drugs designed with AI in human clinical trials, an...
Jun 29, 2023•44 min•Season 1Ep. 45
In this episode, co-hosts Calum and David continue their reflections on what they have both learned from their interactions with guests on this podcast over the last few months. Where have their ideas changed? And where are they still sticking to their guns? The previous episode started to look at two of what Calum calls the 4 Cs of superintelligence: Cease and Control. In this episode, under the headings of Catastrophe and Consent, the discussion widens to look at what might be the very bad out...
Jun 21, 2023•32 min•Season 1Ep. 44
The 4 Cs of Superintelligence is a framework that casts fresh light on the vexing question of possible outcomes of humanity's interactions with an emerging superintelligent AI. The 4 Cs are Cease, Control, Catastrophe, and Consent. In this episode, the show's co-hosts, Calum Chace and David Wood, debate the pros and cons of the first two of these Cs, and lay the groundwork for a follow-up discussion of the pros and cons of the remaining two. Topics addressed in this episode include: *)...
Jun 16, 2023•33 min•Season 1Ep. 43
The launch of GPT-4 on 14th March has provoked concerns and searching questions, and nowhere more so than in the education sector. Earlier this month, the share price of US edutech company Chegg halved when its CEO admitted that GPT technology was a threat to its business model. Looking ahead, GPT models seem to put flesh on the bones of the idea that all students could one day have a personal tutor as effective as Aristotle, who was Alexander the Great’s personal tutor. When that happens, stude...
Jun 08, 2023•47 min•Season 1Ep. 42
The European Commission and Parliament were busily debating the Artificial Intelligence Act when GPT-4 launched on 14 March. As people realised that GPT technology was a game-changer, they called for the Act to be reconsidered. Famously, the EU contains no tech giants, so cutting edge AI is mostly developed in the US and China. But the EU is more than happy to act as the world’s most pro-active regulator of digital technologies, including AI. The 2016 General Data Protection Regulation (or GDPR)...
May 31, 2023•32 min•Season 1Ep. 41
Technological changes have economic impact. It's not just that technology allows more goods and services to be produced more efficiently and at greater scale. It's also that these changes disrupt previous assumptions about the conduct of human lives, human relationships, and the methods to save money to buy goods and services. A society in which people expect to die around the age of 100, or even older, needs to make different plans than a society in which people expect to die in their...
May 24, 2023•34 min•Season 1Ep. 40
One of the questions audiences frequently used to ask futurists was, which careers are most likely to be future-proof? However, that question has changed in recent years. It's now more widely understood that every career is subject to disruption by technological and social trends. No occupation is immune to change. So the question has switched, away from possible future-proof careers, to the skills that are most likely to be useful in these fast-changing circumstances. For example, should e...
May 17, 2023•35 min•Season 1Ep. 39
The last few episodes of our podcast have explored what GPT (generative pre-trained transformer) technology is and how it works, and also the call for a pause in the development of advanced AI. In this latest episode, Ted Lappas, a data scientist and academic, helps us to take a pragmatic turn - to understand what GPT technology can do for each of us individually. Ted is Assistant Professor at Athens University of Economics and Business, and he also works at Satalia, which was London's larg...
May 10, 2023•43 min•Season 1Ep. 38
On March 14th, OpenAI launched GPT-4 , which took the world by surprise and storm. Almost everybody, including people within the AI community, was stunned by its capabilities. A week later, the Future of Life Institute (FLI) published an open letter calling on the world’s AI labs to pause the development of larger versions of GPT (generative pre-trained transformer) models until their safety can be ensured. Recent episodes of this podcast have presented arguments for and against this call for a ...
May 03, 2023•34 min•Season 1Ep. 37
The race to create advanced AI is becoming a suicide race. That's part of the thinking behind the open letter from the Future of Life Institute which "calls on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least six months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4". In this episode, our guest, Jaan Tallinn, explains why he sees this pause as a particularly important initiative. In the 1990s and 20-noughts, Jaan led much of the software engineering for the file-sharing applicat...
Apr 26, 2023•30 min•Season 1Ep. 36
Despite the impressive recent progress in AI capabilities, there are reasons why AI may be incapable of possessing a full "general intelligence". And although AI will continue to transform the workplace, some important jobs will remain outside the reach of AI. In other words, the Economic Singularity may not happen, and AGI may be impossible. These are views defended by our guest in this episode, Kenneth Cukier, the Deputy Executive Editor of The Economist newspaper. For the past decad...
Apr 19, 2023•38 min•Season 1Ep. 35
Should the pace of research into advanced artificial intelligence be slowed down, or perhaps even paused completely? Your answer to that question probably depends on your answers to a number of other questions. Is advanced artificial intelligence reaching the point where it could result in catastrophic damage? Is a slow down desirable, given that AI can also lead to lots of very positive outcomes, including tools to guard against the worst excesses of other applications of AI? And even if a slow...
Apr 12, 2023•35 min•Season 1Ep. 34
2023 is still young, but there's already a change in the attitudes of many business people regarding the future. Previously, businesses expressed occasional interest in possible disruptive scenarios, but their attention often quickly turned back to the apparently more pressing tasks of business-as-usual. But recent news of changes in AI capabilities, along with possible social transformations due to pandemics, geopolitics, and industrial unrest, is leading more and more business people to w...
