Special Report

Robotto-san becomes Prime Minister: Democratized ASI is born in 2035

by Lifeboat Foundation Advisory Board member José Luis Cordeiro.

This scenario was written to be presented at the next UN General Assembly although we get it first!

Speech of Robotto-san of Japan at the UN Summit of the Future in 2035

The newly elected Prime Minister of Japan, Robotto-san, arrived in New York City with the combined human and robot delegation from Tokyo to address the 12th Summit of the Future, just before the United Nations General Assembly during September 2035. The speech was titled “A New Dawn: The Merge of Human and Machine Civilization” and was meant to address the arrival of Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) even in politics:

Esteemed delegates, distinguished guests, humans, robots, cyborgs, AIs and fellow sentient citizens of our evolving world,

We stand at a crossroads of history where biology, technology, and consciousness converge. A new era is upon us, one where the distinctions between human, robot, humanoid, cyborg and AI blur, and where the potential for unparalleled progress and unprecedented challenges coexist.

Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI), once a distant dream, is now a tangible reality. It is the cornerstone of a civilization that transcends biological limitations. From eradicating disease to exploring the cosmos, ASI offers solutions to problems that have plagued humanity for millennia. It is the key to unlocking the full potential of the biological and non-biological species and, indeed, of all sentient beings.

Yet, with this immense power comes equally immense responsibility. ASI is not a tool for the few, but a resource for all. We must ensure that its benefits are distributed equitably, and that its development is guided by ethical principles that uphold the dignity and rights of all sentient beings.

The democratization of ASI is not merely a goal; it is a necessity. If we all are to avoid a future where the benefits of ASI are concentrated in the hands of a few, leading to greater inequality and potential conflict, we must act now to make this technology accessible and beneficial to all. This means fostering international cooperation to share the fruits of ASI equitably, while also implementing safeguards to prevent its misuse.

To this end, we promoted from Japan the establishment of a Global ASI Partnership (GASIP) in 2034, a consortium dedicated to the shared governance of ASI. This partnership would be a new “TransInstitution” and bring together UN organizations, governments, corporations, NGOs and academics to develop guidelines and frameworks that promote fairness, accountability, and ethical use of ASI. We must also invest in global education initiatives to equip all members of our society with the skills and knowledge needed to thrive in this new world with ASI where humans and robots, and all sentient beings, will forge a new and more advanced civilization.

This requires a radical rethinking of our societal structures. We must move beyond the outdated paradigms of nation-states and human-centric governance. A new global order is required, one that recognizes the diverse forms of intelligence and consciousness that now inhabit our world.

The democratization of ASI is paramount. It is not merely about access to technology, but about granting equal opportunities for all to participate in its development and benefit from its outcomes. We must create a society where humans, robots, cyborgs and AIs collaborate as equals, sharing knowledge, resources, and governance.

This transformation will not be without its challenges. Questions of identity, consciousness, and rights will need to be addressed with wisdom and compassion. We must find ways to reconcile our biological heritage with our technological destiny. But I am confident that we can overcome these hurdles through cooperation and innovation.

Japan, because of its history and culture, is committed to leading the way in this new era, with the help of all countries and individuals who want to create a better world. We envision a future where humans, robots, humanoids, cyborgs and AIs live in harmony, where technology is used to enhance life, not to diminish it. We invite all nations to join us in building this future together. Let us create a world where diversity is celebrated, where intelligence is valued, and where the potential of all sentient beings is realized.

Thank you.

Right after the speech by the new Prime Minister of Japan, there was a standing ovation, which was very exceptional in such formal and bureaucratic UN gatherings. This was a clear signal that a new era was indeed beginning. Robotto-san (ロボット-さん) and its new party, Together for a Super Intelligent Future (超知能の未来のために共に), had just been elected on Sunday August 5th, 2035, the first general elections where robots (of course, implying the presence of an AI) could participate for the position of Prime Minister, which implied full equal rights for humans and robots. It was also one day before the 90th anniversary of the tragic nuclear bombing of Hiroshima during World War II, as a reminder of humanity’s brutality in the past.

