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A brace of articles in this past weekend’s Financial Times highlight in their different ways the challenges and opportunities involved in investing in cultural heritage. They make for a fascinating combination, potentially more interesting when taken together, but with a salutary warning if either – or both – are not addressed with focused will and adequate resourcing. Apologies that, for the time being, both articles sit behind the FT’s paywall, leaving the newspaper at my sub-editorial mercies in relaying the potential and purpose in these pieces.
First up is the main feature in the paper’s Life & Arts section, in which government AI advisor and Plural CEO investor Ian Hogarth addresses “Europe’s trillion-dollar question”: can Europe produce a single company that might compete with the trillion-dollar valuations of the titans of Silicon Valley? Largely through a combination of lack of resilience among founders and audacity among investors, the simple answer, so far, is No. Despite the early success over a decade ago by Demis Hassabis with Deep Mind, today’s leaders in AI are OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI, and the power centre has shifted from London to Silicon Valley.
Hogarth’s article moves on to consider the market for nuclear fusion where, again, Europe possesses many natural advantages in terms of both its scientific research base and, so far, government support. This hasn’t been enough to shift the commitment of private capital, however: “when you look at private startups in fusion, four in the USA have raised more than $500mn, compared with only one in China and zero in Europe.” This has reverberating consequences not only for workers in those companies but in the growth of wealth for the societies in which they operate.
What has this to do with AI and the growth potential for immersive heritage? Have a look at the second FT article, written by the newspaper’s architecture critic, Edwin Heathcote: “Sham urbanity dispatches Smithfield to knacker’s yard”. The much reported, imminent closure of Smithfield meat market after more than eight centuries of trading history on the Fleet’s riverbank leaves the City of London facing (at least one) intriguing choice. As the writer terms it, the development of this site as the new location for the relocated London Museum undermines “the actual culture of a commercial city with the institutional culture of the museum.” If museums were to be defined as mausoleums of historical knick-knacks, there might be something here to be apprehensive about.
The London Museum is not such a place. Along with the entire “Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums” sector, it has grasped the potential for immersive technologies and developments in Generative AI are bringing the past to life and developing a vibrant future for EdTech and Tourism. The City of London is itself showing a lead with its new scanning project with The Guildhall, developing it as part of a Europe-wide project for 3D visualisation and Digital Cultural Heritage.
Opening its digital frontiers is playing to London’s strengths in ways that go beyond what a meat market might achieve. It may not be nuclear fusion, but immersive heritage is another sector in which London, with its rich trove of historical data, its world-leading universities, and its immersive technologies can lead the world. Backed by two millennia of rich data, it will employ millions and earn billions, better educating the workforce and offering a rich environment for both Artificial and Real Intelligence.