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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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S1 · E136
Wednesday · 40 min
LFP 136: Steve Keen - Will economists destroy capitalism?
Our guest today is Professor Steve Keen, an economist and author best known for his long-standing critique of mainstream neoclassical economics. He was one of the relatively few economists to warn publicly, in advance, of the dangers that culminated in the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. In 2010 he received the Revere Award from the “Real World Economics Review” for that work. His books include “Debunking Economics”, “Can We Avoid Another Financial Crisis?”, and “The New Economics: A Manifesto”. He has held professorships at Kingston University London, the University of Western Sydney, and UCL – University College London. Selected follow-ups: "Prof Steve Keen" - Patreon "Building a New Economics" - Steve Keen's substack The Technoprogressive Opportunity: Event in London, Sept 19-20 "‘4°C of global warming is optimal’ – even Nobel Prize winners are getting things catastrophically wrong" - The Conversation "Paul Romer and William Nordhaus – why they won the 2018 ‘economics Nobel’" - by Sergey Popov "Energy in packets – What did Planck discover?" - Max Planck Society "Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?" - by Pierre Azoulay et al "The Great Depression" - book by Lionel Robbins "Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism" - book by George Akerlof and Robert Shiller "Irrational Exuberance" - book by Robert Shiller "Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist" - book by Kate Raworth "Hyman Minsky" - Wikipedia "Ben Bernanke" - Wikipedia "Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises" - book by Charles Kindleberger "How is money created?" - Bank of England "The Economic Crisis from a Neoclassical Perspective" - paper by Lee Ohanian "What helium reveals about the next chip shortage" - by Michelle Nguyen "Sovereign Money Creation and Basic Income" - London Futurists webinar featuring Geoff Crocker "The Paradox of Debt, by the Tycho Brahe of Credit" - Review by Steve Keen of the book by Richard Vague "Isabella Weber" - Wikipedia "Economics from the Top Down" - essays by Blair Fix "Stratospheric aerosol injection" - Wikipedia "Space mirror" - Wikipedia "Bamboo: A Vital Ally in Climate Action" - Climate Change Commission "The Role of Kelp Forests in Carbon Dioxide Removal and Climate Mitigation" - Kelp Forest Alliance "The two-year trail of financial controversy dogging Reform and Farage" - The Guardian "Water pollution: Facts & Figures" - Surfers against Sewage "Why is it so difficult to build new reservoirs?" - BBC News "Peter principle" - Wikipedia Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
S1 · E135
August 24 · 44 min
LFP 135: Pat Kane & Indra Adnan - If politics is broken, what's the alternative?
Our guests in this episode are Pat Kane and Indra Adnan, the co-convenors of The Alternative Global. That project was launched in 2017 with the question, “If politics is broken, what’s the alternative?” Pat and Indra will be speaking at the London Futurists and IEET event in London on 19-20 September, “The Technoprogressive Opportunity,” where they’ll giving an update on progress with their project. Our episode today provides a chance to dive into what they have experienced and learned. Pat is a writer, musician, curator, consultant, activist and futurist. He is the author of the book “The Play Ethic”, and has written for the Independent, the Sunday Times, the Guardian/Observer and Scotland’s Sunday Herald, of which he was a founding editor in 1999. He is currently a columnist with The National, and is researching a new book on politics, creativity and the science of emotions. Indra is a psycho-social therapist, founder of the Soft Power Network, and a writer and events producer. She has consulted to the World Economic Forum, Indian, Finnish and Danish governments, NATO, the Scottish Executive and the Institute of Contemporary Arts amongst others. She is the author of the book “The Politics of Waking Up: Power & Possibility In The Fractal Age”. Selected follow-ups: "The Alternative" "The Daily Alternative" (newsletter) "Who Is Pat Kane?" "About Indra Adnan" "The Politics of Waking Up: Power and Possibility in the Fractal Age" - book by Indra "The Play Ethic: A Manifesto For a Different Way of Living" - book by Pat "Fourth Generation Civilization" - Substack by Michel Bauwens "Cosmolocalism: A Framework for Building Sustainable Network State Economies" - by Sterlin "Ecocivilisation through the CAN of CANs [Community Agency Networks]" "Alternative Editorial: All For Devolution" "Scottish Community Coalition on Energy release a Manifesto for Community Renewables" "Alternative Editorial: Facing The Chasm" (covers Three Horizons) "Climate Whistleblower: We Face COLLAPSE" - Aaron Bastani Meets Kevin Anderson "Disruptive Climate Futures, with Dr Tom Harris" - London Futurists "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" by John Maynard Keynes (1930) "Spring: a social and political invitation" "Emotions and the Brain with Mark Solms" - New Thinking Allowed, with Leanne Whitney "Mo Gawdat" The Technoprogressive Opportunity: Event in London, Sept 19-20 Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
