Positive futures
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Welcome to the LSE Events Podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences. Good evening and welcome to the London School of Economics. My name is Neil Lee, I'm Professor of Economic Geography here and I'm delighted to welcome you to what is the final event of this year's LSE Festival.

So our theme for this year's LSE Festival has been 'Visions for the Future'. So we've been hosting a series of events looking at threats and opportunities of the near and distant future and what a better world could look like. We've had some amazing speakers, some fantastic events talking about politics, inequality, climate, technology, sometimes all of these things within the same presentation. It's been a really amazing week but

If I had one critique of the week, it is that it has been a little bit negative. It has been a little bit negative. So one thing which I think we're going to sort of focus on now is we're going to start focusing on something optimistic. We're going to try and finish the week on an optimistic note.

And to do that, we have four fantastic panellists who are going to be hopefully saying a little bit about what the future might look like. So each of our panellists is going to share with us, all of you in the room and also people online, the ideas, inventions, innovations and discoveries that give them optimism for the future. And hopefully we will come away from this with a little bit of sort of a good feeling. We'll ignore the sort of difficulties in the wider world and we'll come out of today with something of a positive view.

So our four speakers are first of all Michael Muthukrishna, he's a professor of economic psychology in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at LSE.

He's also an affiliate of the Development Economics Group at Stickerd and the LSE Data Science Institute. He's founder of LSE Culturalitic, a new approach to culture and diversity, co-founder of the London School of Artificial Intelligence, scientific advisor to an AI startup, Electric Twin. And he's got a fantastic book, A Theory of Everyone, Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going, that was published by Basic Books in 2023, and which is going to be available to buy after the session.

Next up, we have Roger Highfield, Science Director of the Science Museum Group, Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, Royal Society of Biology and Academy of Medical Sciences. He's also a visiting professor at University of Oxford and UCL, a member of the UKRI Medical Research Council. He's also written 10 books, so he's also sort of very... written lots of books. We think they're going to be on sale afterwards, we're not totally sure. I expect you to buy all 10, OK? LAUGHTER

Following that, Sue Hare, I don't know if you've written a book yet, but it's probably only a matter of time, I would imagine. Someone told me to do it so I could sell something after talks. Apparently I'm too academic for the mass market. Well, so Sue Hare, we're very pleased to welcome her today. Technology entrepreneur and creative leader. Founder of OpenEnded, a platform incubator for creative technologists working with artificial intelligence. Her work centers on impact-driven work at the intersection of design, culture, and future-facing technology.

She was at Google and Google Arts and Culture for over a decade, where she led initiatives merging cutting-edge technologies with arts, design, culture, education and environmental sustainability. And I'm also very pleased to welcome Isabel Osada, best-selling British author, journalist and public speaker who combines humour with a serious look at her subject matter. She's worked as an actress, a broadcaster and a public speaker, as well as a comedian and author,

Isabelle is the best-selling author of five previous books, including Battersea Park Road to Enlightenment. Sorry, seven.

I'm three behind Roger. Isabella is the best-selling author of seven previous books, and you have to buy all seven, including Battersea Park Road to Enlightenment, which has sold over 100,000 copies in the UK. I'm an academic. We don't sell that many books, so 100,000 feels like quite a lot. The second edition of her acclaimed book, The Joyful Environmentalist, How to Practice Without Preaching, has been published this April by Watkins Publishing and is available to purchase at the end of the year.

If you're on social media, the hashtag is LSE Festival. If you have a phone, which presumably is almost everyone, put it on silent, please. And there will be a podcast after today, so careful what you say, because it goes online and gets listened to.

In terms of the format, we're going to ask each of the speakers to go in turn with a sort of introductory statement. Then there's going to be some questions. If you're online, you can submit the questions via the Q&A box. Please include your name and affiliation and keep them relatively short. If you're here, welcome as well, and we will be doing the usual sticking your hand up thing.

And actually one thing which we're going to do slightly differently tonight is we don't just want questions. We're also interested in whether you have reasons for optimism. Are there things you think the panel have left out which you think are boding well for the future of the world? Are there things which you think we should be considering in our discussion tonight? So without any further ado, if I could hand over to Michael. Thank you. All right. Thank you so much.

So a lot of my research started in human evolution, and I'm going to spare you the last five to seven million years of it and just say that the Industrial Revolution that happened in this country two and a half centuries ago was an inflection point for humanity. So if you look at just about any measure of progress, health, lifespan, child mortality, size of our cooperative groups, or even overall violence levels, everything looked better and better. Like the hockey stick just goes up.

Prior to that, it was kind of this Malthusian world. And that just kept going right up until around the early 1970s when everything just seemed to change a little bit. There's a wonderful website that I quite enjoy called

WTF happened in 1971. And all it is, it's just a website with a series of graphs. I encourage you to go to it. And all of these graphs just show everything coming apart in society around the early 70s. So you see inequality shifting around the world. You see the kind of working class being left behind. We see all of the problems, the seeds of the problems that we face today emerging at that moment. So that was about 50 years ago.

It's a little bit difficult sometimes to be optimistic in a world where we have war on the horizon once more, right? Europe got a Nobel Prize for peace on the continent, just being peaceful for a little while. And now, you know, in Ukraine, again, we see war once more.

Economic growth has slowed in this country. Many people have been left behind. Our societies are being torn apart, actually, by cultural differences, by economic differences. And with slow growth, all that progress that we made around the reduction in extreme poverty has slowed down and in some cases reversed. Inequality too.

