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
ChatGPT runs for president, with Pedro Domingos
Our guest today is Pedro Domingos, who is joining an elite group of repeat guests – he joined us before in episode 34 in April 2023.
Pedro is Professor Emeritus Of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. He has done pioneering work in machine learning, like the development of Markov logic networks, which combine probabilistic reasoning with first-order logic. He is probably best known for his book "The Master Algorithm" which describes five different "tribes" of AI researchers, and argues that progress towards human-level general intelligence requires a unification of their approaches.
More recently, Pedro has become a trenchant critic of what he sees as exaggerated claims about the power and potential of today’s AI, and of calls to impose constraints on it.
He has just published “2040: A Silicon Valley Satire”, a novel which ridicules Big Tech and also American politics.
Selected follow-ups:
- Pedro Domingos - University of Washington
- Previous London Futurists Podcast episode featuring Pedro Domingos
- 2040: A Silicon Valley Satire
- The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World
- The Bonfire of the Vanities
- Ron Howard
- Mike Judge
- Martin Scorsese
- Pandora’s Brain
- Transcendence
- Future of Life Institute moratorium open letter
- OpenAI working on new reasoning technology under code name ‘Strawberry’
- Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach - by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig
- Google's AI reasons its way around the London Underground - Nature
- Conscium
- Is LaMDA Sentient? — an Interview - by Blake Lemoine
- Could a Large Language Model be Conscious? - Talk by David Chalmers at NeurIPS 2022
- Jeremy Bentham
- The Extended Phenotype - 1982 book by Richard Dawkins
- Clarion West: Workshops for people who are serious about writing
Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