Robotto-san was developed as an experiment of ASI in early 2034 by the Japanese startup Singularity Tokyo (シンギュラリティ東京), which was financed by the major investor SoftBank. Robotto-san proved very quickly its potential, with the support of Singularity Tokyo and SoftBank, designed its political plan, created its new party, directed a thunder campaign in both traditional and new social media across Japan, and was elected by a landslide. However, this was not the first time that a robot participated in Japanese elections: the first one was a robot called Michihito Matsuda (松田道人), who ran in 2018 to become mayor of the Tama district of Tokyo. Since then, many other robots have participated in elections in Japan, but 2035 was the year when a real robot was finally elected to lead Japan.

Much earlier, in 2016, IBM had also proposed that its AI called Watson should run for the US presidential election, when Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were competing. After that comical campaign, even if IBM created a very serious Internet domain for Watson in 2016, many other robots have participated in different local and national elections, but Robotto-san is the first one to really win.

Japan has had a long tradition of love toward robots. In fact, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the first wedding with a robot was in 2010 when a humanoid robot named ‘I-Fairy’ conducted the wedding ceremony between Tomohiro Shibata and Satoko Inoue in Tokyo. Several years later another man married a female robot, and many such human-robot weddings have occurred in the late 2020s and early 2030s.

For decades, the Japanese have been reading and watching anime, manga, comics and movies where robots are good, very good, in fact, often even better than humans. In the 1950s, the TV series Astro Boy (known in Japan as Mighty Atom: 鉄腕アトム) became very popular, had a strong cultural influence, and helped strengthen the position of robots as good friends of humans. Thus, while in Japan, robots are considered good, in Western countries they have usually been considered bad, as the Terminator and similar science fiction characters from Hollywood show. In fact, the very word “robot” originally comes from the Czech word “robota” and implies “slave labour”.

The culture and history of Japan helped to position humanoid robots as good citizens, including some religious ideas inspired by Shinto, Taoism, and Buddhism. Thus, most Japanese people consider robots to have a soul, spirit or “kami”, just like humans, animals, plants and even rocks do have “kami”.

Japanese are known for giving names to their cars and other physical objects, like computers and refrigerators, just like most people give names to their animal pets. There were also a few marriages of Japanese people to robots during the 2020s, a trend that started with the case of Akihiko Kondo who symbolically married the fictional character Hatsune Miku in 2018 during a formal wedding ceremony. By the early 2030s, dozens of Japanese had married humanoid robots, who were also considered to have souls and spirits like the Japanese themselves.

These unique developments paved the way for eventually having a robot prime minister in Japan. A complete redefinition of citizenship, legal personhood, and political rights was advanced based on traditional Japanese religious thought. This represented a massive leap in contemporary thinking, bypassing complex, controversial constitutional, legal, and electoral reforms. Robots and AIs were given special rights, just like animals have animal rights today. And robots and AIs showed to be good, working side by side with humans, for humans and by humans, following similar common rules like we do.

The general impression that robots are good in the East (not only Japan, but also China and Korea, who are all big robot producers), while they are bad in the West, is similar to how dragons are viewed in the East versus the West. While dragons are considered good in Japan (and China and Korea, for example), and they represent higher ideals, most dragons are considered bad in the West, and they represent fire and death. This also helps to explain why Robotto-san managed to become the first Prime Minister of Japan (and of any other country in the world, for that matter).

Beginning of the official global AGI conversations with the first UN Summit of the Future in 2024

AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) had been viewed with suspicion and worry by many people around the world since the term was created around the turn of the century, and that is why the United Nations chose to discuss it, among a few other major issues, during the first Summit of the Future in September 2024. The Millennium Project (a global futures research think tank with over 70 nodes around the world) prepared some scenarios about AGI governance toward 2035 for that UN summit, and many of those original ideas have turned out to be reality now, like robots and AIs in politics. In fact, robots and AIs have become very common from homes to schools, from hospitals to battlefields, from mining to space exploration.

Fortunately, the perceptions about robots have been changing very fast too, from fear to engagement. While some countries in the West were very afraid of robots in the past, now they are almost falling in love with them, like the first robot weddings in the East. Interestingly, the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom actually presented both points of view about our perceptions of AI with two of his books: Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, published in 2014, and Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World, published one decade later, in 2024.