There are actually many reasons why I'm incredibly optimistic even in laying out that story. The first is that one of the privileges of my job is that I get to interact with a lot of young people. And what I see are people who are motivated, passionate, sick of business as usual, and a little bit angry. And I don't want to, you know, that sounds so generic, the young people, they're the future. I want to be a little bit more specific. So groups, I don't know if you've seen groups like Looking for Growth, who have been doing all kinds of things, you know, Crush Crime is another group.

works in progress, laying out plans and problems that exist in our society. So in some cases, going out to the tubes. I catch the central line, there is graffiti on the central line more than there was three years ago. Has anyone seen it? Yeah, on the Bakerloo line as well, I can see some nods. They just went out and they started cleaning it up, which kind of embarrassed the government into actually doing something. So these people are just fed up with business as usual and they're taking things into their own hands. So that's the first reason I'm quite optimistic for the future.

The second is that we have new technologies on the horizon that are potentially massively game-changing. So I've argued that part of what happened with the Industrial Revolution was that there's a whole bunch of stored sunlight in the ground, effectively. So peat turned to black rock in terms of coal.

zooplankton algae turned to oil and natural gas. Now when we use that, we shot the rocket up, but of course we destroyed the planet in the process. We re-released all of that carbon that was trapped by millions of years pressure cook. So millions of years of pressure cooking, we released in a couple of centuries. And now we are in an interesting situation. So we're more cooperative, we're in larger groups, at the expense of our planet. And so the question is,

Do we go for sustainable kind of stagnation which might once more return us to a world of zero-sumness? Or is there a way toward like clean abundance where we might reallocate those resources to cleaning up the mess that we've created? And along those same lines, there have been massive, so we're once again investing in nuclear. We have solar, as I said before, China alone, 228 new nuclear reactors and solar more than almost the rest of the planet, right? And other places are catching up fast.

Fusion, maybe we'll get there somewhere between Monday and the next 30 years as people have been saying. But there's now an industry, both in the private sector and the public sector, invested in nuclear infusion as well. And if we crack it, this could be a major breakthrough for our species. And the third reason I'm optimistic is that a lot of the problems that we face are not in the technology. They're not really in the ideas. We kind of know what to do. They're in the social layer. It's the social software that's kind of broken.

Everyone knows what to do, but the governments don't seem to be doing it. And what we are seeing are also breakthroughs in those new models. And I'll just give you one example just in my own work. We have people streaming across the southern border in the United States. We have people streaming into Europe. There's lots of research on the pool factors of basically the welfare systems being exploited. But on the other hand, the reason they're coming is because the places they live in kind of suck.

And so if you want to solve that problem, you also want to solve it. And we don't have good models of development in aid. Aid is actually quite terrible. So aid can have a role in being a catalyst, but it also props up autocratic regimes. It undermines local industry and farmers. How can you compete with free food from America's surplus? And how can local business compete with NGOs providing those same services for free?

But we have new models that are being deployed. So right now I'm part of a group building a new city in Zanzibar because we seem okay at building a city level. Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Singapore.

And that could be like if we create a Hong Kong in East Africa and if we figure out how. And so the kind of activity that's happening here at the LSE, this kind of know the cause of things for the better of the world, there have been some major breakthroughs in various industries alongside things like our ability to predict people with AI that make me very hopeful that the social sciences might actually become a science that we can trust and rely on, something that we didn't see, for example, during the pandemic.

Because interventions are to the social sciences what interventions are to the physical science. They're science applied as technology. And there needs to be that feedback, and we're starting to see it. So for those three reasons, I'm actually optimistic. Great. Thank you. Roger.

well i think actually i should start off by saying that it's actually good for you to be optimistic i mean there was a study by a harvard team that came out in 2022 160 000 women very diverse group and um they lived longer i think five percent longer the 25 most optimistic compared with the 25 least optimistic so it's good to be optimistic

Why am I optimistic? Actually, picking up on some of the themes that Michael's just already talked about, there was a great study by an Oxford University team a year or two ago, Cameron Hepburn and his colleagues, looking at the rollout of

renewable technologies and other green technologies. Now usually the mantra is that if we're heading for net zero say by 2050 it's impossible, it's too expensive. In fact they concluded that we would save trillions of dollars because when you look at economic modeling of the rollout of new technology it's always underestimated how cheap it would be. It's always been super conservative.

And they look back over several decades and found, say, solar is a classic example. When people said solar would be a serious contributor to the grid in the 90s, people thought it was a joke compared with nuclear. And now look at it. It's really having a massive impact. You multiply that across lots of different technologies. And yes, we can feel a bit optimistic. Fusion as well.

I wrote for The Telegraph for 20 years, and yes, you know, I covered...

jet joint European tourists and column in the in the 80s and the the kind of incremental milestones towards harnessing the power of the Sun Now the British government's actually talking about a prototype power producing fusion plant in 2040 so although the joke about fusion is it's always 50 years away I actually think we are beginning to see a real optimism that fusions a prospect and

And in fact, if you go to Oxfordshire, you'll see there's a whole cluster of privately funded fusion startups and so on. We've got this behemoth in the south of France called ETA, which unfortunately is a bit of a white elephant. But, you know, there's a lot going on on the fusion front. And I think if we got fusion going, that would be a total game changer.

And I suppose the third thing I wanted to talk about was tipping points. It's an idea really pushed by Tim Linton at the University of Exeter, and it's really thinking about the world in a non-linear way. We always think in a linear way. So, for example, a little bit more carbon in the atmosphere means a little bit worse, a little bit more extreme climate. But in fact...

