businesspeople-from-england

"Novels by serious writers of genius often eventually become best-sellers, but most contemporary best-sellers are written by second-class writers whose psychological brew contains a touch of naïvety, a touch of sentimentality, the story-telling gift, and a mysterious sympathy with the day-dreams of ordinary people."

"Nothing matters, and everything matters."

"There is nothing to be said except about the sheer waste and futility of it all. It is the war all over again, when one is rung up to be told that Rupert was dead, or that one's brother was killed, and one knew that it was only to produce the kind of world we are living in now. Horrible."

"Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to be or remain a civilized man."

"One of the most horrible things at that time was to listen on the wireless to the speeches of Hitler, the savage and insane ravings of a vindictive underdog who suddenly saw himself to be all-powerful. We were in Rodmell during the late summer of 1939, and I used to listen to those ranting, raving speeches. One afternoon I was planting in the orchard under an apple-tree iris reticulata, those lovely violet flowers which, like the daffodils, 'come before the swallow dares and take the winds of March with beauty'. Suddenly I heard Virginia's voice calling to me from the sitting room window: 'Hitler is making a speech.' I shouted back, 'I shan't come. I'm planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.' Last March, 21 years after Hitler committed suicide in the bunker, a few of those violet flowers still flowered under the apple-tree in the orchard."

"The more complicated the life of a community or the more "advanced" the civilization, the more complicated, incessant, and severe becomes the control of instincts which is demanded from the individual."

"The barbarian is...not only at our gates; he is always within the walls of our civilization, inside our minds and our hearts. In times of storm and stress within any society, his appeal is very strong. He offers immediate satisfaction of the simple instincts, love, hatred, and anger. He offers to help us to forget our own unhappiness by making other people still more unhappy. He shows us how we may forget our sense of frustration and the intolerable burden of responsibility in blind obedience, the beating of tom-toms, and the shouting of slogans. He gives us the simple satisfaction of violence and destruction, the destruction of society, of the complicated network of rules and regulations, standards and morality which constitute civilization and which all of us feel entangling, frustrating, choking our animal instincts and desires."

"Our shared ambition is clear: we all want to see Manchester United back where we belong, at the very top of English, European and world football."

"America today is self sufficient in oil and gas... and it is because of this new technology, which is extremely safe and well proven. With the demise of huge swathes of manufacturing in the north of England, expansion of the fracking industry would be a big creator of jobs."

"You can't have an economy with nine million people on benefits and huge levels of immigrants coming in. I mean, the UK has been colonised. It's costing too much money. The UK has been colonised by immigrants, really, hasn't it?"

"AI will be disruptive, but will ultimately provide opportunities."

"There is a bit of a bubble in AI. I don’t think that it’s going to go to waste. I think that all this investment will be additive, but there’s an over-expectation of what machine learning can bring right now, because of a lack of appreciation of the fact that machine learning is only part of the journey. And the next part of the journey for most big companies is optimization and decision making."

"I’ve always been interested in what it means to be human, and in the nature of the universe. I did my undergraduate [degree] in AI and my master’s in AI, and my Ph.D. in AI, so I guess I’ve been doing 19 years’ worth of activity in AI."

"We all have an innate desire to do something for humanity"

"The world is changing so quickly, it’s very difficult to actually have all the necessary data points to be able to help you forecast accurately. At the moment, that’s still in the realm of human beings."

"We can build AI to represent every corner of society… we can use it to ensure we build a less biased experience"

"There are two definitions of AI, and the more popular one is the weakest. This first definition [concerns] machines that can do tasks that were traditionally in the realm of human beings. Over the past decade, due to advances in technologies like deep learning, we have started to build machines that can do things like recognize objects in images, and understand and respond to natural language. Humans are the most intelligent things we know in the universe, so when we start to see machines do tasks once constrained to the human domain, then we assume that is intelligence.But I would argue that humans are not that intelligent. Humans are good at finding patterns in, at most, four dimensions, and we’re terrible at solving problems that involve more than seven things. Machines can find patterns in thousands of dimensions and can solve problems that involve millions of things. Even these technologies aren’t AI — they’re just algorithms. They do the same thing over and over again. In fact, my definition of stupidity is doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result."

"And fourth, crucially, for true AI, you need to have an AI architect who understands how to glue these three components together: the data, the machine learning, and the optimization to build adaptive systems. And at the moment, it’s the CIO who is trying to step into that role of overseeing this. But I don’t know of many companies out there that have true AI architects. For now, companies are managing maybe part of this, but not all four categories."

"The best definition of intelligence — artificial or human — that I’ve found is goal-directed adaptive behavior. I use goal-directed in the sense of trying to achieve an objective, which in business might be to roster your staff more effectively, or to allocate marketing spend to sell as [much] ice cream as possible. It might be whatever goal you’re seeking."

"As [futurist] Roy Amara noted, the impact of technology tends to be overestimated in the short run and underestimated in the long run. For now, you can probably ignore the idea of having adaptive systems in your business. That will come later. In the short run, you can use AI to remove the friction of mundane and repetitive tasks across the organization. If used correctly, this can absolutely change your business. But there’s a lot of hype out there, and a lot of people investing in these technologies don’t know what they’re doing."

"Digital twins are the next evolution of digital transformation. To be able to adapt more quickly to a changing world, companies need to create a digital replica of all of their physical assets, their infrastructure and people. Once you have a twin, you can start to run experiments and simulate scenarios to operate your business more effectively. Further down the line we may even have AI setting those experiments, and running experiments without the aid of the human. The role of the strategist and of leadership is to develop a strong vision and purpose, i.e., [determining] what key objective the organization needs to aspire to. I hope that organizations will realize that this objective needs to be much more sophisticated than a financial return to be able to attract, empower, and motivate talent. Exceptional talent wants to align with a strong purpose and inspirational leaders."

"Hierarchies are not structured for good decision making"

"Next is recruiting data scientists who have the machine learning and statistics skills to find insights from the data. Then, the third is [finding] what I call the decision scientists: people who can understand how to make decisions or solve optimization problems that leverage those insights."

"There are four categories of AI skills. The first category is the data. Companies should ask: Are we getting our data into the shape where people can consume it? There are lots of companies out there that are throwing money at building data lakes — that’s all the raw data that a company holds from code generation to sales information — because they think at some point in the future data lakes will be useful. That’s not a bad investment, but I would also suggest that you need to be building applications straight away on top of that data lake that drive value into your business. Companies…should be thinking about building digital twins of their organizations, i.e., a perfect digital representation of their physical assets, like their infrastructure and employees."

"Selecting the best eating plan to help you lose weight is very much down to the individual."

"No one diet is more popular than another. It is all down to personal preference."

"because I'm from a family where food was a very important and enticing temptation. But I didn't enjoy it much at home. Only when I left I enjoyed it, when it wasn't prepared by my mother. I became a compulsive eater – it was gluttony. Before I was born again."

"It is important for us to find a form of exercise we enjoy so that we keep doing it."

"It'd been a very fraught involvement. I'd worked very hard, my first marriage was wrecked. I gave everything and I got gallstones."

"One of the hardest things when our company went into administration was that someone else could use my name."

"I wasn't sorry to lose my SAGG [Slimming and Good Grooming organisation] back in the 80s"

"But everything is for a reason and through suffering gallstones I discovered the hip and thigh diet. I think the Lord put his hand on me. That I discovered low fat, I honestly believe came from the Lord. I can't deny that. I was chosen to spread the word."

"Human nature puts people on a pedestal and we like having someone to look up to."

"I think mine is more acceptable, it rolls off the tongue better. But it certainly reduces the whole area. More from the seat than the hips, to be honest."

"The advent of the internet, internet shopping and mobile phones all mean that we can run our lives without moving around as much as we used to. I really don’t know where it will end unless people take responsibility for their own health and wellbeing."

"My heart goes out to the staff affected, and we are talking to them today to try to work out how best we can help them"

"It's a day which the team and I have worked incredibly hard to try to avoid but the board and I believe that this is the most responsible course of action to take."

"The wonderful thing is that most of my class have been coming to me for at least 30 years, if not 40 years."

"When the credit crunch came, it seemed like a perfect storm."

"I did more classes around the county and it just grew"

"It went from talking about how to make the most of yourself to actually doing some exercise"

"Ever since a young Pete Townshend asked Jim Marshall to place two 4x12 cabinets on top of each other, the Marshall stack has been much imitated, especially after a certain guitarist named Jimi Hendrix also adopted the trend."

"I think this idea that we need to dismantle the state, we need to have maximum freedom – that’s really dangerous. On the other hand, I’m obviously very aware of the danger of centralised authoritarianism and, you know, even in its minuscule forms like nimbyism. That’s why, in the book, we talk about a narrow corridor between the danger of dystopian authoritarianism and this catastrophe caused by openness. That is the big governance challenge of the next century: how to strike that balance."

"I think in the long-term — over many decades — we have to think very hard about how we integrate these tools, because left completely to the market and to their own devices, these are fundamentally labor-replacing tools. They will augment us and make us smarter and more productive, for the next couple decades, but in the longer term that's an open question. They allow us to do new things that software has never been able to do before. These tools are creative, they're empathetic, and they actually act much more like humans than a traditional relational database where you only get out what you put in."

"Organisms will soon be designed and produced with the precision and scale of today’s computer chips."

"After DeepMind I never had to work again. I certainly didn’t have to write a book or anything like that. Money has never ever been the motivation. It’s always, you know, just been a side effect. For me, the goal has never been anything but how to do good in the world and how to move the world forward in a healthy, satisfying way. Even back in 2009, when I started looking at getting into technology, I could see that AI represented a fair and accurate way to deliver services in the world."

"I’ve always been interested in the nature of the universe, nature of reality, consciousness, the meaning of life, all of these big questions. That’s what I wanted to spend my life working on."

"I think that we are obsessed with whether you’re an optimist or whether you’re a pessimist. This is a completely biased way of looking at things. I don’t want to be either. I want to coldly stare in the face of the benefits and the threats. And from where I stand, we can very clearly see that with every step up in the scale of these large language models, they get more controllable."

"What I’ve always tried to do is attach the idea of ethics and safety to AGI. I wrote our business plan in 2010, and the front page had the mission ‘to build artificial general intelligence, safely and ethically for the benefit of everyone’. I think it has really shaped how a lot of the other AI labs formed. OpenAI [the creator of ChatGPT] started as a nonprofit largely because of a reaction to us having set that standard."

"I think we’re at a moment with the development of AI where we have ways to provide support, encouragement, affirmation, coaching and advice. We’ve basically taken emotional intelligence and distilled it. And I think that is going to unlock the creativity of millions and millions of people for whom that wasn’t available."