Peter Small — Biography

Early Education and Technical Formation (from 1947)

Peter Small’s formal education began in 1947 when he won a scholarship to Emanuel School, Battersea, London. Excelling in the sciences, he was later selected from hundreds of applicants to join a newly established experimental college within the Government’s top-secret Radar Research Establishment at Great Malvern, Worcestershire.^*1 The college offered a five-year programme designed to produce specialists who could bridge the gap between scientists and engineers in the fast-developing fields of guided weaponry and electronics—at a time when computers still relied on thermionic valves and stored each bit of memory on a ferrite ring. His studies covered mechanical, electrical, and electronic engineering, as well as computer design technology and automatic control systems.

Finance, Entrepreneurship, and Fashion (1969–early 1980s)

In 1969, Small’s career took an unexpected turn when he was commissioned to write a correspondence course on finance and investment for a City of London firm. The course, titled The Art of Investment^*2, introduced the fundamental theories underpinning finance, banking, and investment—knowledge that would prove invaluable to an aspiring entrepreneur. The programme was a notable success, receiving endorsement as recommended reading by the Stock Exchange Council. This experience ignited Small’s interest in entrepreneurship and in applying game theory to business strategy.

His early ventures centred on leisure enterprises, including holiday companies, a gaming club, and a discotheque. After experimenting with a retail unit in Kensington Market selling antique clothing, he launched The Flea Market on London’s Carnaby Street. From there, he expanded into a variety of central London shops before turning his attention to fashion. In the early 1980s, he established a design studio and retail outlet, Street Theatre, on Newbury Street—where Boy George once worked before forming Culture Club.^*3 The studio’s success, with regular features in major fashion magazines, eventually attracted Topshop, which invited him to open concessions within their stores.

Theory-Driven Ventures and Early Digital Work (1980s–2001)

The most striking feature of Small’s ventures—diverse as they were—was that each was launched without prior experience in the respective industries. Instead, they were conceived and executed spontaneously, guided by theoretical principles drawn from finance, game theory, systems thinking, and strategies inspired by biological processes. A number of these biologically inspired strategies are outlined in Using Biological Strategies^*4.

By the 1980s, during the planning of these enterprises, Small had also become an early adopter of personal computing, working with an Apple II. Following his relocation to Maidenhead in 1988, he began to explore the emerging possibilities of digital technology. At that time, the CD-ROM was a new invention, and he devoted four years to developing the UK’s first interactive CD-ROM book: the award-winning How God Makes God, a treatise on game theory and its application to business and evolutionary biology.^*5

Teaching himself programming for this project, Small went on to author two technical books: Lingo Sorcery: The Magic of Lists, Objects, and Intelligent Agents (Wiley, 1996) and Magical A-Life Avatars: A New Paradigm for the Internet (Manning, 1998). Both works were distinctive for applying object-oriented programming techniques to concepts inspired by biological systems. As the internet began to draw wide business attention in the 1990s, he was commissioned by The Financial Times to write three books on internet commerce: The Entrepreneurial Web: First, Think Like an E-Business (FT.com, 2000); The Ultimate Game of Strategy: Establishing a Niche in the World of E-Commerce (FT.com, 2001); and Web Presence: Creating a Business out of Chaos (FT.com, 2001).^*6

Bot Seminars and Consultancy Work (2000-2005)

In 2000 and 2001, Peter Small was invited to deliver papers at three Bot seminars in the United States: New York (2000), San Francisco (2001) and Boston (2001).^*7

Writing the books also led to Peter Small working on an experimental project - concerned with group information sharing - for the Swedish telecommunications company, Ericsson. Followed by consultancy work for Sanofi, a French, multi-national pharmaceutical company, on an information system for research teams working on cancer treatment trials.

Virtual Worlds and Stigmergic Web Architecture (circa 2007)

Continuing his exploration of new communication strategies, Small turned his attention to virtual reality environments, most notably Second Life^*8. He recognised in such platforms a parallel with the biological principle of stigmergy—the self-organising system observed in ant colonies. ^*9

While assisting his son Elliot in establishing The Furniture Recycling Shop in Bourne End, Buckinghamshire^*10, Small became closely acquainted with the world of auctions and the diverse individuals engaged in selling items online. His observations of e-commerce revealed a common challenge: the difficulty of achieving visibility in a crowded marketplace. From this insight emerged the idea of creating a stigmergic system of specialised online resource centres—self-organising hubs designed to evolve into focal points for specific niche communities^*11.

Technical note (visual analogy)

Small refined the concept by treating the internet as a multi-dimensional Hilbert space^*12. Visually, imagine a vast gallery where every new direction reveals another dimension—each one representing a distinct characteristic of information. Websites appear as points of light suspended in this boundless space. Crowd-sourced curators act like astronomers, drawing “constellations” that group exceptional sites into meaningful clusters. To make this navigable, Small translated the abstraction into a geographic model—organising sites as islands, towns, streets, and buildings—so that users could explore coherent subject areas as if walking through a well-mapped city.

Crowd-sourced Info Towns and 3D Printing (2018–2020)

The model was demonstrated using 3D printing as a practical example. Entitled Crowd-sourced Info Towns^*13, it was accompanied by a technical explanation on Small’s website. To provide a proof of concept—showing how a crowd-sourced info town could inspire individuals to take entirely new directions—Small purchased a 3D printer and taught himself to design models using Blender. Full details of this experiment are recorded in The 3D Arts Studio (2020)reference.^*14

Seeking an application for this new skill, he turned to cake decoration and pâtisserie art: designs would be created in Blender, 3D-printed as prototypes, and used to produce silicone rubber moulds from which intricate pieces could be cast in sugar paste, chocolate, and marzipan^*15.

The project came to an abrupt halt just before its planned launch in March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a nationwide UK lockdown. This interruption and the imposed restrictions on activity outside of the home provided an opportunity for Peter Small to work on another book, fortuitously just at the time Generative AI models were being introduced to the public.

AI Assisted Books, Publishing and project (2021–present day)

Visiting the 2023 London Book Fair, Peter Small observed that publishers were mostly dismissive of generative AI, failing to recognise its potential impact on literature. While they acknowledged its influence in business and marketing, most rejected the idea that AI could play a meaningful role in creative writing. Drawing on his extensive background in artificial intelligence, Small recognised the flaw in this reasoning: AI is not inherently creatively intelligent, but rather acts as an extension of an author’s mind, providing simulated experiences, knowledge, and memory on an unprecedented scale. To challenge these misconceptions, he founded Super Talented Authors and returned to the Fair the following year as an exhibitor^*16, to promote the intelligent use of AI in writing.

The indifference he encountered at that event uncovered a deeper challenge. It was not only authors who misunderstood AI—the entire publishing industry needed convincing. What was needed was not just explanation but demonstration: a proof of concept showing that AI-assisted novels could compete effectively and fairly with traditionally written works. From this realisation, Small founded the Synthesque Literature Project: a combined initiative including a tutorial book for teachers and authors, alongside a privately funded programme aimed at establishing proof of concept through the use of competitive collectives.