J.M. Ledgard
J.M. Ledgard was born in the Shetland Islands. Ledgard is the author of two novels, Giraffe 2006 and Submergence 2013, which was made into a film in 2017 directed by Wim Wenders. His work has been compared to W.G. Sebald and John Le Carré. He has referred to his writing as “planetary”.
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. Giraffe is considered a cult novel in the animal rights movement. A book of essays, Terra Firma, concerned Africa and technology.
He was a fellow and director at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne since 2012, and has been involved in promoting super advanced technology in Africa. 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. He invented the concept of blood delivery by drone, introducing the American startup Zipline into Rwanda. He advanced the idea of droneports across the tropics, realising together with the architect Lord Norman Foster 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. He supports digital self-sovereignty and was involved in early mobile money.
Since 2018, he has been focused on how artificial intelligence will perceive nature. He was a visiting professor in AI and Nature at the Czech Technical University. 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. He is an early proponent of the interspecies, an attempt to better comprehend other species using new technologies. He is a fellow of the Linnean Society and was a visiting fellow at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Currently, J.M. Ledgard is heading up a United Nations backed initiative to give "Interspecies Money" to a herd of dugongs. In a revolutionary technological step it is proposed that the dugong herd pay for their own protection.
