Episode 23: Taylor Black, The AI Revolution and the Reshaping of Human Society

There's a great example of an individual in Australia.

Their dog had cancer.

And so they sequenced their dog's DNA.

They worked with Claude Opus to come up with a... therapy for their dog, sent that proposed therapy into a drug manufacturing, a bespoke drug manufacturing firm, which already exists, mail order, had the firm produce the drug and treated their dog's cancer with it and the dog's in remission.

all for under $5,000.

Now, you can imagine a similar sort of AI automated process that just chugs through all of the research papers that has access to a wet lab where it's able to run the experiments autonomously and just report out what happened, right? Is it doing any of the thinking? Yeah.

Hi, welcome to the Catholic Scientist Podcast.

I'm one of your co-hosts, Dr. Dan Keebler, and I'm joined by my co-host, Dr. Stephen Barr.

And today's episode, we are fortunate to have as our guest, Taylor Black, who is the Director of AI and Venture Ecosystems at Microsoft.

And he is the founding director of a new initiative at Catholic University on artificial intelligence and emerging technologies called the Leonum Initiative.

Institute for AI and Emerging Tech.

So he splits his time out in Washington and also at CUA running this venture.

So he's got an interesting background.

He has an undergraduate degree in philosophy and classics from Gonzaga University, then a master's in philosophy and a law degree from Boston College.

I don't know if you ever practiced law, did you? No.

No, actually, I started a tech company while I was in law school.

And while I graduated, I ended up doing that instead of practicing.

Okay.

And that's what got you into eventually working at Microsoft and then eventually being the founding director of the Leonum Institute.

So, Taylor, welcome to the show.

Great to be here.

Thanks for having me, Daniel and Steve.