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    Technology

    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.

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    Copyright: © 2022 London Futurists

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    Latest Episodes:
    AGI alignment: the case for hope, with Lou de K Mar 22, 2024
    Show notes

    Our guest in this episode is Lou de K, Program Director at the Foresight Institute.
    David recently saw Lou give a marvellous talk at the TransVision conference in Utrecht in the Netherlands, on the subject of “AGI Alignment: Challenges and Hope”. Lou kindly agreed to join us to review some of the ideas in that talk and to explore their consequences.
    Selected follow-ups:

    • Personal website of Lou de K (Lou de Kerhuelvez)
    • Foresight.org
    • TransVision Utrecht 2024
    • The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence by Tim Urban on Wait But Why
    • AI Alignment: A Comprehensive Survey - 98 page PDF with authors from Peking University and other universities
    • Synthetic Sentience: Can Artificial Intelligence become conscious? - Talk by Joscha Bach at CCC, December 2023
    • Pope Francis "warns of risks of AI for peace" (Vatican News)
    • Claude's Constitution by Anthropic
    • Roman Yampolskiy discusses multi-multi alignment (Future of Life podcast)
    • Shoggoth with Smiley Faceon Know Your Meme
    • Shoggoth on AISafetyMemes on X/Twitter
    • Orthogonality Thesis on LessWrong
    • Quotes by the poet Lucille Clifton
    • Decentralized science (DeSci) on Ethereum.org
    • Listing of Foresight Institute fellows
    • The Network State by Balaji Srinivasan
    • The Network State vs. Coordi-Nations featuring the ideas of Primavera De Filippi
    • DeSci London event, Imperial College Business School, 23-24 March

    Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration


    The Political Singularity and a Worthy Successor, with Daniel Faggella Mar 15, 2024
    Show notes

    Calum and David recently attended the BGI24 event in Panama City, that is, the Beneficial General Intelligence summit and unconference. One of the speakers we particularly enjoyed listening to was Daniel Faggella, the Founder and Head of Research of Emerj.
    Something that featured in his talk was a 3 by 3 matrix, which he calls the Intelligence Trajectory Political Matrix, or ITPM for short. As we’ll be discussing in this episode, one of the dimensions of this matrix is the kind of end goal future that people desire, as intelligent systems become ever more powerful. And the other dimension is the kind of methods people want to use to bring about that desired future.
    So, if anyone thinks there are only two options in play regarding the future of AI, for example “accelerationists” versus “doomers”, to use two names that are often thrown around these days, they’re actually missing a much wider set of options. And frankly, given the challenges posed by the fast development of AI systems that seem to be increasingly beyond our understanding and beyond our control, the more options we can consider, the better.
    The topics that featured in this conversation included:

    • "The Political Singularity" - when the general public realize that one political question has become more important than all the others, namely should humanity be creating an AI with godlike powers, and if so, under what conditions
    • Criteria to judge whether a forthcoming superintelligent AI is a "worthy successor" to humanity.

    Selected follow-ups:

    • The website of Dan Faggella
    • The BGI24 conference, lead organiser Ben Goertzel of SingularityNET
    • The Intelligence Trajectory Political Matrix
    • The Political Singularity
    • A Worthy Successor - the purpose of AGI
    • Roko Mijic on Twitter/X
    • The novel Diaspora by Greg Egan

    Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration


    The Longevity Singularity, with Daniel Ives Mar 07, 2024
    Show notes

    In the wide and complex subject of biological aging, one particular kind of biological aging has been receiving a great deal of attention in recent years. That’s the field of epigenetic aging, where parts of the packaging or covering, as we might call it, of the DNA in all of our cells, alters over time, changing which genes are turned on and turned off, with increasingly damaging consequences.
    What’s made this field take off is the discovery that this epigenetic aging can be reversed, via an increasing number of techniques. Moreover, there is some evidence that this reversal gives a new lease of life to the organism.
    To discuss this topic and the opportunities arising, our guest in this episode is Daniel Ives, the CEO of Shift Bioscience. As you’ll hear, Shift Bioscience is a company that is carrying out some very promising research into this field of epigenetic aging.
    Daniel has a PhD from the University of Cambridge, and co-founded Shift Bioscience in 2017.
    The conversation highlighted a way of using AI transformer models and a graph neural network to dramatically speed up the exploration of which proteins can play the best role in reversing epigenetic aging. It also considered which other types of aging will likely need different sorts of treatments, beyond these proteins. Finally, conversation turned to a potential fast transformation of public attitudes toward the possibility and desirability of comprehensively treating aging - a transformation called "all hell breaks loose" by Daniel, and "the Longevity Singularity" by Calum.
    Selected follow-ups:
    Shift Bioscience
    Aubrey de Grey's TED talk "A roadmap to end aging"
    Epigenetic clocks (Wikipedia)
    Shinya Yamanaka (Wikipedia)
    scGPT - bioRxiv preprint by Bo Wang and colleagues
    Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration


    Where are all the Dyson spheres? with Paul Sutter Feb 21, 2024
    Show notes

    In this episode, we look further into the future than usual. We explore what humanity might get up to in a thousand years or more: surrounding whole stars with energy harvesting panels, sending easily detectable messages across space which will last until the stars die out.
    Our guide to these fascinating thought experiments in Paul M. Sutter, a NASA advisor and theoretical cosmologist at the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University in New York and a visiting professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, also in New York. He is an award-winning science communicator, and TV host.
    The conversation reviews arguments for why intelligent life forms might want to capture more energy than strikes a single planet, as well as some practical difficulties that would complicate such a task. It also considers how we might recognise evidence of megastructures created by alien civilisations, and finishes with a wider exploration about the role of science and science communication in human society.
    Selected follow-ups:
    Paul M. Sutter - website
    "Would building a Dyson sphere be worth it? We ran the numbers" - Ars Technica
    Forthcoming book - Rescuing Science: Restoring Trust in an Age of Doubt
    "The Kardashev scale: Classifying alien civilizations" - Space.com
    "Modified Newtonian dynamics" as a possible alternative to the theory of dark matter
    The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory - 1999 book by Brian Greene
    The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark - 1995 book by Carl Sagan
    Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration


    Provably safe AGI, with Steve Omohundro Feb 13, 2024
    Show notes

    AI systems have become more powerful in the last few years, and are expected to become even more powerful in the years ahead. The question naturally arises: what, if anything, should humanity be doing to increase the likelihood that these forthcoming powerful systems will be safe, rather than destructive?
    Our guest in this episode has a long and distinguished history of analysing that question, and he has some new proposals to share with us. He is Steve Omohundro, the CEO of Beneficial AI Research, an organisation which is working to ensure that artificial intelligence is safe and beneficial for humanity.
    Steve has degrees in Physics and Mathematics from Stanford and a Ph.D. in Physics from U.C. Berkeley. He went on to be an award-winning computer science professor at the University of Illinois. At that time, he developed the notion of basic AI drives, which we talk about shortly, as well as a number of potential key AI safety mechanisms.
    Among many other roles which are too numerous to mention here, Steve served as a Research Scientist at Meta, the parent company of Facebook, where he worked on generative models and AI-based simulation, and he is an advisor to MIRI, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.
    Selected follow-ups:
    Steve Omohundro: Innovative ideas for a better world
    Metaculus forecast for the date of weak AGI
    "The Basic AI Drives" (PDF, 2008)
    TED Talk by Max Tegmark: How to Keep AI Under Control
    Apple Secure Enclave
    Meta Research: Teaching AI advanced mathematical reasoning
    DeepMind AlphaGeometry
    Microsoft Lean theorem prover
    Terence Tao (Wikipedia)
    NeurIPS Tutorial on Machine Learning for Theorem Proving (2023)
    The team at MIRI
    Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration


    Robots and the people who love them, with Eve Herold Feb 06, 2024
    Show notes

    In this episode, our subject is the rise of the robots – not the military kind of robots, or the automated manufacturing kind that increasingly fill factories, but social robots. These are robots that could take roles such as nannies, friends, therapists, caregivers, and lovers. They are the subject of the important new book Robots and the People Who Love Them, written by our guest today, Eve Herold.
    Eve is an award-winning science writer and consultant in the scientific and medical nonprofit space. She has written extensively about issues at the crossroads of science and society, including stem cell research and regenerative medicine, aging and longevity, medical implants, transhumanism, robotics and AI, and bioethical issues in leading-edge medicine – all of which are issues that Calum and David like to feature on this show.
    Eve currently serves as Director of Policy Research and Education for the Healthspan Action Coalition. Her previous books include Stem Cell Wars and Beyond Human. She is the recipient of the 2019 Arlene Eisenberg Award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors.
    Selected follow-ups:
    Eve Herold: What lies ahead for the human race
    Eve Herold on Macmillan Publishers
    The book Robots and the People Who Love Them
    Healthspan Action Coalition
    Hanson Robotics
    Sophia, Desi, and Grace
    The AIBO robotic puppy
    Some of the films discussed:
    A.I. (2001)
    Ex Machina (2014)
    I, Robot (2004)
    I'm Your Man (2021)
    Robot & Frank (2012)
    WALL.E (2008)
    Metropolis (1927)
    Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration


    Education and work - past, present, and future, with Riaz Shah Jan 25, 2024
    Show notes