S1 · E134
August 12 · 37 min
LFP 134: Ewan McMillan - AI overhang and economics impact
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
S1 · E133
August 4 · 40 min
LFP 133: Oliver Ritchie - Waking up Economists
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
S1 · E132
July 21 · 49 min
LFP 132: Matteo Rossi MacDermant - Technoprogressive Worldbuilding
This is the first of a number of episodes on the broad theme of “the technoprogressive opportunity”. That’s the name of a conference taking place in London on the weekend of 19th and 20th September, co-organised by London Futurists and the IEET – the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. In these episodes, some of the speakers from that conference will be appearing as guests on this show. Our guest today is one of these speakers, Matteo Rossi MacDermant, a technophilosopher from the University of New Mexico. Matteo hosts a show called “Bread and Robots”, which covers subjects such as post-scarcity economics, universal basic income, the tech workers movement, and how technology can be steered toward collective abundance rather than corporate exploitation. Matteo is also the instructor for an online course called “An introduction to technoprogressive worldbuilding”. Selected follow-ups: The Technoprogressive Opportunity: Event in London, Sept 19-20 The IEET - A Technoprogressive Think-Tank Matteo Rossi MacDermant - LinkedIn Bread and Robots - Podcast and Substack by Matteo Rossi MacDermant An Introduction to Technoprogressive Worldbuilding "Technoprogressive Declaration" - from Transvision 2014 2017 update to the Technoprogressive Declaration UBI Guide - by Scott Santens Universal Basic Capital - Windfall Trust "How a Land Value Tax Can Fund a UBI" - Scott Santens Universal Basic Income and/or Alternatives - London Futurists conference held in 2018 "Why the AI world is suddenly obsessed with a 160-year-old economics paradox" - Jevon's Paradox explained by Greg Rosalsky "The Longevity City: Cities as the Engines of Healthy Longevity" - essay by Matteo Rossi MacDermant "The London boroughs with the best and worst 'healthy life' expectancy" "The Abolition of Aging" - book by David Wood (includes analysis of economic implications) Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
S1 · E131
June 28 · 34 min
LFP 131: Ben Luong - The Discontinuity Thesis
AI-driven automation of cognitive labour is not merely another technological transition but a structural discontinuity that will end, sooner or later, the central role of wages in how society operates. This discontinuity can be called “The End of Postwar Capitalism”. That’s the conclusion of a tightly argued set of essays, “The Discontinuity Thesis”, written by our guest in this episode, Ben Luong. The essays look at a range of arguments that all try to make the case that wages paid for cognitive labour will remain significant for the majority of people, so that capitalism can continue in place, even with AI having greatly expanded capabilities. According to Ben, each of these arguments fail. These back-and-forth debates are what we explore in this episode. Selected follow-ups: "The Discontinuity Thesis: A Sequence of Seven Essays on Why Postwar Capitalism Ends" by Ben Luong "Mark Zuckerberg just declared war on the entire advertising industry" - The Verge "P versus NP problem" - Wikipedia "KPMG Pulls AI Report After Hallucinated Claims About Major Organisations" - AI Insider "GDPval-AA v2 Leaderboard" - Artificial Analysis "OSWorld: 369 real computer tasks across Windows, macOS, and Ubuntu requiring GUI interaction... Much harder than web-only benchmarks" "Sorites paradox" - Wikipedia "Young people not in education, employment or training (NEET), UK: May 2026" - Office of National Statistics "Five Years" - Song by David Bowie "How ZEISS and ASML Enable the Modern Chip Industry" - Rob Hoeijmakers "Mistral AI’s $830 Million Debt Financing: Inside the European Bet on 13,800 Nvidia GPUs and a Paris AI Data Center" - Marcus Chen "Colossus (data center)" - Wikipedia "Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence" - Stanford Digital Economy Lab "Appendix I: What Would Refute the Thesis" - by Ben Luong "The Cope Index: Tracking who's coping hardest about the end of work" - by Ben Luong "The AI Alignment Problem" - from "The Singularity Principles" Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
S1 · E130
June 1 · 41 min
LFP 130: Gerry Tsoukalas and Brett Falk - The AI Automation Layoff Trap
