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Machine consciousness: definitions, implications, risks

Machine consciousness: definitions, implications, risks

Calum discusses the implications of machine consciousness for a New York-based think tank. Defining Consciousness: How do we define consciousness, and what criteria would we use to determine if an AI system has achieved it? It is ironic how little we understand consciousness, since it is actually the only thing any of us know anything about. I am a co-founder of Conscium, a company which seeks to remedy that. A rough-and-ready definition of consciousness is that it is the experience of experiencing. The philosopher Ned Block wrote a famous paper in 1974 called “What’s it like to be a bat?”...
AI Will Convert Space Telecoms From Science Fiction To Reality

AI Will Convert Space Telecoms From Science Fiction To Reality

We all know that artificial intelligence is transforming every industry. One industry which is nascent today, but will be critical to us all in the future, and which could hardly exist without AI, is space telecoms - or Non-Terrestrial Networks, as participants prefer to call it. At a conference on NTNs in Riyadh last month, industry leaders discussed how to ensure its potential benefits are realised, including global connectivity, better understanding of our planet, and progress towards a multiplanetary future. The Importance Of NTNs One reason why NTNs are so important is that they will bring true connectivity to the...
Artificial Intelligence and Weaponised Nostalgia

Artificial Intelligence and Weaponised Nostalgia

The first political party to be called populist was the People’s Party, a powerful but short-lived force in late 19th-century America. It was a left-wing movement which opposed the oligarchies running the railroads, and promoted the interests of small businesses and farms. Populists can be right-wing or left-wing. In Europe they tend to be right-wing and in Latin America they tend to be left-wing. Populist politicians pose as champions for the “ordinary people” against the establishment. They claim that a metropolitan elite has stolen the birthright of the virtuous, “real” people, and they promise to restore it. At the heart...
Government regulation of AI is like pressing a big red danger button

Government regulation of AI is like pressing a big red danger button

Imagine that you and I are in my laboratory, and I show you a Big Red Button. I tell you that if I press this button, then you and all your family and friends - in fact the whole human race - will live very long lives of great prosperity, and in great health. Furthermore, the environment will improve, and inequality will reduce both in your country and around the world. Of course, I add, there is a catch. If I press this button, there is also a chance that the whole human race will go extinct. I cannot tell...
The Bletchley Park summit on AI safety deserves two and a half cheers

The Bletchley Park summit on AI safety deserves two and a half cheers

The taboo is broken. The possibility that AI is an existential risk has now been voiced in public by many of the world’s political leaders. Although the question has been discussed in Silicon Valley and other futurist boltholes for decades, no country’s leader had broached it before last month. That is the lasting legacy of the Bletchley Park summit on AI Safety, and it is an important one. It might not be the most important legacy for the man who made the summit happen. According to members of the opposition Labour Party, Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was using the...
Arabian moonshots may hold huge implications for the whole world

Arabian moonshots may hold huge implications for the whole world

After Silicon Valley, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) may be the most future-oriented and optimistic place on the planet. Futurism and techno-optimism are natural mindsets in a country which has pretty much invented itself from scratch in two generations. During this period its people have progressed from a mediaeval lifestyle to being 21st century metropolitans. So it is unsurprising that the UAE has been quick to spot the enormous future significance of artificial intelligence to all of us, and to pioneer its deployment. It is not just the UAE. The leaders of all six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council...
How to use GPT-4 yourself. With Ted Lappas

How to use GPT-4 yourself. With Ted Lappas

The last few episodes of the London Futurists 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 the latest episode, Ted Lappas, a data scientist and academic, helps us to understand what GPT technology can do for each of us individually. Lappas is Assistant Professor at Athens University of Economics and Business, and he also works at Satalia, which was London's largest independent AI consultancy before it was acquired last year by the media giant WPP. Head start Lappas uses GPTs...
Extending health spans by extending telomeres: profile of Liz Parrish

Extending health spans by extending telomeres: profile of Liz Parrish

Patient zero Liz Parrish was nervous. She was on a plane to Colombia, where she would undergo an untested gene therapy. She and her colleagues had spent two years developing the therapy and making the preparations, but they could not know how it would work out. It was September 2015, and Parrish had been inspired to take this step because her son, suffering from type 1 diabetes, was unable to obtain treatment for his condition in the USA. She decided to embark upon a mission to persuade the FDA to move from a precautionary approach to a proactive one. It...
Why is it so hard to deploy AI? With Daniel Hulme

Why is it so hard to deploy AI? With Daniel Hulme

We all know AI will transform everything There might be a corporate executive somewhere who hasn’t yet concluded that over the next few years, artificial intelligence (AI) will transform their organisation and their industry. If there is, they are very unusual. However, despite this general acknowledgement of its importance, many companies are struggling to deploy AI. How should they do it? Daniel Hulme has some suggestions, which he explains in episode 8 of the London Futurist podcast. Daniel is the founder and CEO of Satalia, which until recently was London’s largest independent AI consultancy, helping companies solve hard problems with...
Has there been a second AI Big Bang? With Aleksa Gordic

