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
Facing our Futures, with Nikolas Badminton
2023 is still young, but there's already a change in the attitudes of many business people regarding the future. Previously, businesses expressed occasional interest in possible disruptive scenarios, but their attention often quickly turned back to the apparently more pressing tasks of business-as-usual. But recent news of changes in AI capabilities, along with possible social transformations due to pandemics, geopolitics, and industrial unrest, is leading more and more business people to wonder: How can they become more effective in anticipating and managing potential significant changes in their business landscape?
In this context, the new book by our guest in this episode, Nikolas Badminton, is particularly timely. It's called "Facing our Futures: How foresight, futures design and strategy creates prosperity and growth".
Over the last few years, Nikolas has worked with over 300 organizations including Google, Microsoft, NASA, the United Nations, American Express, and Rolls Royce, and he advised Robert Downey Jr.’s team for the ‘Age of A.I.’ documentary series.
Selected follow-up reading:
https://nikolasbadminton.com/
https://futurist.com/
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/facing-our-futures-9781399400237/
Topics in this conversation include:
*) A personal journey to becoming a futurist - with some "hot water" along the way
*) The "Dark Futures" project: "what might happen if we take the wrong path forward"
*) The dangers of ignoring how bad things might become
*) Are we heading toward "the end times"?
*) Being in a constant state of collapse
*) Human resilience, and how to strengthen it
*) Futurists as "hope engineers"
*) Pros and cons of the "anti-growth" or "de-growth" initiative
*) The useful positive influence of "design fiction" (including futures that are "entirely imaginary")
*) The risks of a "pay to play" abundance future
*) The benefits of open medicine and open science
*) Examples of decisions taken by corporations after futures exercises
*) Tips for people interested in a career as a futurist
*) Pros and cons of "pop futurists"
*) The single biggest danger in our future?
*) Evidence from Rene Rohrbeck and Menes Etingue Kum that companies who apply futures thinking significantly out-perform their competitors in profitability and growth
*) The idea of an "apocalypse windfall" from climate change
*) Some key messages from the book "Facing our Futures": recommended mindset changes
*) Having the honesty and courage to face up to our mistakes
*) What if... former UK Prime Minister David Cameron had conducted a futures study before embarking on the Brexit project?
*) A multi-generational outlook on the future - learning from the Iroquois
Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
Agency in Amsterdam dives into topics like Tech, AI, digital marketing, and more drama...
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