Generative Futures

David Edgerton is Professor of History at Kings College London. His book Shock of the Old challenged the way we think about innovation, arguing that we systematically overvalue the new and ignore the old (including maintenance). He has also written importantly on the British ‘warfare state’ and his book The Rise and Fall of the British Nation argues Britain became a fundamentally national economy...

The rhythm of social media is frenetic. But what if AI can give us more choice about the speed at which we live our lives? In his article ‘Time Machines’ Nicklas Berild Lundblad outlines the thesis that AI has the potential to be a ‘temporal mediator’, enabling a decoupling of computational and biological time. Nicklas is a writer, investor, and formerly Head of Global Policy and Public Affairs at...

I spoke to Carl Benedikt Frey, Professor at the Oxford Internet Institute and one of the most cited scholars on the political economy of technology. His new book How Progress Ends argues that technological progress is far from inevitable. In this conversation, we discuss the delicate choreography between exploration and implementation, why different institutions suit different phases of the techno...

Jonathan White is Professor of Politics at the London School of Economics and author of In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea . His research explores how time has been used and thought about politically. I have found his argument that politicians (and the public) feel we are in a situation of ‘temporal claustrephobia’ really useful for understanding our current landscape. Our actions fee...

Sean Ó hÉigeartaigh is Program Director of AI Futures and Responsibility at the Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge. I spoke to him about his article The Most Dangerous Fiction: The Rhetoric and Reality of the AI Race This is a really important question and Sean is a leading thinker and practitioner in this field. Do you believe China is racing for AGI? Why or why not? (...

In this conversation with Hamish Low we discuss his recent article ‘Compute is not the answer to AI sovereignty’ . Hamish is an AI Policy Fellow at IAPS and I think provides a really nuanced way to think about how the influence of AI on power dynamics might be distributed. Transcript below! Philip Bell: Hamish, you wrote this article as part of the Center for Governance of AI summer fellowship. Yo...

Why we don't understand LLMs ... yet What's really happening inside models when they generate text? Lee Sharkey, Principal Investigator at Goodfire AI and co-founder of Apollo Research, and I discuss mechanistic interpretability - the emerging science of reverse-engineering neural networks to understand how they actually work. Lee works at Goodfire AI, an AI interpretability research lab f...