You get feedback loops. Lovelock was famous for his Daisy World model in showing that negative feedbacks can actually stabilize the climate. But also, Daisy World showed that if you go too far, the climate system can click very rapidly into a new state. So there's a lot of concern about with the Amazon or the tundra or the ocean.

or the great circulation in the North Atlantic, that if we cross one of these thresholds, the planet's going to click into a new system. There could even be cascades. So that's all very gloomy. But Lenton's team has also done work on what they call positive tipping points, showing how you can pass a threshold for environmental change. And there's some jolly stories about this, like in, I think, in Norway in the 90s,

The head of the band Aha with Bologna drove around in Norway in an electric vehicle incurring fines and getting a lot of publicity complaining about how it was more expensive to run an electric vehicle. And now Norway actually leads the world in terms of adoption of electric vehicles. And the day that electric is cheaper,

than conventional diesel, whatever vehicles, that's going to be a turning point. Similarly with things like coal, when it's when when you know, there are still places where coal offers you a cheaper alternative to solar. But as soon as there's nowhere where that happens, then I think there's going to be a positive tipping point, massive adoption. So let's have faith in positive tipping points. And that's enough for me, I think. Thanks, Roger.

I actually, every few months I turn off my Instagram account and I did it five days ago and I really am feeling much better. Part of it is like every problem is probably not our problem and I think there is something really simple about just trying to disconnect a little bit

So, you know, I think it's really interesting that we've talked about science and technology as reasons to be optimistic. And, you know, it is true. I think innovations in science have really propelled us to have hope for the future. But I'm also interested in the arts and the humanities.

And I think there's a moment in scientific innovation where we're at right now, where looking to the arts and looking to the creative industries can actually help us to see a pathway that could set new boundaries, new ethical frameworks, and also new possibilities for what science might accomplish.

I do write a sub stack, which you're all welcome to follow. And the last post was on swarm AI and swarm machines and algorithms. And a swarm, as everyone here knows, is a collection of animals like ants or bumblebees or even swallows that operate according to their own particular behavior and connection to one another.

And there is technology that's been developed. Some of it is being applied in combat zones, but a lot of it is actually being built into algorithms that are looking to engage with drug discovery, monitoring blood sugar levels, and so on and so forth, that is inspired by the behavior of swarms.

And for me, it's a fascinating opportunity to think about how scientists are now looking at nature and biomimicry to think about where technology may go. But the reason I got interested in swarms was actually the work of two artists that I've worked with in my time at Google. They're both creative technologists. One's called Daisy Ginsberg, the other is called Anab Jain. And they look at studying more than human or non-human intelligence in their work.

And they've been working for many years now to think about, as artists, as designers, how to consider the so-called intelligence of animals, other species, in how we inform AI systems. So the reason I bring that up is because I think there's a moment actually with technology, particularly with AI, where we have an opportunity to merge other ways of thinking and other belief systems

not just thinking about creative thinking, but thinking about other spiritual practices, indigenous knowledge, and forms of intelligence that are not just necessarily logical or cognitive and how we build technologies for the future. And I'm optimistic because a lot of it is starting to happen. It's not happening at scale. It's happening in R&D labs, it's happening in artist studios, in design studios, and it could form an amazing pathway for where we go next in terms of

of possibly more expansive, more thoughtful, less extractive ways of developing technology in the future. And I also...

I just wrote a blog post for the LSE on neuroscience. And so very specifically, it's looking at AI and dreams and also the rules of where we go next with neuroscience and how neuroscience engages with AI. But the reason I'm mentioning this is that, I mean, it is a fact that most AI right now and most technology that we're seeing is directly influenced and inspired by science fiction. I don't know how many people here read science fiction.

And actually also lots of people read books apparently based on the last talk. I think a lot of what we've seen, a lot of like famous tech CEOs talk very much about being inspired by iRobot, tons of other literature, and that's setting a narrative and a pathway for their careers. Things like flying robots or mind reading and brain computer interfaces have actually evolved directly out of science fiction

And I think we have an opportunity right now because technologies like AI are so embedded into our lives, into our devices, and also into how we might build our own futures to look to other forms of inspiration and imagination. And I think those will come from other cultures. Those will come from other perspectives. They will come from young people and they will come from artists. So I would say that I'm also optimistic that there's a chance right now to

in this moment of where AI goes next, to think about imagination beyond a certain kind of science fiction and to see where we might take it further. That's fantastic. Just to warn the other panellists, I'm going to ask you about where you find your inspiration, where are the other communities, the other places you can find inspiration from? But first of all, Isabel. I suddenly realised I wanted to quote from my own book, so please forgive me. You should remember us. Are we allowed to do that? The quote, I think, is on page 12.

Ah, yes, here we are. Marvellous. OK, so my reason to be positive about the future is slightly different from all these, that the idea of...

the Joyful Environmentalist, is that I'm interested in learning about all the things that we can each do as individuals to make a difference and then doing them. That's my particular point of almost obsession. So whenever I go to talks, scientific talks or lectures of any kind, I'm always sitting there with my notepaper and pencil just wanting to write down actual actions that I can take.

I just want the answer to the question, but what can we do? What can we do? So, and I'm a great believer in both large actions and small actions. So I'm just going to tell those, in case there's anyone in the audience feeling like me, that you just want positive examples of actions you can take, I'm going to give you some. So one of the things that I'm a great believer in...

that I don't understand why everyone doesn't do it is ethical banking. I'm a subscriber. If you only subscribe to one magazine, I do recommend The Ethical Consumer because there's an impact of every single thing you can buy. And not all things we buy are the same as others. Some companies work ethically, some don't. Some banks work ethically, some don't. As anyone with an environmental interest here will know, a lot of the high street banks, the lending and investment portfolio is not in the public domain.

