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 134: Ewan McMillan - AI overhang and economics impact
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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 that people can no longer obtain the resources they need by doing jobs.
Our guest today is Ewan McMillan, the founder of New Gradient, an Edinburgh-based consultancy that builds AI systems for a variety of industries, from biotech to mining. He took a degree in theoretical physics at the University of Edinburgh, and since then he has spent seven years delivering applied AI R&D.
We wanted to have Ewan on the show because he also writes about the economics of AI from the perspective of someone who is actually implementing it. This spring he posted a series of thought-provoking articles called “The Economics of AGI”.
Selected follow-ups:
- New Gradient - Company website
- Ewan McMillan - LinkedIn
- "The Economics of AGI" - Part 1 of Ewan's essay
- "The Innovation Paradox" - Part 2 of the essay
- "The Allocation Stack" - Part 3 of the essay
- "Bitter lesson" (general AIs will in due course out-perform specific AIs) - Wikipedia
- "AlphaZero" (covers the chess match vs. Stockfish) - Wikipedia
- "Smartphones and Beyond: Lessons from the remarkable rise and fall of Symbian" - book by David
- "Culture series" (about science fiction series written by Iain M Banks) - Wikipedia
- "Aghion–Howitt model" - Wikipedia
- 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics (recipients include Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt)
- "The First Solo Unicorns Are Here: Meet the One-Person Companies Racing to $1B in 2026" - Founder Institute
- "Understanding Alpha in Investing" - Investopedia
- "'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
Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
