London Futurists
Anticipating and managing exponential impact - hosts David Wood and Calum Chace Calum Chace is a sought-after keynote speaker and best-selling writer on artificial intelligence. He focuses on the medium- and long-term impact of AI on all of us, our societies and our economies. He advises companies and governments on AI policy. His non-fiction books on AI are Surviving AI, about superintelligence, and The Economic Singularity, about the future of jobs. Both are now in their third editions. He also wrote Pandora's Brain and Pandora’s Oracle, a pair of techno-thrillers about the first superintelligence. He is a regular contributor to magazines, newspapers, and radio. In the last decade, Calum has given over 150 talks in 20 countries on six continents. Videos of his talks, and lots of other materials are available at https://calumchace.com/. He is co-founder of a think tank focused on the future of jobs, called the Economic Singularity Foundation. The Foundation has published Stories from 2045, a collection of short stories written by its members. Before becoming a full-time writer and speaker, Calum had a 30-year career in journalism and in business, as a marketer, a strategy consultant and a CEO. He studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford University, which confirmed his suspicion that science fiction is actually philosophy in fancy dress. David Wood is Chair of London Futurists, and is the author or lead editor of twelve books about the future, including The Singularity Principles, Vital Foresight, The Abolition of Aging, Smartphones and Beyond, and Sustainable Superabundance. He is also principal of the independent futurist consultancy and publisher Delta Wisdom, executive director of the Longevity Escape Velocity (LEV) Foundation, Foresight Advisor at SingularityNET, and a board director at the IEET (Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies). He regularly gives keynote talks around the world on how to prepare for radical disruption. See https://deltawisdom.com/. As a pioneer of the mobile computing and smartphone industry, he co-founded Symbian in 1998. By 2012, software written by his teams had been included as the operating system on 500 million smartphones. From 2010 to 2013, he was Technology Planning Lead (CTO) of Accenture Mobility, where he also co-led Accenture’s Mobility Health business initiative. Has an MA in Mathematics from Cambridge, where he also undertook doctoral research in the Philosophy of Science, and a DSc from the University of Westminster.
Episodes
Our subject in this episode may seem grim – it’s the potential extinction of the human species, either from a natural disaster, like a supervolcano or an asteroid, or from our own human activities, such as nuclear weapons, greenhouse gas emissions, engineered biopathogens, misaligned artificial intelligence, or high energy physics experiments causing a cataclysmic rupture in space and time.
These scenarios aren’t pleasant to contemp...
Our guest in this episode, Ramez Naam, is described on his website as “climate tech investor, clean energy advocate, and award-winning author”. But that hardly starts to convey the range of deep knowledge that Ramez brings to a wide variety of fields. It was his 2013 book, “The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet”, that first alerted David to the breadth of scope of his insight about future possibilities – both...
In this episode, our guest is Rebecca Finlay, the CEO at Partnership on AI (PAI). Rebecca previously joined us in Episode 62, back in October 2023, in what was the run-up to the Global AI Safety Summit in Bletchley Park in the UK. Times have moved on, and earlier this month, Rebecca and the Partnership on AI participated in the latest global summit in that same series, held this time in Paris. This summit, breaking with the previou...
The most highly anticipated development in AI this year is probably the expected arrival of AI agents, also referred to as “agentic AI”. We are told that AI agents have the potential to reshape how individuals and organizations interact with technology.
Our guest to help us explore this is Tom Davenport, Distinguished Professor in Information Technology and Management at Babson College, and a globally recognized thought leader in th...
In this episode, we return to a theme which is likely to become increasingly central to public discussion in the months and years ahead. To use a term coined by this podcast’s cohost Calum Chace, this theme is the Economic Singularity, namely the potential all-round displacement of humans from the workforce by ever more capable automation. That leads to the question: what are our options for managing the transition of society to in...
Our guests in this episode have been described as the world’s two oldest scientifically astute longevity activists. They are Kenneth Scott, aged 82, who is based in Florida, and Helga Sands, aged 86, who lives in London.
David has met both of them several times at a number of longevity events, and they always impress him, not only with their vitality and good health, but also with the level of knowledge and intelligence th...
Our guest in this episode is Jeff LaPorte, a software engineer, entrepreneur and investor based in Vancouver, who writes Road to Artificia, a newsletter about discovering the principles of post‑AI societies.
Calum recently came across Jeff's article “Valuing Humans in the Age of Superintelligence: HumaneRank” and thought it had some good, original ideas, so we wanted to invite Jeff onto the podcast and explore them.
Our subject in this episode is altruism – our human desire and instinct to assist each other, making some personal sacrifices along the way. More precisely, our subject is the possible future of altruism – a future in which our philanthropic activities – our charitable donations, and how we spend our discretionary time – could have a considerably greater impact than at present. The issue is that many of our present activities, whic...
Our guest in this episode is Amory Lovins, a distinguished environmental scientist, and co-founder of RMI, which he co-founded in 1982 as Rocky Mountain Institute. It’s what he calls a think do and scale tank, with 700 people in 62 countries, and a budget of well over $100m a year.
For over five decades, Amory has championed innovative approaches to energy systems, advocating for a world where energy services are delivered...
Some people say that all that’s necessary to improve the capabilities of AI is to scale up existing systems. That is, to use more training data, to have larger models with more parameters in them, and more computer chips to crunch through the training data. However, in this episode, we’ll be hearing from a computer scientist who thinks there are many other options for improving AI. He is Alexander Ororbia, a professor at the Roches...
In David's life so far, he has read literally hundreds of books about the future. Yet none has had such a provocative title as this: “The future loves you: How and why we should abolish death”. That’s the title of the book written by the guest in this episode, Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston. Ariel is a neuroscientist, and a Research Fellow at Monash University, in Melbourne, Australia.
One of the key ideas in Ariel’s book ...
Our guest in this episode is Sterling Anderson, a pioneer of self-driving vehicles. With a masters degree and a PhD from MIT, Sterling led the development and launch of the Tesla Model X, and then led the team that delivered Tesla Autopilot. In 2017 he co-founded Aurora, along with Chris Urmson, who was a founder and CTO of Google’s self-driving car project, which is now Waymo, and also Drew Bagnell, who co-founded and led Uber’s s...
Our guest in this episode is Parmy Olson, a columnist for Bloomberg covering technology. Parmy has previously been a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and for Forbes. Her first book, “We Are Anonymous”, shed fascinating light on what the subtitle calls “the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency”.
But her most recent book illuminates a set of high-stakes relations with potentially even bigge...
Our guest in this episode is Andrea Miotti, the founder and executive director of ControlAI. On their website, ControlAI have the tagline, “Fighting to keep humanity in control”. Control over what, you might ask. The website answers: control deepfakes, control scaling, control foundation models, and, yes, control AI.
The latest project from ControlAI is called “A Narrow Path”, which is a comprehensive policy plan split int...
Our guest in this episode is David Wakeling, a partner at A&O Shearman, which became the world’s third largest law firm in May, thanks to the merger of Allen and Overy, a UK “magic circle” firm, with Shearman & Sterling of New York.
David heads up a team within the firm called the Markets Innovation Group (MIG), which consists of lawyers, developers and technologists, and is seeking to disrupt the legal industry. H...
Our guest in this episode is Matt Burgess. Matt is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wyoming, where he moved this year after six years at the University of Boulder, Colorado. He has specialised in the economics of climate change.
Calum met Matt at a recent event in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and knows from their conversations then that Matt has also thought deeply about the impact of social media, the causes of popul...
Our guest in this episode is Karl Pfleger. Karl is an angel investor in rejuvenation biotech startups, and is also known for creating and maintaining the website Aging Biotech Info. That website describes itself as “Structured info about aging and longevity”, and has the declared mission statement, “Everything important in the field (outside of academia), organized.”
Previously, Karl worked at Google from 2002 to 2013, as ...
Our guest today is Pedro Domingos, who is joining an elite group of repeat guests – he joined us before in episode 34 in April 2023.
Pedro is Professor Emeritus Of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. He has done pioneering work in machine learning, like the development of Markov logic networks, which combine probabilistic reasoning with first-order logic. He is probably best known for his book...
Our guest in this episode is the journalist and author James Ball. James has worked for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, The Guardian, WikiLeaks, BuzzFeed, The New European, and The Washington Post, among other organisations. As special projects editor at The Guardian, James played a key role in the Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the NSA leaks by Edward Snowden.
Books that James has written include “Post-Truth: ...
In this episode, we have not one guest but two – Brett King and Robert Tercek, the hosts of the Futurists Podcast.
Brett King is originally from Australia, and is now based in Thailand. He is a renowned author, and the founder of a breakthrough digital bank. He consults extensively with clients in the financial services industry.
Robert Tercek, based in the United States, is an expert in digital media with a succe...
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