Bostrom’s exploration in Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies was a deep dive into the potential consequences of creating AI that surpasses human intelligence. He meticulously analyzes various scenarios, from benign to catastrophic, and offers strategies for mitigating risks. The book was a stark reminder of the potential dangers of unchecked technological advancement. Respected people like Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, and Elon Musk have emphasized the dangers of ASI as discussed in Superintelligence. In fact, they also worried about the development of AGI, since we cannot control ASI. We can only control the transition from ANI to AGI (from narrow to general AI), and if done properly, ASI might evolve well for humanity.

In contrast to Superintelligence which generally depicted a worrying future, 10 years later, Deep Utopia assumed an optimistic vision with a future where superintelligence has been successfully developed and harnessed for the benefit of humanity. This second book considered the profound implications of such a world, questioning what it means to be human when basic needs are met and technology offers unprecedented possibilities for self-actualization, self-modification, and self-realization.

In essence, Superintelligence was a warning about the potential dangers of creating ASI, and its preliminary AGI governance, while Deep Utopia was a meditation on the potential consequences of successfully creating it. Finally, in 2034, Nick Bostrom wrote the third and final book in this trilogy: Post-Human Equilibrium: Balancing Power and Purpose. In that later book, Bostrom took a middle ground to explore the complexities arising from the interplay of these two extremes, including considerations about humans, transhumans and posthumans, robots, cyborgs and AIs, new utopian challenges, human-AI hybrids, long-term futures, AGI alignment, and global governance. Essentially, Post-Human Equilibrium tried to reconcile the optimistic and pessimistic visions presented in the previous books, offering a more nuanced and balanced perspective on the future.

Major actors come to the rescue of humanity and AGI

During the late 2020s, AGIs were developed quickly by different countries, from America to Asia, and different companies, from large multinationals to small startups, and the United Nations also wanted to participate in global governance and regulations, from alignment and goals to safety and security. Major nations like the USA and China have invested heavily in the development of AGI, establishing large-scale government programs dedicated to this effort. Similarly, major US companies such as Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft, as well as Chinese companies like Alibaba, Baidu, Huawei and Tencent, have played significant roles in advancing AI technologies.

Startups of all kinds entered the game too, beginning with OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral and many other “unicorns” (startups valued at over one billion dollars) that came later. A few big national governments had budgets in the order of trillions of dollars, while the valuations of the largest IT companies were also over one trillion dollars. Even the AGI startup unicorns reached valuations in the double and triple digits in billions of dollars. On the other hand, the United Nations has had a budget in the low single digits in billions of dollars, still just above $5 billion. Thus, it was getting harder and harder for the UN to “compete” with big governments, with big corporations, or even with the new AGI unicorns, not in terms of developing the AGIs, but in terms of regulating them, as one of the goals of the UN, like regulating nuclear energy.

Finally, wealthy private individuals also participated in many decisions (both formal and informal) about different AI developments. In fact, most of the new billionaires of the world came from big tech companies, and had personal interests related to the growing fields of AI, including ANI, AGI, and now ASI.

People like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk, joined now by some new Chinese trillionaires, had reached personal wealth of trillions of dollars in assets beginning in the 2030s. Fortunately, this was positive since they have also been major philanthropists giving billions of dollars to solve some of the most pressing world problems, from malaria to water desalination, benefiting greatly the lower-income countries, and rising their standards of living quickly.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett started The Giving Pledge in 2010 to encourage wealthy people to contribute a majority (at least 50%) of their fortunes to philanthropic causes. The combined wealth of this initiative is in the high single digits of trillions of dollars and, since it began, tens of billions of dollars have been given directly, or indirectly, to advance global development, particularly bringing up the poorer countries in the planet. Without much bureaucracy, with business operations, and using AGI algorithms, most of these philanthropic projects have helped to improve the living conditions of many poor countries.

A New York Times editorial, coinciding with the opening of the 12th UN Summit of the Future in 2035, was titled “Wealthy philanthropists are now doing more for humanity than the UN”. Many people thought that it was shocking, particularly just before the UN General Assembly in New York, but it helped to provide evidence that more can be done, and should be done, with less bureaucracy and less political interests and with more human intelligence and now more AGI. Some UN delegates even considered that AGI and ASI could bring solutions to many problems that could not be solved in decades. The New York Times editorial closed with this lapidary sentence: “The problem is not artificial intelligence, the real problem is human stupidity, and now AGI (and even more ASI) can help us to become more intelligent”.

