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
Assessing the AI duopoly, with Jeff Ding
Advanced AI is currently pretty much a duopoly between the USA and China. The US is the clear leader, thanks largely to its tech giants – Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple. China also has a fistful of tech giants – Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent are the ones usually listed, but the Chinese government has also taken a strong interest in AI since Deep Mind’s Alpha Go system beat the world’s best Go player in 2016.
People in the West don’t know enough about China’s current and future role in AI. Some think its companies just copy their Western counterparts, while others think it is an implacable and increasingly dangerous enemy, run by a dictator who cares nothing for his people. Both those views are wrong.
One person who has been trying to provide a more accurate picture of China and AI in recent years is Jeff Ding, the author of the influential newsletter ChinAI.
Jeff grew up in Iowa City and is now an Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University. He earned a PhD at Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and wrote his thesis on how past technological revolutions influenced the rise and fall of great powers, with implications for U.S.-China competition. After gaining his doctorate he worked at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute and Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.
Selected follow-up reading:
https://jeffreyjding.github.io/
https://chinai.substack.com/
https://www.tortoisemedia.com/intelligence/global-ai/
Topics in this conversation include:
*) The Thucydides Trap: Is conflict inevitable as a rising geopolitical power approaches parity with an established power?
*) Different ways of trying to assess how China's AI industry compares with that of the U.S.
*) Measuring innovations in creating AI is different from measuring adoption of AI solutions across multiple industries
*) Comparisons of papers submitted to AI conferences such as NeurIPS, citations, patents granted, and the number of data scientists
*) The biggest misconceptions westerners have about China and AI
*) A way in which Europe could still be an important player alongside the duopoly
*) Attitudes in China toward data privacy and facial recognition
*) Government focus on AI can be counterproductive
*) Varieties of government industrial policy: the merits of encouraging decentralised innovation
*) The Titanic and the origin of Silicon Valley
*) Mariana Mazzucato's question: "Who created the iPhone?"
*) Learning from the failure of Japan's 5th Generation Computers initiative
*) The evolution of China's Social Credit systems
*) Research by Shazeda Ahmed and Jeremy Daum
*) Factors encouraging and discouraging the "splinternet" separation of US and Chinese tech ecosystems
*) Connections that typically happen outside of the public eye
*) Financial interdependencies
*) Changing Chinese government attitudes toward Chinese Internet giants
*) A broader tension faced by the Chinese government
*) Future scenarios: potential good and bad developments
*) Transnational projects to prevent accidents or unauthorised use of powerful AI systems
Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
