J.M. Ledgard

After reporting on the Romanian revolution for The Scotsman as a student,[1] he worked as a foreign political and war correspondent for two decades. He reported lead stories from 60 countries for The Economist, including stints in Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Africa.[2] His emphasis was on security, natural resources, and macroeconomics. He reported on several conflicts and is a founder member of The Frontline Club. He was a contributing writer to 1843, The Economist's sister magazine. He writes occasional long pieces for The Atlantic and other publications.[3]

Ledgard is the author of two novels, Giraffe (2006)[4][5] and Submergence (2013),[6][7] which was made into a film in 2017 of the same name by Wim Wenders.[8] His work has been compared to W.G. Sebald and John Le Carré.[9] He has referred to his writing as “planetary”.[10] Submergence was a New York Times Book of the Year and a pick of the year by Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, NPR, and New York.[11] Giraffe is considered a cult novel in the animal rights movement.[12] A book of essays, Terra Firma, concerned Africa and technology.[13]

Linnaeus, a prototype for interspecies money transfer

He was a fellow and director at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne since 2012,[1] and has been involved in promoting super advanced technology in Africa.[14] He works with leading artificial intelligence scientists and roboticists to improve outcomes in often very poor communities and for nature. He was an early proponent of drone technology.[15][16] He invented the concept of blood delivery by drone, introducing the American startup Zipline into Rwanda.[17] He advanced the idea of droneports across the tropics, realising together with the architect Lord Norman Foster[18] a droneport prototype at the 2016 Venice Biennale. His cargo drone work has been taken up and scaled by the World Bank, the UN and commercial partners.[19] He supports digital self-sovereignty and was involved in early mobile money.[20] Since 2018, he has been focused on how artificial intelligence will perceive nature.[21] He was a visiting professor in AI and Nature at the Czech Technical University.[22] He is presently developing a prototype for interspecies money, by which rare non-human life forms may revalue themselves to improve their chance of survival.[23] He is an early proponent of the interspecies, an attempt to better comprehend other species using new technologies.[24] He is a fellow of the Linnean Society and was a visiting fellow at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

He collaborates with major artists on nature based projects, including on the deep ocean and digital futures with Olafur Eliasson,[25] on the interspecies with Tomas Saraceno,[26] and Federico Diaz[27] on nature based projects.