So whatever your values and your ethics are, the chances are that your bank is spending your money on something different. So just to save you a lot of research time, according to the Ethical Consumer, the two most ethical banks in the country are, and I hope some of you will write this down, Triodos and Co-op Smile.

They are the top of the ethical consumer list for banks where you know that your money is being ethically invested and it's not being given into the arms. I mean, you could be a Quaker and your money's going into the arms industry, or you could be a vegan who's interested in animal rights and you could be building the vivisection factory down the road. You've just got no idea because they won't tell you. So ethical banking is a step that everybody can take. It's very easy to move your bank. You just phone up the new bank and say, I'd like to move, and they arrange it all for you.

Another thing that we can all get involved in that's really positive is the rewilding movement in Britain and the increase in biodiversity. The rewilding movement is going from strength to strength. If you've not visited NEP, the most fantastic, shining example of the rewilding movement in Britain, do go and visit NEP. The work that they're doing there with nature, with what I call free nature, is absolutely outstanding and it's growing every day and moving. It's a...

It's the rewilding movement. For those of you looking for futures, it's just the most inspiring and beautiful way of working with nature. So there's that. Energy, as Michael and Roger were saying, those in the know tell me that the fossil fuel industry is almost...

It's on its last legs. It's on its way out. We're talking about futures. It's just not going to be around. However, what they're doing instead is they're trying to sell us all plastic. And I've got a couple of examples for you. So oil companies...

Oil companies have spent £180 billion in the last seven years finding new products that we need to buy. They like to call them eco, so that you're more inclined to buy them. And I'm just going to give you two examples of ridiculous things that were sold, made out of plastic. This is what the fossil fuel is doing. So a plastic pram for pushing a watermelon includes chiller to keep your melon cool, £130.

A plastic contraption for hard boiling eggs without the shell. You take the eggs out of their shells, put them in an egg-shaped container, which you then place in boiling water. £14. And for all those of you that have relationships, listen to this. An intimate shaping tool. A piece of plastic that you put between your legs to shave your pubic hair into a heart shape, a downward arrow or an exclamation mark. LAUGHTER

£14.95. Now, don't those of you that have relationships wonder how you've managed to survive without owning a plastic intimate shaping tool sold to you by the fossil fuel industry? Now, the reason I'm saying this is I just want to make you aware next time you see something utterly ridiculous being sold to you that is coming from the fossil fuel industry, just don't buy their plastic rubbish. Okay.

Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy. LSE IQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question. Like, why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or, can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for LSE IQ wherever you get your podcasts. Now, back to the event.

supply chains, develop an obsessive interest in where your products are coming from. The ethical consumer will help you, particularly with clothing. I generally say, don't shop, we've all got enough clothes. How do we know? You never see people walking the streets naked. We've all got enough clothes. Stop, please, buying clothes. There's way too much shopping for clothes going on out there. And then I know I've only got five minutes, so I must talk quickly. I just wanted to put it, oh yes, if you want to volunteer, don't...

Don't just plant a tree in Britain, look up Trees for Life, the charity, and go and help replant the Caledonian forest right across Scotland. Plant 100 trees, go out there, and I know they fence off areas for natural regeneration, but they also plant native species, so this is another wonderful way that you can do that.

With your spare time, I've got so many examples I realise. I did say I was going to keep talking to someone who said, can I cut you off? I just want to say a little word about digital pollution. 2,397 tonnes of CO2 are released into the atmosphere every day because of unwanted emails. In the UK alone, 64 million unnecessary emails are sent every day.

If you delete and unsubscribe from 500 emails, it removes 172 grams of CO2 from data storage. Now, I know it sounds ridiculous, but the cloud, incidentally, there is no cloud.

There is no fluffy white cloud up in the sky. We've all been given this wonderful illusion, haven't we? It's all these terrible data centres that are polluting our countrysides. The cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. So please, friends, unsubscribe from as much as you can. This is an action that we can all take tonight. And if you've got 20,000 photographs, please be loving to your loved ones. If you get run over on the way home, no one's going to go through 20,000 photographs.

Please, delete 15,000 of them and just keep the ones that you really love because we really have to start being concerned about digital pollution. And if you want another 156 examples of what you can do, then my book is available after the talk. Wonderful. I think round of applause. Actually, I think that's probably the first time that intimate shaping has ever been mentioned in an LSE public event. Delighted, delighted to. Probably the last, so... LAUGHTER

Right. Well, they probably won't let me run one again. So that's, um, so let me, let me start off with this question. So Sue had this very interesting question about where are the communities, where are the groups, where are the places, where are the species that you look to for inspiration? So Michael, Roger, Isabel, do you have a, you know, where do you look? Michael? Gosh, where do I look? I don't know if I look in any particular place. Um,

Actually, I'll tell you about something. So we have some new data. Science covered it today, actually, if you go check it out, where we show that there's a visual illusion, right? It's called the coffer illusion. You can look it up later. You can either see circles or rectangles on it. And everyone, if I were to survey this crowd, everyone here sees rectangles. Everyone in the West sees rectangles. And we went out to this site in northern Namibia. They're called the Himba people. They rub red ochre on their skin. You've probably seen them. All of them see circles. None of them see rectangles.

And I think that's really diversity. One of the things that I think keeps me up at night is just that we have human compute. We're talking about artificial intelligence. We have human intelligence that is being wasted on this planet for lack of opportunity, for lack of development. And what you really want is people who can be in the room where you see rectangles and they see circles and you say, actually, there's some circles there.

