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
Investing in AI, with John Cassidy
Our topic in this episode is investing in AI, so we're delighted to have as our guest John Cassidy, a Partner at Kindred Capital, a UK-based venture capital firm. Before he became an investment professional, John co-founded CCG.ai, a precision oncology company which exited to Dante Labs in 2019.
We discuss how the investment landscape is being transformed by the possibilities enabled by generative AI .
Selected follow-ups:
https://kindredcapital.vc/
https://cradle.bio/
https://scarletcomply.com/
https://www.five.ai/
Topics addressed in this episode include:
*) The argument for investing not just in "platforms" but also in "picks and shovels" - items within the orchestration or infrastructure layers of new solutions
*) Examples of recent investments by Kindred Capital
*) Comparisons between the surge of excitement around generative AI and previous surges of excitement around crypto and dot-com
*) Companies such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft kept delivering value despite the crash of the dot-com bubble; will something similar apply with generative AI?
*) The example of how Nvidia captures significant value in the chip manufacturing industry
*) However, looking further back in history, many people who invested in the infrastructure of railways and canals lost lots of money
*) Reasons why generative AI might produce large amounts of real value more quickly than previous technologies
*) The example of Cradle Bio as enablers of protein engineering - and what might happen if Google upgrade their protein folding prediction software from AlphaFold 2 to AlphaFold 3
*) Despite the changes in technological possibilities, what most interests VCs is the calibre of a company's founding team
*) The search for individuals who have "creative destruction in their being" - people with a particular kind of irrational self-belief
*) The contrast between crystallized intelligence and fluid intelligence - and why both are needed
*) Advantages and disadvantages for investors being located in the UK vs. being located in the US
*) Why doesn't Europe have tech giants?
*) Complications with government regulation of tech industries
*) The example of Scarlet as a company helping to streamline the regulation of medical software that is frequently updated
*) Why government regulators need to engage with people in industry who are already immersed in considering safety and efficacy of products
*) Wherever they are located, companies need to plan ahead for their products reaching new jurisdictions
*) Ways in which AI is likely to impact industries in new ways in the near future
*) The particular need to improve the efficiency of the later stages of clinical trials of new medical treatments
Audio engineering by Alexander Chace.
Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
