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
Introducing Conscium, with Daniel Hulme and Ted Lappas
This episode is a bit different from the usual, because we are interviewing Calum's boss. Calum says that mainly to tease him, because he thinks the word “boss” is a dirty word.
His name is Daniel Hulme, and this is his second appearance on the podcast. He was one of our earliest guests, long ago, in episode 8. Back then, Daniel had just sold his AI consultancy, Satalia, to the advertising and media giant WPP. Today, he is Chief AI Officer at WPP, but he is joining us to talk about his new venture, Conscium - which describes itself as "the world's first applied AI consciousness research organisation".
Conscium states that "our aim is to deepen our understanding of consciousness to pioneer efficient, intelligent, and safe AI that builds a better future for humanity".
Also joining us is Ted Lappas, who is head of technology at Conscium, and he is also one of our illustrious former guests on the podcast.
By way of full disclosure, Calum is CMO at Conscium, and David is on the Conscium advisory board.
Selected follow-ups:
- Conscium
- Satalia
- Six categories of application of AI
- Six singularities - TEDx talk by Daniel Hulme
- Professor Mark Solms
- Professor Karl Friston
- A recent paper on different theories of consciousness, by Patrick Butlin, Robert Long, et al
- Professor Nicola Clayton
- Professor Jonathan Birch
- WPP
- The Conscious AI meetup
- AI for organisations - Previous episode featuring Daniel Hulme
- How to use GPT-4 yourself - Previous episode featuring Ted Lappas
Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
