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
A defence of human uniqueness against AI encroachment, with Kenn Cukier
Despite the impressive recent progress in AI capabilities, there are reasons why AI may be incapable of possessing a full "general intelligence". And although AI will continue to transform the workplace, some important jobs will remain outside the reach of AI. In other words, the Economic Singularity may not happen, and AGI may be impossible.
These are views defended by our guest in this episode, Kenneth Cukier, the Deputy Executive Editor of The Economist newspaper.
For the past decade, Kenn was the host of its weekly tech podcast Babbage. He is co-author of the 2013 book “Big Data", a New York Times best-seller that has been translated into over 20 languages. He is a regular commentator in the media, and a popular keynote speaker, from TED to the World Economic Forum.
Kenn recently stepped down as a board director of Chatham House and a fellow at Oxford's Saïd Business School. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. His latest book is "Framers", on the power of mental models and the limits of AI.
Follow-up reading:
http://www.cukier.com/
https://mediadirectory.economist.com/people/kenneth-cukier/
https://www.metaculus.com/questions/3479/date-weakly-general-ai-is-publicly-known/
Kurzweil's version of the Turing Test: https://longbets.org/1/
Topics addressed in this episode include:
*) Changing attitudes at The Economist about how to report on the prospects for AI
*) The dual roles of scepticism regarding claims made for technology
*) 'Calum's rule' about technology forecasts that omit timing
*) Options for magazine coverage of possible developments more than 10 years into the future
*) Some leaders within AI research, including Sam Altman of OpenAI, think AGI could happen within a decade
*) Metaculus community aggregate forecasts for the arrival of different forms of AGI
*) A theme for 2023: the increased 'emergence' of unexpected new capabilities within AI large language models - especially when these models are combined with other AI functionality
*) Different views on the usefulness of the Turing Test - a test of human idiocy rather than machine intelligence?
*) The benchmark of "human-level general intelligence" may become as anachronistic as the benchmark of "horsepower" for rockets
*) The drawbacks of viewing the world through a left-brained hyper-rational "scientistic" perspective
*) Two ways the ancient Greeks said we could find truth: logos and mythos
*) People in 2023 finding "mythical, spiritual significance" in their ChatGPT conversations
*) Appropriate and inappropriate applause for what GPTs can do
*) Another horse analogy: could steam engines that lack horse-like legs really replace horses?
*) The Ship of Theseus argument that consciousness could be transferred from biology to silicon
*) The "life force" and its apparently magical, spiritual aspects
*) The human superpower to imaginatively reframe mental models
*) People previously thought humans had a unique superpower to create soul-moving music, but a musical version of the Turing Test changed minds
*) Different levels of creativity: not just playing games well but inventing new games
*) How many people will have paid jobs in the future?
*) Two final arguments why key human abilities will remain unique
*) The "pragmatic turn" in AI: duplicating without understanding
*) The special value, not of information, but of the absence of information (emptiness, kenosis, the "cloud of unknowing")
*) The temptations of mimicry and idolatry
Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
