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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:
    Don't try to make AI safe; instead, make safe AI, with Stuart Russell Dec 27, 2023
    Show notes

    We are honoured to have as our guest in this episode Professor Stuart Russell. Stuart is professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and the traditional way to introduce him is to say that he literally wrote the book on AI. Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, which he co-wrote with Peter Norvig, was first published in 1995, and the fourth edition came out in 2020.
    Stuart has been urging us all to take seriously the dramatic implications of advanced AI for longer than perhaps any other prominent AI researcher. He also proposes practical solutions, as in his 2019 book Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control.
    In 2021 Stuart gave the Reith Lectures, and was awarded an OBE. But the greatest of his many accolades was surely in 2014 when a character with a background remarkably like his was played in the movie Transcendence by Johnny Depp.
    The conversation covers a wide range of questions about future scenarios involving AI, and reflects on changes in the public conversation following the FLI's letter calling for a moratorium on more powerful AI systems, and following the global AI Safety Summit held at Bletchley Park in the UK at the beginning of November.
    Selected follow-ups:
    Stuart Russell's page at Berkeley
    Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence (CHAI)
    The 2021 Reith Lectures: Living With Artificial Intelligence
    The book Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control
    Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration


    Aligning AI, before it's too late, with Rebecca Gorman Dec 09, 2023
    Show notes

    Our guest in this episode is Rebecca Gorman, the co-founder and CEO of Aligned AI, a start-up in Oxford which describes itself rather nicely as working to get AI to do more of the things it should do and fewer of the things it shouldn’t.
    Rebecca built her first AI system 20 years ago and has been calling for responsible AI development since 2010. With her co-founder Stuart Armstrong, she has co-developed several advanced methods for AI alignment, and she has advised the EU, UN, OECD and the UK Parliament on the governance and regulation of AI.
    The conversation highlights the tools faAIr, EquitAI, and ACE, developed by Aligned AI. It also covers the significance of recent performance by Aligned AI software in the CoinRun test environment, which demonstrates the important principle of "overcoming goal misgeneralisation".
    Selected follow-ups:

    • buildaligned.ai
    • Article: "Using faAIr to measure gender bias in LLMs"
    • Article: "EquitAI: A gender bias mitigation tool for generative AI"
    • Article: "ACE for goal generalisation"
    • "CoinRun: Solving Goal Misgeneralisation" - a publication on arXiv
    • Aligned AI repositories on GitHub
    • "Specification gaming examples in AI" - article by Victoria Krakovna
    • Rebecca Gorman speaking at the Cambridge Union on "This House Believes Artificial Intelligence Is An Existential Threat" (YouTube)

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


    Shazam! with Dhiraj Mukherjee Nov 27, 2023
    Show notes

    Our guest in this episode is Dhiraj Mukherjee, best known as the co-founder of Shazam. Calum and David both still remember the sense of amazement we felt when, way back in the dotcom boom, we used Shazam to identify a piece of music from its first couple of bars. It seemed like magic, and was tangible evidence of how fast technology was moving: it was creating services which seemed like science fiction.

    Shazam was eventually bought by Apple in 2018 for a reported 400 million dollars. This gave Dhiraj the funds to pursue new interests. He is now a prolific investor and a keynote speaker on the subject of how companies both large and small can be more innovative.
    In this conversation, Dhiraj highlights some lessons from his personal entrepreneurial journey, and reflects on ways in which the task of entrepreneurs is changing, in the UK and elsewhere. The conversation covers possible futures in fields such as Climate Action and the overcoming of unconscious biases.
    Selected follow-ups:
    https://dhirajmukherjee.com/
    https://www.shazam.com/
    https://dandelionenergy.com/
    https://technation.io/
    Entrepreneur First
    https://fairbrics.co/
    https://neoplants.com/
    Al Gore's Generation Investment Management Fund
    https://www.mevitae.com/
    Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration


