Calum Chace's Blog, page 4

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

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

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...

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

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.

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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.

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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’...

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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...

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Peter James: best-selling author and transhumanist

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...

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

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...

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Pioneering Transhumanism: a conversation with Natasha Vita-More

It is nearly 40 years since Natasha Vita-More wrote the first version of the Transhumanist Manifesto. She was drawn to transhumanist ideas from an early age, but she felt they were too radical to gain widespread acceptance at the time. She was also disinclined to pursue the career in medicine which her family favoured, and went into the arts instead. She spent some time living with a group of...

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Why are UFOs still blurry? A conversation with David Brin

In recent years there has been a surge in reported sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs). There are perhaps more now than at any time since the 1950s. But there are also many millions more cameras active on the earth than there were in the 1950s, and the cameras are far better, so why are the UFOs still blurry? One man who has some answers is the scientist and science fiction author...

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