Richard Susskind and Charlotte Blease

Renowned computer scientist Professor Richard Susskind and health researcher Charlotte Blease discuss the future impacts of artificial intelligence (AI), including the advent of conscious machines and virtual new worlds and the potential for much better healthcare.

Susskind is an expert on AI and a former technology adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales. He is author of 11 books, including his latest, How To Think About AI: A Guide for the Perplexed. In it, he looks at the history of AI and argues that balancing its benefits and threats is the greatest challenge of our age. Susskind says we are in the foothills of development of AI and must look well beyond today’s technologies to what is to come in the 2030s, including conscious machines and new AI-enabled virtual worlds, and at what the impact might be on human evolution.

Blease is a researcher at Harvard Medical School looking into the impacts of AI on healthcare. In Dr Bot: Why Doctors Can Fail Us and How AI Could Save Lives, she says thousands die every year through misdiagnosis by doctors facing an increasingly stressful burden of care. Shew argues that AI could provide us with the most reliable physician in history. She describes how AI is already having an impact and has the potential to do much more if we implement it carefully.