    The Politics of Transhumanism, with James Hughes Nov 13, 2023
    Show notes

    Our guest in this episode is James Hughes. James is a bioethicist and sociologist who serves as Associate Provost at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is also the Executive Director of the IEET, that is the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, which he co-founded back in 2004.
    The stated mission of the IEET seems to be more important than ever, in the fast-changing times of the mid-2020s. To quote a short extract from its website:
    The IEET promotes ideas about how technological progress can increase freedom, happiness, and human flourishing in democratic societies. We believe that technological progress can be a catalyst for positive human development so long as we ensure that technologies are safe and equitably distributed. We call this a “technoprogressive” orientation.
    Focusing on emerging technologies that have the potential to positively transform social conditions and the quality of human lives – especially “human enhancement technologies” – the IEET seeks to cultivate academic, professional, and popular understanding of their implications, both positive and negative, and to encourage responsible public policies for their safe and equitable use.
    That mission fits well with what we like to discuss with guests on this show. In particular, this episode asks questions about a conference that has just finished in Boston, co-hosted by the IEET, with the headline title “Emerging Technologies and the Future of Work”. The episode also covers the history and politics of transhumanism, as a backdrop to discussion of present and future issues.
    Selected follow-ups:
    https://ieet.org/
    James Hughes on Wikipedia
    https://medium.com/institute-for-ethics-and-emerging-technologies
    Conference: Emerging Technologies and the Future of Work
    Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration


    How to make AI safe, according to the tech giants, with Rebecca Finlay, CEO of PAI Oct 30, 2023
    Show notes

    The Partnership on AI was launched back in September 2016, during an earlier flurry of interest in AI, as a forum for the tech giants to meet leaders from academia, the media, and what used to be called pressure groups and are now called civil society. By 2019 more than 100 of those organisations had joined.
    The founding tech giants were Amazon, Facebook, Google, DeepMind, Microsoft, and IBM. Apple joined a year later and Baidu joined in 2018.
    Our guest in this episode is Rebecca Finlay, who joined the PAI board in early 2020 and was appointed CEO in October 2021. Rebecca is a Canadian who started her career in banking, and then led marketing and policy development groups in a number of Canadian healthcare and scientific research organisations.
    In the run-up to the Bletchley Park Global Summit on AI, the Partnership on AI has launched a set of guidelines to help the companies that are developing advanced AI systems and making them available to you and me. Rebecca will be addressing the delegates at Bletchley, and no doubt hoping that the summit will establish the PAI guidelines as the basis for global self-regulation of the AI industry.
    Selected follow-ups:
    https://partnershiponai.org/
    https://partnershiponai.org/team/#rebecca-finlay-staff
    https://partnershiponai.org/modeldeployment/
    An open event at Wilton Hall, Bletchley, the afternoon before the Bletchley Park AI Safety Summit starts: https://lu.ma/n9qmn4h6
    Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration


    The shocking problem of superintelligence, with Connor Leahy Oct 25, 2023
    Show notes

    This is the second episode in which we discuss the upcoming Global AI Safety Summit taking place on 1st and 2nd of November at Bletchley Park in England.
    We are delighted to have as our guest in this episode one of the hundred or so people who will attend that summit – Connor Leahy, a German-American AI researcher and entrepreneur.
    In 2020 he co-founded Eleuther AI, a non-profit research institute which has helped develop a number of open source models, including Stable Diffusion. Two years later he co-founded Conjecture, which aims to scale AI alignment research. Conjecture is a for-profit company, but the focus is still very much on figuring out how to ensure that the arrival of superintelligence is beneficial to humanity, rather than disastrous.
    Selected follow-ups:
    https://www.conjecture.dev/
    https://www.linkedin.com/in/connor-j-leahy/
    https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ai-safety-summit-programme/ai-safety-summit-day-1-and-2-programme
    https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ai-safety-summit-introduction/ai-safety-summit-introduction-html
    An open event at Wilton Hall, Bletchley, the afternoon before the AI Safety Summit starts: https://www.meetup.com/london-futurists/events/296765860/
    Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration


    Preparing for Bletchley Park: behind the scenes, with Ollie Buckley Oct 18, 2023
    Show notes