    Our guest in this episode is Riaz Shah. Until recently, Riaz was a partner at EY, where he was for 27 years, specialising in technology and innovation. Towards the end of his time at EY he became a Professor for Innovation & Leadership at Hult International Business School, where he leads sessions with senior executives of global companies.
    In 2016, Riaz took a one-year sabbatical to open the One Degree Academy, a free school in a disadvantaged area of London. There’s an excellent TEDx talk from 2020 about how that happened, and about how to prepare for the very uncertain future of work.
    This discussion, which was recorded at the close of 2023, covers the past, present, and future of education, work, politics, nostalgia, and innovation.
    Selected follow-ups:
    Riaz Shah at EY
    The TEDx talk Rise Above the Machines by Riaz Shah
    One Degree Mentoring Charity
    One Degree Academy
    EY Tech MBA by Hult International Business School
    Gallup survey: State of the Global Workplace, 2023
    BCG report: How People Can Create—and Destroy—Value with Generative AI
    Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration


    What is your p(doom)? with Darren McKee Jan 18, 2024
    Show notes

    In this episode, our subject is Uncontrollable: The Threat of Artificial Superintelligence and the Race to Save the World. That’s a new book on a vitally important subject.
    The book’s front cover carries this endorsement from Professor Max Tegmark of MIT: “A captivating, balanced and remarkably up-to-date book on the most important issue of our time.” There’s also high praise from William MacAskill, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford: “The most accessible and engaging introduction to the risks of AI that I’ve read.”
    Calum and David had lots of questions ready to put to the book’s author, Darren McKee, who joined the recording from Ottawa in Canada.
    Topics covered included Darren's estimates for when artificial superintelligence is 50% likely to exist, and his p(doom), that is, the likelihood that superintelligence will prove catastrophic for humanity. There's also Darren's recommendations on the principles and actions needed to reduce that likelihood.
    Selected follow-ups:
    Darren McKee's website
    The book Uncontrollable
    Darren's podcast The Reality Check
    The Lazarus Heist on BBC Sounds
    The Chair's Summary of the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park
    The Statement on AI Risk by the Center for AI Safety
    Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration


    Climate Change: There’s good news and bad news, with Nick Mabey Jan 11, 2024
    Show notes

    Our guest in this episode is Nick Mabey, the co-founder and co-CEO of one of the world’s most influential climate change think tanks, E3G, where the name stands for Third Generation Environmentalism.
    As well as his roles with E3G, Nick is founder and chair of London Climate Action Week, and he has several independent appointments including as a London Sustainable Development Commissioner.
    Nick has previously worked in the UK Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, the UK Foreign Office, WWF-UK, London Business School, and the UK electricity industry. As an academic he was lead author of “Argument in the Greenhouse”; one of the first books examining the economics of climate change.
    He was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Jubilee honours list in 2022 for services to climate change and support to the UK COP 26 Presidency.
    As the conversation makes clear, there is both good news and bad news regarding responses to climate change.
    Selected follow-ups:
    Nick Mabey's website
    E3G
    "Call for UK Government to 'get a grip' on climate change impacts"
    The IPCC's 2023 synthesis report
    Chatham House commentary on IPCC report
    "Why Climate Change Is a National Security Risk"
    The UK's Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC)
    Bjørn Lomborg
    Matt Ridley
    Tim Lenton
    Jason Hickel
    Mark Carney
    Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration


    Meet the electrome! with Sally Adee Jan 05, 2024
    Show notes

    Our subject in this episode is the idea that the body uses electricity in more ways than are presently fully understood. We consider ways in which electricity, applied with care, might at some point in the future help to improve the performance of the brain, to heal wounds, to stimulate the regeneration of limbs or organs, to turn the tide against cancer, and maybe even to reverse aspects of aging.
    To guide us through these possibilities, who better than the science and technology journalist Sally Adee? She is the author of the book “We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds”. That book gave David so many insights on his first reading, that he went back to it a few months later and read it all the way through again.
    Sally was a technology features and news editor at the New Scientist from 2010 to 2017, and her research into bioelectricity was featured in Yuval Noah Harari’s book “Homo Deus”.
    Selected follow-ups:
    Sally Adee's website
    The book "We are Electric"
    Article: "An ALS patient set a record for communicating via a brain implant: 62 words per minute"
    tDCS (Transcranial direct-current stimulation)
    The conference "Anticipating 2025" (held in 2014)
    Article: "Brain implants help people to recover after severe head injury"
    Article on enhancing memory in older people
    Bioelectricity cancer researcher Mustafa Djamgoz
    Article on Tumour Treating Fields
    Article on "Motile Living Biobots"
    Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration


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