London Futurists

The UK government has announced plans for a global AI Safety Summit, to be held in Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, outside London, on 1st and 2nd of November. That raises the importance of thinking more seriously about potential scenarios for the future of AI. In this episode, co-hosts Calum and David review Calum's concept of the Economic Singularity - a topic that deserves to be addresse...

This episode, like the previous one, consists of a number of short interviews recorded at the Longevity Summit Dublin between 17th and 20th August, featuring a variety of different speakers from the Summit. In this episode, we'll hear first from Matt Kaeberlein, the CEO of a company called Optispan, following a 20 year period at the University of Washington studying the biological mechanisms...

The Longevity Summit Dublin took place from 17th to 20th August. In between presentations, Calum and David caught up with a number of the speakers to ask about their experiences at the Summit. This episode features three of these short interviews. First up is Aubrey de Grey, the President and Chief Science Officer of the LEV Foundation - a person deeply involved in the design and planning of the S...

The legal profession is rarely accused of being at the cutting edge of technological development. Lawyers may not still use quill pens, but they’re not exactly famous for their IT skills. Nevertheless, the profession has a number of characteristics which make it eminently suited to the deployment of advanced AI systems. Lawyers are deluged by data, and commercial law cases can be highly lucrative....

Our guest in this episode is Aidan McCullen. For ten years from 1998 to 2008, Aidan was a professional rugby player, delighting crowds in Ireland, England, and France. He made the very natural transition from that into sports commentating, but he also moved into digital media. He started as an intern at Communicorp to learn digital media and marketing, and he learned about digital by doing it, liv...

Our guest in this episode is Martin O'Dea. As the CEO of Longevity Events Limited, Martin is the principal organiser of the annual Longevity Summit Dublin. In a past life, Martin lectured on business strategy at Dublin Business School. He has been keeping a close eye on the longevity space for more than ten years, and is well placed to speak about how the field is changing. Martin sits on a n...

Our topic in this episode is investing in AI, so we're delighted to have as our guest John Cassidy, a Partner at Kindred Capital, a UK-based venture capital firm. Before he became an investment professional, John co-founded CCG.ai, a precision oncology company which exited to Dante Labs in 2019. We discuss how the investment landscape is being transformed by the possibilities enabled by gener...

Our guest in this episode is Jeremy Kahn, a senior writer at Fortune Magazine, based in the UK. He writes about artificial intelligence and other disruptive technologies, from quantum computing to augmented reality. Previously he was at Bloomberg for eight years, again writing mostly about technology, and in moving to Fortune he was returning to his journalistic roots, as he started his career the...

An intriguing possibility created by the exponential growth in the power of our technology is that within the lifetimes of people already born, death might become optional. Show co-hosts Calum and David are both excited about this idea, but our excitement is as nothing compared to the exuberant enthusiasm of our guest in this episode, José Cordeiro. José was born in Venezuela, to parents who fled...

Our guest in this episode is Shamus Rae. Shamus is the co-founder of Engine B, a startup which aims to expedite the digitisation of the professional services industry (in particular the accounting and legal professions) and level the playing field, so that small companies can compete with larger ones. It is supported by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (the ICAEW) and th...

In this episode our guest is David Giron, the Director at what is arguably one of the world's most innovative educational initiatives, Codam College in Amsterdam. David was previously the head of studies at Codam's famous parent school 42 in Paris, and he has now spent 10 years putting into practice the somewhat revolutionary ideas of the 42 network. We ask David about what he has learne...

Alex Zhavoronkov is our first guest to make a repeat appearance, having first joined us in episode 12, last November. We are delighted to welcome him back, because he is doing some of the most important work on the planet, and he has some important news. In 2014, Alex founded Insilico Medicine, a drug discovery company which uses artificial intelligence to identify novel targets and novel molecule...

In this episode, co-hosts Calum and David continue their reflections on what they have both learned from their interactions with guests on this podcast over the last few months. Where have their ideas changed? And where are they still sticking to their guns? The previous episode started to look at two of what Calum calls the 4 Cs of superintelligence: Cease and Control. In this episode, under the...

The 4 Cs of Superintelligence is a framework that casts fresh light on the vexing question of possible outcomes of humanity's interactions with an emerging superintelligent AI. The 4 Cs are Cease, Control, Catastrophe, and Consent. In this episode, the show's co-hosts, Calum Chace and David Wood, debate the pros and cons of the first two of these Cs, and lay the groundwork for a follow-u...

The launch of GPT-4 on 14th March has provoked concerns and searching questions, and nowhere more so than in the education sector. Earlier this month, the share price of US edutech company Chegg halved when its CEO admitted that GPT technology was a threat to its business model. Looking ahead, GPT models seem to put flesh on the bones of the idea that all students could one day have a personal tut...

The European Commission and Parliament were busily debating the Artificial Intelligence Act when GPT-4 launched on 14 March. As people realised that GPT technology was a game-changer, they called for the Act to be reconsidered. Famously, the EU contains no tech giants, so cutting edge AI is mostly developed in the US and China. But the EU is more than happy to act as the world’s most pro-active re...

Technological changes have economic impact. It's not just that technology allows more goods and services to be produced more efficiently and at greater scale. It's also that these changes disrupt previous assumptions about the conduct of human lives, human relationships, and the methods to save money to buy goods and services. A society in which people expect to die around the age of 100...

One of the questions audiences frequently used to ask futurists was, which careers are most likely to be future-proof? However, that question has changed in recent years. It's now more widely understood that every career is subject to disruption by technological and social trends. No occupation is immune to change. So the question has switched, away from possible future-proof careers, to the...

The last few episodes of our podcast have explored what GPT (generative pre-trained transformer) technology is and how it works, and also the call for a pause in the development of advanced AI. In this latest episode, Ted Lappas, a data scientist and academic, helps us to take a pragmatic turn - to understand what GPT technology can do for each of us individually. Ted is Assistant Professor at Ath...

On March 14th, OpenAI launched GPT-4 , which took the world by surprise and storm. Almost everybody, including people within the AI community, was stunned by its capabilities. A week later, the Future of Life Institute (FLI) published an open letter calling on the world’s AI labs to pause the development of larger versions of GPT (generative pre-trained transformer) models until their safety can b...

The race to create advanced AI is becoming a suicide race.  That's part of the thinking behind the open letter from the Future of Life Institute which "calls on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least six months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4". In this episode, our guest, Jaan Tallinn, explains why he sees this pause as a particularly important initiative....

Despite the impressive recent progress in AI capabilities, there are reasons why AI may be incapable of possessing a full "general intelligence". And although AI will continue to transform the workplace, some important jobs will remain outside the reach of AI. In other words, the Economic Singularity may not happen, and AGI may be impossible. These are views defended by our guest in this...

Should the pace of research into advanced artificial intelligence be slowed down, or perhaps even paused completely? Your answer to that question probably depends on your answers to a number of other questions. Is advanced artificial intelligence reaching the point where it could result in catastrophic damage? Is a slow down desirable, given that AI can also lead to lots of very positive outcomes,...

2023 is still young, but there's already a change in the attitudes of many business people regarding the future. Previously, businesses expressed occasional interest in possible disruptive scenarios, but their attention often quickly turned back to the apparently more pressing tasks of business-as-usual. But recent news of changes in AI capabilities, along with possible social transformations...

In the last few weeks, the pace of change in AI has been faster than ever before. The changes aren't just announcements of future capabilities - announcements that could have been viewed, perhaps, as hype. The changes are new versions of AI systems that are available for users around the world to experiment with, directly, here and now. These systems are being released by multiple different c...