This episode continues our investigation into the implications of advanced AI for jobs, and specifically, how to design an economic system that makes a huge success of full automation by AI. Back in 2017, Bill Gates mused that governments should address radical automation by taxing robots. Gates may not have known it at the time, but he was suggesting a Pigouvian tax. In a 1920 book called “The Economics of Welfare”, Arthur Pigou proposed levying taxes on activities that generate negative externalities — costs on third parties to a transaction. The classic example of that is pollution: a factory produces goods but creates pollution. The market price of the goods doesn't reflect the pollution costs, so the factory managers don’t try very hard to minimise them. A Pigouvian tax adds the social cost of the pollution into the price, so the producer is incentivised to minimise it. Gerry Tsoukalas and Brett Falk have published a well-received paper called “The AI Layoff Trap”, which recommends introducing a Pigouvian tax on automation that eliminates human jobs. Their proposal deserves credit for taking seriously the idea that AI may well cause severe automation, perhaps full automation – i.e. the Economic Singularity. The paper describes how firms face a prisoner’s dilemma. If they automate all their jobs then there will be no consumers to pay for any of their products. But if any of them don’t, their automating competitors will drive them out of business. Tsoukalas and Falk point out, counter-intuitively, that the fiercer the competition, the more acute the dilemma, so if we want to hold back automation, we might be better off with monopoly-ridden economies. Selected follow-ups: Gerry Tsoukalas Brett Hemenway Falk The AI Layoff Trap - The Wharton School Research Paper PDF of the AI Layoff Trap paper Arthur Pigou - Wikipedia Prisoner's dilemma - Wikipedia "Microsoft AI chief gives it 18 months—for all white-collar work to be automated by AI" "Chinese court rules firms can’t lay off workers on AI grounds" Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
S1 · E129
May 9 · 44 min
LFP 129: Ted Shelton - Post-labour economics and the future of capitalism
This episode continues our investigation into the potential wide-ranging implications of advanced AI for economics. Traditionally, value is said to be created by a combination of capital, which covers the cost of materials and equipment, and labour, whereby humans exercise skills, ingenuity, diligence, attention, and more. What has been a constant debate is the appropriate division of rewards between capital and labour. Critics of the operation of capitalism have often predicted that an accumulation of value within small groups of owners of capital will cause economic instabilities and a subsequent collapse. Despite these forecasts, capitalism has, so far, demonstrated great resilience, defying predictions of its collapse. But if human labour is increasingly displaced by advanced automation, the balance of labour and capital will be fundamentally changed, and capitalism will come under unprecedented pressures. That’s the thesis of our guest today, Ted Shelton. David first met Ted about 25 years ago, when Ted was Chief Strategy Officer of the software development tools company Borland, and David was an executive within the early smartphone industry. Since that time, Ted has worked for a variety of companies in and around Silicon Valley, including PwC, Cognizant Technology Solutions, Catalytic, Bain, and Inflection AI. Recently, he has been giving a great deal of thought to where AI is taking the economy. Selected follow-ups: Ted Shelton's posts on LinkedIn "On the Transformation of Capitalism's Fundamental Assumptions Under Conditions of Scaling Machine Intelligence" - working paper by Ted Shelton "The Industrial Economy Is Ending. What Comes Next?" - by Ted Shelton Thomas Piketty's book "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" - Wikipedia Nicholas Eberstadt's book "Men Without Work: America's Invisible Crisis" - Wikipedia Richard Sutton's essay "Bitter Lesson" - Wikipedia "Technofeudalism" - articles by Yanis Varoufakis Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
S1 · E128
April 22 · 44 min
LFP 128: Adrian Brown - Windfall Trust and the Economic Singularity
