The Atomic Human with Neil Lawrence

The Evolving Leader

During this episode of The Evolving Leader podcast, co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender talk to Professor Neil Lawrence. Neil is one of the world’s most influential thinkers on the future of machine intelligence and the implications of what it means to be human. He’s the DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge and a Visiting Professor at the University of Sheffield. In his book ‘The Atomic Human’, he explores the differences between AI and human intelligence. For three years (2016 – 2019) Neil was also Director of Machine Learning at Amazon.
Other reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender:
Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, 2023)
The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, 2023)
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The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.

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Chapters

1. Introduction (00:00:00)

2. Check-in (00:03:19)

3. Why did you write Atomic Human and what does it help the person on the street understand? (00:03:50)

4. Why do you use the term machine intelligence rather than AI? (00:05:48)

5. What are we getting wrong when we think about the role of AI in our futures? (00:08:29)

6. How can we start to reframe how we think about AI? (00:13:01)

7. How do we avoid losing some of the qualities that elevate us above the machine? (00:18:14)

8. How can we avoid relying too heavily on automated tools? (00:22:33)

9. How can we convince leaders that the way we currently view AI might prevent us from seeing how to move forward in its adoption? (00:33:38)

10. How can leaders help manage the overwhelm that many people are feeling at this technology? (00:42:59)

11. If you were going to start a business and wanted to amplify human value creation and not have it undermined by automation, what might you start to do? (00:49:53)

12. Do we need to invest even more effort into education so we’re capable of being the atomic human? (00:54:11)

13. What’s the advice that we should be thinking about in terms of our children to be an atomic human in this future? (00:58:46)