Has there been a second AI Big Bang? With Aleksa Gordic

The first Big Bang in 2012 The Big Bang in artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the breakthrough in 2012, when a team of researchers led by Geoff Hinton managed to train an artificial neural network (known as a deep learning system) to win an image classification competition by a surprising margin. Prior to that, AI had performed some remarkable feats, but it had never made much money. Since 2012, AI has helped the big technology companies to generate enormous wealth, not least from advertising. A second Big Bang in 2017? Has there been a new Big Bang in AI, since...
Preventing the brain from aging: profile of Jean Hébert

Preventing the brain from aging: profile of Jean Hébert

Machines can be fixed Jean Hébert wanted to be a molecular biologist long before he knew what the term meant. As a boy in elementary school in Montreal, Quebec, he decided that getting old was a bad idea. He reasoned that we are essentially machines, so it must be possible to fix our bodies when they suffer damage, and begin to malfunction. This line of thinking led him all the way to a PhD in genetics, but while doing that he realised that re-engineering the genome to stop aging would be very hard indeed. He decided to change direction, and...
Can the UAE become one of the world’s major centres for longevity research?

Can the UAE become one of the world’s major centres for longevity research?

According to Betteridge’s Law, any headline that ends with a question mark can be answered with a “no”. But let’s not be hasty. A few months ago, the UAE declared a shift in its healthcare policy towards longevity and healthy aging. Throughout its fairly short history, the UAE has been a remarkably ambitious country. Could it become one of the world’s longevity capitals - a global centre for longevity research? Transformations In the 51 years since its creation in 1971, the UAE has gone through a series of remarkable transformations. It has developed from a collection of Bedouin tribes to...
AI and skin biomarkers: profile of Anastasia Georgievskaya

AI and skin biomarkers: profile of Anastasia Georgievskaya

Anastasia Georgievskaya is using AI to develop biomarkers from photos of consumers’ skin. She is doing important work for the longevity revolution, but the consumers are more attracted by offers of improved attractiveness than offers of extended lifespan. Skin biomarkers Anastasia Georgievskaya runs a company in Estonia that provides consumers with recommendations engines for healthcare and lifestyle changes, using indicators from photographs of their skin. The company is called Haut.AI, and it operates a software platform which solicits images, and also lifestyle and preference data from individuals. It processes this information, and provides the results to clients. The clients include...
Biotech firm puts R2D2 to work in lab

Biotech firm puts R2D2 to work in lab

Applying AI to drug development Drug development is a time-consuming and expensive business. Notoriously, it takes over 10 years and costs around $2 billion to bring one drug to market — and around 90% of candidate drugs fail during human trials. And the situation is getting worse. Eroom’s Law (Moore’s Law in reverse) is the observation that the cost of developing a new drug doubles roughly every nine years. The most promising solution to this problem is applying artificial intelligence to the process. A number of companies are pursuing this, and one of the leaders is Insilico Medicine, which announced...
The Impact of AI on Delivery Businesses

The Impact of AI on Delivery Businesses

The travelling salesman problem You know the Travelling Salesman Problem? Find the shortest route that takes you to every city on a list and returns you home. It’s a hard problem. In fact it’s an NP-hard problem, where NP stands for non-deterministic polynomial time. Just in case you were in any doubt about how hard it is. But if you’re a grocery retailer, delivering the weekly shopping to millions of homes, or the country’s leading furniture maker... well, it’s a problem you have to solve. Who you gonna call? Tesco deliveries Tesco not only has to deliver hundreds of thousands...
Using AI to live to 200: profile of Sergey Young

Using AI to live to 200: profile of Sergey Young

Hard work Sergey Young was born in Dalnegorsk, a small and shrinking town in Russia's Far East. It is closer to China and Japan than to the regional capital Vladivostok, and Young describes it as not so much in the middle of nowhere as at the end of nowhere. But he was lucky enough to be born into the age of glasnost and perestroika (openness and restructuring). It didn't seem lucky at first. His parents were chemical engineers, and he followed in their footsteps by taking an engineering degree in Moscow. He was still only 18 when his mother phoned...
The optimistic investor: profile of Jim Mellon

The optimistic investor: profile of Jim Mellon

The greatest investment opportunity in history Jim Mellon is an optimist. Which is just as well, since he is one of the people trying to engineer a complete transformation in attitudes towards aging – attitudes within the medical profession, among the public at large, and crucially, in the investment community. As an example of his optimism, Mellon says that, thanks largely to the vertiginous advances in artificial intelligence, “if you can stay alive for another ten to twenty years, and if you aren’t yet over 75, and if you remain in reasonable health for your age, you have an excellent...
First wholly AI-developed drug enters Phase 1 Trials

First wholly AI-developed drug enters Phase 1 Trials

For several years we have been hearing about the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve traditional drug discovery and development. In the last two years, clinical trials have begun. The UK’s Exscientia made headlines last April by announcing the start of a Phase 1 clinical trial for a drug it designed using AI for an established protein target. Recursion Pharmaceuticals in Utah uses AI to find new uses for the drugs owned by other companies. Insilico Medicine has now announced the crucial next step: the start of the world’s first Phase 1 clinical trial of a drug developed from...