So I don't think there's one particular place. What I would like to see is the human collective brain come together, given the opportunity to take advantage of all of that compute power and put towards the many problems that we face today. Thank you. Roger?

Gosh, there's such a rich discussion. I mean, the last but one book I did was about digital twins, actually in medicine. So this is creating a twin of you based on your data. And actually, people don't realise with AI, if you train an AI model on population data, you just get one size fits all medicine. And the reason I'm interested in digital twins is that they're models of the real world. They're attempts to model the whole planet,

I say you can do amazing models of the heart and so on. And for me, they're great stimulus for the imagination because you can play with these models to do what-if scenarios. So computationally, we're getting incredibly powerful now. And actually, just to pick up Louise's point, I totally agree about energy consumption. My co-author now uses one of the exascale...

two or three exascale machines on the planet. These things are burning something like 20 megawatts to 60 megawatts. But there is an optimistic future in quantum and analogue computing, which does offer low-power computing. And on science fiction, we did a whole exhibition...

around this science museum. And there are some brilliant examples of how, say, when you look at why did the Soviet Union beat America in the space race rather comprehensively at the start of the 60s? It goes back to the Cosmis movement in Russia in the 19th century, dreaming about colonizing other worlds and so on, inspired by H.G. Wells'

and Jules Verne and so on. There were big fairs about sort of space in Moscow in the 20s. It was kind of baked into their culture, this idea of space exploration. So of course the Soviets were the first into space and really beat the Americans for the first half of the 60s. So it shows you the power of sci-fi. One last example, I once interviewed Gerry Anderson

who came up with all those creaky old puppet shows like Thunderbirds, and he said he'd lost count of the number of NASA engineers who wrote him letters saying, I helped land someone on the moon inspired by Thunderbirds and so on. So sci-fi is really powerful. Wonderful. Isabel, I'm going to go to you. Then afterwards, Suha, I'm going to ask you about quantum, if that's OK. Oh, wonderful. LAUGHTER

Where do we go for inspiration? That's the whole emphasis of my work because I'm looking all the time for learning about the environment in order to learn what can we do

So I'm looking for huge and small acts of inspiration. I was reading a book today about ivy, about the amazing power of ivy, which incidentally, everyone tells me, please tell your audiences, it does not kill trees. Don't take your ivy down, it's a myth. It's really good for nature, it's really good for the environment, it's really good for CO2. So even little things like that, I take huge delight in finding solutions, large and small, in fact...

I interview a climate scientist in my book and she says, be a little bit activist. And I love that phrase because it doesn't sound like we've got to give up our whole lives, but on the other hand, it sounds a little bit intimidating. If I was a local council and I knew there were a group being a little bit activist, I'd be a little bit intimidated. And I think we can all find ways to be a little bit activist, which work for us, combine our other interests,

and have an impact on the planet. So I'm always looking for what inspires me in terms of what can lead to action. We'll come to the audience in a moment, but Suhair, Roger was optimistic about quantum. Is he right? Oh, yeah. Roger's right about everything. Steady on.

So, yeah, so I have many things in my head right now because such interesting thoughts. I'm really excited about quantum. I think that it's a frontier technology that could in many ways supercharge how technology is evolving right now. I think there's already applications of quantum technology in transportation.

obviously in defense, in imaging. I didn't know until recently that GPS is actually built off of quantum mechanics. And I think that speaking of usage of energy, quantum, you know, for now,

Quantum computing is not necessarily going to require new data centres. It will be built off of what's existing, which is also good. I do think that it will take time. The hardware for quantum in many ways has not fully been built or developed and won't be. And I think it requires, you know,

clearer thinking than how we've built AI today, clearer thinking about what is environmental impact, what is corporate responsibility, what are ethical frameworks for building technologies that will be incredibly powerful and will benefit only a few. So I think the bigger issue is how we think about how society and government deals with a new technology than necessarily the technology itself, which is going to in many ways

transform scientific research and how we live. The other thing I was going to mention was just books. I think there seems to be some students here, and I just think reading, you mentioned James Lovelock. His last book was called Novocine, and he was in his 90s when he wrote it. And so he's a chemist, and he wrote the famous book on Gaia theory, but he also had an incredible career as a scientist. And in his last book, he kind of

kind of all bets were off, I guess, and he wrote what he really thought. And he talked about machines in some way, I guess, replacing us as humans and taking us to the stars and kind of being kind of the reason that we as humans end up accomplishing our dreams of going to outer space or to Mars or to other galaxies because we physically couldn't do what machines that we built could do. So it's quite dystopian. It's quite intense. It's almost science fiction, but he speaks as a scientist.

And I often think of that book, and you mentioned him, because it just charts a path forward that we wouldn't have been able to think about ourselves. And I think reading and going deeper and understanding subject matter as written by experts or people who have the time and the expertise to put ideas down beyond just...

a paragraph or a sub-star pose is actually where most of us will find our inspiration, whatever the field. And I think we've become incredibly siloed in how we see the world and also, you know, most of where we could go next with imagination or where technology is through depth and expertise. And that's what will drive technology, at least in the future. And I think we just need to keep coming back to that. Great. Thank you.

Can we try and disagree with each other a bit more, though? Everyone's too nice on this panel on optimism. I'm not going to disagree with Roger, but I'll pick on someone else. So, questions from the audience, please. And also, if there's things you think have been missed out, which are good reasons for optimism, we'd like to hear them as well. So we've got the gentleman here in the green. Name the affiliation, if you can, and then keep the question relatively short, please. David Walter from... I'm a Birkbeck alumni.