Apr 05, 2023•33 min•Season 1Ep. 33
In the last few weeks, the pace of change in AI has been faster than ever before. The changes aren't just announcements of future capabilities - announcements that could have been viewed, perhaps, as hype. The changes are new versions of AI systems that are available for users around the world to experiment with, directly, here and now. These systems are being released by multiple different companies, and also by open-source collaborations. And users of these systems are frequently expressi...
Mar 29, 2023•33 min•Season 1Ep. 32
Ben Goertzel is a cognitive scientist and artificial intelligence researcher. He is CEO and founder of SingularityNET, leader of the OpenCog Foundation, and chair of Humanity+. Ben is perhaps best-known for popularising the term 'artificial general intelligence', or AGI, a machine with all the cognitive abilities of an adult human. He thinks that the way to create this machine is to start with a baby-like AI, and raise it, as we raise children. We would do this either in VR, or in robo...
Mar 22, 2023•38 min•Season 1Ep. 31
At a time when many people find it depressingly easy to see how "bad futures" could arise, what is a credible narrative of a "good future"? That question is of central concern to our guest in this episode, Gerd Leonhard. Gerd is one of the most successful futurists on the international speaker circuit. He estimates that he has spoken to a combined audience of 2.5 million people in more than 50 countries. He left his home country of Germany in 1982 to go to the USA to study mu...
Mar 15, 2023•36 min•Season 1Ep. 30
Our guest in this episode is Francesca Rossi. Francesca studied computer science at the University of Pisa in Italy, where she became a professor, before spending 20 years at the University of Padova. In 2015 she joined IBM's T.J. Watson Research Lab in New York, where she is now an IBM Fellow and also IBM's AI Ethics Global Leader. Francesca is a member of numerous international bodies concerned with the beneficial use of AI, including being a board member at the Partnership on AI, a ...
Mar 08, 2023•36 min•Season 1Ep. 29
In this episode, Tim Clement-Jones brings us up to date on the reactions by members of the UK's House of Commons to recent advances in the capabilities of AI systems, such as ChatGPT. He also looks ahead to larger changes, in the UK and elsewhere. Lord Clement-Jones CBE, or Tim, as he prefers to be known, has been a very successful lawyer, holding senior positions at ITV and Kingfisher among others, and later becoming London Managing Partner of law firm DLA Piper. He is better known as a po...
Mar 01, 2023•37 min•Season 1Ep. 28
Advanced AI is currently pretty much a duopoly between the USA and China. The US is the clear leader, thanks largely to its tech giants – Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple. China also has a fistful of tech giants – Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent are the ones usually listed, but the Chinese government has also taken a strong interest in AI since Deep Mind’s Alpha Go system beat the world’s best Go player in 2016. People in the West don’t know enough about China’s current and future role in ...
Feb 22, 2023•31 min•Season 1Ep. 27
Peter James is one of the world’s most successful crime writers. His "Roy Grace" series, about a detective in Brighton, England, near where Peter lives, has produced a remarkable 19 consecutive Sunday Times Number One bestsellers. His legions of devoted fans await each new release eagerly. The books have been televised, with the third series of "Grace", starting John Simm, being commissioned for next year. Peter has worked in other genres too, having written 36 novels altoget...
Feb 15, 2023•33 min•Season 1Ep. 26
Our guest in this episode is a Briton who is based in Berlin, namely Andrew Steele. Earlier in his life Andrew spent nine years at the University of Oxford where, among other accomplishments, he gained a PhD in physics. His focus switched to computational biology, and he held positions at Cancer Research UK and the Francis Crick Institute. Along the way, Andrew decided that aging was the single most important scientific challenge of our time. This led him to write the book "Ageless: The New...
Feb 08, 2023•38 min•Season 1Ep. 25
It is nearly 40 years since our guest in this episode, pioneering transhumanist Natasha Vita-More, created the first version of the Transhumanist Manifesto. Since that time, Natasha has established numerous core perspectives, values, and actions in the global transhumanist family. Natasha joins us in this episode to share her observations on how transhumanism has evolved over the decades, and to reflect on her work in building the movement—from practice-based approaches, scientific contributions...
Feb 01, 2023•36 min•Season 1Ep. 24
Our guest in this episode is the scientist and science fiction author Davin Brin, whose writings have won the Hugo, Locus, Campbell, and Nebula Awards. His style is sometimes called 'hard science fiction'. This means his narratives feature scientific or technological change that is plausible rather than purely magical. The scenarios he creates are thought-provoking as well as entertaining. His writing inspires readers but also challenges them, with important questions not just about th...
Jan 25, 2023•39 min•Season 1Ep. 23
OpenAI's ChatGPT and picture generating AI systems like MidJourney and Stable Diffusion have got a lot more people interested in advanced AI and talking about it. Which is a good thing. It will not be pretty if the transformative changes that will happen in the next two or three decades take most of us by surprise. A company that has been pioneering advanced AI for longer than most is IBM, and we are very fortunate to have with us in this episode one of IBM’s most senior executives. Alessan...
Jan 18, 2023•36 min•Season 1Ep. 22
Quantum computing is a tough subject to explain and discuss. As Niels Bohr put it, “Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it”. Richard Feynman helpfully added, “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics”. Quantum computing employs the weird properties of quantum mechanics like superposition and entanglement. Classical computing uses binary digits, or bits, which are either on or off. Quantum computing uses qubits, which can be both on and off at ...
Jan 11, 2023•33 min•Season 1Ep. 21
