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
The Discontinuity Thesis, with Ben Luong
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AI-driven automation of cognitive labour is not merely another technological transition but a structural discontinuity that will end, sooner or later, the central role of wages in how society operates. This discontinuity can be called “The End of Postwar Capitalism”. That’s the conclusion of a tightly argued set of essays, “The Discontinuity Thesis”, written by our guest in this episode, Ben Luong.
The essays look at a range of arguments that all try to make the case that wages paid for cognitive labour will remain significant for the majority of people, so that capitalism can continue in place, even with AI having greatly expanded capabilities. According to Ben, each of these arguments fail. These back-and-forth debates are what we explore in this episode.
Selected follow-ups:
- "The Discontinuity Thesis: A Sequence of Seven Essays on Why Postwar Capitalism Ends" by Ben Luong
- "Mark Zuckerberg just declared war on the entire advertising industry" - The Verge
- "P versus NP problem" - Wikipedia
- "KPMG Pulls AI Report After Hallucinated Claims About Major Organisations" - AI Insider
- "GDPval-AA v2 Leaderboard" - Artificial Analysis
- "OSWorld: 369 real computer tasks across Windows, macOS, and Ubuntu requiring GUI interaction... Much harder than web-only benchmarks"
- "Sorites paradox" - Wikipedia
- "Young people not in education, employment or training (NEET), UK: May 2026" - Office of National Statistics
- "Five Years" - Song by David Bowie
- "How ZEISS and ASML Enable the Modern Chip Industry" - Rob Hoeijmakers
- "Mistral AI’s $830 Million Debt Financing: Inside the European Bet on 13,800 Nvidia GPUs and a Paris AI Data Center" - Marcus Chen
- "Colossus (data center)" - Wikipedia
- "Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence" - Stanford Digital Economy Lab
- "Appendix I: What Would Refute the Thesis" - by Ben Luong
- "The Cope Index: Tracking who's coping hardest about the end of work" - by Ben Luong
- "The AI Alignment Problem" - from "The Singularity Principles"
Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
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