Looking at the news and I think the most important legacy and the most important optimism is that young people are beginning to take the lead. I'll give a couple of names. Ibrahim Choury, the president of Burkina Faso and Greta Thunberg. Both of them are young. For me, the technology is here nor there. It all depends on how this world changes and what the attitude comes from that change.

I think it's important that young people need to take over. There's too many old people running the world. It was the same before the First World War. And I think it's time young people have to start. They live in it, they work in it, they sleep in this world, so they might as well run this world. It's no longer ours. Young people. We'll go down here.

Hi, my name is Emma and I'm from Kirkstall Valley Farm in Leeds, which is a sustainable community food project. So my question is, there's been a lot of talk about changing from fossil fuels to green energy or changing from traditional cars to electric cars or making lifestyle changes, which I'm all over.

But that all feels like it's very much within the current sort of system. And we all get told all of the time that once our needs are met at a certain level, after that, the more we have, nobody gets any happier.

So does anybody think there is a viable alternative to the current consumerist capitalist system that we live within, which is all about growth and progress, not necessarily about community or happiness? Thanks. Great question. Quite big one. And then this gentleman here.

Thank you all very much. That was a tour de force. The names Ewan Grant, UK Defense Forum. I've been broadcasting a lot on the Ukraine war. And I'm an actual pessimist. So my question needs to be read in that light. Where do you see the positive outcomes, whether intended or not,

of the move towards peer nation armed conflicts. Technologies will be created which can have spin-off effects for good as well as for ill. And what worries me is that many people are not aware

recognizing that and rather closing their minds to rather awkward facts that these can be used for good purposes. And I think that's just giving, sadly, to many of them, the Greta Thunbergs and so on, that's giving a green light to Presidents Xi and Putin. Thank you. Who wants to go first?

Take some of those. Michael, can I ask you something? I was going to defend growth and progress, so maybe you're familiar. You want me to do that? I want you to do that, yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, I think the trouble with...

So growth and progress, if the pie grows bigger, it means that you have an opportunity to take more of it. And if you shrink it or-- that was the world we lived in really for most of our history. It means that if someone gets more, you get less. So it's true that in an individual level, you don't necessarily want more and more. But in a world in which every country is competing with every other country and every company is competing with every other company and everyone wants more than your neighbor,

all that slowing growth does is it just entrenches everything. So you might say, okay, so E.O. Wilson, who is an entomologist, he worked on insects, he said, "I love communism. "It's a great system, it's just the wrong species." And I feel that way around, you know, I feel that way about a lot of these things. It's like, these are great ideas, but it's the wrong species.

So what I would advocate for is more abundance and growth but in a way that doesn't destroy the planet because if you look it's the places that have wealth that are able to re-out. So Australia, you know years ago I went to the Great Barrier Reef, it was beautiful when I was a child. I went back again, it was bleached and I went back again a couple of years ago and they were starting to restore it. Why? Because Australia has resources to be able to do that.

If you're poorer, you have to cut down rainforests in order to feed your people. And if you have wealth, you have options. So I don't think it's so much growth and progress. It's how we use that growth and progress, how we choose to allocate it to bigger yachts and more of what we don't need or toward cleaning up the planet and toward a greener, more abundant natural future.

Roger? I suppose actually I can sort of talk to what David and Emma were saying, really by going back to positive tipping points, which start off with people doing things. So I completely agree about young people. In fact, Tim Lenton, when talking about positive tipping points, talks about Greta Thunberg, for example. And Emma, I kind of... I wish we could do a kind of experiment where we could take everybody and make them live like a hunter-gatherer for like a month.

And then I think when they returned to today's world, they would hopefully not be as materialistic and treasure fewer possessions and so on, respect

biodiversity because although we talk about climate change, the biodiversity crisis and climate change are really two sides of the same coin and maybe get off this treadmill of ever increasing consumption and treasure resources like water which we rather take for granted but actually if you look at projections so I'm hoping, but I've got to end optimistically, positive tipping point philosophy and

And people like Greta are going to get us all in a better place, I think. It's incredible that we're all talking about her and how she operates as a leader of a movement that is so decentralized, so dispersed and evolving so much.

I also wonder, can we actually shift? Because you said growth. At the end of the day, what is growth? I think we have to completely redefine what growth is. Growth is not just the fact that-- sorry, I'm disagreeing with you. Australia is a very wealthy country and can therefore fix its coral reef.

Ocean temperatures have risen all over the world. In fact, the only corals that are now being regenerated are of particular species that can survive in the new normal. That means that biodiversity has been permanently altered, which is a necessary outcome of human progress and growth. So fixing that isn't necessarily an outcome. And I agree on the point on allocation of resources and inequality, but at the end of the day,

I work in tech, I have, you know, for most of my career, very few people are going to get the spoils of this era and very few people are going to make decisions on where resources are allocated. And so, you know, we have to fundamentally reimagine what growth is, and it should be probably in universities and institutions like this that it's happening, but it doesn't seem to be happening. So I don't have the answer for it, but I just don't think we can assume that business as usual continues. On war...

I'm half Indian, half Pakistani. I grew up in Islamabad in the war on terror.

seen many sides of it and what I do know is that people who live through conflict end up of course being damaged in many ways but it does create a different kind of empathy for suffering and I think that if there's any hope we might take away with what comes next is that people who are going to suffer, who are going to be the direct kind of respondents to war, who are not playing video games and throwing AI

generated drones and weapons down in other countries, are the ones who will probably be part of a movement that could change things. And unfortunately, that's also a lot of people right now who we could look to mobilise. Isabel? Do you want to get on the growth point? Yes, I will take the growth point. I just... I thought it was almost established now that... I mean, I'm disagreeing too, evidently, on growth, because I just don't see...

