London Futurists

Self-driving cars has long been one of the most exciting potential outcomes of advanced artificial intelligence. Contrary to popular belief, humans are actually very good drivers, but even so, well over a million people die on the roads each year. Globally, for people between 12 and 24 years old, road accidents are the most common form of death.Google started its self-driving car project in January 2009, and spun out a separate company, Waymo, in 2016. Expectations were high. Many people shared hopes that within a few years, humans would no longer need to drive. Some of us also thought that the arrival of self-driving cars would be the signal to everyone else that AI was our most powerful technology, and would get people thinking about the technological singularity. They would in other words be the “canary in the coal mine”.The problem of self-driving turned out to be much harder, and insofar as most people think about self-driving cars today at all, they probably think of them as a technology that was over-hyped and failed. And it turned out that chatbots – and in particular GPT-4 - would be the canary in the coal mine instead.But as so often happens, the hype was not wrong – it was just the timing that was wrong. Waymo and Cruise (part of GM) now operate paid-for taxi services in San Francisco and Phoenix, and they are demonstrably safer than humans. Chinese companies are also pioneering the technology.One man who knows much more about this than most is our guest today, Timothy Lee, a journalist who writes the newsletter "Understanding AI". He was previously a journalist at Ars Technica and the Washington Post, and he has a masters degree in Computer Science. In recent weeks, Timothy has published some carefully researched and insightful articles about the state of the art in self-driving cars.Selected follow-ups:https://www.UnderstandingAI.org/Topics addressed in this episode include:*) The two main market segments for self-driving cars*) Constraints adopted by Waymo and Cruise which allowed them to make progress*) Options for upgrading the hardware in a self-driven vehicle*) Some local opposition to self-driving cars in San Francisco*) A safety policy: when uncertain, stop, and phone home for advice*) Support from the State of California - and from other US States*) Comparing accident statistics: human drivers versus self-driving*) Why self-driving cars don't require AGI (Artificial General Intelligence)*) Reasons why self-driving cars cannot be remotely tele-operated*) Prospects for self-driven freight transport running on highways*) The company Nuro that delivers pizza and other items by self-driven robots*) Another self-driving robot company: Starship ("your local community helpers")*) The Israeli company Mobileye - acquired by Intel in 2017*) Friction faced by Chinese self-driving companies in the US and elsewhere*) Different possibilities for the speed at which self-driving solutions will scale up*) Potential social implications of wider adoption of self-driving solutions*) Consequences of fatal accidents*) Dangerous behaviour from safety drivers*) The special case of Tesla FSD (assisted "Full Self-Driving") and Elon Musk*) The future of recreational driving*) An invitation to European technologistsMusic: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain DeclarationDigital Disruption with Geoff Nielson Discover how technology is reshaping our lives and livelihoods.Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Stacey Edmonds, an expert in cybercrime and artificial intelligence, discusses the increase in cybercrime fueled by Generative AI. They explore strategies for reducing 'scam-ability' and fostering trusted digital relationships. The podcast also covers the profitability and unreported instances of cybercrime, trust issues in mainstream media, and understanding 'scammability' in the future of cybercrime.

The podcast discusses the upcoming AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park and explores the risks and opportunities of AI. It compares joblessness to the displacement of horses by cars. The concept of abundance and a generous income is proposed to address technological unemployment. The idea of a Universal Generous Income (UGI) is explored, along with the connection between risks and economic mobility.