What happens if AI delivers major advances in capability and productivity, but also creates significant disruption to jobs, incomes, and public finances? That question sits at the heart of today’s episode. Our guest is Adrian Brown, the Founder and Chief Executive of Windfall Trust, a nonprofit focused on helping governments and societies prepare for the economic consequences of advanced AI. Windfall describes itself not as a think tank, but as a “policy accelerator for the age of artificial intelligence”. Their work starts from a simple premise: if AI systems significantly reshape the economy, then the question is not only how we build them, but how we prepare for their impacts, and how the gains are ultimately shared. Before founding Windfall Trust, Adrian was the founding Executive Director of the Centre for Public Impact, worked as a policy advisor in the UK Cabinet Office, and held roles at McKinsey and the Boston Consulting Group. Selected follow-ups: Windfall Trust Exercise Cygnus (Wikipedia) Erik Brynjolfsson (personal site) Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence (paper by Erik Brynjolfsson and colleagues) Anton Korinek (personal site) Windfall's UK Scenarios exercise The Economic Singularity (recent discussion paper by Calum Chace) Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age (OpenAI) UK Government announcement of the formation of "The AI and Future of Work Unit" UK Chancellor Rachel Reeve's announcement of a new "AI Economics Institute" "AI will kill income tax" - episode of Robert Peston's podcast "The Rest is Money" Windfall Policy Atlas Task-Completion Time Horizons of Frontier AI Models (METR) Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
S1 · E127
January 7 · 51 min
LFP 127: Anticipating 2026
When we started this Podcast back in August 2022, we, Calum and David, announced the theme to be “Anticipating and managing exponential impact”. We talked about three sub-themes: Developing the skills of exponential foresight; Distinguishing between scenarios, whether they were plausible or implausible, and whether they were desirable or undesirable; and thirdly, Supporting the community of collaborative exponential foresight. 126 episodes later, as we reach the transition between 2025 and 2026, it’s a good time for the two of us to take stock. Accordingly, in this episode, we each pick out a number of events from the last 12 months which we see as potential signals of larger exponential impact ahead. Selected follow-ups: An MIT report that 95% of AI pilots fail spooked investors - by Jeremy Kahn The Shape of AI: Jaggedness, Bottlenecks and Salients - by Ethan Mollick The Road To Superintelligence - by Calum AI Doomers, Accelerationists & Scouts - Digital Disruption The Economic Singularity - book by Calum How can better foresight actually improve the world? - Webinar in the series "From forecasts to levers" Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign - Anthropic Major Neuromorphic Computing projects - listed by Conscium Why AI Agent Verification Is A Critical Industry - by Calum Climate change and populism: Grounds for optimism? - LFP episode with Matt Burgess What's Our Problem? - book by Tim Urban OpenAI and Retro Biosciences achieve 50x increase in expressing stem cell reprogramming markers Progress at LEVF, December 2025 - by David UK Biobank The THRIVE Act - Regenerative Medicine Foundation Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
S1 · E126
Dec 23, 2025 · 34 min
The puzzle pieces that can defuse the US-China AI race dynamic, with Kayla Blomquist
Almost every serious discussion about options to constrain the development of advanced AI results in someone raising the question: “But what about China?” The worry behind this question is that slowing down AI research and development in the US and Europe will allow China to race ahead. It's true: the relationship between China and the rest of the world has many complications. That’s why we’re delighted that our guest in this episode is Kayla Blomquist, the Co-founder and Director of the Oxford China Policy Lab, or OCPL for short. OCPL describes itself as a global community of China and emerging technology researchers at Oxford, who produce policy-relevant research to navigate risks in the US-China relationship and beyond. In parallel with her role at OCPL, Kayla is pursuing a DPhil at the Oxford Internet Institute. She is a recent fellow at the Centre for Governance of AI, and the lead researcher and contributing author to the Oxford China Briefing Book. She holds an MSc from the Oxford Internet Institute and a BA with Honours in International Relations, Public Policy, and Mandarin Chinese from the University of Denver. She also studied at Peking University and is professionally fluent in Mandarin. Kayla previously worked as a diplomat in the U.S. Mission to China, where she specialized in the governance of emerging technologies, human rights, and improving the use of new technology within government services. Selected follow-ups: Kayla Blomquist - Personal site Oxford China Policy Lab The Oxford Internet Institute (OII) Google AI defeats human Go champion (Ke Jie) AI Safety Summit 2023 (Bletchley Park, UK) United Kingdom: Balancing Safety, Security, and Growth - OCPL China wants to lead the world on AI regulation - report from APEC 2025 China's WAICO proposal and the reordering of global AI governance Impact of AI on cyber threat from now to 2027 Options for the future of the global governance of AI - London Futurists Webinar A Tentative Draft of a Treaty - Online appendix to the book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies An International Agreement to Prevent the Premature Creation of Artificial Superintelligence Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
