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
The Political Singularity and a Worthy Successor, with Daniel Faggella
Calum and David recently attended the BGI24 event in Panama City, that is, the Beneficial General Intelligence summit and unconference. One of the speakers we particularly enjoyed listening to was Daniel Faggella, the Founder and Head of Research of Emerj.
Something that featured in his talk was a 3 by 3 matrix, which he calls the Intelligence Trajectory Political Matrix, or ITPM for short. As we’ll be discussing in this episode, one of the dimensions of this matrix is the kind of end goal future that people desire, as intelligent systems become ever more powerful. And the other dimension is the kind of methods people want to use to bring about that desired future.
So, if anyone thinks there are only two options in play regarding the future of AI, for example “accelerationists” versus “doomers”, to use two names that are often thrown around these days, they’re actually missing a much wider set of options. And frankly, given the challenges posed by the fast development of AI systems that seem to be increasingly beyond our understanding and beyond our control, the more options we can consider, the better.
The topics that featured in this conversation included:
- "The Political Singularity" - when the general public realize that one political question has become more important than all the others, namely should humanity be creating an AI with godlike powers, and if so, under what conditions
- Criteria to judge whether a forthcoming superintelligent AI is a "worthy successor" to humanity.
Selected follow-ups:
- The website of Dan Faggella
- The BGI24 conference, lead organiser Ben Goertzel of SingularityNET
- The Intelligence Trajectory Political Matrix
- The Political Singularity
- A Worthy Successor - the purpose of AGI
- Roko Mijic on Twitter/X
- The novel Diaspora by Greg Egan
Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
