J. M. Ledgard

Jonathan M. Ledgard (born 1968) is a Scottish born journalist, author and an expert in advanced technology, emerging markets, nature and literature.

Early life

Ledgard was born in 1968 in the Shetland Islands off the coast of Scotland.

Career

Journalism

Beginning in 1998 he worked as a foreign political and war correspondent for 15 years, with particular expertise in emerging economies, security, business, and natural resources. He reported in Central Asia, Latin America, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Africa. He was the East Africa correspondent for The Economist.

Author

Ledgard is the author of two novels, Giraffe (2006) and Submergence (2013), which was made into a film in 2017 by the same name.

Futurist

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 and across the tropics. He works with leading artificial intelligence scientists and roboticists to improve outcomes for nature and often very poor local communities. 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 and other partners. Since 2018, he has been focused on artificial intelligence and nature and is developing a prototype for interspecies money transfer, by which rare non-human life forms can receive money and spend it on their survival.