Some people say that all that’s necessary to improve the capabilities of AI is to scale up existing systems. That is, to use more training data, to have larger models with more parameters in them, and more computer chips to crunch through the training data. However, in this episode, we’ll be hearing from a computer scientist who thinks there are many other options for improving AI. He is Alexander Ororbia, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York State, where he directs the Neural Adaptive Computing Laboratory.

David had the pleasure of watching Alex give a talk at the AGI 2024 conference in Seattle earlier this year, and found it fascinating. After you hear this episode, we hope you reach a similar conclusion. 

Selected follow-ups:

• Alexander Ororbia - Rochester Institute of Technology
• Alexander G. Ororbia II - Personal website
• AGI-24: The 17th Annual AGI Conference - AGI Society
• Joseph Tranquillo - Bucknell University
• Hopfield network - Wikipedia
• Karl Friston - UCL
• Predictive coding - Wikipedia
• Mortal Computation: A Foundation for Biomimetic Intelligence - Quantitative Biology
• The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory? - Nature Reviews Neuroscience
• I Am a Strange Loop (book by Douglas Hofstadter) - Wikipedia
• Mark Solms - Wikipedia
• Conscium: Pioneering Safe, Efficient AI
• The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness (book by Mark Solms)
• Carver Mead - Wikipedia
• Event camera (includes Dynamic Vision Sensors) - Wikipedia
• ICRA (International Conference on Robotics and Automation)
• Brain-Inspired Machine Intelligence: A Survey of Neurobiologically-Plausible Credit Assignment
• A Review of Neuroscience-Inspired Machine Learning
• ngc-learn
• Taking Neuromorphic Computing to the Next Level with Loihi 2 Technology Brief - Intel

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

Inspiring Tech Leaders - The Technology Podcast
Interviews with Tech Leaders and insights on the latest emerging technology trends.

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In David's life so far, he has read literally hundreds of books about the future. Yet none has had such a provocative title as this: “The future loves you: How and why we should abolish death”. That’s the title of the book written by the guest in this episode, Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston. Ariel is a neuroscientist, and a Research Fellow at Monash University, in Melbourne, Australia.

One of the key ideas in Ariel’s book is that so long as your connectome – the full set of the synapses in your brain – continues to exist, then you continue to exist. Ariel also claims that brain preservation – the preservation of the connectome, long after we have stopped breathing – is already affordable enough to be provided to essentially everyone. These claims raise all kinds of questions, which are addressed in this conversation.

Selected follow-ups:

• Dr Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston - personal website
• Book webpage - includes details of when Ariel is speaking in the UK and elsewhere
• Monash Neuroscience of Consciousness
• Deep hypothermic circulatory arrest - Wikipedia
• Sentience and the Origins of Consciousness - article by Karl Friston that mentions bacteria
• List of advisors to Conscium
• Does the UK use £15,000, £30,000 or a £70,000 per QALY cost effectiveness threshold? by Jason Shafrin
• Researchers simulate an entire fly brain on a laptop. Is a human brain next? - US Berkeley News
• What are memories made of? A survey of neuroscientists on the structural basis of long-term memory - Preprint by Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston, Emil Kendziora, and Andrew McKenzie

Related previous episodes:

• Ep 91: The low-cost future of preserving brains, with Jordan Sparks
• Ep 77: The case for brain preservation, with Kenneth Hayworth

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

Inspiring Tech Leaders - The Technology Podcast
Interviews with Tech Leaders and insights on the latest emerging technology trends.

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Our guest in this episode is Sterling Anderson, a pioneer of self-driving vehicles. With a masters degree and a PhD from MIT, Sterling led the development and launch of the Tesla Model X, and then led the team that delivered Tesla Autopilot. In 2017 he co-founded Aurora, along with Chris Urmson, who was a founder and CTO of Google’s self-driving car project, which is now Waymo, and also Drew Bagnell, who co-founded and led Uber’s self-driving team.

