Our guest in this episode is Riaz Shah. Until recently, Riaz was a partner at EY, where he was for 27 years, specialising in technology and innovation. Towards the end of his time at EY he became a Professor for Innovation & Leadership at Hult International Business School, where he leads sessions with senior executives of global companies.

In 2016, Riaz took a one-year sabbatical to open the One Degree Academy, a free school in a disadvantaged area of London. There’s an excellent TEDx talk from 2020 about how that happened, and about how to prepare for the very uncertain future of work.

This discussion, which was recorded at the close of 2023, covers the past, present, and future of education, work, politics, nostalgia, and innovation.

Selected follow-ups:
Riaz Shah at EY
The TEDx talk Rise Above the Machines by Riaz Shah
One Degree Mentoring Charity
One Degree Academy
EY Tech MBA by Hult International Business School
Gallup survey: State of the Global Workplace, 2023
BCG report: How People Can Create—and Destroy—Value with Generative AI

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

In this episode, our subject is Uncontrollable: The Threat of Artificial Superintelligence and the Race to Save the World. That’s a new book on a vitally important subject.

The book’s front cover carries this endorsement from Professor Max Tegmark of MIT: “A captivating, balanced and remarkably up-to-date book on the most important issue of our time.” There’s also high praise from William MacAskill, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford: “The most accessible and engaging introduction to the risks of AI that I’ve read.”

Calum and David had lots of questions ready to put to the book’s author, Darren McKee, who joined the recording from Ottawa in Canada.

Topics covered included Darren's estimates for when artificial superintelligence is 50% likely to exist, and his p(doom), that is, the likelihood that superintelligence will prove catastrophic for humanity. There's also Darren's recommendations on the principles and actions needed to reduce that likelihood.

Selected follow-ups:
Darren McKee's website
The book Uncontrollable
Darren's podcast The Reality Check
The Lazarus Heist on BBC Sounds
The Chair's Summary of the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park
The Statement on AI Risk by the Center for AI Safety

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

Our guest in this episode is Nick Mabey, the co-founder and co-CEO of one of the world’s most influential climate change think tanks, E3G, where the name stands for Third Generation Environmentalism.

As well as his roles with E3G, Nick is founder and chair of London Climate Action Week, and he has several independent appointments including as a London Sustainable Development Commissioner.

Nick has previously worked in the UK Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, the UK Foreign Office, WWF-UK, London Business School, and the UK electricity industry. As an academic he was lead author of “Argument in the Greenhouse”; one of the first books examining the economics of climate change.

He was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Jubilee honours list in 2022 for services to climate change and support to the UK COP 26 Presidency.

As the conversation makes clear, there is both good news and bad news regarding responses to climate change.

Selected follow-ups:
Nick Mabey's website
E3G
"Call for UK Government to 'get a grip' on climate change impacts"
The IPCC's 2023 synthesis report
Chatham House commentary on IPCC report
"Why Climate Change Is a National Security Risk"
The UK's Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC)
Bjørn Lomborg
Matt Ridley
Tim Lenton
Jason Hickel
Mark Carney

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

Our subject in this episode is the idea that the body uses electricity in more ways than are presently fully understood. We consider ways in which electricity, applied with care, might at some point in the future help to improve the performance of the brain, to heal wounds, to stimulate the regeneration of limbs or organs, to turn the tide against cancer, and maybe even to reverse aspects of aging.

To guide us through these possibilities, who better than the science and technology journalist Sally Adee? She is the author of the book “We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds”. That book gave David so many insights on his first reading, that he went back to it a few months later and read it all the way through again.

Sally was a technology features and news editor at the New Scientist from 2010 to 2017, and her research into bioelectricity was featured in Yuval Noah Harari’s book “Homo Deus”.

Selected follow-ups:
Sally Adee's website
The book "We are Electric"
Article: "An ALS patient set a record for communicating via a brain implant: 62 words per minute"
tDCS (Transcranial direct-current stimulation)
The conference "Anticipating 2025" (held in 2014)
Article: "Brain implants help people to recover after severe head injury"
Article on enhancing memory in older people
Bioelectricity cancer researcher Mustafa Djamgoz
Article on Tumour Treating Fields
Article on "Motile Living Biobots"

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

We are honoured to have as our guest in this episode Professor Stuart Russell. Stuart is professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and the traditional way to introduce him is to say that he literally wrote the book on AI. Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, which he co-wrote with Peter Norvig, was first published in 1995, and the fourth edition came out in 2020.

Stuart has been urging us all to take seriously the dramatic implications of advanced AI for longer than perhaps any other prominent AI researcher. He also proposes practical solutions, as in his 2019 book Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control.

In 2021 Stuart gave the Reith Lectures, and was awarded an OBE. But the greatest of his many accolades was surely in 2014 when a character with a background remarkably like his was played in the movie Transcendence by Johnny Depp.

The conversation covers a wide range of questions about future scenarios involving AI, and reflects on changes in the public conversation following the FLI's letter calling for a moratorium on more powerful AI systems, and following the global AI Safety Summit held at Bletchley Park in the UK at the beginning of November.

Selected follow-ups:
Stuart Russell's page at Berkeley
Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence (CHAI)
The 2021 Reith Lectures: Living With Artificial Intelligence
The book Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control

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

Our guest in this episode is Rebecca Gorman, the co-founder and CEO of Aligned AI, a start-up in Oxford which describes itself rather nicely as working to get AI to do more of the things it should do and fewer of the things it shouldn’t.

Rebecca built her first AI system 20 years ago and has been calling for responsible AI development since 2010. With her co-founder Stuart Armstrong, she has co-developed several advanced methods for AI alignment, and she has advised the EU, UN, OECD and the UK Parliament on the governance and regulation of AI.

