11 June 2023
11 June 2023
On 11 June 2023 the Sunday Times published Neil Lawrence’s opinion piece Our lives may be enhanced by AI, but Big Tech just sees dollar signs.
The article contrasts what the public asks for from AI — healthcare, education, social care, security — with where much commercial investment has gone. Neil argues that grand narratives of artificial general intelligence suit incumbent interests, and that the harder task is deploying tools that re-empower the people who already hold society together. He also pushes back on existential “apex intelligence” framing associated with Geoffrey Hinton’s departure from Google: human intelligence was never the apex in every respect; machines already exceed us in many, and the real risk is who controls the infrastructure of information.
The piece sits with later policy and media work on AI adoption and with The Atomic Human.
17 April 2020
The Royal Society launches DELVE — Data Evaluation and Learning for Viral Epidemics — to feed data-driven analysis into SAGE. Neil Lawrence helps lead the group; Jessica Montgomery provides secretariat.
4 May 2020
The first DELVE report argues that face coverings, including homemade cloth masks, could reduce community transmission when physical distancing is hard to maintain.
27 May 2020
A DELVE report sets out when TTI can help control COVID-19; Andrei Paleyes and colleagues release open simulation software used in the supporting analysis.