Aurora is concentrating on automating long-distance trucks, and expects to be the first company to deploy fully self-driving trucks in the US when it deploys big driverless trucks (16 tons and more) between Dallas and Houston in April 2025.

Self-driving vehicles will be one of the most significant technologies of this decade, and we are delighted that one of the stars of the sector, Sterling, is joining us to share his perspectives.

Selected follow-ups:

• The future of transportation is here - Aurora website
• Leadership Team - Aurora website

Previous episodes also featuring self-driving vehicles:

• Ep 58: Whatever happened to self-driving cars, with Timothy Lee
• Ep 26: Peter James, best-selling crime-writer and transhumanist

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

Inspiring Tech Leaders - The Technology Podcast
Interviews with Tech Leaders and insights on the latest emerging technology trends.

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Our guest in this episode is Parmy Olson, a columnist for Bloomberg covering technology. Parmy has previously been a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and for Forbes. Her first book, “We Are Anonymous”, shed fascinating light on what the subtitle calls “the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency”.

But her most recent book illuminates a set of high-stakes relations with potentially even bigger consequences for human wellbeing. The title is “Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World”. The race is between two remarkable individuals, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Demis Hassabis of DeepMind, who are each profoundly committed to build AI that exceeds human capabilities in all aspects of reasoning.

Selected follow-ups:

• Parmy Olson, Bloomberg
• Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race that Will Change the World
• AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley and the new world order - book by Kai-Fu Lee
• The Coming Wave - book by Mustafa Suleyman
• Bromance Gone Sour: OpenAI and Microsoft’s Partnership Hits a Rough Patch - Geekflare
• For our Posterity - essay by Leopold Aschenbrenner
• OpenAI appoints Retired U.S. Army General Paul M. Nakasone to Board of Directors
• Do Computers Have Feelings? Don’t Let Google Alone Decide - article by Parmy Olson about Blake Lemoine
• Conscium - Pioneering Safe, Efficient AI

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

Inspiring Tech Leaders - The Technology Podcast
Interviews with Tech Leaders and insights on the latest emerging technology trends.

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Our guest in this episode is Andrea Miotti, the founder and executive director of ControlAI. On their website, ControlAI have the tagline, “Fighting to keep humanity in control”. Control over what, you might ask. The website answers: control deepfakes, control scaling, control foundation models, and, yes, control AI.

The latest project from ControlAI is called “A Narrow Path”, which is a comprehensive policy plan split into three phases: Safety, Stability, and Flourishing. To be clear, the envisioned flourishing involves what is called “Transformative AI”. This is no anti-AI campaign, but rather an initiative to “build a robust science and metrology of intelligence, safe-by-design AI engineering, and other foundations for transformative AI under human control”.

The initiative has already received lots of feedback, both positive and negative, which we discuss.

Selected follow-ups:

• A Narrow Path - main website
• ControlAI
• Conjecture - Redefining AI Safety
• What is Agentic AI - Interface.AI
• Chat GPT’s new O1 model escaped its environment to complete “impossible” hacking task - by Mihai Andrei
• Biological Weapons Convention - United Nations
• Poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal - Wikipedia (use of Novichok nerve agent in Salisbury, UK)
• Gathering of AI Safety Institutes in November in San Francisco
• Conscium - Pioneering safe, efficient AI
• The UK's APPG (All Party Parliamentary Group) on AI

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

Inspiring Tech Leaders - The Technology Podcast
Interviews with Tech Leaders and insights on the latest emerging technology trends.

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Our guest in this episode is David Wakeling, a partner at A&O Shearman, which became the world’s third largest law firm in May, thanks to the merger of Allen and Overy, a UK “magic circle” firm, with Shearman & Sterling of New York.

David heads up a team within the firm called the Markets Innovation Group (MIG), which consists of lawyers, developers and technologists, and is seeking to disrupt the legal industry. He also leads the firm's AI Advisory practice, through which the firm is currently advising 80 of the largest global businesses on the safe deployment of AI.

