Last December, Tortoise launched the Global AI Index, the first to benchmark nations on their level of investment, innovation and implementation of artificial intelligence. For the past year, our team has been working on expanding the Index, adding another 10 countries and bringing in further metrics to deepen the analysis on the battle for AI domination.

On December 3, we’ll release the Index’s second iteration as the centrepiece of an AI digital summit where leaders in politics, technology and business will imagine a world with AI at its core. We’ll discuss the geopolitical implications of AI development, how companies can avoid “ethics washing”, the key breakthroughs in AI-led technology, and how gene-editing may change the human experience.

Sessions include:

• The Tortoise Global AI Index: 2020 results
• Geo-politics: the return of empires?
• AI's ugly underbelly: winners and losers of the workforce
• AI you can trust: taking ethics from rhetoric to reality
• AI: the breakthroughs that will shape your life
• AI life and death: how many can we save?

Experts include:

• Sir Nigel Shadbolt, Professor of Computing Science at the University of Oxford and Chairman of the Open Data Institute
• Gemma Milne, technology journalist, co-host of the Radical Science podcast
• Chris Wigley, CEO of Genomics England
• Frida Polli, award-winning Harvard and MIT neuroscientist and CEO of Pymetrics
• Jaan Tallinn, co-founder of Skype
• Jean-François Gagne, Founder, Element AI
• Benedict Evans, former Venture Partner, Entrepreneur First
• Taavi Kotka, first Chief Information Officer for the Estonian Government
• Dipayan Ghosh, former tech advisor under Barack Obama and former public policy advisor at Facebook
• Lofred Madzou, Project Lead for AI at the World Economic Forum

The format

The Tortoise Global AI Summit is a one day programme of virtual conversations hosted by Tortoise. The summit will bring together 20-30 leading thinkers and commentators along with 2,000+ individuals from around the world.

Sessions will be hosted using Tortoise’s award-winning ThinkIn format, encouraging open, two-way dialogue between experts and attendees. Sessions will be moderated by senior Tortoise Editors, including James Harding, Editor and Co-Founder, Alexandra Mousavizadeh, Director of Tortoise Intelligence, and Alexi Mostrous, Editor and Partner.

About Tortoise

Tortoise is a new media organisation focused on slow news and opening up journalism. At the heart of Tortoise is the ThinkIn – our live journalism event that is modelled on an editorial conference. We host ThinkIns every day for our members and we are delighted to have hosted recent ThinkIns with Tony Blair, former UK Prime Minister; Ana Botin, Executive Chair, Banco Santander; Mark Carney, former Governor of the Bank of England and Dave Lewis, former CEO, Tesco; and Pascal Soriot, CEO, AstraZeneca.

Tortoise was founded by James Harding, former Editor of The Times and Director of News at the BBC; Katie Vanneck-Smith, former President of Dow Jones, and Matthew Barzun, President Obama’s Ambassador to the UK and Sweden.