Will extraterrestrial technology change life on Earth?

About this episode

Why should we keep our eyes on the stars? In this episode, Luciano Diana interviews Sophie Hackford to explore why the future of space technology matters and how it is changing life on Earth, setting the course for humanity for years to come.

Featured in this episode

Sophie Hackford

Sophie Hackford is a futurist. She has given 160 provocative talks to boards and exec teams on novel science and tech. Clients come from every industry – Adobe, Bank of New York, DeepMind, EY, Vogue – although the best questions have so far come from audiences of schoolchildren. Sophie co-founded 1715Labs: a spinout from Oxford University’s Astrophysics Department, labelling data to train algorithms. She is on the board of two growth-stage startups.

Sophie previously worked at WIRED Magazine, at Singularity University on the NASA Research Park in Silicon Valley, and Oxford University where she raised USD120m for frontier-bending research. Despite very real threats, Sophie is an optimist about the future.

Luciano Diana

Luciano Diana joined Pictet Asset Management in 2009. He is a Senior Investment Manager in the Thematic Equities Team. Before joining Pictet, Luciano spent four years at Morgan Staley, where he headed the London-based clean energy sell side research team. He began his career in 1998 as an IT strategy consultant at Accenture.

Luciano holds a Laurea in Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Padua in Italy. He was Visiting Scholar at the University in Berkeley. He holds an MBA from INSEAD.