4 April 2025
4 April 2025
On 4 April 2025 Neil Lawrence spoke at the 36th edition of The Outlook for the Economy and Finance, hosted by The European House – Ambrosetti at Villa d’Este, Cernobbio. His talk was titled AI Cannot Replace the Atomic Human.
The argument matches the line of his December 2024 Financial Times opinion piece: what can be measured is easier to automate; the atomic human is what is left when quantified facets are sliced away — attention, judgement, the quality of interaction that does not show up in waiting lists or exam scores. Reinvesting efficiency gains into human contact is the productivity question the talk puts to business and policy audiences.
Slides are on inverseprobability.com. The same themes run through The Atomic Human.
The AI Adoption programme studies how institutions take up AI in ways that deliver public value — through public dialogue, practitioner partnership, and emerging theory on judgement, model minimisation, and the information topography of organisational change.
Information topography is the geometry of how information flows through a complex system. The programme develops the mathematical foundations of that geometry — from information-theoretic axioms to predictive accounts of how communication structure emerges and reorganises.
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.
