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
LFP 133: Oliver Ritchie - Waking up Economists
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We are continuing our investigation into the implications of the Economic Singularity, the time when we need a new economic system because full automation by AI means people can no longer obtain the resources they need by doing jobs.
Our guest today is Oliver Ritchie, the UK Policy Lead at the Future of Life Institute. Previously, he was a Senior Fellow at the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy, and a Research Scholar at GovAI. He also spent over six years in policy formation at the Treasury, which is where many of the brightest minds in UK public sector work, and where the really big decisions are made, because the Treasury hold the purse strings.
We wanted to have Oliver on the show because he has written two thought-provoking articles on the Economic Singularity, a paper called “The Fiscal Challenge of Advanced AI”, and a Substack post which summarises it, called “Can we afford to support workers whose jobs are displaced by AI?”
Selected follow-ups:
- "Oliver Ritchie" - Future of Life Institute
- "Return on Intelligence" - Oliver's Substack
- "Can we afford to support workers whose jobs are displaced by AI?" - Substack article by Oliver
- "The Fiscal Challenge Of Advanced AI" (PDF) - article by Oliver
- "The case for G20 coordination on wealth taxes" - article by Liam Byrne
- "US super-rich 'pay almost no income tax'" - BBC
- "Trump to meet AI leaders to discuss US investment in their companies" - BBC
- "Getting Ahead of AI's Economic Disruption" - Windfall Trust
- "AI’s Role in Reshaping Power Distribution" - Future of Life Institute project
- "Can you safely build something that may kill you?" (about Sam Altman) - by Kelsey Piper
- "Exploring Machine Consciousness" - Prism / Conscium podcast, cohost Calum Chace
- "The biggest blockages to successful governance of advanced AI" - Review by David Wood, contains section "Why a pause isn’t that inconceivable"
- "Trump considering AI controls after OpenAI hacking incidents" - BBC
- "Pacing the Frontier" - A statement from over 1,300 employees of frontier AI companies
- "Why a Custom AI Just Beat Every Frontier Model" - about Thinking Machines Lab and Bridgewater
- "The On-Device LLM Revolution" - by Steve Roddy
- "AI Economics Institute (AIEI): Prospectus" - UK Government
- "Minister of State for the Future of Work" - Kate Dearden MP (LinkedIn)
- "'We Must Act Now': Sixteen Nobel Laureates Join Leading Economists and AI Researchers in Call to Prepare for AI’s Economic Transformation" - Stanford Digital Economy Lab
- "A Potential Path to Safer AI Development" by Yoshua Bengio, introduces Scientist AI
- "Bitter lesson" (general AIs will in due course out-perform specific AIs) - Wikipedia
- "Why Tool AIs Want to Be Agent AIs" - Gwern
Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