I don't see it working. I don't see more happy people. I don't see richer people being happier people. I don't see... I just don't see it around me. I see society less and less happy. Communications families breaking down. Growth isn't helping us. It's not saving them. It's not clearing up the environment. It's destroying the environment. And I think, you know, all the great environmentalists, I mean, Thoreau said, simplify, simplify, simplify.

And I think it's almost, I mean, I thought it was almost proven that when we live simpler lives, we live with less, we appreciate more what we have, we see more what we have. I mean, even on a day-to-day basis in your homes, is it have nothing in your home that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful? And then we see what's in our homes and we appreciate them. And so simplicity and environmentalism, I think, go together as natural companions.

So, yes, I'm not a component in growth, but I'm hoping that you're going to use your growth to... I'm delighted you're going to use your growth for the sake of supporting nature. I look forward to seeing that. Do you want to come back? Yeah, I do, I do, I do. So, I mean, two things, right? So one is that I have no qualms. Like, growth has harmed the planet. It has reduced biodiversity. I mean, this country is a garden. It is a biodiversity desert, actually. We killed the last wild animals in the 17th century or something like that, right? Yes.

No qualms there. Growth has also led to longer, more prosperous, healthier lives in a way that almost nothing else... All around the world that's what people are clamoring for. It's a matter of what we do with that. So I have no qualms about giving people the options to live more simply. It's a kind of pathway to poverty or enforced poverty that is a bit of a problem.

You talked about hunter-gatherers, so someone who actually works with semi-nomadic pastoralist people. Hunter-gatherers are actually a degrowth society. And on the back of that, they're low productivity and they live quite difficult lives, actually. They go through famine and so on. And what has happened in the course of human history is that we were hunter-gatherers right up until around 10,000 years ago when we moved into agriculture. And what ended up happening was that agriculturalists, because they were able to grow,

pushed out the hunter-gatherers to the margins where they still live today. So where do hunter-gatherers live? In the deep rainforests that are harder to clear or in the deserts. And this kind of pathway, this thinking of not letting the line go up in some way, but in a way that's actually better for our planet, will lead to this continent or this country being replaced by those who choose to grow. If you decide not to have children, that's fine. It just means the end of your lineage at the expense of everyone else's. That's a law of life.

I'll move on to, if we can get some questions, do we have online questions? Yeah? If we could have a couple of those. We have one question actually from Aditya Kumar, undergraduate student in economics from India.

AI technologies are expanding at a rapid pace, leading to speculation about job losses, threat of irrelevance of certain skills, and many other unprecedented problems. But AI is here to stay, so what are the ways in which we can ensure that it's put to positive uses so that it can shape a better, more equal, and sustainable future?

And then there was another question in the room here. We need a microphone. Sorry. You pass it now. Thank you so much and thank you for inspiring presentations. My comment is directed to Roger. And Roger, with respect, ITER is not a white elephant. ITER is a necessary and essential milestone for the development of the tokamak. And it is necessary.

It is part of the development of the tokamak. Therefore, as I said, with respect, I enjoyed your talk, but that is quite erroneous to actually say that it is a white elephant. Just to add some data on that...

Oh, Thomas Hobbit's expert back in the industry in the meantime. Just to add data to exactly that point, there was a lot of noise increasing the budget of ITER by 5 billion over 10 years. The UK is blowing away.

25 billion a year in subsidizing renewable energy, windmills, right? The moment it goes live, you can basically forget about all of these windmill projects. You don't need it anymore. So what do we need to get an Apollo-style project going

to arrive at viable nuclear fuel. I will probably ask Roger to do the ETA. Yeah, actually, let me nuance what I said. I visited ITER a couple of years ago, actually, and I was blown away by the engineering and the scale of the whole thing.

I suppose what I meant to say was I'm worried it's turning into a white elephant because of the overruns, the cost overruns, which are billions, and also the delays, which are many years. And it's a huge... I mean, I'm definitely pro-fusion. It's a huge disappointment to me that the next phase in tokamak development

is being delayed and delayed and delayed. And in fact, you know, it's interesting to me also that the Brits are talking about Step, another tokamak design, and they're kind of leapfrogging ITER. So I sort of agree with you in a way. I really wish we can get ITER up and running.

In terms of AI and sustainability, I think it's coming up more and more that it takes a colossal amount of energy to train a large language model. And then even when you've got your inference model where you ask it questions, it's being trained. If enough people do it, that's a colossal amount of energy consumption. So I do think we have to think about, for example, things like analogue communication.

computing and so on. And I do actually also think that in AI, there's a lot of hype around AI at the moment. I think what scares me most about the current generation of AI is that it's often right, it's plausible, it's always plausible, and it's significantly wrong for a significant fraction of time. And the problem with the current generation of AI is that if you look under the bonnet, there

There are billions, if not trillions of parameters, and you don't understand what's going on. So how can we trust something that we don't understand? So to come back to the impact on labour and so on, I think until the next generation of AI comes along, which is explainable AI, that gives you real insights into how it came to that answer, I think people will still have an incredibly important role. So I'm optimistic about people and AI. I think they're going to be co-creators for the time being.

Michael. So a couple of things. One is I don't argue with the French over nuclear. I learned, so there's a wonderful document by Sam Bowman called Foundations. It kind of outlines why Britain is broken and how to fix the thing. And I learned from this document that the French are actually, in terms of productivity, they're very good at protesting. In fact, they invented a barbecue that fits on the tram tracks so you can grill while you protest.