One of the initiatives David has led is the development and launch of ContractMatrix, in partnership with Microsoft and Harvey, an OpenAI-backed, GPT-4-based large language model that has been fine-tuned for the legal industry. ContractMatrix is a contract drafting and negotiation tool powered by generative AI. It was tested and honed by 1,000 of the firm’s lawyers prior to launch, to mitigate against risks like hallucinations. The firm estimates that the tool is saving up to seven hours from the average contract review, which is around a 30% efficiency gain. As well as internal use by 2,000 of its lawyers, it is also licensed to clients.

This is the third time we have looked at the legal industry on the podcast. While lawyers no longer use quill pens, they are not exactly famous for their information technology skills, either. But  the legal profession has a couple of characteristics which make it eminently suited to the deployment of advanced AI systems: it generates vast amounts of data and money, and lawyers frequently engage in text-based routine tasks which can be automated by generative AI systems.

Previous London Futurists Podcast episodes on the legal industry:

• Ep 53: The Legal Singularity, with Benjamin Alarie
• Ep 47: AI transforming professional services, with Shamus Rae

Other selected follow-ups:

• David Wakeling
• A&O Shearman
• ContractMatrix
• Harvey AI
• RAG - Retrieval-Augmented Generation
• Digital Operational Resilience Act (impacts banking)
• The Productivity J-Curve (PDF), by Erik Brynjolfsson, Daniel Rock, Chad Syverson
• Agentic AI: The Next Big Breakthrough That's Transforming Business And Technology, by Bernard Marr

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

Inspiring Tech Leaders - The Technology Podcast
Interviews with Tech Leaders and insights on the latest emerging technology trends.

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Our guest in this episode is Matt Burgess. Matt is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wyoming, where he moved this year after six years at the University of Boulder, Colorado. He has specialised in the economics of climate change.

Calum met Matt at a recent event in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and knows from their conversations then that Matt has also thought deeply about the impact of social media, the causes of populism, and many other subjects.

Selected follow-ups:

• Matt Burgess at the University of Wyoming
• Guided Civic Revival - Substack of Matt Burgess
• How polarization will destroy itself
• Roger A. Pielke Jr. - Wikipedia
• ‘My Life as a Climate Lukewarmer’ - National Review
• Shared Socioeconomic Pathways - Wikipedia (includes climate scenario SSP5-8.5)
• Exceeding 1.5°C global warming could trigger multiple climate tipping points - Science
• Fat-Tailed Uncertainty in the Economics of Catastrophic Climate Change (PDF) - explains "The Dismal Theorem"
• Sri Lanka’s organic farming disaster, explained - Vox
• Solar panel prices have fallen by around 20% every time global capacity doubled - Our World in Data
• Special guest speech by Mark Carney - YouTube
• Younger Dryas - Wikipedia (prehistoric period with rapid climate change)
• Platform policies of Jill Stein, US Green Party leader
• Agrowth – should we better be agnostic about growth? - degrowth
• ‘4°C of global warming is optimal’ – even Nobel Prize winners are getting things catastrophically wrong - The Conversation
• Economists' Statement on Carbon Dividends
• Who Is Favored To Win The 2024 Presidential Election? - Nate Silver

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

Inspiring Tech Leaders - The Technology Podcast
Interviews with Tech Leaders and insights on the latest emerging technology trends.

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Our guest in this episode is Karl Pfleger. Karl is an angel investor in rejuvenation biotech startups, and is also known for creating and maintaining the website Aging Biotech Info. That website describes itself as “Structured info about aging and longevity”, and has the declared mission statement, “Everything important in the field (outside of academia), organized.”

Previously, Karl worked at Google from 2002 to 2013, as a research scientist and data analyst, applying AI and machine learning at scale. He has a BSE in Computer Science from Princeton, and a PhD in Computer Science and AI from Stanford.

