America
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America
Saving eyesight of Ukrainian children; book publishers to huddle on AI regulation; leading ethicist to keynote Project Voice 2024
Far…we've been traveling far.
Without a home, but not without a star.
Free - only want to be free.
We huddle close - hang on to a dream.
On the boats and on the planes
They're coming to America
Never looking back again
They're coming to America
Neil Diamond wrote America quickly, for a film called The Jazz Singer which though profitable, wasn’t considered a hit, and didn’t put much stock in the song at first.
As Diamond noted, American sentiment was at a low point in 1979, when the song and movie were released.
But in 1980 and into 1981, the song’s popularity took off, becoming his sixth number-one record of his illustrious career.
We are especially proud, on this 4th of July week, of Project Voice Capital Partners’ investor Paul Runge.
(PVCP, which invests in conversational AI startups on a quarterly basis, will announce its Q2 investments Monday, July 10.)
Dr. Runge is a retired ophthalmologist who we first welcomed as a visitor to Project Voice’s annual conference over five years ago.
He’s been part of the Project Voice ecosystem since then, and earlier this year, joined Project Voice Capital Partners as a limited partner.
He has spent the bulk of his “retirement” in Ukraine, where he has been educating Ukrainian doctors on how to use special lasers to save the eyesight of Ukrainian children, and also performing many of these surgeries himself.
His local paper, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, interviewed Dr. Runge late last year on his work, where he was quoted:
“I wasn’t ready to just sit around and do nothing for the remaining part of my life,” Runge said in a phone interview, speaking with the Herald-Tribune from Ivano-Frankivsk. “I was sitting at home like everybody else, watching (war) unfold and just wondering what I could do.”
I asked Paul about what he felt was one of his greatest accomplishments since beginning his work in Ukraine.
His response was obtaining and deploying the laser used to prevent blindness in premature babies in the neonatal intensive care unit at the children’s hospital there.
The typically-$30k piece of equipment was provided by an American benefactor.
Our team is proud to call Paul a friend and partner, and his servant leadership deserves special attention as we think about America’s place in the world.
Thank you, Paul.
A group of 100 North American book publishers will convene beginning later next month to determine what addendum, if any, is needed to add to the existing Ethics and Integrity Charter for LLM-Based AI.
We have succeeded, in the aftermath of Project Voice 2023, in getting this Charter in front of personnel with the World Economic Forum and our own Presidential administration.
An important next step will be to create sub-committees representing various industries. Book publishing will be among the first.
Participating publishers will be invited to attend a series of virtual meetings leading up to a physical gathering at January’s Digital Book World 2024 in NYC.
Leading AI ethicist Merve Hickok (President, Center for AI and Digital Policy) was announced last week as the opening keynote for Project Voice’s annual conference next year.
Registration for the event can be found here.
