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
Climate change and populism: Grounds for optimism? with Matt Burgess
Our guest in this episode is Matt Burgess. Matt is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wyoming, where he moved this year after six years at the University of Boulder, Colorado. He has specialised in the economics of climate change.
Calum met Matt at a recent event in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and knows from their conversations then that Matt has also thought deeply about the impact of social media, the causes of populism, and many other subjects.
Selected follow-ups:
- Matt Burgess at the University of Wyoming
- Guided Civic Revival - Substack of Matt Burgess
- How polarization will destroy itself
- Roger A. Pielke Jr. - Wikipedia
- ‘My Life as a Climate Lukewarmer’ - National Review
- Shared Socioeconomic Pathways - Wikipedia (includes climate scenario SSP5-8.5)
- Exceeding 1.5°C global warming could trigger multiple climate tipping points - Science
- Fat-Tailed Uncertainty in the Economics of Catastrophic Climate Change (PDF) - explains "The Dismal Theorem"
- Sri Lanka’s organic farming disaster, explained - Vox
- Solar panel prices have fallen by around 20% every time global capacity doubled - Our World in Data
- Special guest speech by Mark Carney - YouTube
- Younger Dryas - Wikipedia (prehistoric period with rapid climate change)
- Platform policies of Jill Stein, US Green Party leader
- Agrowth – should we better be agnostic about growth? - degrowth
- ‘4°C of global warming is optimal’ – even Nobel Prize winners are getting things catastrophically wrong - The Conversation
- Economists' Statement on Carbon Dividends
- Who Is Favored To Win The 2024 Presidential Election? - Nate Silver
Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
