Founders at the University of Cambridge

The Atomic Human: Understanding Ourselves in the Age of AI

Last week we welcomed a small group of Founders’ Community members to Downing College in Cambridge. Neil Lawrence, DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge, delivered a fantastic talk with many insights from his new book Atomic Human, along with a wider conversation on UK and US tech ecosystems.

Neil’s talk challenges us all to think laterally about AI. Scroll to watch the talk in full, or read the key insights below.

Insights

• Human brains have great (and very efficient) computing power but poor bandwidth. Our ability to communicate what happens in our brains is wildly slow. Machines are far less efficient in their computing abilities but have greater bandwidth and can communicate with other machines at the speed of light. Machines are isolated from world, but integrated with other machines. We are integrated with the world but isolated from each other.
• What happens when AI (and any innovation for that matter) meets the economy? What do those efficiency gains mean for human labour and for our lived experiences?
• Who is missing out on the AI revolution? How do we include the sectors that matter most to people?
• Generative AI will open up AI to regular people, not just software engineers, enabling them to collaborate with the machine and use it to achieve their goals.
• Human attention is the most precious resource! The urgent challenge we face is making sure that with this new wave of technology we are using it to empower people to uplift their thinking, ensuring that when people and machines operate together they become greater than the sum of their parts.