Season 3: Episode 15 - Keeping a Plane in the Air: What Aerospace Teaches Us About Governing AI

Sophie and David are back for episode 15.

This week's guest is Sergei Irisov, Head of IT and Digital Transformation at ZeroAvia, the company building the first new type of aircraft powertrain in 50 years - a hydrogen-electric system that has to survive a punishing web of certification requirements before it's allowed anywhere near the sky. Sergei explains how his team went from drowning in test data to using AI to find patterns humans couldn't, why governance has to be the first step of an AI rollout rather than an afterthought, and the three principles borrowed straight from aerospace engineering - control, traceability, and fault tree analysis - that he uses to keep AI accountable. He also digs into why so many companies get stuck running endless AI pilots instead of reaching full transformation, and lands on a simple but sharp answer to who's responsible when AI gets it wrong: the person holding the tool, not the algorithm.

Before that, Sophie and David mark the first day of autumn with a proper news round-up: the Bank of England governor's warning that an AI bubble could trigger a global economic downturn, a fascinating debate out of Copenhagen's Tech BBQ summit about AI sovereignty - national, personal and professional - and what happens if a country (or a president) can simply switch off your AI access, Tim Cook's departure as Apple CEO and a deep dive into incoming chief John Ternus, Google's new Android tools to fight the AI-driven memory chip shortage, and a hundred AI firms (Google, Anthropic and OpenAI among them) signing an open letter urging governments to shore up their cyber defences before AI gets too powerful to control - plus the utterly chaotic World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, complete with robots catching fire and toppling into judges' tables.

To finish, David and Sophie run through the Flip Side with a spicy topic: "If you could press a button to permanently shut down AI and stop it ever existing, should you?".