This episode, like the previous one, consists of a number of short interviews recorded at the Longevity Summit Dublin between 17th and 20th August, featuring a variety of different speakers from the Summit.In this episode, we'll hear first from Matt Kaeberlein, the CEO of a company called Optispan, following a 20 year period at the University of Washington studying the biological mechanisms of aging and potential interventions to improve healthspan. Among other topics, Matt talks to us about the Dog Aging Project, the Million-Molecule Project, and whether longevity science is at the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning.Our second speaker is João Pedro de Magalhães who is the Chair of Molecular Biogerontology at the University of Birmingham, where he leads the genomics of aging and rejuvenation lab. João Pedro talks to us about the motivation to study and manipulate the processes of aging, and his work to improve the low-temperature cryopreservation of human organs. You may be surprised at how many deaths are caused by the present lack of such cryopreservation methods.Third is Steve Horvath, who has just retired from his position as a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is now a Principal Investigator at Altos Labs in Cambridge. Steve is known for developing biomarkers of aging known as epigenetic clocks. He describes three generations of these clocks, implications of mammalian species with surprisingly long lifespans, and possible breakthroughs involving treatments such as senolytics, partial epigenetic reprogramming, and altering metabolic pathways.The episode rounds off with an interview with Tom Lawry, Managing Director for Second Century Tech, who refers to himself as a recovering Microsoft executive. We discuss his recent bestselling book "Hacking Healthcare", what's actually happening with the application of Artificial Intelligence to healthcare (automation and augmentation), the pace of change regarding generative AI, and whether radiologists ought to fear losing their jobs any time soon to deep learning systems.Selected follow-ups:https://longevitysummitdublin.com/speakers/https://optispanlife.com/https://orabiomedical.com/https://rejuvenomicslab.com/https://oxfordcryotech.com/https://horvath.genetics.ucla.edu/https://altoslabs.com/team/principal-investigators-san-diego/steven-horvath/https://www.tomlawry.com/https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781003286103/hacking-healthcare-tom-lawryMusic: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain DeclarationDigital Disruption with Geoff Nielson Discover how technology is reshaping our lives and livelihoods.Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

The Longevity Summit Dublin took place from 17th to 20th August. In between presentations, Calum and David caught up with a number of the speakers to ask about their experiences at the Summit. This episode features three of these short interviews.First up is Aubrey de Grey, the President and Chief Science Officer of the LEV Foundation - a person deeply involved in the design and planning of the Summit. Next, we hear from Andrew Steele, who is an author and campaigner. The third interview features Liz Parrish, the CEO of BioViva Sciences and COO of Genorasis.Selected follow-ups:https://longevitysummitdublin.com/speakers/https://www.levf.org/https://maiabiotech.com/https://andrewsteele.co.uk/https://bioviva-science.com/https://www.bestchoicemedicine.com/https://www.genorasis.com/Audio engineering assisted by Alexander Chace.Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain DeclarationDigital Disruption with Geoff Nielson Discover how technology is reshaping our lives and livelihoods.Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Benjamin Alarie, an expert in the deployment of advanced AI systems in the legal profession, discusses how AI can radically improve the legal industry. Topics include the data-heavy nature of legal work, the slow adoption of technological innovations, automating legal processes, predicting court decisions with AI, surpassing human predictions, and the potential implications of AI in the legal profession.

