
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
Safe superintelligence via a community of AIs and humans, with Craig Kaplan
Craig Kaplan has been thinking about superintelligence longer than most. He bought the URL superintelligence.com back in 2006, and many years before that, in the late 1980s, he co-authored a series of papers with one of the founding fathers of AI, Herbert Simon.
Craig started his career as a scientist with IBM, and later founded and ran a venture-backed company called PredictWallStreet that brought the wisdom of the crowd to Wall Street, and improved the performance of leading hedge funds. He sold that company in 2020, and now spends his time working out how to make the first superintelligence safe. As he puts it, he wants to reduce P(Doom) and increase P(Zoom).
Selected follow-ups:
- iQ Company
- Herbert A. Simon - Wikipedia
- Amara’s Law and Its Place in the Future of Tech - Pohan Lin
- Predict Wall Street
- The Society of Mind - book by Marvin Minsky
- AI 'godfather' Geoffrey Hinton warns of dangers as he quits Google - BBC News
- Statement on AI Risk - Center for AI Safety
- I’ve Spent My Life Measuring Risk. AI Rings Every One of My Alarm Bells - Paul Tudor Jones
- Secrets of Software Quality: 40 Innovations from IBM - book by Craig Kaplan
- London Futurists Podcast episode featuring David Brin
- Reason in human affairs - book by Herbert Simon
- US and China will intervene to halt ‘suicide race’ of AGI – Max Tegmark
- If Anybody Builds It, Everyone Dies - book by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares
- AGI-25 - conference in Reykjavik
- The First Global Brain Workshop - Brussels 2001
- Center for Integrated Cognition
- Paul S. Rosenbloom
- Tatiana Shavrina, Meta
- Henry Minsky launches AI startup inspired by father’s MIT research
Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration