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
Regulating Big Tech, with Adam Kovacevich
Our guest in this episode is Adam Kovacevich. Adam is the Founder and CEO of the Chamber of Progress, which describes itself as a center-left tech industry policy coalition that works to ensure that all citizens benefit from technological leaps, and that the tech industry operates responsibly and fairly.
Adam has had a front row seat for more than 20 years in the tech industry’s political maturation, and he advises companies on navigating the challenges of political regulation.
For example, Adam spent 12 years at Google, where he led a 15-person policy strategy and external affairs team. In that role, he drove the company’s U.S. public policy campaigns on topics such as privacy, security, antitrust, intellectual property, and taxation.
We had two reasons to want to talk with Adam. First, to understand the kerfuffle that has arisen from the lawsuit launched against Apple by the U.S. Department of Justice and sixteen state Attorney Generals. And second, to look ahead to possible future interactions between tech industry regulators and the industry itself, especially as concerns about Artificial Intelligence rise in the public mind.
Selected follow-ups:
- Adam Kovacevich's website
- The Chamber of Progress
- Gartner Hype Cycle
- "Justice Department Sues Apple for Monopolizing Smartphone Markets"
- The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
- Epic Games v. Apple (Wikipedia)
- "AirTags Are the Best Thing to Happen to Tile" (Wired)
- Adobe Firefly
- The EU AI Act
Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