Our guest in this episode is Aidan McCullen. For ten years from 1998 to 2008, Aidan was a professional rugby player, delighting crowds in Ireland, England, and France. He made the very natural transition from that into sports commentating, but he also moved into digital media.He started as an intern at Communicorp to learn digital media and marketing, and he learned about digital by doing it, living it and building it – as he puts it, by jumping off a cliff and building a plane on the way down. With typical humility, he says he was just a few Google searches ahead of everyone else.With this grounding, Aidan has made himself a genuine expert on innovation. He is a keynote speaker, an executive coach, a board director, a lecturer, and the author of “Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention for Individuals, Organisations and Life”.Aidan may be known best as the enthusiastic and generous host of a podcast called the Innovation Show, which offers weekly interviews with leaders in their fields, including writers, academics, inventors, executives and mavericks. The central message of that podcast is that we all need to stay open to new ideas, and always keep learning.Selected follow-ups:https://theinnovationshow.io/about/Topics addressed in this episode include:*) Lessons from Aidan's time as a rugby player*) The gift of discipline*) Being ready to take advantage of unexpected good luck*) Avoiding the "WASP" trap - wandering aimlessly without purpose*) The "centaur" model - half human and half machine*) Aidan's own use of generative AI - embellishing graphics, developing metaphors, suggesting questions for interviews*) An alternative to a lemonade stand: creating an entire cartoon book using generative AI*) Why audiences are leaning in, more than before*) Various ways in which automation will impact the jobs market and the cost of services*) Career advice for a nine year old*) Encouraging students to use and understand generative AI tools*) Tangible examples of Amara's Law*) The special value of skills in communication, collaboration, 'cobot'ing, coordination, and looking after your health*) Actions today in anticipation of being healthy at the age of 100*) Deciding who to collaborate with*) Developing a "stem cell" mindset - knowing our purpose, but keeping our options open*) Bruce Lipton's research on epigenetics*) What drives Aidan: helping people make better decisions and lead better lives*) Building a community of people who are prepared to think differentlyAudio engineering by Alexander Chace.Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain DeclarationDigital Disruption with Geoff Nielson Discover how technology is reshaping our lives and livelihoods.Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Our guest in this episode is Martin O'Dea. As the CEO of Longevity Events Limited, Martin is the principal organiser of the annual Longevity Summit Dublin. In a past life, Martin lectured on business strategy at Dublin Business School. He has been keeping a close eye on the longevity space for more than ten years, and is well placed to speak about how the field is changing. Martin sits on a number of boards including the LEV Foundation, where, full disclosure, so does David.This conversation is a chance to discover, ahead of time, what some of the highlights are likely to be at this year's Longevity Summit Dublin, which is taking place from 17th to 20th August.Selected follow-ups:https://longevitysummitdublin.com/https://www.levf.org/projects/robust-mouse-rejuvenation-study-1Topics addressed in this episode include:*) Emma Teeling and the unexpected longevity of bats*) Steve Austad and a wide range of long-lived animal species, as featured in his recent new book "Methuselah's Zoo"*) Michael Levin and the role of bioelectrical networks in the coordination of cells during embryogenesis and regeneration*) Filling four days of talks - "not an issue at all"*) A special focus on "the hard problems of aging"*) The work of the LEV (Longevity Escape Velocity) Foundation and the vision of Aubrey de Grey*) Various signs of growing public interest in intervening in the biology of aging*) A look back at a conference in London in 2010*) Two events in 2013: academic publications on "hallmarks of aging", and Google's creation of Calico*) Multi-million dollar investments in longevity are increasingly becoming "just pocket change... par for the course"*) Selective interest from media and documentary makers, coupled with some hesitancy*) Playing tennis at the age of 110 with your great grandchildren - and then what?*) The possibility of "a ChatGPT moment for longevity" that changes public opinion virtually overnight*) Why the attainment of RMR (Robust Mouse Rejuvenation) would be a seminal event*) The rationale for trying a variety of different life-extending interventions in combination - and why pharmaceutical companies and academics have both shied away from such an experiment*) The four treatments trialled in phase 1 of RMR, with other treatments under consideration for later phases*) A message to any billionaires listening*) A message to any politicians listening: the longevity dividend, as expounded by Andrew Scott and Andrew Steele*) Another potential seminal moment: the TAME trial (Targeting Aging with Metformin), as advocated by Nir Barzilai*) Why researchers who wanted to work on aging had to work on Parkinson's instead*) Looking ahead to 2033*) The role of longevity summits in strengthening the longevity community and setting individuals on new trajectories in their lives*) The benefits of maintaining a collaborative, open attitude, without the obstacles of NDAs (Non-Disclosure Agreements)*) Options for progress accelerating, not just from exponential trends, but from intersections of insights from different fields*) Beware naïve philosophical concerns about entropy and about the presumed wisdom of evolution*) The sad example of campaigner Aaron Schwartz*) Important roles for decentralized science alongside existing commercial modelsMusic: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain DeclarationDigital Disruption with Geoff Nielson Discover how technology is reshaping our lives and livelihoods.Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

