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
GPT-4 and the EU’s AI Act, with John Higgins
The European Commission and Parliament were busily debating the Artificial Intelligence Act when GPT-4 launched on 14 March. As people realised that GPT technology was a game-changer, they called for the Act to be reconsidered.
Famously, the EU contains no tech giants, so cutting edge AI is mostly developed in the US and China. But the EU is more than happy to act as the world’s most pro-active regulator of digital technologies, including AI. The 2016 General Data Protection Regulation (or GDPR) seeks to regulate data protection and privacy, and its impacts remain controversial today.
The AI Act was proposed in 2021. It does not confer rights on individuals, but instead regulates the providers of artificial intelligence systems. It is a risk-based approach.
John Higgins joins us in this episode to discuss the AI Act. John is the Chair of the Global Digital Foundation, a think tank, and last year he was president of BCS (British Computer Society), the professional body for the IT industry. He has had a long and distinguished career helping to shape digital policy in the UK and the EU.
Follow-up reading:
https://www.globaldigitalfoundation.org/
https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/
Topics addressed in this episode include:
*) How different is generative AI from the productivity tools that have come before?
*) Two approaches to regulation compared: a "Franco-German" approach and an "Anglo-American" approach
*) The precautionary principle, for when a regulatory framework needs to be established in order to provide market confidence
*) The EU's preference for regulating applications rather than regulating technology
*) The types of application that matter most - when there is an impact on human rights and/or safety
*) Regulations in the Act compared to the principles that good developers will in any case be following
*) Problems with lack of information about the data sets used to train LLMs (Large Language Models)
*) Enabling the flow, between the different "providers" within the AI value chain, of information about compliance
*) Two potential alternatives to how the EU aims to regulate AI
*) How an Act passes through EU legislation
*) Conflicting assessments of the GDPR: a sledgehammer to crack a nut?
*) Is it conceivable that LLMs will be banned in Europe?
*) Why are there no tech giants in Europe? Does it matter?
*) Other metrics for measuring the success of AI within Europe
*) Strengths and weaknesses of the EU single market
*) Reasons why the BCS opposed the moratorium proposed by the FLI: impracticality, asymmetry, benefits held back
*) Some counterarguments in favour of the FLI position
*) Projects undertaken by the Global Digital Foundation
*) The role of AI in addressing (as well as exacerbating) hate speech
*) Growing concerns over populism, polarisation, and post-truth
*) The need for improved transparency and improved understanding
Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
