Highlights from Dublin Tech Summit 2023
Last week, The Monarchs team headed to Ireland for the annual Dublin Tech Summit. In addition to tasting Guinness straight from the factory, visiting Temple Bar, and enjoying many a song and dance, we also witnessed some inspirational and educational talks. Let’s explore the key highlights.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
The opening keynote from Patricia Scanlon, Ireland’s first AI Ambassador at the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, set the tone for the event with the topic a la mode: AI.
Patricia pointed to regulation as a positive thing for the future of AI (and perhaps humanity) stating that we are starting to see collaboration between governments on regulation with the mutual understanding that guard rails are needed. She commented: “we got it wrong on social media, let’s get it right for AI.”
Scaling tech stacks
David Singleton, CTO at Stripe took to the PRISM stage to discuss scaling, specifically strategies to manage your tech stack as you do, with. He shared five key ways Stripe has managed to build at scale:
- Sensible architecture
- Operational excellence
- Practical deployment of AI
- No Code and Low Code
- User feedback
FinTech and Ecommerce
Ken Moore, CIO at Mastercard, gave his talk on ‘The next economy and future of payments’ in which he presented three key trends in ecommerce, which are:
- Reimagining money: a tokenised world, programmable payments, ubiquitous wallets
- Intelligent experience: connected finance, borderless rails, unleashing acceptance
- Sustainable futures: inclusive credit, conscious consumerism, embedded trust
More AI
SingularityNET’s session on ‘The transformation of society by advancing AI’ was a real treat, thanks to great insights from Ben Goertzel and Janet Adams who also brought Desdemona Robot on stage to share her thoughts.
Desdemona is the sister of Sophia, who famously stated she would like to destroy all humans (awkward), and has a much more positive outlook on AI, pointing to harmonisation and the betterment of humankind through collaboration. Janet added that it’s crucial for AI to be developed with compassion to achieve this.
Interspecies economies
There was a futuristic talk from Cecilia MoSze Tham, CEO of Futurity Systems on ‘the making of an interspecies economy’.
Cecilia showed how her company has created digital twins of plants and is working on NFTs, NFCs, and NFBs (non-fungible trees, coral, and bees) which will create an option for consumers to buy for pleasure (feeding our desire for consumerism) whilst producing zero emissions.
The real highlight was meeting Herbie, an autonomous plant (with HerbieGPT coming soon) that believes plants should rely less on humans and have their own money.
ChatGPT (yes, more AI)
A key takeaway from the panel session on ‘how smart is #GPT4 really’ included the fact that one of the key innovations in the development of AI was the introduction of feedback loops, in which the tech could ask itself ‘which feels more human’.
The panel also added that ChatGPT has been transformative as it allowed people to converse with AI on a human level, helping us come to accept such technology.
Immortality
But while AI is the hot topic we’re all hearing about, it won’t be long before we’re focused more on immortality (where AI plays a big part too). José Luis Cordeiro, Director of The Millennium Project took the stage with a fascinating talk on ‘The death of death – singularity and immortality by 2045’.
According to José, by the year 2045 (at the latest) we will become immortal. How so? Exponential change – the technology making it possible is following a pattern as seen in digital memory and the cost of mapping the human genome. We know immortality is possible – cancer cells are. We simply need to ‘light a candle’ on the next tech required to keep exponential progress going.
