Investigating the transition to a computational world.
Conversations and investigations exploring how AI is changing technology, work, infrastructure and the systems around us.
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The Future of British Defence: Can We Adapt Fast Enough? | Air Marshal Andrew Turner
Can Britain defend itself in a prolonged war? Air Marshal Andrew Turner, one of Britain’s most experienced former RAF commanders, delivers a stark assessment of UK military readiness and explores how artificial intelligence, autonomous warfare, defence technology and industrial innovation could reshape Britain’s national security.
After 40 years in the Royal Air Force, including operational service in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans, Andrew Turner has experienced the human reality of warfare, commanded military operations and helped shape Britain’s defence capabilities. Now CEO of SAIBRE Capital, he invests in emerging technologies spanning AI, quantum computing, advanced manufacturing, semiconductors, energy and sovereign infrastructure.
In this episode of BASELINE, Andrew challenges conventional military procurement and explains why buying today’s drones could mean buying obsolescence. We explore a future of decentralised, on-demand manufacturing, where military units could produce and adapt equipment using real-time battlefield intelligence, connected data systems and continuous production processes.
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What Happens When AI Becomes Critical Infrastructure?
AI is moving into critical systems, business operations and infrastructure where simply shutting it down could cause more harm than leaving it running.
The challenge is no longer just how we control AI, but how we isolate, govern and remain resilient around systems we increasingly depend on. In his third BASELINE conversation, Gavin Ray explores what happens when autonomous agents are given objectives and access to resources without the sanctions that govern human behaviour. They discuss why the traditional AI “kill switch” may already be the wrong idea, the widening gap between technological capability and governance, the extraordinary capital flowing into AI infrastructure, and why the final 5% of creating real commercial value remains stubbornly difficult.
The conversation also exposes a less visible consequence of enterprise adoption: as AI enters organisations and accumulates their knowledge, processes and experience, are companies adopting the model, or gradually distilling themselves into it? And if decades of human expertise can eventually be queried on demand, what becomes of the value of time and talent?
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AI vs AI: The Strange New Reality of Getting Hired
Stephen South and Devin Boddie are building https://vocator.ai, an AI hiring platform designed to look beyond the CV and give more candidates an opportunity to demonstrate what they actually know. Candidates can generate and submit applications at unprecedented scale. E
mployers are increasingly using AI to analyse, filter and screen them. The result is a strange new system where, as Devin Boddie puts it, “AI information” is increasingly interacting with AI information. We discuss fake applicants, automated screening, why good candidates disappear inside traditional hiring systems, whether human capability can really be reduced to data, which jobs remain valuable as AI advances, and a future where you may no longer apply for jobs at all. Instead, a digital representation of you could find opportunities and interact with other AI systems on your behalf.
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AI Is Changing the Rules of Growth
AI is making it easier than ever to build technology. But for many companies, understanding what customers want, where growth comes from and what to do next is becoming harder. Olayide Odeyemi at https://www.imperialpipeline.co.uk has spent more than a decade selling complex technology across enterprise, defence and cybersecurity.
Today, as founder of Imperial Pipeline, he works with technology founders trying to turn good ideas into real customers. In this conversation, we explore what he is seeing from inside the market: AI-generated noise, fragmented buying journeys, the changing craft of sales, people quietly disengaging from work, and leadership teams trying to make decisions while the technology beneath them keeps moving. We also get into something more fundamental.
What happens when we automate the parts of work that gave people agency, craft and satisfaction? And as AI becomes capable of doing more for us, what do we actually want to keep doing ourselves?
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Can Humanity Control AI? | Lt Gen Sir Tom Copinger-Symes
AI is changing warfare. Drones, autonomous weapons, AI agents and machine-speed decision making are challenging some of our most fundamental assumptions about human control.
For BASELINE100, Lieutenant General Sir Tom Copinger-Symes KCB CBE, former Deputy Commander of UK Strategic Command, explores AI warfare, cognitive warfare, sovereign AI, autonomous weapons and the future of human-in-the-loop decision making. From the battlefield in Ukraine to the printing press, this conversation asks a much bigger question: can humanity control the technologies it creates?
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The Chinese AI Question Nobody Can Avoid
AI is getting cheaper, open models are getting better, and China is changing the economics of the global AI race. But as intelligence becomes more widely available, who actually stays in control? Eight months after our first conversation, I sit down again with Red Hat’s Jonny Williams to examine what has changed.
We explore Chinese open-weight AI models, OpenAI and Anthropic, the shift from AI training to inference, the enormous investment in GPUs and data centres, and what AI sovereignty really means for the UK. As models become increasingly interchangeable, value may be moving elsewhere: into proprietary data, compute, infrastructure, energy and the applications built on top.
That creates difficult questions for governments and businesses about dependency, resilience, regulation and who can ultimately “pull the plug”.
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Why More People Are Starting To Build - Ian Sutherland
For decades, turning an idea into a product required funding, developers, technical expertise and a team. Today, that barrier is beginning to disappear. In this episode of BASELINE, former Tide CFO Ian Sutherland shares how a career break after helping scale Tide from less than $1 million to more than $200 million in revenue led him to an unexpected discovery: modern AI tools had dramatically reduced the distance between an idea and a working product.
We explore why more people are starting to build, how AI is changing entrepreneurship, what it means for startups and investors, and why some of the most interesting products of the next decade may come from people who understand the problem rather than those who simply know how to code.
Topics include AI-assisted software development, Claude Code, angel investing, startup economics, productivity, the future of work, niche software businesses, venture capital, and the changing relationship between expertise and execution.
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