Longevity, a $56 trillion opportunity. With Andrew Scott

Longevity, a $56 trillion opportunity. With Andrew Scott

In unguarded moments, politicians occasionally wish that retired people would "hurry up and die", on account of the ballooning costs of pensions and healthcare. Andrew J Scott confronts this attitude in his book, “The 100-Year Life”, which has been sold a million copies in 15 languages, and was runner up in both the FT/McKinsey and Japanese Business Book of the Year Awards. Scott joined the London Futurists Podcast to discuss his arguments. Scott is a professor of economics at the London Business School, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, and a consulting scholar at Stanford University’s...
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...
GPT: to ban or not to ban? That is the question

GPT: to ban or not to ban? That is the question

OpenAI launched GPT-4 on 14th March, and its capabilities were shocking to people within the AI community and beyond. A week later, the Future of Life Institute (FLI) published an open letter calling on the world’s leading AI labs to pause the development of even larger GPT (generative pre-trained transformer) models until their safety can be ensured. Geoff Hinton went so far as to resign from Google in order to be free to talk about the risks. Recent episodes of the London Futurists Podcast have presented the arguments for and against this call for a moratorium. Jaan Tallinn, one of...
Evomics deploys AI and nuclear medicine in the fight against cancer

Evomics deploys AI and nuclear medicine in the fight against cancer

AI and nuclear medicine Some of the most innovative uses of artificial intelligence in healthcare today are in the field of nuclear medicine, and thanks to AI, nuclear medicine is demonstrating great potential for cancer treatment. There are around 20 million new cancer cases a year, and around 10 million deaths, which is around one in six of all deaths. The problem, and therefore the opportunity, is vast. One of the leading companies in the field is Evomics, based in Shanghai and Vienna. It is using the same technology to develop both diagnostics and therapies, and it has ambitious plans...
The AI suicide race. With Jaan Tallinn

The AI suicide race. With Jaan Tallinn

From Skype to Safe AI In the 1990s and early noughties, Jaan Tallinn led much of the software engineering for the file-sharing application Kazaa and the online communications tool Skype. He was also one of the earliest investors in DeepMind, before they were acquired by Google. Since then, he has been a prominent advocate for study of existential risks, including the risks from artificial superintelligence. He joined the London Futurists Podcast to discuss the recent calls for a pause in the development of advanced AI systems. Two Cambridge XRisk organisations In the previous decade, Tallinn co-founded not one but two...
Is AGI possible? With Kenn Cukier

Is AGI possible? With Kenn Cukier

Most media coverage of AI is weak The launch of the large language model known as GPT-4 has re-ignited the debate about where AI is going, and how fast. A paper by some researchers at Microsoft (which is the major investor in OpenAI, the creator of GPT-4) claimed to detect in GPT-4 some sparks of AGI – artificial general intelligence, a system with all the cognitive abilities of an adult human. The Future of Humanity Institute, an organisation based at MIT that studies existential risks, published an open letter calling for a six-month pause in the development of advanced AI....
Against pausing AI research. With Pedro Domingos

Against pausing AI research. With Pedro Domingos

Should AI research be paused? 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 very positive outcomes, including tools to guard against the worst excesses of other applications of AI? And even if a slow-down is desirable, is it practical? Professor Pedro Domingos of the University of Washington is best known for his book "The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World". It describes five different "tribes" of AI researchers, each with their own paradigms, and it...
What do professional futurists do? With Nikolas Badminton

What do professional futurists do? With Nikolas Badminton

GPT-4 has got people interested in the future again We're only a few weeks into 2023, but there has been a sea-change in the thinking of many business people regarding the future. GPT-4 and similar systems look likely to usher in major changes to the way many of us work and play, and they will probably have significant impacts on markets, economies, politics, and international relations. How can businesses become more effective in anticipating and managing these changes in their business landscapes? A new book which addresses this question of managing rapid change is Nikolas Badminton’s "Facing our Futures: How...
GPT-4. Commotion and controversy

GPT-4. Commotion and controversy

Call for a moratorium on advanced AI development On the day that a London Futurists Podcast episode dedicated wholly to OpenAI’s GPT-4 system dropped, the Future of Life Institute published an open letter about the underlying technology. Signed by Stuart Russell, Max Tegmark, Elon Musk, Jaan Tallinn, and hundreds of other prominent AI researchers and commentators, the letter called for a pause in the development of the large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4, and Google’s Bard. It was surprising to see the name of Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, on the list, and indeed it soon disappeared again. At the time...
Benign superintelligence, and how to get there. With Ben Goertzel

