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 economic case for a second longevity revolution, with Andrew Scott
The public discussion in a number of countries around the world expresses worries about what is called an aging society. These countries anticipate a future with fewer younger people who are active members of the economy, and a growing number of older people who need to be supported by the people still in the workforce. It’s an inversion of the usual demographic pyramid, with less at the bottom, and more at the top.
However, our guest in this episode recommends a different framing of the future – not as an aging society, but as a longevity society, or even an evergreen society. He is Andrew Scott, Professor of Economics at the London Business School. His other roles include being a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, and a consulting scholar at Stanford University’s Center on Longevity.
Andrew’s latest book is entitled “The Longevity Imperative: Building a Better Society for Healthier, Longer Lives”. Commendations for the book include this from the political economist Daron Acemoglu, “A must-read book with an important message and many lessons”, and this from the historian Niall Ferguson, “Persuasive, uplifting and wise”.
Selected follow-ups:
- Personal website of Andrew Scott
- Andrew Scott at the London Business School
- The book The Longevity Imperative: How to Build a Healthier and More Productive Society to Support Our Longer Lives
- Longevity, the 56 trillion dollar opportunity, with Andrew Scott - episode 40 in this series
- Population Pyramids of the World from 1950 to 2100
- Thomas Robert Malthus - Wikipedia
- DALYs (Disability-adjusted life years) and QALYs (Quality-adjusted life years) - Wikipedia
- VSL (Value of Statistical Life) - Wikipedia
- The economic value of targeting aging - paper in Nature Aging, co-authored by Andrew Scott, Martin Ellison, and David Sinclair
- A great-grandfather from Merseyside has become the world's oldest living man - BBC, 5th April 2024
Related quotations:
- Aging is "...revealed and made manifest only by the most unnatural experiment of prolonging an animal's life by sheltering it from the hazards of its ordinary existence" - Peter Medawar, 1951
- "To die of old age is a death rare, extraordinary, and singular, and, therefore, so much less natural than the others; ’tis the last and extremest sort of dying: and the more remote, the less to be hoped for" - Michel de Montaigne, 1580
Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