S1 · E125
Dec 16, 2025 · 44 min
Jensen Huang and the zero billion dollar market, with Stephen Witt
Our guest in this episode is Stephen Witt, an American journalist and author who writes about the people driving the technological revolutions. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, and is famous for deep-dive investigations. Stephen's new book is "The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip", which has just won the 2025 Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award. It is a definitive account of the rise of Nvidia, from its foundation in a Denny's restaurant in 1993 as a video game component manufacturer, to becoming the world's most valuable company, and the hardware provider for the current AI boom. Stephen's previous book, “How Music Got Free”, is a history of music piracy and the MP3, and was also a finalist for the FT Business Book of the Year. Selected follow-ups: Stephen Witt - personal site Articles by Stephen Witt on The New Yorker The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip - book site Stephen Witt wins FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year - Financial Times Nvidia Executives Battle Royale (Japanese film) - IMDb The Economic Singularity - book by Calum Chace A Cubic Millimeter of a Human Brain Has Been Mapped in Spectacular Detail - Nature NotebookLM - by Google Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
S1 · E124
Dec 5, 2025 · 43 min
What's your p(Pause)? with Holly Elmore
Our guest in this episode is Holly Elmore, who is the Founder and Executive Director of PauseAI US. The website pauseai-us.org starts with this headline: “Our proposal is simple: Don’t build powerful AI systems until we know how to keep them safe. Pause AI.” But PauseAI isn’t just a talking shop. They’re probably best known for organising public protests. The UK group has demonstrated in Parliament Square in London, with Big Ben in the background, and also outside the offices of Google DeepMind. A group of 30 PauseAI protesters gathered outside the OpenAI headquarters in San Francisco. Other protests have taken place in New York, Portland, Ottawa, Sao Paulo, Berlin, Paris, Rome, Oslo, Stockholm, and Sydney, among other cities. Previously, Holly was a researcher at the think tank Rethink Priorities in the area of Wild Animal Welfare. And before that, she studied evolutionary biology in Harvard’s Organismic and Evolutionary Biology department. Selected follow-ups: Holly Elmore - substack PauseAI US PauseAI - global site Wild Animal Suffering... and why it matters Hard problem of consciousness - Wikipedia The Unproven (And Unprovable) Case For Net Wild Animal Suffering. A Reply To Tomasik - by Michael Plant Leading Evolution Compassionately - Herbivorize Predators David Pearce (philosopher) - Wikipedia The AI industry is racing toward a precipice - Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) Nick Bostrom's new views regarding AI/AI safety - reddit AI is poised to remake the world; Help us ensure it benefits all of us - Future of Life Institute On being wrong about AI - by Scott Aharonson, on his previous suggestion that it might take "a few thousand years" to reach superhuman AI California Institute of Machine Consciousness - organisation founded by Joscha Bach Pausing AI is the only safe approach to digital sentience - article by Holly Elmore Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers - book by Geoffrey Moore Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
S1 · E123
Oct 31, 2025 · 39 min
Real-life superheroes and troubled institutions, with Tom Ough
Popular movies sometimes feature leagues of superheroes who are ready to defend the Earth against catastrophe. In this episode, we’re going to be discussing some real-life superheroes, as chronicled in the new book by our guest, Tom Ough. The book is entitled “The Anti-Catastrophe League: The Pioneers And Visionaries On A Quest To Save The World”. Some of these heroes are already reasonably well known, but others were new to David, and, he suspects, to many of the book’s readers. Tom is a London-based journalist. Earlier in his career he worked in newspapers, mostly for the Telegraph, where he was a staff feature-writer and commissioning editor. He is currently a senior editor at UnHerd, where he commissions essays and occasionally writes them. Perhaps one reason why he writes so well is that he has a BA in English Language and Literature from Oxford University, where he was a Casberd scholar. Selected follow-ups: About Tom Ough The Anti-Catastrophe League - The book's webpage On novel methods of pandemic prevention What is effective altruism? (EA) Sam Bankman-Fried - Wikipedia (also covers FTX) Open Philanthropy Conscium Here Comes the Sun - book by Bill McKibben The 10 Best Beatles Songs (Based on Streams) Carrington Event - Wikipedia Mirror life - Wikipedia Future of Humanity Institute 2005-2024: final report - by Anders Sandberg Oxford FHI Global Catastrophic Risks - FHI Conference, 2008 Forethought Review of Nick Bostrom’s Deep Utopia - by Calum DeepMind and OpenAI claim gold in International Mathematical Olympiad What the Heck is Hubble Tension? The Decade Ahead - by Leopold Aschenbrenner AI 2027 Anglofuturism Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
