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
Generative AI drug discovery breakthrough, with Alex Zhavoronkov
Alex Zhavoronkov is our first guest to make a repeat appearance, having first joined us in episode 12, last November. We are delighted to welcome him back, because he is doing some of the most important work on the planet, and he has some important news.
In 2014, Alex founded Insilico Medicine, a drug discovery company which uses artificial intelligence to identify novel targets and novel molecules for pharmaceutical companies. Insilico now has drugs designed with AI in human clinical trials, and it is one of a number of companies that are demonstrating that developing drugs with AI can cut the time and money involved in the process by as much as 90%.
Selected follow-ups:
https://insilico.com/
ARDD 2023: https://agingpharma.org/
Topics addressed in this episode include:
*) For the first time, an AI-generated molecule has entered phase 2 human clinical trials; it's a candidate treatment for IPF (idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis)
*) The sequence of investigation: first biology (target identification), then chemistry (molecule selection), then medical trials; all three steps can be addressed via AI
*) Pros and cons of going after existing well-known targets (proteins) for clinical intervention, versus novel targets
*) Pros and cons of checking existing molecules for desired properties, versus imagining (generating) novel molecules with these properties
*) Alex's experience with generative AI dates back to 2015 (initially with GANs - "generative adversarial networks")
*) The use of interacting ensembles of different AI systems - different generators, and different predictors, allocating rewards
*) The importance of "diversity" within biochemistry
*) A way in which Insilico follows "the Apple model"
*) What happens in Phase 2 human trials - and what Insilico did before reaching Phase 2
*) IPF compared with fibrosis in other parts of the body, and a connection with aging
*) Why probability of drug success is more important than raw computational speed or the cost of individual drug investigations
*) Recent changes in the AI-assisted drug development industry: an investment boom in the wake of Covid, spiced-up narratives devoid of underlying substance, failures, downsizing, consolidation, and improved understanding by investors and by big pharma
*) The AI apps created by Insilico can be accessed by companies or educational institutes
*) Insilico research into quantum computing: this might transform drug discovery in as little as two years
*) Real-world usage of quantum computers from IBM, Microsoft, and Google
*) Success at Insilico depended on executive management task reallocation
*) Can Longevity Escape Velocity be achieved purely by pharmacological interventions?
*) Insilico's Precious1GPT approach to multimodal measurements of biological aging, and its ability to suggest new candidate targets for age-associated diseases: "one clock to rule them all"
*) Reasons to mentally prepare to live to 120 or 150
*) Hazards posed to longevity research by geopolitical tensions
*) Reasons to attend ARDD in Copenhagen, 28 Aug to 1 Sept
*) From longevity bunkers to the longevity dividend
Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
