New GerdBot AI App, LookUpNow Film on AI Futures coming soon. The latest update by Futurist Gerd Leonhard (July 4, 2023)

Greetings dear subscribers, friends, clients and colleague!

I hope you are well. I have 2 big updates for you today:

1) My new film ‘LookUpNow’ (LuN) is scheduled for release within 4–6 weeks. LuN is about the future of humanity in the context of recent advancements in artificial intelligence, and it is my first collaboration with Emmy-award winning director Chris Sean Nolan. In terms of style, look and feel, LuN will be totally different than my previous films; a riveting 24-minute docu-fiction production on the future of artificial intelligence and humanity, with many amazing CGI scenes, holograms and special effects. In the film, I propose that we should embrace AI, but not become beholden to it — using it as a tool but not as a purpose, harnessing its positive potentials while curtailing its negative externalities (to find out more, watch my talk at the Times event in India, here) AI should be used to help us to bring about The Good Future, but not to replace humans and to reduce what makes us human, or to create a synthetic, post-human society.

The title is obviously a play off the DiCaprio film ‘Don’t look Up’ but LuN is not about pointing at AI “hurtling towards us like an asteroid, invariably destroying humanity” but about understanding the tremendous powers as well as the dangers of AI and AGI, and redirecting it into our orbit (so to speak) where we could safely harness its potential for the collective good of all of humanity and the planet. Not to deny its possibilities, not to ignore what might go wrong with it, not to try to hinder its progress, but to use its power to further collective human and planetary flourishing. To not be hasty, naive, or greedy, but to act collectively, with wisdom and foresight, to find a balance between pro-action and precaution.

We will have a trailer available next week, and we are open to partnership inquiries for the distribution, marketing and promotion of this important film. Please contact me anytime to find out more.

2) I am also super-excited to announce the launch of GerdBot aka TheGerd.AI: Now you can ask me any question and get instant answers, drawing from all my content from the past 10 years, using my new ChatBot. Read the announcement on my blog, or watch the video overview.

Some context: I receive many emails and messages about my work and my topics, and almost always, the answers are already contained somewhere within my many writings (see Forbes, Medium) videos, books and shared feeds — but they’re hard to find and it’s often difficult to remember where exactly to point people. Now that powerful LLMs such as ChatGPT have become available, I figured it should be possible to feed all my books, posts, blogs, and other content into a clever algorithm. Recently, I was very fortunate to meet the amazing developer and VC Stevica Kuharski at FutureTense 2023 in Zagreb, Croatia and he offered to work with me on building a GerdBot.

So, a few days ago, we unveiled TheGerd.ai aka GerdBot, a sophisticated web application that leverages cutting-edge AI technologies to facilitate seamless access to my extensive digital archive from the past 12 years. Give it a try, and I hope you’ll like it!

I will send my usual best-of links and morsels within a week, again; in the meantime please use the GerdBot or just browse GerdFeed to see my latest highlights, or visit my blog for my latest posts.

Thanks again for being a subscriber, and please send feedback or comments anytime. Live long and prosper!

Gerd Leonhard Futurist and Humanist, CEO The Futures Agency
Founder of The Good Future Project. Zurich / Switzerland
Film Maker