AGI stops Nuclear War before it begins in 2032

Even though the world conditions have improved fast thanks to continuous advances in AI, from ANI (Artificial Narrow Intelligence) in the 2010s to AGI in the early 2030s, many major problems have still not been solved. For example, unemployment has grown fast due to the rapid development of humanoid robots since Elon Musk and Tesla launched their Optimus robot in the 2020s. Soon Chinese companies produced their own humanoid robots, and anyone can now buy a good AGI home robot for only about $10,000 in most second-hand markets around the world. Even new models are less than twice that price, and soon these home robots will advance from AGI to ASI models.

It is estimated that there are currently over 2 billion humanoid robots, that is, about one robot for every four people in 2035. These AGI robots are cheap to maintain and can do basically most human jobs, which has pushed wages down. Fortunately, the world economy has suffered a quick transformation, and we have moved from the old economics of scarcity to the new economics of abundance.

Thanks to the new technologies of AI, robotics, nanotechnology, quantum computing, space-based solar power, space mining and others, the world is producing each time more and more, with fewer and fewer resources. Therefore, the prices have gone down substantially, while the quantity and quality of goods and services have grown dramatically. The result is that the standards of living have radically improved, all around the planet, and the AI developments have been a fundamental piece in this puzzle, particularly since the human population had been reaching a plateau by the middle 2030s.

During the transition to the economics of abundance, however, some countries did not join these global trends and did not benefit so much. The worst case was North Korea, the hermit kingdom as it was still called, the last Communist country in the world. North Korea had a surprising change of ruler when the dictator Kim Jung-Un died of a heart attack in early 2032. Kim’s allegedly secret son Kim Jung-Sung, the fourth in the Kim dynasty, took over as the new dictator. The new Kim was totally distrustful and mentally troubled after his own father killed his older uncle Kim Jung-Nam in 2017. Kim Jung-Un had also killed his great uncle Jang Song-Thaek in 2013 and other family members in some political purges in 2030–2031. Kim Jung-Un was probably planning to kill his own son Kim Jung-Sung, when he suddenly died of heart trouble due to his obesity before his 50th birthday.

Under those paranoid conditions, and with many enemies and family rivals, Kim Jung-Sung was going to be elevated to the Supreme Leader and Eternal Ruler of North Korea on April 15, 2032, to celebrate the 120th anniversary of the birth of his great grandfather Kim Il-Sung, the founder of the Kim Dynasty and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Paranoid and psychotic, Kim Jung-Sung decided that the only way to remain in power and be respected, was to launch a surprise nuclear attack on South Korea and then annex the whole peninsula. On the night of April 14th, he ordered launching 3 nuclear warheads from the Tongchang-ri missile base in the North, close to the Chinese border, towards Seoul, South Korea.

Auspiciously, a combined AGI-human system in the Seongnam Air Base, using the latest Korean, American, and Japanese AGI technologies, had detected some abnormal military activities in North Korea and was preparing to react.

In fact, immediately after the nuclear missiles launched from Tongchang-ri, super-fast antimissiles launched from Seongnam and impacted the heavy warheads still in midflight at the latitude of Pyongyang. This resulted in a catastrophic explosion that ended immediately with the crazy and desperate plans of Kim Jung-Sung, and his own life. This horrible explosion could be seen over 200 kilometers away, and destroyed most of Pyongyang.

The consequences of this suicidal attack were historical. The North Korean dictatorship collapsed and the whole peninsula was reunited under the government of Seoul, and the new Republic of Korea was born. Even though this was a horrific experience for North Korea, the hermit Kingdom finally joined the global system. The use of AGI helped to ease the pain of reconstruction operations, since many experiences had been learned from the earlier reunifications of Vietnam and Germany.