The conversation highlights the tools faAIr, EquitAI, and ACE, developed by Aligned AI. It also covers the significance of recent performance by Aligned AI software in the CoinRun test environment, which demonstrates the important principle of "overcoming goal misgeneralisation". 

Selected follow-ups:

• buildaligned.ai
• Article: "Using faAIr to measure gender bias in LLMs"
• Article: "EquitAI: A gender bias mitigation tool for generative AI"
• Article: "ACE for goal generalisation"
• "CoinRun: Solving Goal Misgeneralisation" - a publication on arXiv
• Aligned AI repositories on GitHub
• "Specification gaming examples in AI" - article by Victoria Krakovna
• Rebecca Gorman speaking at the Cambridge Union on "This House Believes Artificial Intelligence Is An Existential Threat" (YouTube)

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

Our guest in this episode is Dhiraj Mukherjee, best known as the co-founder of Shazam. Calum and David both still remember the sense of amazement we felt when, way back in the dotcom boom, we used Shazam to identify a piece of music from its first couple of bars. It seemed like magic, and was tangible evidence of how fast technology was moving: it was creating services which seemed like science fiction.

Shazam was eventually bought by Apple in 2018 for a reported 400 million dollars. This gave Dhiraj the funds to pursue new interests. He is now a prolific investor and a keynote speaker on the subject of how companies both large and small can be more innovative.

In this conversation, Dhiraj highlights some lessons from his personal entrepreneurial journey, and reflects on ways in which the task of entrepreneurs is changing, in the UK and elsewhere. The conversation covers possible futures in fields such as Climate Action and the overcoming of unconscious biases.

Selected follow-ups:
https://dhirajmukherjee.com/
https://www.shazam.com/
https://dandelionenergy.com/
https://technation.io/
Entrepreneur First
https://fairbrics.co/
https://neoplants.com/
Al Gore's Generation Investment Management Fund
https://www.mevitae.com/

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

Our guest in this episode is James Hughes. James is a bioethicist and sociologist who serves as Associate Provost at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is also the Executive Director of the IEET, that is the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, which he co-founded back in 2004.

The stated mission of the IEET seems to be more important than ever, in the fast-changing times of the mid-2020s. To quote a short extract from its website:

The IEET promotes ideas about how technological progress can increase freedom, happiness, and human flourishing in democratic societies. We believe that technological progress can be a catalyst for positive human development so long as we ensure that technologies are safe and equitably distributed. We call this a “technoprogressive” orientation.

Focusing on emerging technologies that have the potential to positively transform social conditions and the quality of human lives – especially “human enhancement technologies” – the IEET seeks to cultivate academic, professional, and popular understanding of their implications, both positive and negative, and to encourage responsible public policies for their safe and equitable use.

That mission fits well with what we like to discuss with guests on this show. In particular, this episode asks questions about a conference that has just finished in Boston, co-hosted by the IEET, with the headline title “Emerging Technologies and the Future of Work”. The episode also covers the history and politics of transhumanism, as a backdrop to discussion of present and future issues.

Selected follow-ups:
https://ieet.org/
James Hughes on Wikipedia
https://medium.com/institute-for-ethics-and-emerging-technologies
Conference: Emerging Technologies and the Future of Work

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

The Partnership on AI was launched back in September 2016, during an earlier flurry of interest in AI, as a forum for the tech giants to meet leaders from academia, the media, and what used to be called pressure groups and are now called civil society. By 2019 more than 100 of those organisations had joined.

The founding tech giants were Amazon, Facebook, Google, DeepMind, Microsoft, and IBM. Apple joined a year later and Baidu joined in 2018.

Our guest in this episode is Rebecca Finlay, who joined the PAI board in early 2020 and was appointed CEO in October 2021. Rebecca is a Canadian who started her career in banking, and then led marketing and policy development groups in a number of Canadian healthcare and scientific research organisations.

In the run-up to the Bletchley Park Global Summit on AI, the Partnership on AI has launched a set of guidelines to help the companies that are developing advanced AI systems and making them available to you and me. Rebecca will be addressing the delegates at Bletchley, and no doubt hoping that the summit will establish the PAI guidelines as the basis for global self-regulation of the AI industry.

Selected follow-ups:
https://partnershiponai.org/
https://partnershiponai.org/team/#rebecca-finlay-staff
https://partnershiponai.org/modeldeployment/

An open event at Wilton Hall, Bletchley, the afternoon before the Bletchley Park AI Safety Summit starts: https://lu.ma/n9qmn4h6

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

This is the second episode in which we discuss the upcoming Global AI Safety Summit taking place on 1st and 2nd of November at Bletchley Park in England.

We are delighted to have as our guest in this episode one of the hundred or so people who will attend that summit – Connor Leahy, a German-American AI researcher and entrepreneur.

In 2020 he co-founded Eleuther AI, a non-profit research institute which has helped develop a number of open source models, including Stable Diffusion. Two years later he co-founded Conjecture, which aims to scale AI alignment research. Conjecture is a for-profit company, but the focus is still very much on figuring out how to ensure that the arrival of superintelligence is beneficial to humanity, rather than disastrous.

Selected follow-ups:
https://www.conjecture.dev/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/connor-j-leahy/
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ai-safety-summit-programme/ai-safety-summit-day-1-and-2-programme
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ai-safety-summit-introduction/ai-safety-summit-introduction-html
An open event at Wilton Hall, Bletchley, the afternoon before the AI Safety Summit starts: https://www.meetup.com/london-futurists/events/296765860/

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