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
Innovation as a mindset, with Aidan McCullen
Our guest in this episode is Aidan McCullen. For ten years from 1998 to 2008, Aidan was a professional rugby player, delighting crowds in Ireland, England, and France. He made the very natural transition from that into sports commentating, but he also moved into digital media.
He started as an intern at Communicorp to learn digital media and marketing, and he learned about digital by doing it, living it and building it – as he puts it, by jumping off a cliff and building a plane on the way down. With typical humility, he says he was just a few Google searches ahead of everyone else.
With this grounding, Aidan has made himself a genuine expert on innovation. He is a keynote speaker, an executive coach, a board director, a lecturer, and the author of “Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention for Individuals, Organisations and Life”.
Aidan may be known best as the enthusiastic and generous host of a podcast called the Innovation Show, which offers weekly interviews with leaders in their fields, including writers, academics, inventors, executives and mavericks. The central message of that podcast is that we all need to stay open to new ideas, and always keep learning.
Selected follow-ups:
https://theinnovationshow.io/about/
Topics addressed in this episode include:
*) Lessons from Aidan's time as a rugby player
*) The gift of discipline
*) Being ready to take advantage of unexpected good luck
*) Avoiding the "WASP" trap - wandering aimlessly without purpose
*) The "centaur" model - half human and half machine
*) Aidan's own use of generative AI - embellishing graphics, developing metaphors, suggesting questions for interviews
*) An alternative to a lemonade stand: creating an entire cartoon book using generative AI
*) Why audiences are leaning in, more than before
*) Various ways in which automation will impact the jobs market and the cost of services
*) Career advice for a nine year old
*) Encouraging students to use and understand generative AI tools
*) Tangible examples of Amara's Law
*) The special value of skills in communication, collaboration, 'cobot'ing, coordination, and looking after your health
*) Actions today in anticipation of being healthy at the age of 100
*) Deciding who to collaborate with
*) Developing a "stem cell" mindset - knowing our purpose, but keeping our options open
*) Bruce Lipton's research on epigenetics
*) What drives Aidan: helping people make better decisions and lead better lives
*) Building a community of people who are prepared to think differently
Audio engineering by Alexander Chace.
Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
