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
AI Impacts Survey - The key implications, with Katja Grace
Our guest in this episode grew up in an abandoned town in Tasmania, and is now a researcher and blogger in Berkeley, California. After taking a degree in human ecology and science communication, Katja Grace co-founded AI Impacts, a research organisation trying to answer questions about the future of artificial intelligence.
Since 2016, Katja and her colleagues have published a series of surveys about what AI researchers think about progress on AI. The 2023 Expert Survey on Progress in AI was published this January, comprising responses from 2,778 participants. As far as we know, this is the biggest survey of its kind to date.
Among the highlights are that the time respondents expect it will take to develop an AI with human-level performance dropped between one and five decades since the 2022 survey. So ChatGPT has not gone unnoticed.
Selected follow-ups:
- AI Impacts
- World Spirit Sock Puppet - Katja's blog
- Survey of 2,778 AI authors: six parts in pictures - from AI Impacts
- OpenAI researcher who resigned over safety concerns joins Anthropic - article in The Verge about Jan Leike
- MIRI 2024 Mission and Strategy Update - from the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI)
- Future of Humanity Institute 2005-2024: Final Report - by Anders Sandberg (PDF)
- Centre for the Governance of AI
- Reasons for Persons - Article by Katja about Derek Parfit and theories of personal identity
- OpenAI Says It Has Started Training GPT-4 Successor - article in Forbes
Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