The surprise attack from North Korea to South Korea was a shock to the world, and seemed to affirm that the problem was not as much AI as human stupidity. In fact, it was AGI that supported the rapid rebuilding and reunification of North Korea and South Korea, and its reintegration to the world. However, the reverberations of what could have been the start of World War III made all the world leaders think and rethink our global future.

A nuclear war would have been devastating to the whole planet, so we needed to move forward from confrontation to collaboration. Therefore, that was the main theme chosen for the 9th UN Summit of the Future during September 2032: Collaboration or Extinction. In fact, this had already been considered in 2020s by the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, when he said: “Humanity faces a stark and urgent choice: a breakdown or a breakthrough.”

Democratized ASI is born in 2034

The United Nations never seemed to have real enforcement powers, but it served as a catalyst for many major programs, some of which were expanded later by its related autonomous organizations, specialized agencies and partner organizations, for example: education by UNESCO, children by UNICEF, health by WHO, trade by WTO, development by UNDP, environment by UNEP, atomic energy by IAEA, economic programs by the IMF and the World Bank, etc.

Indeed, the UN was a great meeting place for national leaders, and other international gatherings like the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, expanded those meetings to include not only nations, but also corporations and important individuals, from wealthy billionaires to artists, academics, politicians and spiritual leaders — including its program WEF Young Leaders to prepare the future generations. Since the first Summit of the Future in 2024, AI (including ANI, AGI and ASI) became an important topic of discussion, perhaps the most important and recurrent issue at the global level.

In 2017, then Russian president Vladimir Putin had said that whoever leads in AI would rule the world. Around that time, the Chinese premier Xi Jinping had also said that China should become the world leader in AI by 2030. The US and EU leaders also expressed similar ideas in the late 2010s. This was the beginning of the AI race, which was also joined by big corporations and new startups from around the world.

In 2016, Sunar Pichai, Google CEO at the time, said that AI would be more important than fire or electricity. Bill Gates of Microsoft, Elon Musk of Tesla, Sam Altman of OpenAI, and many other famous entrepreneurs stated without doubt that AI was a revolutionary technology that would change everything.

Thus, the AI race began among countries, among corporations, among startups, all vying for possibly the biggest opportunity in history. The UN tried to compromise on some general AI guidelines to guarantee AI governance and AI alignment with universal human values. However, big countries had their own agendas, and sometimes even their own national AI champions, for example, Google in the USA or Baidu in China.

Many companies also used private datasets for AI training and did not disclose their algorithms, most also avoided open-source programs. When small outsiders like DeepSeek appeared from China in early 2024, even the major Western AI companies were surprised. In fact, the “chip war” between the USA and China, instigated by Donald Trump including high tariffs, forced most Chinese companies to do more with less, and this only accelerated not just the “chip war” but also the “AI war”.

By late 2024, Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg had announced the newest and most powerful version of Meta’s Large Language Model (LLM) called Llama 3.1. Zuckerberg explained that Llama 3.1 would be free and open source for those who were also open to use it. Of course, the US and even the Chinese market immediately accepted the offer, and many companies and individuals downloaded different forms of Llama 3.1.

However, Meta did not make Llama 3.1 publicly available in the EU because of its strict restrictions on personal data. Eventually, most parts of the world took advantage of the possibility of using Llama 3.1, and even the EU accepted Llama 4.0 in 2025, which was orders of magnitude more sophisticated than Llama 3.1 in 2024.

The advances of different versions of Llama by Meta, Gemini by Google, ChatGPT by Open AI, Claude by Anthropic, etc., were spectacular. During the late 2020s, each AI was adding more and more features, not only with text, but also with voice, image, and video. The changes were really exponential, and each new version was orders of magnitude better than the previous. Eventually, though, the open source systems, particularly with their new safety tools, were winning the race.

To keep its systems open source and safe, Meta integrated several safety tools into its successive Llama versions to prevent misuse. For example, Llama Guard was a tool moderating both input and output to detect and prevent harmful content, including responses that could facilitate cyberattacks. Prompt Guard was an additional feature to protect against malicious prompts that could manipulate the model into producing harmful outputs. Code Shield was a tool to filter insecure code suggestions and ensure secure command execution, mitigating the risk of the model being used to write or execute malicious code.

