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
AI transforming professional services, with Shamus Rae
Our guest in this episode is Shamus Rae. Shamus is the co-founder of Engine B, a startup which aims to expedite the digitisation of the professional services industry (in particular the accounting and legal professions) and level the playing field, so that small companies can compete with larger ones. It is supported by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (the ICAEW) and the main audit firms.
Shamus was ideally placed to launch Engine B, having spent 13 years as a partner at the audit firm KPMG, where he was Head of Innovation and Digital Disruption. But his background is in technology, not accounting, which will become clear as we talk: he is commendably sleeves-rolled-up and hands-on with AI models. Back in the 1990s he founded and sold a technology-oriented outsourcing business, and then built a 17,000-strong outsourcing business for IBM in India from scratch.
Selected follow-ups:
https://engineb.com/
https://www.icaew.com/
Topics addressed in this episode include:
*) AI in many professional services contexts depends on the quality of the formats used for the data they orchestrate (e.g. financial records and legal contracts)
*) "Plumbing for accountants and lawyers"
*) Why companies within an industry generally shouldn't seek competitive advantage on the basis of the data formats they are using
*) Data lakes contrasted with data swamps
*) Automated data extraction can coexist with data security and data privacy
*) The significance of knowledge graphs
*) Will advanced AI make it harder for tomorrow’s partners to acquire the skills they need?
*) Examples of how AI-powered "co-pilots" augment the skills of junior members of a company
*) Should junior staff still be expected to work up to 18 hours a day, "ticking and bashing" or similar, if AI allows them to tackle tedious work much more quickly than before?
*) Will advanced AI will destroy the billable hours business model used by many professional services companies?
*) Alternative business models that can be adopted
*) Anticipating an economy of abundance, but with an unclear transitional path from today's economy
*) Reasons why consulting reports often downplay the likely impact of AI on jobs
*) Some ways in which Google might compete against the GPT models of OpenAI
*) Prospects for improved training of AI models using videos, using new forms of reinforcement learning from human feedback, and fuller use of knowledge graphs
*) Geoff Hinton's "Forward-Forward" algorithm as a potential replacement for back propagation
*) Might a "third AI big bang" already have started, without most observers being aware of it?
*) The book by Mark Humphries, "The Spike: An Epic Journey Through the Brain in 2.1 Seconds"
*) Comparisons between the internal models used by GPT 3.5 and GPT 4
*) A comparison with the globalisation of the 1990s, with people denying that their own jobs will be part of the change they foresee
Audio engineering assisted by Alexander Chace.
Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