    The launch of GPT-4 on the 14th of March this year was shocking as well as exciting. ChatGPT had been released the previous November, and became the fastest-growing app ever. But GPT-4’s capabilities were a level beyond, and it provoked remarkable comments from people who had previously said little about the future of AI. In May, Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak described superintelligence as an existential risk to humanity. A year ago, it would have been inconceivable for the leader of a major country to say such a thing.
    The following month, in June, Sunak announced that a global summit on AI safety would be held in November at the historically resonant venue of Bletchley Park, the stately home where during World War Two, Alan Turing and others cracked the German Enigma code, and probably shortened the war by many months.
    Despite the fact that AI is increasingly humanity’s most powerful technology, there is not yet an established forum for world leaders to discuss its longer term impacts, including accelerating automation, extended longevity, and the awesome prospect of superintelligence. The world needs its leaders to engage in a clear-eyed, honest, and well-informed discussion of these things.
    The summit is scheduled for the 1st and 2nd of November, and Matt Clifford, the CEO of the high-profile VC firm Entrepreneur First, has taken a sabbatical to help prepare it.
    To help us all understand what the summit might achieve, the guest in this episode is Ollie Buckley.
    Ollie studied PPE at Oxford, and was later a policy fellow at Cambridge. After six years as a strategy consultant with Monitor, he spent a decade as a civil servant, developing digital technology policy in the Cabinet Office and elsewhere. Crucially, from 2018 to 2021 he was the founding Executive Director of the UK government's original AI governance advisory body, the Centre for Data Ethics & Innovation (CDEI), where he led some of the original policy development regarding the regulation of AI and data-driven technologies. Since then, he has been advising tech companies, civil society and international organisations on AI policy as a consultant.
    Selected follow-ups:
    https://www.linkedin.com/in/ollie-buckley-10064b/
    https://www.publicaffairsnetworking.com/news/tech-policy-consultancy-boosts-data-and-ai-offer-with-senior-hire
    https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ai-safety-summit-programme/ai-safety-summit-day-1-and-2-programme
    https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ai-safety-summit-introduction/ai-safety-summit-introduction-html
    An open event at Wilton Hall, Bletchley, the afternoon before the AI Safety Summit starts: https://www.meetup.com/london-futurists/events/296765860/
    Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration


    The future of space-based solar power, with John Bucknell Oct 11, 2023
    Show notes

    In the future, energy will be too cheap to meter. That used to be a common vision of the future: abundant, clean energy, if not exactly free, then much cheaper than today's energy. But a funny thing happened en route to that future of energy abundance. High energy costs are still with us in 2023, and are part of what's called the cost-of-living crisis. Moreover, although there's some adoption of green, non-polluting energy, there seems to be as much carbon-based energy used as ever.
    Regular listeners to this show will know, however, that one of our themes is that forecasts of the future often go wrong, not so much in their content, but in their timing. New technology and the associated products and services can take longer than expected to mature, but once a transition does start, it can accelerate. And that's a possible scenario for the area of technology we discuss in this episode, namely, space-based solar power.
    Joining us to discuss the prospects for satellites in space gathering significant amounts of energy from the sun, and then beaming it wirelessly to receivers on the ground, is John Bucknell, the CEO of the marvellously named company Virtus Solis.
    John has been with Virtus Solis, as CEO and Founder, since 2018. His career previously involved leading positions at Chrysler, SpaceX, General Motors, and the 3D printing company Divergent.
    Selected follow-ups:
    https://virtussolis.space/
    Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration


    Whatever happened to self-driving cars, with Timothy Lee Sep 27, 2023
    Show notes

