The platforms and devices provided by Big Tech pervade every aspect of our private and public lives. They promise a more efficient, social and entertaining world, but how far should we trust this new algorithmic oligarchy with our future? Author and futurist Lucie Greene has spent the last few years studying this question for her book, ‘Silicon States’. I caught up with her in New York to discuss what drives these organizations, and what might happen when they move beyond social media and search, to reinventing other sectors like space travel, education, finance or the housing market.

Ali Parsa is a fascinating leader and entrepreneur. Founder of Babylon Health, a company that is working with algorithms and AI to reinvent the healthcare industry, Ali has been both an influential and provocative figure at the intersection of medicine, business and technology. A few years ago, he was an early guest on the Between Worlds podcast. Since then, Babylon has expanded globally to Africa and China - as well as achieving significant advances with their own AI systems. I caught up with Ali again to learn more about his early experiences fleeing Iran as a child, where AI-first healthcare is going next, and what it takes to design successful, algorithmic organizations.

Daniel, a British expert on AI and machine learning, founded Satalia, one of the world’s first companies that brought algorithms from the academic world, into practical application at organizations. He has a Masters and Doctorate in Artificial Intelligence from UCL, lecturing in Computer Science and Business, and has spoken everywhere from TED to the Singularity University. We caught up in Soho, London to discuss the latest developments in AI, the new kinds of people that algorithmic organizations will need to hire, and his own experiments in designing a management model without traditional KPIs and hierarchies.

Right before he joined the AI company, Cognitive Scale, Ganesh Padmanabhan was working on his own AI startup aimed at trying to make systems that were able to explain how they reach their conclusions. The real threat of AI is not killer robots or rogue star destroyers, but rather systems that lack accountability, or consideration of their economic impact on job replacement. Speaking at the Cognitive Scale HQ in Austin, Ganesh and I explored some of the big topics around augmenting human intelligence through machine learning, capturing knowledge and talent patterns, and how to personalize customer experiences at scale.