'We're on the edge of really very exciting things, but also tremendous risks at the same time.' Patrick Dixon, Futurist author and AI keynote speaker in conversation with Alison Jones - Extraordinary Business Book Club - about his latest book "How AI Will Change Your Life".

Whether you're an AI enthusiast or it fills you with existential terror, this conversation will challenge your perspectives and elevate your understanding of our increasingly super-smart world. Futurist Patrick Dixon has been predicting AI for 25 years, and now he works with the world's largest corporations and governments, helping them explore the profound implications of artificial intelligence across all sectors from medicine to marketing to global security. This is not comfortable listening. We peer into the chasm (did you know that in a recent study, half of AI researchers perceive a 5% risk of AI leading to human extinction?). But Patrick remains an optimist, albeit a worried one, and hopefully you'll feel the same way at the end.  One great cause for hope is his insistence on the importance of authenticity in writing, the irreplaceable human connection that readers seek; AI-generated content cannot replicate human passion. A thought-provoking conversation that merges foresight with practical wisdom.

MANY OF MY GLOBAL CLIENTS are food and beverages retailers (F&B), or they manufacture Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) retail products that sell globally, and these are sectors that are changing very rapidly but not always as people expect.  AI will be vital to the future of grocery retail, food and beverages - what we eat and drink. Take total online retail sales, (including Fast Moving Consumer Goods) which have reached 22% of retail globally.

This figure for home-food ordering leapt during COVID but will not leap forward as much again because there is a natural limit here – physical retail will always play an important role in every society. This is especially true for food, less so for beverages, because consumers often like to see, feel, smell the food they buy, and there are often wider ranges of package size in store compared to online. The UK is one of the world’s most advanced online economies: online food and grocery sales shot up during the pandemic as part of the jump in total retail sales from 20% to 37%, then (as I predicted) total online retail dropped back again, to 32%, which is probably close to where it will be for the longer term – significantly less than 50%.

AI impact on global food market - worth $1 trillion a year

The global food market is worth $10tn a year, and will grow rapidly. It needs to. More than 800 million people across the world are often hungry, while 1 billion are now considered obese. By 2050 the number of people who are obese will rise to 2 billion, and half a billion people will probably still be hungry. So how will AI help us provide enough food for tomorrow’s world?

There is no doubt that AI will help many farmers grow more food, using smaller teams. Agriculture in countries like the UK, France, US and Canada is already highly industrialised, with ever larger landholdings and food output. The latest agricultural machines are so complex and expensive that many individual farms now rent them by the day.

Farmers are totally dependent on the right amounts of sun and rain each month. More accurate long-range weather forecasts using AI will mean farmers improve their food harvest yields – advised by AI when best to plant, spray, weed, fertilise and harvest. AI will help farmers work out how best to maintain their soil with improved diagnostics. Videos by drones will be used by AI for ‘precision agriculture’: earlier diagnosis of damaged crops, weed infestations and possible disease...

WE NEED TO DISTINGUISH between government as in managing a country, which is about the civil service and ministerial departments, and government as in leading a nation, which is all about politics in a democracy, autocracy or dictatorship. (See previous chapter for wider use of AI in surveillance).

AI is already widely used by the civil service in most developed countries, supporting whoever is leading government. Key areas for AI will be developing policy options, modelling the impact of proposed policies, writing policy details and drafting legislation.

And at the end of this book is a proposed 10 Point Plan AI for governments, actions  and policy decisions to take now.

For the next five years, almost all such AI support activities will tend to be on separate systems, but by 2040 many government AI systems will be networked into one all-powerful, all-knowing AI colossus. This is despite inherent risks.

To some extent this is already happening across systems used by security services. So, for example, a security officer can access all of someone’s personal information relating to internet activity (searches, social media, purchases), location, phone logs, family and friends, employment, tax, immigration, banking, driving offences, criminal record, health records – plus other insights generated by AI-linked pattern recognition, predictive analytics. Such an entity will become a primary target for hostile countries to attack (and for ‘friendly’ countries to quietly probe).

MILITARY SPENDING across the world will accelerate rapidly over the next decade and beyond, because of a growing threat of major wars in addition to existing conflicts. AI will be part of this defence industry boom. Military AI is racing ahead of all other AI innovation, except for AI in cybersecurity, national security, healthcare and workplace automation.

Military forces already spend $5bn a year on AI, for target acquisition, battle simulation, smarter intelligence and better weapon design. The Pentagon alone will invest $2bn in AI in 2025,

some of which will be in cybersecurity and cyberattack capabilities.The first two years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine were a ghastly shock to military forces across the world, who had become over-reliant on smart weapons and mobile troops. Half a million fighters trapped in frozen trenches, cowering under artillery bombardment, trapped by landmines, thousands blown apart every month, in static conditions like those in the First World War.

Despite the horrors in Ukraine and the failure of high-tech weapons to achieve rapid gains, AI supremacy will become increasingly important. Indeed, the next stages of the Russian conflict will be dominated by drones and tech which increasingly relies on AI.

Wartime has always driven rapid innovation, and the fastest advances in AI will happen in the heat of fighting, amid the thunder of explosions and the destruction of cities. Advanced AI will detect threats in microseconds and be capable of triggering military conflicts in minutes, beyond the mental capacity of military leaders. AI will therefore end up with huge influence over military strategies and will control most firepower directly or indirectly.