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
Windfall Trust and the Economic Singularity, with Adrian Brown
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What happens if AI delivers major advances in capability and productivity, but also creates significant disruption to jobs, incomes, and public finances? That question sits at the heart of today’s episode.
Our guest is Adrian Brown, the Founder and Chief Executive of Windfall Trust, a nonprofit focused on helping governments and societies prepare for the economic consequences of advanced AI. Windfall describes itself not as a think tank, but as a “policy accelerator for the age of artificial intelligence”.
Their work starts from a simple premise: if AI systems significantly reshape the economy, then the question is not only how we build them, but how we prepare for their impacts, and how the gains are ultimately shared.
Before founding Windfall Trust, Adrian was the founding Executive Director of the Centre for Public Impact, worked as a policy advisor in the UK Cabinet Office, and held roles at McKinsey and the Boston Consulting Group.
Selected follow-ups:
- Windfall Trust
- Exercise Cygnus (Wikipedia)
- Erik Brynjolfsson (personal site)
- Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence (paper by Erik Brynjolfsson and colleagues)
- Anton Korinek (personal site)
- Windfall's UK Scenarios exercise
- The Economic Singularity (recent discussion paper by Calum Chace)
- Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age (OpenAI)
- UK Government announcement of the formation of "The AI and Future of Work Unit"
- UK Chancellor Rachel Reeve's announcement of a new "AI Economics Institute"
- "AI will kill income tax" - episode of Robert Peston's podcast "The Rest is Money"
- Windfall Policy Atlas
- Task-Completion Time Horizons of Frontier AI Models (METR)
Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
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