David Rowan

Back in 1994, Marc Andreessen released a free web browser called Netscape Navigator that heralded the birth of the consumer internet. Netscape transformed what was an obscure academic and governmental hypertext network and opened the door to what became the multi-trillion-dollar internet economy. David Rowan, founding editor-in-chief of WIRED magazine’s UK edition, and author of the bestselling book “Non-Bullshit Innovation” (Penguin), is convinced we’re at the Netscape moment in the Artificial Intelligence era: at the very beginning of a massive series of disruptive industry upheavals built on AI that will create vast new wealth — and punish any business that underestimates the speed and depth of the shift to the new AI economy.

You can already see the signals:

• Deepfakes and synthetic voice actors becoming ever more convincing
• Generative AIs such as GPT-4, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, creating books, images or movies based on your text prompts
• Algorithmic content selection moving from TikTok to the wider entertainment economy (such as Spotify’s new AI DJs personalising your playlists for you)
• Medical AIs reading patients’ CT scans to spot tumours more reliably than human radiographers
• Autonomous cars driving more safely than humans, and autonomous swarm drones getting ready for the battlefield
• Hundreds of thousands of gamers interacting seamlessly in virtual world with no constraints on their in-game creative expression

But as with all exponential technologies, what we’re seeing now is just a hint of the upcoming shifts that will impact politics, education, creative expression — even the very meaning of what it is to be human.

David works with technology founders and regularly travels to the research labs, and what he’s seeing now is a Cambrian explosion of creative uses of AI colliding with ever increasing processing power. Today the buzz is around Large Language Models that enable compelling conversations with a machine; and around neural networks that can take still images and animate them as video (look at the latest Google Maps releases to see how a neural network lets you explore a fly-through of a restaurant, coded simply from a few photos). But tomorrow? We’re getting closer to Artificial General Intelligence, when the machine can solve any challenge as well as a human. In the meantime, journalists are competing with automated story writers; lawyers with automated discovery engines; medical consultants with algorithms that have studied every footnote in every peer-reviewed journal.

Where do we go from here — and how should you prepare? David will explain how education is about to be personalised at scale — with each student having “Einstein” explain quantum physics at their own pace; how Hollywood is planning for a future where actors won’t even need to be present to star in a blockbuster; where the customer-service agent is an AI who understand your mood and can respond to your facial expression; how we’ll discover new drugs and new carbon-negative materials by simulating molecular interactions inside an all-powerful AI.

Longer term, we need an honest public conversation about ethics: about what it means to be human in an age ever more dominated by robots; about how we constrain the AI before its encoded biases and autonomous decision-making cause us harm; about how to ensure fair access to these AIs before societies become more polarised than ever. There’s plenty of grounds to be optimistic: in fighting climate change alone, the AI can help us track and cut emissions and can conserve energy and water far more effectively than today’s systems. In tracking our bodies’ health, the AI will be our personal 24/7medical concierge service, spotting disease by analysing our breath or enabling the most soothing sleep. But how do we prepare for some of the more harmful consequences of this nascent revolution: from job losses at scale, to automated propaganda, to biases that entrench social and economic disadvantage?

David will translate how AI is being applied today in top university labs and in the most ambitious startups, and help you understand what is about to happen in your industry. Because you can’t assume it will be business as normal.