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.com/https://www.five.ai/Topics addressed in this episode include:*) The argument for investing not just in "platforms" but also in "picks and shovels" - items within the orchestration or infrastructure layers of new solutions*) Examples of recent investments by Kindred Capital*) Comparisons between the surge of excitement around generative AI and previous surges of excitement around crypto and dot-com*) Companies such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft kept delivering value despite the crash of the dot-com bubble; will something similar apply with generative AI?*) The example of how Nvidia captures significant value in the chip manufacturing industry*) However, looking further back in history, many people who invested in the infrastructure of railways and canals lost lots of money*) Reasons why generative AI might produce large amounts of real value more quickly than previous technologies*) The example of Cradle Bio as enablers of protein engineering - and what might happen if Google upgrade their protein folding prediction software from AlphaFold 2 to AlphaFold 3*) Despite the changes in technological possibilities, what most interests VCs is the calibre of a company's founding team*) The search for individuals who have "creative destruction in their being" - people with a particular kind of irrational self-belief*) The contrast between crystallized intelligence and fluid intelligence - and why both are needed*) Advantages and disadvantages for investors being located in the UK vs. being located in the US*) Why doesn't Europe have tech giants?*) Complications with government regulation of tech industries*) The example of Scarlet as a company helping to streamline the regulation of medical software that is frequently updated*) Why government regulators need to engage with people in industry who are already immersed in considering safety and efficacy of products*) Wherever they are located, companies need to plan ahead for their products reaching new jurisdictions*) Ways in which AI is likely to impact industries in new ways in the near future*) The particular need to improve the efficiency of the later stages of clinical trials of new medical treatmentsAudio engineering by Alexander Chace.Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain DeclarationDigital Disruption with Geoff Nielson Discover how technology is reshaping our lives and livelihoods.Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

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 think his weekly newsletter “Eye on AI” is one of the very best non-technical sources of news and views about the technology.Jeremy has some distinctive views on the significance of transformers and the LLMs (Large Language Models) they enable.Selected follow-ups:https://www.fortune.com/newsletters/eye-on-aihttps://fortune.com/author/jeremy-kahn/Topics addressed in this episode include:*) Jeremy's route into professional journalism, focussing on technology*) Assessing the way technology changes: exponential, linear with a steep incline, linear with leaps, or something else?*) Some characteristics of LLMs that appear to "emerge" out of nowhere at larger scale, can actually be seen developing linearly when attention is paid to the second or third prediction of the model*) Some leaps in capability depend, not on underlying technological power, but on improvements in interfaces - as with ChatGPT*) Some leaps in capability require, not just step-ups in technological power, but changes in how people organise their work around the new technology*) The decades-long conversion of factories from steam-powered to electricity-powered*) Reasons to anticipate significant boosts in productivity in many areas of the economy within just two years, with assistance from AI co-pilots and from "universal digital assistants"*) Related forthcoming economic impacts: slow-downs in hiring, and depression of some wages (akin to how Uber drivers reduced how much yellow cab drivers could charge for fares)*) The potential, not just for companies to learn to make good use of existing transformer technologies, but for forthcoming next generation transformers to cause larger disruptions*) Models that predict, not "the next most likely word", but "the next most likely action to take to achieve a given goal"*) Recent AI startups with a focus on using transformers for task automation include Adept and Inflection*) Risks when LLMs lack sufficient common sense, and might take actions which a human assistant would know to check beforehand with their supervisor*) Ways in which LLMs could acquire sufficient common sense*) Ways in which observers can be misled about how much common sense is possessed by an LLM*) Reasons why some companies have instructed their employees not to use consumer-facing versions of LLMs*) The case, nevertheless, for companies to encourage bottom-up massive experimentation with LLMs by employees*) The possibility for companies to have departments without any people in them*) Implications of LLMs for geo-security and international relations*) A possible agency, akin to the International Atomic Energy Agency, to monitor the training and use of next generation LLMs*) Interest by the Pentagon (and also in China) for LLMs that can act as "battlefield advisors"*) A call to action: people need to get their heads around transformers, and understand both the upsides and the risksDigital Disruption with Geoff Nielson Discover how technology is reshaping our lives and livelihoods.Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify