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.
London Futurists
AI overview: 3. Recent developments
In this episode, co-hosts Calum Chace and David Wood explore a number of recent developments in AI - developments that are rapidly changing what counts as "state of the art" in AI.
00.05: Short recap of previous episodes
00.20: A couple of Geoff Hinton stories
02.27: Today's subject: the state of AI today
02.53: Search
03.35: Games
03.58: Translation
04.33: Maps
05.33: Making the world understandable. Increasingly
07.00: Transformers. Attention is all you need
08.00: Masked language models
08.18: GPT-2 and GPT-3
08.54: Parameters and synapses
10.15: Foundation models produce much of the content on the internet
10.40: Data is even more important than size
11.45: Brittleness and transfer learning
13.15: Do machines understand?
14.05: Human understanding and stochastic parrots
15.27: Chatbots
16.22: Tay embarrasses Microsoft
16.53: Blenderbot
17.19: Far from AGI. LaMDA and Blaise Lemoine
18.26: The value of anthropomorphising
19.53: Automation
20.25: Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
20.55: Drug discovery
21.45: New antibiotics. Discovering Halicin
23.50: AI drug discovery as practiced by Insilico, Exscientia and others
25.33: Eroom's Law
26.34: AlphaFold. How 200m proteins fold
28.30: Towards a complete model of the cell
29.19: Analysis
30.04: Air traffic controllers use only 10% of the data available to them
30.36: Transfer learning can mitigate the escalating demand for compute power
31.18: Next up: the short-term future of AI
Audio engineering by Alexander Chace.
Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
For more about the podcast hosts, see https://calumchace.com/ and https://dw2blog.com/
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