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
Gen AI cuts costs by 30%: lessons from a leading law firm, with David Wakeling
Our guest in this episode is David Wakeling, a partner at A&O Shearman, which became the world’s third largest law firm in May, thanks to the merger of Allen and Overy, a UK “magic circle” firm, with Shearman & Sterling of New York.
David heads up a team within the firm called the Markets Innovation Group (MIG), which consists of lawyers, developers and technologists, and is seeking to disrupt the legal industry. He also leads the firm's AI Advisory practice, through which the firm is currently advising 80 of the largest global businesses on the safe deployment of AI.
One of the initiatives David has led is the development and launch of ContractMatrix, in partnership with Microsoft and Harvey, an OpenAI-backed, GPT-4-based large language model that has been fine-tuned for the legal industry. ContractMatrix is a contract drafting and negotiation tool powered by generative AI. It was tested and honed by 1,000 of the firm’s lawyers prior to launch, to mitigate against risks like hallucinations. The firm estimates that the tool is saving up to seven hours from the average contract review, which is around a 30% efficiency gain. As well as internal use by 2,000 of its lawyers, it is also licensed to clients.
This is the third time we have looked at the legal industry on the podcast. While lawyers no longer use quill pens, they are not exactly famous for their information technology skills, either. But the legal profession has a couple of characteristics which make it eminently suited to the deployment of advanced AI systems: it generates vast amounts of data and money, and lawyers frequently engage in text-based routine tasks which can be automated by generative AI systems.
Previous London Futurists Podcast episodes on the legal industry:
- Ep 53: The Legal Singularity, with Benjamin Alarie
- Ep 47: AI transforming professional services, with Shamus Rae
Other selected follow-ups:
- David Wakeling
- A&O Shearman
- ContractMatrix
- Harvey AI
- RAG - Retrieval-Augmented Generation
- Digital Operational Resilience Act (impacts banking)
- The Productivity J-Curve (PDF), by Erik Brynjolfsson, Daniel Rock, Chad Syverson
- Agentic AI: The Next Big Breakthrough That's Transforming Business And Technology, by Bernard Marr
Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
