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
Climate Change: There’s good news and bad news, with Nick Mabey
Our guest in this episode is Nick Mabey, the co-founder and co-CEO of one of the world’s most influential climate change think tanks, E3G, where the name stands for Third Generation Environmentalism.
As well as his roles with E3G, Nick is founder and chair of London Climate Action Week, and he has several independent appointments including as a London Sustainable Development Commissioner.
Nick has previously worked in the UK Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, the UK Foreign Office, WWF-UK, London Business School, and the UK electricity industry. As an academic he was lead author of “Argument in the Greenhouse”; one of the first books examining the economics of climate change.
He was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Jubilee honours list in 2022 for services to climate change and support to the UK COP 26 Presidency.
As the conversation makes clear, there is both good news and bad news regarding responses to climate change.
Selected follow-ups:
Nick Mabey's website
E3G
"Call for UK Government to 'get a grip' on climate change impacts"
The IPCC's 2023 synthesis report
Chatham House commentary on IPCC report
"Why Climate Change Is a National Security Risk"
The UK's Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC)
Bjørn Lomborg
Matt Ridley
Tim Lenton
Jason Hickel
Mark Carney
Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
