Upcoming: Money as memory: The Tehanu Project and its first step towards interspecies economic participation, with Jonathan Ledgard & Neil Gershenfeld
April 26 2025, 16:00 GMT / 17:00 BST / 12:00 EDT / 9:00 PDT (4pm GMT/ 5 pm BST / 12 pm EST/ 9am PST)
Money as memory: The Tehanu Project and its first step towards interspecies economic participation
Jonathan Ledgard, CEO of Tehanu, will present on the Tehanu pilot project’s results and the Tehanu Foundation’s vision for interspecies equity through digital, AI and economic representation for non-human species.
In a world first, the Tehanu pilot project in Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda, a family of mountain gorillas was assigned digital identities and wallets. Leveraging artificial intelligence, blockchain, and digital identities, the pilot demonstrated that gorilla-linked digital wallets can make payments in line with AI-inferred gorilla interests.
Tehanu envisions this model as a scalable solution for biodiversity preservation, where AI-driven interspecies transactions create economic incentives for protecting wildlife. In the long-term, Tehanu seeks to further non-human species participation in the digital, economic and AI realms. The vision highlights the potential for digital and financial technologies to reshape the way humans interact with nonhuman life, leading to a new era of interspecies equity and new evolutionary futures.
Join Jonathan Ledgard and special guest Neil Gershenfeld to discover this groundbreaking innovation in conservation and interspecies collaboration.
About the speaker
Jonathan Ledgard is the creator of Interspecies Money concept and CEO of Tehanu. As a director at the avant-garde EPFL in Switzerland he pioneered robotics, blockchain, and digital identity projects. He invented the cargo drone and droneport concept and introduced it into Africa, bringing in Norman Foster as design lead. He developed his Interspecies thinking as a visiting professor in AI at the Czech Technical University. Jonathan is a leading thinker on risk, advanced technology, and nature, advising up to head of state level. Separately, he spent two decades as an award-winning foreign and war correspondent for The Economist, reporting lead stories from over 50 countries and a number of wars - including a decade as Africa correspondent. As 'J.M.Ledgard' he is a critically acclaimed novelist. His most recent novel Submergence was a New York Times Book of the Year and adapted for Hollywood by Wim Wenders.
About the special guest
Prof. Neil Gershenfeld is the Director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms, where his unique laboratory is breaking down boundaries between the digital and physical worlds, from pioneering quantum computing to digital fabrication to the Internet of Things. He has been elected a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Physical Society, has been named one of Scientific American's 50 leaders in science and technology, as one of 40 Modern-Day Leonardos by the Museum of Science and Industry, one of Popular Mechanic's 25 Makers, has been selected as a CNN/Time/Fortune Principal Voice, and by Prospect/Foreign Policy as one of the top 100 public intellectuals. He's the founder of a global network of over 2500 fab labs in 150 countries, chairs the Fab Foundation, and leads the Fab Academy.
This talk will be hosted on Zoom, please register below to receive a calendar invitation including link to join.
