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
AGI alignment: the case for hope, with Lou de K
Our guest in this episode is Lou de K, Program Director at the Foresight Institute.
David recently saw Lou give a marvellous talk at the TransVision conference in Utrecht in the Netherlands, on the subject of “AGI Alignment: Challenges and Hope”. Lou kindly agreed to join us to review some of the ideas in that talk and to explore their consequences.
Selected follow-ups:
- Personal website of Lou de K (Lou de Kerhuelvez)
- Foresight.org
- TransVision Utrecht 2024
- The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence by Tim Urban on Wait But Why
- AI Alignment: A Comprehensive Survey - 98 page PDF with authors from Peking University and other universities
- Synthetic Sentience: Can Artificial Intelligence become conscious? - Talk by Joscha Bach at CCC, December 2023
- Pope Francis "warns of risks of AI for peace" (Vatican News)
- Claude's Constitution by Anthropic
- Roman Yampolskiy discusses multi-multi alignment (Future of Life podcast)
- Shoggoth with Smiley Face on Know Your Meme
- Shoggoth on AISafetyMemes on X/Twitter
- Orthogonality Thesis on LessWrong
- Quotes by the poet Lucille Clifton
- Decentralized science (DeSci) on Ethereum.org
- Listing of Foresight Institute fellows
- The Network State by Balaji Srinivasan
- The Network State vs. Coordi-Nations featuring the ideas of Primavera De Filippi
- DeSci London event, Imperial College Business School, 23-24 March
Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