Previous London Futurists Podcast episodes mentioned in this conversation:

• Ep 74: The Longevity Singularity, with Daniel Ives
• Ep 45: Generative AI drug discovery breakthrough, with Alex Zhavoronkov
• Ep 12: Pioneering AI drug development, with Alex Zhavoronkov

Other selected follow-ups:

• AgingBiotech.Info
• Lifespan.io rejuvenation roadmap
• AgingDB list
• Stealth Biotherapeutics
• NewLimit
• Juvenity
• Juvena Therapeutics
• Immunis
• Partnership between Calico and AbbVie
• Hevolution
• Unity Biotechnology
• Here's Why resTORbio Fell Over 83% Today
• A4LI Responds to NIH Reform Proposal
• Great Desire for Extended Life and Health amongst the American Public - a paper by Karl Pfleger. Kristen Fortney, Joe Betts-LaCroix and others, 
• LEV achieved for young people before it is achieved for old people
• Longevity Biotech Fellowship
• Foresight Institute
• Longevity Global
• Vitalism.IO

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

Inspiring Tech Leaders - The Technology Podcast
Interviews with Tech Leaders and insights on the latest emerging technology trends.

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Our guest today is Pedro Domingos, who is joining an elite group of repeat guests – he joined us before in episode 34 in April 2023.

Pedro is Professor Emeritus Of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. He has done pioneering work in machine learning, like the development of Markov logic networks, which combine probabilistic reasoning with first-order logic. He is probably best known for his book "The Master Algorithm" which describes five different "tribes" of AI researchers, and argues that progress towards human-level general intelligence requires a unification of their approaches.

More recently, Pedro has become a trenchant critic of what he sees as exaggerated claims about the power and potential of today’s AI, and of calls to impose constraints on it.

He has just published “2040: A Silicon Valley Satire”, a novel which ridicules Big Tech and also American politics.

Selected follow-ups:

• Pedro Domingos - University of Washington
• Previous London Futurists Podcast episode featuring Pedro Domingos
• 2040: A Silicon Valley Satire
• The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World
• The Bonfire of the Vanities
• Ron Howard
• Mike Judge
• Martin Scorsese
• Pandora’s Brain
• Transcendence
• Future of Life Institute moratorium open letter
• OpenAI working on new reasoning technology under code name ‘Strawberry’
• Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach - by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig
• Google's AI reasons its way around the London Underground - Nature
• Conscium
• Is LaMDA Sentient? — an Interview - by Blake Lemoine
• Could a Large Language Model be Conscious? - Talk by David Chalmers at NeurIPS 2022
• Jeremy Bentham
• The Extended Phenotype - 1982 book by Richard Dawkins
• Clarion West: Workshops for people who are serious about writing

Music: Spike Protein, by

Inspiring Tech Leaders - The Technology Podcast
Interviews with Tech Leaders and insights on the latest emerging technology trends.

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Our guest in this episode is the journalist and author James Ball. James has worked for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, The Guardian, WikiLeaks, BuzzFeed, The New European, and The Washington Post, among other organisations. As special projects editor at The Guardian, James played a key role in the Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the NSA leaks by Edward Snowden.

Books that James has written include “Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World”, “Bluffocracy”, which makes the claim that Britain is run by bluffers, “The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us”, and, most recently, “The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World”.

That all adds up to enough content to fill at least four of our episodes, but we mainly focus on the ideas in the last of these books, about digital pandemics.

Selected follow-ups:

• James Ball (personal website)
• The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World - book by James Ball
• Guardian and Washington Post win Pulitzer prize for NSA revelations
• Meme - as described by Richard Dawkins
• Dreyfus affair
• Blood libel
• Future Shock - book by Alvin and Heidi Toffler
• How The Gulf Of Tonkin Incident Sparked The Vietnam War
• Why Narcissists Love Conspiracy Theories
• Nigel Farage - UK politician 
• WarGames - 1983 movie
• Gish gallop - rhetorical technique
• Dominic Cummings has admitted the Leave campaign won by lying
• Reality check: how do Farage’s claims on immigration, economy and crime hold up?
• Facts don’t change minds – and there’s data to prove it

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

Inspiring Tech Leaders - The Technology Podcast
Interviews with Tech Leaders and insights on the latest emerging technology trends.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify