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
The key workforce skills for 2026, with Mike Howells
One of the questions audiences frequently used to ask futurists was, which careers are most likely to be future-proof? However, that question has changed in recent years. It's now more widely understood that every career is subject to disruption by technological and social trends. No occupation is immune to change. So the question has switched, away from possible future-proof careers, to the skills that are most likely to be useful in these fast-changing circumstances. For example, should everyone be learning to code, or deepen their knowledge of STEM - that is, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths? Or should there be more focus on so-called human skills or soft skills?
Who better to answer that question than our guest in this episode, Mike Howells? Mike is the President of the Workforce Skills Division at Pearson, the leading learning company.
The perennial debate about when and how advanced AI will cause widespread disruption in education has been given extra impetus by the launch of ChatGPT last November, and GPT-4 in March. Pearson, a venerable British company which has gone through various incarnations, is one of the companies at the sharp end of this debate about the changing role of technology in education. The share price of several of these companies suffered a temporary setback recently, due to a perception that GPT technology would replace many of their services. However, Pearson and its peers have rebutted these claims, and the stock has largely recovered.
Indeed, with what could be viewed as considerable prescience, Pearson carried out a major piece of research before ChatGPT was launched, to identify which skills employers are prioritising for their new hires - new employees who will be in their stride in 2026 - three years from now.
Follow-up reading:
https://www.pearson.com/
https://plc.pearson.com/en-GB/insights/pearson-skills-outlook-powerskills
Topics addressed in this episode include:
*) Some lessons from Mike's own career trajectory
*) How Pearson used AI in their survey of key workforce skills
*) The growing importance - and growing value - of human skills
*) The top 5 "power skills" that employers are seeking today
*) The top 5 "power skills" that are projected to be most in-demand by 2026 - and which are in need of greatest improvement and investment
*) Given that there are no university courses in these skill areas, how can people gain proficiency in them?
*) Three ways of inferring evidence of someone's proficiency in these skill areas
*) How the threat of automation has moved from blue collar jobs to white collar jobs
*) People are used to taking data-driven decisions in many areas of their lives - e.g. which restaurants to visit or which holidays to book - but the data about the effect of various educational courses is surprisingly thin
*) The increasing need for data-driven retraining
*) Ways in which the retraining experience can be improved by AI and VR/AR/XR
*) The attraction of digital assistants that can provide personalised tuition, especially as costs drop
*) School-age children often already use their skills with existing technology to augment and personalise their learning
*) Complications with privacy, security, consent, and measuring efficacy
*) "It's not about what you've done; it's about what you can do"
*) A closer look at "personal learning and mastery" and "cultural and social intelligence"
Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public
Agency in Amsterdam dives into topics like Tech, AI, digital marketing, and more drama...
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