Dear Futurists
It’s now less than four weeks until the start of this year’s CogX Festival – which is taking place at the O2, London from 12-14 September.
The festival is described as “The Festival of Inspiration, Impact, and Transformational Change“. It features 500 speakers spread across three different Summits – DeepTech, Industry Transformation, and Global Leadership – all addressing a question that is close to my heart. Namely, “How Do We Get The Next 10 Years Right?”
Below, please find details of a final opportunity for members and friends of London Futurists to obtain free and discounted tickets to attend some or all of what CogX offers. You’ll also find news of other opportunities to join conversations about AI, longevity technology, and other futurist matters.
1.) Free and discounted CogX passes
Thanks to the partnership between London Futurists and CogX, a number of free passes have been released for CogX Expo & Networking tickets. When registering, use the special code EXJULDFUTS23 on this page.
Please note these passes can only be claimed using a work email address.
CogX write as follows:
With this pass you can discover the most exciting start-ups, scale ups and enterprises in Magazine London. And sign up for speed matchmaking sessions to generate new leads, find new employees, raise capital and find investment opportunities.
There’s lots more happening at CogX in addition to the Expo and Networking. You can view the entire agenda here. A tiny fraction of the 500+ speakers are shown in the following image:
To obtain a 15% discount on all Platinum, Gold and Standard passes for this year’s CogX, use the code 15LDFUT23 when registering.
I’m already having great difficulty figuring out which of several parallel sessions I should attend at various points during the three days. The parallel options all look really inviting!
2.) Intelligence Squared events on AI
Consider the debate topic, “AI Is An Existential Threat to Humanity”.
Until recently, about the only place where you could expect such a debate to take place in London was at one of our own London Futurists events. But now, Intelligence Squared are picking up that challenge.
The race to develop artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating at a dizzying rate. Tech giants like Google and OpenAI are investing large amounts of money and resources into creating AI systems that hope to outthink and outperform human intelligence, all in the name of solving some of humanity’s most complex problems and to make profits for their shareholders.
Some experts are beginning to sound the alarm that the push to create ever more sophisticated AI could pose an existential threat to humankind. The fear is that machines could potentially turn against us or become too powerful for us to control.
On the other hand, proponents argue that the benefits of AI far outweigh the risks, and that we can design systems with ethical considerations and safeguards to ensure their safe and responsible use. But the risks of AI are serious, with concerns ranging from mass unemployment to life and death decisions being made by machines with no human emotion, as well as the possibility of AI being used by bad actors in cyber warfare.
Join us on September 28 for a debate on the future of technology and its impact on society. Experts will explore the pros and cons of advanced AI, and whether we can ensure its development is guided by ethical and responsible principles. Don’t miss this opportunity to gain insight into one of the most pressing issues of our time.
The four speakers listed as debating the motion are Stuart Russell, Meredith Whittaker, Carl Miller, Sougwen Chung. I’m expecting stimulating contributions from at least two of these 😮
That’s not the only forthcoming Intelligence Squared event on the subject of AI. Two others are:
- Gillian Tett on Growth, AI and the Economic Outlook for the World – October 24th
- Mustafa Suleyman and Zanny Minton Beddoes on the AI Revolution – September 11th
3.) Creating and exploring AGI scenarios
With both CogX and Intelligence Squared putting on some fine events on the subject of AI, does that mean that London Futurists can retire?
Not so fast!
Important aspects of the discussion about future scenarios still generally fail to come to the fore in these other events.
Hence our event on Saturday 26th, “Creating and exploring AGI scenarios”:
It’s time to retire the paperclip maximiser. That thought experiment for the evolution of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) has attracted lots of attention over the years, but it’s too easy for people to dismiss it as abstract, unrealistic, or science fiction.
It’s the same with many other popular narratives about the rise of AGI. These narratives often do more harm than good, hindering people from gaining a genuine understanding of the rich spectrum of possibilities ahead.
This online workshop is a chance to leave these narratives behind. It’s a chance to draw on the best of recent thinking around the world, in order to jointly create and explore better scenarios for the evolution of AGI. The goal is to develop scenarios which have a good chance of striking reviewers as credible, real-world, engaging, and worthy of further investigation.
One or more of these scenarios will explore how events can, credibly, slide from an initially positive state (with optimistic participants) into a disaster.
Additionally, one or more scenarios will explore how events can, credibly, progress from an initially confused state into a successful governance of the transition to extraordinarily beneficial AGI.
Thanks to support of Iain Beveridge of Telepresent, this event will be taking place inside the Remo remote conferencing environment.
Once you’ve registered (via the links on the meetup page) and joined the test environment, you’ll find yourself in something like what’s shown in this screenshot:
The event will vary between plenary mode (everyone in a single discussion) and table mode (where each table hosts a separate conversation).
It’s a bit of an experiment, but the goal is to encourage and enable a richer conversation.
If we get things right, the experience will in effect feature aspects of the best of both worlds – offline and online. Moreover, we should develop a better set of AGI scenarios as the basis for further discussion.
On this occasion, there’s no charge to register or join the event.
4.) “My genes and longevity” – a comic book
What’s a good use of generative AI, such as Midjourney?
How about the creation of an entire comic book, to help spread an understanding of genes and longevity?
Visit https://dna-seq.github.io/dna-seq_stories/ and enjoy it!
To find out more about the team behind this project, see this page on Github.
Many thanks to Anton Kulaga for drawing this to my attention!
5.) News from Dublin
I’ll be in Dublin for the next few days, for this year’s Longevity Summit Dublin.
The Summit is officially running from Thursday through Sunday. But if anyone is in Dublin this evening (Wednesday) and wishes to met up to discuss any matters concerned with the future and/or longevity, there will be an informal gathering at the Long Hall Pub on George St, from 8pm. The details are here.
I look forward to joining you in a toast to the mission of the LEV Foundation: conducting and inspiring research to comprehensively cure and prevent human age-related disease.
// David W. Wood
Chair, London Futurists
London Futurists 