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
Post-labour economics, with David Shapiro
In this episode, we return to a theme which is likely to become increasingly central to public discussion in the months and years ahead. To use a term coined by this podcast’s cohost Calum Chace, this theme is the Economic Singularity, namely the potential all-round displacement of humans from the workforce by ever more capable automation. That leads to the question: what are our options for managing the transition of society to increasing technological unemployment and technological underemployment.
Our guest, who will be sharing his thinking on these questions, is the prolific writer and YouTuber David Shapiro. As well as keeping on top of fast-changing news about innovations in AI, David has been developing a set of ideas he calls post-labour economics – how an economy might continue to function even if humans can no longer gain financial rewards in direct return for their labour.
Selected follow-ups:
- David Shapiro’s Substack
- David Shapiro's channel on YouTube
- Julia McCoy's channel on YouTube
- Next stop: Miami - Waymo
- Resource Based Economy
- Debt: The First 5,000 Years - book by David Graeber
- Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better - book by Lyn Alden
- The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking - book by Saifedean Ammous
- Normalcy bias - Wikipedia
- Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty - book by Daron Acemoğlu and James A. Robinson
- Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail - book by Ray Dalio
- Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom - book by Grace Blakeley
- The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and Fully Automated Luxury Capitalism - book by Calum Chace
Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
