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
Progress with ending aging, with Aubrey de Grey
Our topic in this episode is progress with ending aging. Our guest is the person who literally wrote the book on that subject, namely the book, “Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime”. He is Aubrey de Grey, who describes himself in his Twitter biography as “spearheading the global crusade to defeat aging”.
In pursuit of that objective, Aubrey co-founded the Methuselah Foundation in 2003, the SENS Research Foundation in 2009, and the LEV Foundation, that is the Longevity Escape Velocity Foundation, in 2022, where he serves as President and Chief Science Officer.
Full disclosure: David also has a role on the executive management team of LEV Foundation, but for this recording he was wearing his hat as co-host of the London Futurists Podcast.
The conversation opens with this question: "When people are asked about ending aging, they often say the idea sounds nice, but they see no evidence for any actual progress toward ending aging in humans. They say that they’ve heard talk about that subject for years, or even decades, but wonder when all that talk is going to result in people actually living significantly longer. How do you respond?"
Selected follow-ups:
- Aubrey de Grey on X (Twitter)
- The book Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime
- The Longevity Escape Velocity (LEV) Foundation
- The SENS paradigm for ending aging , contrasted with the "Hallmarks of Aging" - a 2023 article in Rejuvenation Research
- Progress reports from the current RMR project
- The plan for RMR 2
- The RAID (Rodent Aging Interventions Database) analysis that guided the design of RMR 1 and 2
- Longevity Summit Dublin (LSD): 13-16 June 2024
- Unblocking the Brain’s Drains to Fight Alzheimer’s - Doug Ethell of Leucadia Therapeutics at LSD 2023 (explains the possible role of the cribriform plate)
- Targeting Telomeres to Clear Cancer – Vlad Vitoc of MAIA Biotechnology at LSD 2023
- How to Run a Lifespan Study of 1,000 Mice - Danique Wortel of Ichor Life Sciences at LSD 2023
- XPrize Healthspan
- The Dublin Longevity Declaration ("DLD")
Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