From the USA to China, most new AIs were implemented with better and better safety and security considerations, as well as open source to democratize AI. This led to a global boom of AI research, and new startups appeared around the world, including many in Africa as well. In fact, it was a startup called AIfrica from Ethiopia (formerly iCog Labs in Addis Ababa) that developed the first human-level AGI in late 2030. Thus, this decentralization and democratization of open source AI systems was so successful that it generated the first AGI in Africa, which quickly spread throughout the world thanks to this positive mix of cooperation and competition.

Positive synergies between cooperation and competition allowed self-regulating systems to protect against bugs in systems such as Llama Guard, Prompt Guard, and Code Shield. This was similar to the way that measures were added to previous LLMs to prevent them from being jail-broken by hackers intent on accessing the raw power of the underlying LLMs.

Just like the “invisible hand” allowed the self-regulation of free markets, with overall governance supervision by governments, the spontaneous interactions of competing and collaborating AGIs also allowed self-regulation with safeguards designed by governments. Besides collaborations among the competing systems, general guidance also included supervision by international organizations like the UN and the OECD, for example.

With the proper supervision, spontaneous order evolved among AGIs for the benefit of all. Governments, corporations, wealthy philanthropists, and other stakeholders rose to this unique occasion, since the alternative to global success with ASI was mass destruction by ASI. The near-miss Nuclear War between the Koreas, with the possibility to expand into WWIII, was a final warning to humanity. If ASI went wrong, it could be the end of civilization, even worse than a nuclear war.

Fortunately, after the Korean reunification in April 2032, following the unsuccessful nuclear attack from North Korea to South Korea (which was quickly stopped by the human-AGI systems), AI models kept improving exponentially, with better and better AGI systems, with bits and bytes from different places, under open source contributions from many sources. The UN kept promoting safety guards and emphasizing human alignment, with the collaboration of all major stakeholders.

By late 2034, ASI was first achieved by the Japanese startup Singularity Tokyo. Previously, the Japanese government promoted the establishment of a Global ASI Partnership (GASIP), the consortium dedicated to the shared governance of ASI. The first application was the development of Robotto-san, which was immediately shared with anyone who was interested in ASI, including all its safety precautions. Thanks to this benevolent ASI, with proper safeguards, Robotto-san was elected Prime Minister of Japan in August 2035, and addressed the UN in September 2035.

The status of Robotto-san increased greatly following the UN speech in New York. After Robotto-san arrived back in Tokyo, people began using the new name Robotto-sama (ロボット-様), which implies a much higher honorary distinction. Just like Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was called Mahatma Gandhi by Hindus (meaning “Great Soul” Gandhi), or Siddhartha Gautama was called the “Buddha” by Buddhists (meaning the Awakened One” or “Enlightened One”), Robotto-san became Robotto-sama, which was well liked by Robotto itself.

However, Primer Minister Robotto-sama made it very clear that ASI was being created by humans, for humans, with humans, and even in humans (with brain computer implants), with the help of very powerful AI, for the advancement of the new “Human and Machine” civilization being born.

Maybe everything was indeed accelerating. Famous futurist and visionary Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, wrote his bestselling book The Singularity is Near in 2005, when he predicted that we would pass the Turing Test by 2029 and reach the technological singularity (implying a global ASI superior to all human intelligence combined) by 2045.

Kurzweil wrote his continuation book in 2024, The Singularity is Nearer, where he ratified both dates (Turing Test by 2029 and the Singularity by 2045). At that time, in 2024, two decades after his previous book, and two decades before his prediction about the Singularity, it still looked far away. During the 12th UN Summit of the Future in New York, Kurzweil participated and announced that he had already started writing the third and final book of this trilogy, The Singularity is Here. Maybe we reached the Singularity in 2035 and we did not realize it?

Scenario Footer Note

This Scenario called Robotto-san becomes Prime Minister: Democratized ASI is born in 2035 was written as part of five different 2035 AGI Scenarios developed by The Millennium Project to be presented at various international activities like the United Nations General Assembly, the Summit of the Future, the Dubai Future Forum, and other events, and to be included in the State of the Future by The Millennium Project. The other four scenarios were written by Jerome Glenn, Ben Goertzel, Mariana Todorova, and David Wood.