And they've still maintained growth nonetheless because in part of their wise bet on nuclear providing them with secure energy. As an engineer and someone who works as a scientific advisor to an AI startup, AI is interesting. So a few things. One is before AI takes your job, the cliche is that someone who knows how to use AI will. So preparing yourself and understanding this technology is important.

The second thing is, you know, the possibilities, in my view, AI may be as disruptive as the Industrial Revolution. Like, when people used to make, you know, clothes or shoes by hand, they got really upset when the factories were doing it. They tried to burn the thing down. So it may be as disruptive as that and maybe as dangerous as nuclear power in terms of what it can do in military applications. And it's coming at us faster than social media and the Internet.

So how do we kind of account for this? One of the things I am actually concerned about is the centralization of the foundation models and control over that. And I do think we need to rethink the way that

We tax and we reallocate. So I'm a big advocate of, for example, land value taxes as a tax base that can't flee the country, that is fundamentally redistributive generation by generation. And I would love to see it replace income tax, which at least in the United States only emerged in 1912, sales tax, inheritance tax, and the whole lot. But I guess we need ways of figuring out how to give everyone a share because what money really is...

is a choice over how we spend our energy budget, how we spend our goods and services. And when fewer people have that choice, well, it means they have fewer choice. I'm up for applause as well as disagreement. I don't-- I mean, I feel like I don't-- I don't want this just to be about AI, so I'd love to-- Well, on the subject of energy, I mean,

I'm sorry, it sounds like I'm being very simple, but I keep drawing it back to us. But the energy companies are like the banks, in that some of them, it's just greenwashing, greenwashing, greenwashing. There are two companies in the country at the moment that, again, according to Ethical Consumer, this isn't my opinion, I'm reporting the work of good research organisations, the two that are best in the country are Ecotricity and Octopus.

You might like to look at who's providing your energy. And one thing we all need to do is use less energy in our homes. We need to start there. We need to get off the grid. We need to be self-sufficient in terms of our energy. And I mean, if you have money and you don't have a solar panel on your roof, then it's a really good way to stop using the energy on the grid and become an expert. If you're going to have an expert subject...

Be expert in your energy use, in your house. The number of people I visit, they have their sofa right in front of the radiator. All they've got is hot sofas.

They're not thinking about how the energy goes around the house or where the heat's coming in and out. And I mean, one of the first things this government says is we need to all lower our personal energy use. So I keep drawing it back to what can we do, what can we do, what can we do? We can check we're not with one of the least ethical energy providers in the country. We're not giving our money to people that are basically telling us lies. So...

Yeah, so I love that. Thank you for sharing that. I just wanted to say about this whole AI and collective intelligence and then everything and everyone is like, I think that is a source of great panic and also helplessness for all of us. So I also don't think that AI is going to take everyone's jobs immediately. I know there's a lot of literature and writing

and kind of how structurally it will change everything. Well, we haven't really seen that yet. And I think we should be really thinking about where it can be used in a targeted way to help with efficiency, to help to improve creative processes, to help reduce energy usage, and so on and so forth, not

not assuming that what we read in the news and the headlines about it destroying everything or taking over everything are true. And I think as educated individuals with critical thinking, it's just really important to keep reminding yourself of that. If you understand how technologies are used, you can also understand where they go and how they're applied.

Secondly, yes, of course it's not that good yet. I think, in fact, if anything, AI content is excellent, but it's really not that good. So when you listen to an AI-generated podcast or you read an essay written for you, it's

it's reducing our standards for what good and good enough are. And I think that's the thing we should be concerned about is that what are our standards? What is good enough? And where do we see quality in the future because of what technologies can do apart from the mistakes that they make? But I think the one thing that is of concern is these like headlines and this idea of

how everything will change for everyone, because unfortunately it's going to be asymmetric, it's going to be difficult to predict, and a lot of new evolutions in technology are going to happen in the next couple of years, which will change everyone's, you know, kind of projections right now. And I think it's important to keep that in mind. One optimistic thing, which I wanted to add, was around another kind of...

direction from the arts. So there's two artists who had an exhibition recently at the Serpentine, Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst, and they do a lot of work on data trusts, which are actually an evolving space in data ownership in technology, and they actually were able to use the singing of choral singers to create a new collective

and a new collective performance using AI, taking their voices and creating new output. But what was almost more important was this was an R&D project for AI, for how data ownership may work in the future, for what collective data ownership could be. There's already data trusts operating in industries in various parts of the world. They are difficult to scale. They're more complicated. It takes more time and resource. But there are possibilities to create

infrastructures in which your data is yours even if you're part of a collective and I think that's a really positive way of thinking about where each of us might think of it not as a huge thing but as strands that are evolving very quickly.

It's wonderful. I'm so pleased we got to end it on a positive note there, which is great. A few things to sort of, you know, just finish off. So, I mean, Isabel made a great point that we shouldn't be buying stuff. The exception is books. Yeah, the exception is books. So if you want to get ten of Roger's, seven of Isabel's, one of Michael's, they're all there. Can I just say why books need to be an exception? Because we desperately need new ideas and positive new ideas. That's why...

That's where the source of books can be the source of new inspiration or nobody would have published them. That's why books are an exception. I'm sold. I'm an academic. I'm fine with that. So,

So, books are going to be for sale. There are also drinks. This is the last event of the LSE Festival. So I just want to say a few thank yous to various people. The LSE Festival is like a week-long set of events. It's very difficult to organise. Part of that is because you have to work with academics. So at the back we have Louise and Antigone, who are like two of the sort of, you know, people who have to work with us and do it brilliantly. So thank you very much. And

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