Benign superintelligence, and how to get there. With Ben Goertzel

Never work with children or animals ... or humans During a keynote talk that Ben Goertzel gave recently, the robot that accompanied him on stage went mute. The fault lay not with the robot, but with a human who accidentally kicked a cable out of a socket backstage. Goertzel quips that in the future, the old warning against working with children and animals may be extended to a caution against working with any humans at all. Goertzel is a cognitive scientist and artificial intelligence researcher. He is CEO and founder of SingularityNET, leader of the OpenCog Foundation, and chair of the transhumanist organisation, Humanity+. He is a unique and...
GPT-4 heralds an enormous productivity boost, and a wrenching transformation of work

GPT-4 heralds an enormous productivity boost, and a wrenching transformation of work

GPTs will change the nature of work ChatGPT woke the world up to the importance of artificial intelligence last year. The media has not been so full of talk about AI since DeepMind’s AlphaGo system beat the world’s best Go player in 2016. Launched at the end of November, ChatGPT wasn’t the best AI in the world, as the prominent AI researcher Yann LeCun pointed out. But it was the first time the general public got to play with such a sophisticated and capable model. Launched on 14 March, GPT-4 is a genuine game changer. It seems likely that over...
What does a Good Future look like? With futurist keynote speaker Gerd Leonhard

What does a Good Future look like? With futurist keynote speaker Gerd Leonhard

Dystopian fears Polls suggest that most Millennials think the future will be terrible, or at least worse than the past, not least due to climate change and war. Gerd Leonhard fears that such a negative outlook can create a negative future, and he is exploring how to create what he calls The Good Future. By this he does not mean that everyone is rich, but that everyone’s fundamental needs are fulfilled: health, food, shelter, education, a meaningful job, and the basic democratic freedoms. Leonhard is one of the most successful futurists on the international speaker circuit. He estimates that he...
Why you should be getting ready now for a world with quantum computers. With Ignacio Cirac

Why you should be getting ready now for a world with quantum computers. With Ignacio Cirac

Distant, yet urgent Any organisation which handles sensitive data should start preparing now for the arrival of quantum computing. The technology is unlikely to be ready for widespread use for years – maybe another couple of decades – but it has been known for some time that when it is, it will crack the encryption used by governments and armies, banks and hospitals. Messages sent today will become insecure overnight. A tough subject Quantum computing is a tough subject to explain. As Niels Bohr put it, “Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it”. Richard Feynman...
ChatGPT raises old and new concerns about AI. A conversation with Francesca Rossi

ChatGPT raises old and new concerns about AI. A conversation with Francesca Rossi

The latest generative AI models are sharpening up some long-standing debates about privacy, bias and transparency of AI systems. These issues are often called AI Ethics, or Responsible AI. Francesca Rossi points out that among other things, previous systems were trained on data sets which were more heavily curated, so attempts could at least be made to minimise the amount of bias they displayed. Generative AI systems are hungry beasts, devouring as much as possible of the data available in the world – or at least, on the internet. Rossi studied computer science at the University of Pisa in Italy,...
ChatGPT has woken up the House of Commons. A conversation with Tim Clement-Jones

ChatGPT has woken up the House of Commons. A conversation with Tim Clement-Jones

Some people have biographical summaries which wear you out just by reading them. Lord Clement-Jones is one of those people. He 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 senior politician, becoming a life peer in 1998. He has been the Liberal Democrats’ spokesman on a wide range of issues, and he joined the London Futurists Podcast to discuss how policy makers globally should think about AI. ChatGPT and MPs Lord Clement-Jones set up the All-Party...
China and AI – fearsome dragon or paper tiger?

China and AI – fearsome dragon or paper tiger?

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. Are the world’s two AI superpowers doomed to confrontation and conflict? Western misperceptions of China People in the West don’t know enough about China’s...
Peter James: best-selling author and transhumanist

Peter James: best-selling author and transhumanist

Crime and science fiction Peter James is one of the world’s most successful crime writers. His Roy Grace series, about a detective in Brighton, England, has produced 19 consecutive Sunday Times Number One bestsellers. His legions of devoted fans await each new release eagerly, but most of them probably don’t know that James is also a transhumanist. James has written 36 novels altogether, in several genres, including science fiction. His novel “Host” is about mind uploading, and appropriately enough, it was the world’s first electronically published novel - a copy of its floppy disc version is on display in London’s...
Just $100bn to cure aging. A conversation with Andrew Steele

Just $100bn to cure aging. A conversation with Andrew Steele

Ageless Andrew Steele is a Briton based in Berlin. At Oxford University he gained a PhD in physics, but then he switched to computational biology, and held positions at Cancer Research UK and the Francis Crick Institute. Along the way, he decided that aging was the single most important scientific challenge of our time. This led him to write the book "Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old". Steele has become one of TV’s favourite science experts, appearing on the "Impossible Engineering" show on the Discovery channel, and the "Strangest Things" show on Sky. He joined the...