Anticipating an Einstein moment in the understanding of consciousness, with Henry Shevlin Artwork

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.

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London Futurists

Anticipating an Einstein moment in the understanding of consciousness, with Henry Shevlin

May 28, 2025 • London Futurists • Season 1 • Episode 114

Our guest in this episode is Henry Shevlin. Henry is the Associate Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, where he also co-directs the Kinds of Intelligence program and oversees educational initiatives.

He researches the potential for machines to possess consciousness, the ethical ramifications of such developments, and the broader implications for our understanding of intelligence.

In his 2024 paper, “Consciousness, Machines, and Moral Status,” Henry examines the recent rapid advancements in machine learning and the questions they raise about machine consciousness and moral status. He suggests that public attitudes towards artificial consciousness may change swiftly, as human-AI interactions become increasingly complex and intimate. He also warns that our tendency to anthropomorphise may lead to misplaced trust in and emotional attachment to AIs.

Note: this episode is co-hosted by David and Will Millership, the CEO of a non-profit called Prism (Partnership for Research Into Sentient Machines). Prism is seeded by Conscium, a startup where both Calum and David are involved, and which, among other things, is researching the possibility and implications of machine consciousness. Will and Calum will be releasing a new Prism podcast focusing entirely on Conscious AI, and the first few episodes will be in collaboration with the London Futurists Podcast.

Selected follow-ups: