Journal

Spent a couple of days in Barcelona for ACCIÓ’s fifth Exponential Day. Have been involved in the region for some years, for example through events organised by Fundación Ship2B and Cathy Runciman’s Fixing the Future team. Delightful supper yesterday evening with Ana Simon Villacampa, deputy director of innovation and disruption at Catalonia Exponential, and Louis Juncà, director-general for innovation, digital economy and entrepreneurship at Generalitat de Catalunya.

Artificial intelligence, or AI, was central to the proceedings – to the point where the stage featured three 3D versions of the term. I kicked off by quoting Mexican Spanish, and saying that it made me thing of the saying ay-ay-ay, denoting dismay. The audience laughed, but my intent was serious. Indeed, have just been finishing off an article for the risk journal Sentinel, following my recent speech at the AIRMIC conference in Manchester.

After the event, I took a cab out to the airport, where I spent 5-6 hours (partly because my plane was delayed) in the BA lounge, among other things finishing off a quarterly column for the Frontier Report run by my old friends E-Square in Tokyo, this piece on the greening of the world’s royal families. Inspired both by meeting Spain’s King Felipe VI on a recent trip to Madrid for South Summit, and by the release of the UK Royal Household’s latest report and accounts, given that I have served for some years on the Royal Household’s Environment Committee.

Every day that I go into Somerset House from Waterloo, my route takes me under the bridge via a tunnel that is like a window into a parallel universe. Despite frequent efforts to paint out the messages, they continue to appear – a fair few lambasting the World Economic Forum and the world of Davos Man, and Woman presumably.

Sitting out on the deck, after a day of calls with people like the Volans team, the Tessa Tennant ‘Amulet‘ team, Natura and Professor Cameron Hepburn of Oxford University’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment (whose founder, Sir Martin Smith, we had bumped into at the Culham fusion research centre recently), Elaine and I were struck by the cloudscape as the sun sank into the west.

Travelled north to Leeds by train yesterday for Yorkshire Sustainability Week, speaking today in a session alongside someone I have known through his many incarnations, Dr Wayne Visser. Not sure I have ever been to Leeds before, but was impressed.

Also impressed by what Kate Hutchinson and her team have managed to pull off – and heard something of their ambitious expansion plans. After our session we went to lunch with someone else I have long known, Mike Berners-Lee of Small World Consulting. Fun. That said, noise in rail carriages both ways was not fun – thank heavens for headphones …

Wonderful to see media coverage beginning for Hania’s new Amazon Prime series, Fifteen-Love, starring Aidan Turner and Ella Lily Hyland. Can’t wait to see it.