RUSHES: Lord Mayor's Banquet: Boris Johnson speech

Lord Mayor's Banquet: Boris Johnson speech; ENGLAND: London: City of London: Guildhall:Boris Johnson speech SOT (6 of 8)- What we also have are the coders and the software engineers, the scientists and digital entrepreneurs, oh and by the way – we have the bankers too and the lawyers – and the regulators.You want a country that can do scientific breakthroughs, come to us: there is a reason why we have more tech unicorns than anywhere else in Europe. It’s because on the whole people like to come and live and work in the UK, they like the freedom of thought and expression and the rule of law and the nightlife and the museums, and the fact that provided they do no harm to others, on the principle of JS Mill, they can live their lives here as they please.And that is broadly why we have so many outstanding universities and so many Nobel Prizes. And we mean now to turbo-charge that, if you can turbo-charge a non-hydrocarbon engine.The other day I met Demis Hassabis of Deep Mind, which is an extraordinary company located near King’s Cross, and he told me about AI which is not a two toed sloth you use in Scrabble by the way, but artificial intelligence and he more or less blew my mind, because AI transcends the limits of our poor mammalian brains, crunches problems with astonishing speed, but also somehow creatively and intuitively, so that DeepMind has beaten all comers at Go.It is already being used to predict where the wind will blow and therefore where is the optimal place to locate your turbines and to predict any maintenance issues before they arise. And the cost of offshore wind power has already fallen by 60 per cent in the last ten years, partly thanks to AI, and you can see the potential of AI to drive it down still further.We are already using AI to rationalise energy use in the vast data storage centres that are so important to the global economy, and DeepMind has worked out how to cut the use of energy in Google data centres by 40 per...