What's

the upside and downside, as you see it? What do you think is the best case that we get with AI? What's the worst case that we get with AI? Let's

start with the worst case. I do share the worries that indeed Jeff Hinton has He has,

Jeff Hinton,

yeah. Indeed, about AI being let loose and being abused by people. His worry, which I share, is that the speed of progress in AI is so fast at the moment that it is very hard for the way we organize society to accommodate that speed of change. So that is a worry. My optimistic hope is that AI will contribute to quality models of the world, including, you know, economics and all the sort of important decisions that politicians and we as humans have to make, that these models are good enough and have enough predictive quality so that you can run what-if calculations and what-if scenarios. So when we come to decisions like climate change, you can say, well, we can reduce CO2 here or we cannot. This is what the model predicts. And we then have to choose what to do. But we know the consequences. And if you're honest with people, show them the scenarios, I think they will make rational decisions. So

I do want to ask about quantum computing. I'm wondering what the most simplistic terms that you have about why it will make an impact for us could be. Well,

first of all, the amazing fact that quantum computing is so fundamentally different from the rest of computing. And is the reason why that's so

exciting because, to your point earlier, about things like climate change and real problems around energy, fuel, poverty, food sources, etc. These are questions that can be queried by computers that are exponentially more powerful than the current models we have to solve some of those big problems? Well,

the excitement about quantum computing is that it actually can make a contribution to all the really interesting problems that we still have that we can't tackle with classical computing. And they are these very large optimization problems. they're finding and modeling quantum systems. Again, quoting Richard Feynman, why on earth would you want to use a classical computer to simulate a quantum system? You should use a quantum computer to simulate a quantum system. Why are quantum systems so important? Well, because all the molecules are quantum systems. So if you want to make any progress in drug development, for example, this is basically a quantum mechanical problem. You want to find out how a small molecule finds a particular binding site in a protein and then has its effect of stopping that protein doing things that you don't want to do it or indeed encouraging the protein to do things that you want it to do.

Other than I get why physicists would be excited by it, what difference does quantum computing make to the average person who might be listening? It sounds to me like the answer might be, for example, solving cancer.

Well, indeed, yes. If you could speed up the drug development and maybe ideally in the long term do drug trials in silico rather than on a quantum computer, than on people over many years, because it takes about $2 billion and I think 12 years to develop a drug. So if you could reduce that to just a few months or a few years, it would completely change the pharma industry. From a practical point of

view, you mentioned quantum computing, AI, synthetic biology. And then you said something I just wasn't really expecting, which is blockchain. And I think that's probably because blockchain out of all of those, well, I mean, maybe not AI, but you know, has had its hype moment. And it's been at that sort of sort of failure to launch aspect of finding real consumer breakthrough. Arguably Bitcoin is the best known usage of it. But it seems sort of stuck, I would say. So what is your view on why blockchain still matters today? Well,

first of all, it hasn't burst. It is already an absolutely huge market. The problem is, at the moment, it is still very fraudulent. Lots of people use blockchain and bitcoins for illicit trades, and there are lots of scandals and lots of scams. And that, of course, distracts from the fact that the blockchain technology and the mathematics behind the blockchain technology is very sound. The great excitement I have about the blockchain is that in combination with smart contracts, it enables us to automate business processes and increase the efficiency of our economy. If so, the banks are involved, as opposed to the Wild West that we have at the moment with Bitcoin, with fantastic gyrations of the price of the Bitcoin, then we can get the benefits of digital currencies, which is zero cost of payment transactions, instant transactions. on the e-pound, the e-euro, the e-dollar. And then, of course, there is the e-huan, which has already been rolled out in China and is used by 180 million people. But it's the smart contracts that are not just the payment system, but the ability to agree on a business process and then have the automatic implementation of it through the blockchain mechanism. All

of this is to say you have some unbelievable and rare creds, as Gen Z would call it. Now, in 2010, you predicted some big tech trends that were upcoming. I'd love to know, you know, briefly, as a little interlude, which ones of those have succeeded and which ones have bombed?

There have been some disappointments, like fuel cells, for example, I expected fuel cells to be much further along than they are right now. So stem cells is probably the single most exciting development because although it's not big news yet, the fact that we can produce stem cells from normal skin cells using the Yamanakta transcription factors, the four transcription factors that Yamanaka-san got his Nobel Prize for, to take a normal mature cell, like a skin cell, and reverse it back into an embryonic stem cell. These are called induced pluripotent cells, which then can act as a starting point to create any of the cell types that we have in the human body in up to 200 cell types, is exactly that breakthrough that I talked about earlier that enabled synthetic biology and is the basis for Optiox, which is the patented technology that we're using at Bit.Bio to create these very high quality human cells.

There's a well-known saying, which is America innovates, China imitates, and Europe regulates. In the view of that statement in post-Brexit Britain, but realistically across Europe as well, do you think Europe is kind of screwed against America and China for technological advancements? No,

I don't. And the reason why I don't is a recent Atomica report has pointed out something that we people in Europe who like to be doomsayers and knock ourselves down. And if you actually look at the figures, there are some encouraging news. First of all, our university system produces outputs, research outputs, which is comparable to the US. So we don't have a problem with respect to the production of IP in the first place. Secondly, Europe produces more startups than the US, since there's a little known fact. So we actually don't have a startup problem. We've got a scale-up problem, but we don't have a startup problem. Thirdly, we have more software programs in Europe than in the U.S. and more AI specialists. But the most surprising thing of that report really was that we have a net immigration into Europe of technology specialists from the U.S., not the other way around. So there is this myth in Europe that everybody wants to go to Silicon Valley. And Silicon Valley, of course, still is the leading technology hub in the world. But there are more Americans preferring the European lifestyle rather than the other way around. Presumably

predominantly into the UK, where there's a real focus on AI. In London anyway, London and Cambridge.

No, it's actually surprisingly spread out. So Lisbon, for example, has a great community of Americans that love Lisbon, including Tony Fidel, who also spends a lot of time in Paris. Paris is very high up the list. I mean, London is number one. There's no doubt about it. But it is surprisingly evenly spread across Europe. Now, the big problem that we still have is scale-ups. So when a startup has shown that they do have a world-beating idea or product, et cetera, then in America and in China, it must be said, mainly through government funding, people are willing to put the hundreds of millions of dollars behind that company to make them a global winner. And that is the firepower that we lack in Europe. It is getting better. We now have a few hundred million dollar financing like Mistral in AI in Paris, Pascal again, a quantum computer company. It is encouraging. It is happening, but still far behind the US and China.