    Self-driving cars has long been one of the most exciting potential outcomes of advanced artificial intelligence. Contrary to popular belief, humans are actually very good drivers, but even so, well over a million people die on the roads each year. Globally, for people between 12 and 24 years old, road accidents are the most common form of death.
    Google started its self-driving car project in January 2009, and spun out a separate company, Waymo, in 2016. Expectations were high. Many people shared hopes that within a few years, humans would no longer need to drive. Some of us also thought that the arrival of self-driving cars would be the signal to everyone else that AI was our most powerful technology, and would get people thinking about the technological singularity. They would in other words be the “canary in the coal mine”.
    The problem of self-driving turned out to be much harder, and insofar as most people think about self-driving cars today at all, they probably think of them as a technology that was over-hyped and failed. And it turned out that chatbots – and in particular GPT-4 - would be the canary in the coal mine instead.
    But as so often happens, the hype was not wrong – it was just the timing that was wrong. Waymo and Cruise (part of GM) now operate paid-for taxi services in San Francisco and Phoenix, and they are demonstrably safer than humans. Chinese companies are also pioneering the technology.
    One man who knows much more about this than most is our guest today, Timothy Lee, a journalist who writes the newsletter "Understanding AI". He was previously a journalist at Ars Technica and the Washington Post, and he has a masters degree in Computer Science. In recent weeks, Timothy has published some carefully researched and insightful articles about the state of the art in self-driving cars.
    Selected follow-ups:
    https://www.UnderstandingAI.org/
    Topics addressed in this episode include:
    *) The two main market segments for self-driving cars
    *) Constraints adopted by Waymo and Cruise which allowed them to make progress
    *) Options for upgrading the hardware in a self-driven vehicle
    *) Some local opposition to self-driving cars in San Francisco
    *) A safety policy: when uncertain, stop, and phone home for advice
    *) Support from the State of California - and from other US States
    *) Comparing accident statistics: human drivers versus self-driving
    *) Why self-driving cars don't require AGI (Artificial General Intelligence)
    *) Reasons why self-driving cars cannot be remotely tele-operated
    *) Prospects for self-driven freight transport running on highways
    *) The company Nuro that delivers pizza and other items by self-driven robots
    *) Another self-driving robot company: Starship ("your local community helpers")
    *) The Israeli company Mobileye - acquired by Intel in 2017
    *) Friction faced by Chinese self-driving companies in the US and elsewhere
    *) Different possibilities for the speed at which self-driving solutions will scale up
    *) Potential social implications of wider adoption of self-driving solutions
    *) Consequences of fatal accidents
    *) Dangerous behaviour from safety drivers
    *) The special case of Tesla FSD (assisted "Full Self-Driving") and Elon Musk
    *) The future of recreational driving
    *) An invitation to European technologists
    Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration


    Generative AI, cybercrime, and scamability, with Stacey Edmonds Sep 20, 2023
    Show notes

    One of the short-term concerns raised by artificial intelligence is cybercrime. Cybercrime didn’t start with AI, of course, but it is already being aggravated by AI, and will become more so.
    We are delighted to have as our guest in this episode somebody who knows more about this than most people. After senior roles in audit and consulting firm Deloitte, and the headhunting firm Korn Ferry, Stacey Edmonds set up Lively, which helps client companies to foster the culture they want, and to inculcate the skills, attitudes, and behaviours that will enable them to succeed, and to be safe online.
    Stacey’s experience and expertise also encompasses social science, youth work, education, Edtech, and the creative realm of video production. She is a juror at the New York Film Festival and the International Business Awards.
    In this discussion, Stacey explains how cybercrime is on the increase, fuelled not least by Generative AI. She discusses how people can reduce their 'scam-ability' and live safely in the digital world, and how organisations can foster and maintain trusted digital relationships with their customers.
    Selected follow-ups:
    https://www.linkedin.com/in/staceyedmonds/
    https://futurecrimesbook.com/ (book by Marc Goodman)
    https://cybersecurityventures.com/cybercrime-to-cost-the-world-8-trillion-annually-in-2023/
    https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/9/15/23875113/mgm-hack-casino-vishing-cybersecurity-ransomware
    https://www.trustcafe.io/
    Topics addressed in this episode include:
    *) Excitement and apprehension following the recent releases of generative AI platforms
    *) The cyberattack on the MGM casino chain
    *) Estimates of the amount of money stolen by cybercrime
    *) The human trauma of victims of cybercrime
    *) Four factors pushing cybercrime figures higher
    *) Hacking "the human algorithm"
    *) Phishing attacks with and without spelling mistakes
    *) The ease of cloning voices
    *) The digital wild west, where the sheriff has gone on holiday
    *) People who are particularly vulnerable to digital scams
    *) The human trafficking of men with IT skills
    *) Economic drivers for both cybercrime and solutions to cybercrime
    *) Comparing the threat from spam and the threat from deep fakes
    *) Anticipating a surge of deep fakes during the 2024 election cycle
    *) A possible resurgence of mainstream media
    *) Positive examples: BBC Verify, Trust Café (by Jimmy Wales), the Reddit model of upvoting and downvoting, community notes on Twitter
    *) Strengthening "netizen" skills in critical thinking
    *) The forthcoming app (due to launch in November) "Dodgy or Not" - designed to help people build their "scam ability"
    *) Cyber meets Tinder meets Duolingo meets Angry Birds
    *) Scenarios for cybercrime 3-5 years in the future
    *) Will a future UGI (Universal Generous Income) reduce the prevalence of cybercrime?
    Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration


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