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
128 episodes
Windfall Trust and the Economic Singularity, with Adrian Brown
What happens if AI delivers major advances in capability and productivity, but also creates significant disruption to jobs, incomes, and public finances? That question sits at the heart of today’s episode.Our guest is Adrian Brown, the F...
Anticipating 2026
When we started this Podcast back in August 2022, we, Calum and David, announced the theme to be “Anticipating and managing exponential impact”. We talked about three sub-themes: Developing the skills of exponential foresight; Distinguishing be...
The puzzle pieces that can defuse the US-China AI race dynamic, with Kayla Blomquist
Almost every serious discussion about options to constrain the development of advanced AI results in someone raising the question: “But what about China?” The worry behind this question is that slowing down AI research and development in the US...
Jensen Huang and the zero billion dollar market, with Stephen Witt
Our guest in this episode is Stephen Witt, an American journalist and author who writes about the people driving the technological revolutions. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, and is famous for deep-dive investigations.<...
What's your p(Pause)? with Holly Elmore
Our guest in this episode is Holly Elmore, who is the Founder and Executive Director of PauseAI US. The website pauseai-us.org starts with this headline: “Our proposal is simple: Don’t build powerful AI systems until we know how to keep them sa...
Real-life superheroes and troubled institutions, with Tom Ough
Popular movies sometimes feature leagues of superheroes who are ready to defend the Earth against catastrophe. In this episode, we’re going to be discussing some real-life superheroes, as chronicled in the new book by our guest, Tom Ough. The b...
Safe superintelligence via a community of AIs and humans, with Craig Kaplan
Craig Kaplan has been thinking about superintelligence longer than most. He bought the URL superintelligence.com back in 2006, and many years before that, in the late 1980s, he co-authored a series of papers with one of the founding fathers of ...
How progress ends: the fate of nations, with Carl Benedikt Frey
Many people expect improvements in technology over the next few years, but fewer people are optimistic about improvements in the economy. Especially in Europe, there’s a narrative that productivity has stalled, that the welfare state is over-st...
Tsetlin Machines, Literal Labs, and the future of AI, with Noel Hurley
Our guest in this episode is Noel Hurley. Noel is a highly experienced technology strategist with a long career at the cutting edge of computing. He spent two decade-long stints at Arm, the semiconductor company whose processor designs power hu...
Intellectual dark matter? A reputation trap? The case of cold fusion, with Jonah Messinger
Could the future see the emergence and adoption of a new field of engineering called nucleonics, in which the energy of nuclear fusion is accessed at relatively low temperatures, producing abundant clean safe energy? This kind of idea has been ...
AI agents, AI safety, and AI boycotts, with Peter Scott
This episode of London Futurists Podcast is a special joint production with the AI and You podcast which is hosted by Peter Scott. It features a three-way discussion, between Peter, Calum, and David, on the future of AI, with particular focus o...
The remarkable potential of hydrogen cars, with Hugo Spowers
The guest in this episode is Hugo Spowers. Hugo has led an adventurous life. In the 1970s and 80s he was an active member of the Dangerous Sports Club, which invented bungee jumping, inspired by an initiation ceremony in Vanuatu. Hugo skied dow...
AI and the end of conflict, with Simon Horton
Can we use AI to improve how we handle conflict? Or even to end the worst conflicts that are happening all around us? That’s the subject of the new book of our guest in this episode, Simon Horton. The book has the bold title “The End of Conflic...
The AI disconnect: understanding vs motivation, with Nate Soares
Our guest in this episode is Nate Soares, President of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, or MIRI.MIRI was founded in 2000 as the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence by Eliezer Yudkowsky, with support from a coup...
Anticipating an Einstein moment in the understanding of consciousness, with Henry Shevlin
Our guest in this episode is Henry Shevlin. Henry is the Associate Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, where he also co-directs the Kinds of Intelligence program and oversees educatio...
The case for a conditional AI safety treaty, with Otto Barten
How can a binding international treaty be agreed and put into practice, when many parties are strongly tempted to break the rules of the agreement, for commercial or military advantage, and when cheating may be hard to detect? That’s the dilemm...
Humanity's final four years? with James Norris
In this episode, we return to the subject of existential risks, but with a focus on what actions can be taken to eliminate or reduce these risks.Our guest is James Norris, who describes himself on his website as an existential safety adv...
Human extinction: thinking the unthinkable, with Sean ÓhÉigeartaigh
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 emissi...
The best of times and the worst of times, updated, with Ramez Naam
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 ...
PAI at Paris: the global AI ecosystem evolves, with Rebecca Finlay
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 mo...
AI agents: challenges ahead of mainstream adoption, with Tom Davenport
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 te...
Post-labour economics, with David Shapiro
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 t...
Longevity activism at 82, 86, and beyond, with Kenneth Scott and Helga Sands
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 bo...
Models for society when humans have zero economic value, with Jeff LaPorte
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 Je...
From ineffective altruism to effective altruism? with Stefan Schubert
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 ac...