S1 · E122
Oct 10, 2025 · 41 min
Safe superintelligence via a community of AIs and humans, with Craig Kaplan
Craig Kaplan has been thinking about superintelligence longer than most. He bought the URL superintelligence.com back in 2006, and many years before that, in the late 1980s, he co-authored a series of papers with one of the founding fathers of AI, Herbert Simon. Craig started his career as a scientist with IBM, and later founded and ran a venture-backed company called PredictWallStreet that brought the wisdom of the crowd to Wall Street, and improved the performance of leading hedge funds. He sold that company in 2020, and now spends his time working out how to make the first superintelligence safe. As he puts it, he wants to reduce P(Doom) and increase P(Zoom). Selected follow-ups: iQ Company Superintelligence - by iQ Company Herbert A. Simon - Wikipedia Amara’s Law and Its Place in the Future of Tech - Pohan Lin The Society of Mind - book by Marvin Minsky AI 'godfather' Geoffrey Hinton warns of dangers as he quits Google - BBC News Statement on AI Risk - Center for AI Safety I’ve Spent My Life Measuring Risk. AI Rings Every One of My Alarm Bells - Paul Tudor Jones Secrets of Software Quality: 40 Innovations from IBM - book by Craig Kaplan London Futurists Podcast episode featuring David Brin Reason in human affairs - book by Herbert Simon US and China will intervene to halt ‘suicide race’ of AGI – Max Tegmark If Anybody Builds It, Everyone Dies - book by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares AGI-25 - conference in Reykjavik The First Global Brain Workshop - Brussels 2001 Center for Integrated Cognition Paul S. Rosenbloom Tatiana Shavrina, Meta Henry Minsky launches AI startup inspired by father’s MIT research Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
S1 · E121
Sep 17, 2025 · 37 min
How progress ends: the fate of nations, with Carl Benedikt Frey
Many people expect improvements in technology over the next few years, but fewer people are optimistic about improvements in the economy. Especially in Europe, there’s a narrative that productivity has stalled, that the welfare state is over-stretched, and that the regions of the world where innovation will be rewarded are the US and China – although there are lots of disagreements about which of these two countries will gain the upper hand. To discuss these topics, our guest in this episode is Carl Benedikt Frey, the Dieter Schwarz Associate Professor of AI & Work at the Oxford Internet Institute. Carl is also a Fellow at Mansfield College, University of Oxford, and is Director of the Future of Work Programme and Oxford Martin Citi Fellow at the Oxford Martin School. Carl’s new book has the ominous title, “How Progress Ends”. The subtitle is “Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations”. A central premise of the book is that our ability to think clearly about the possibilities for progress and stagnation today is enhanced by looking backward at the rise and fall of nations around the globe over the past thousand years. The book contains fascinating analyses of how countries at various times made significant progress, and at other times stagnated. The book also considers what we might deduce about the possible futures of different economies worldwide. Selected follow-ups: Professor Carl-Benedikt Frey - Oxford Martin School How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations - Princeton University Press Stop Acting Like This Is Normal - Ezra Klein ("Stop Funding Trump’s Takeover") OpenAI o3 Breakthrough High Score on ARC-AGI-Pub A Human Amateur Beat a Top Go-Playing AI Using a Simple Trick - Vice The future of employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation? - Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne Europe's Choice: Policies for Growth and Resilience - Alfred Kammer, IMF MIT Radiation Laboratory ("Rad Lab") Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
S1 · E120
Sep 8, 2025 · 35 min
Tsetlin Machines, Literal Labs, and the future of AI, with Noel Hurley
Our guest in this episode is Noel Hurley. Noel is a highly experienced technology strategist with a long career at the cutting edge of computing. He spent two decade-long stints at Arm, the semiconductor company whose processor designs power hundreds of billions of devices worldwide. Today, he’s a co-founder of Literal Labs, where he’s developing Tsetlin Machines. Named after Michael Tsetlin, a Soviet mathematician, these are a kind of machine learning model that are energy-efficient, flexible, and surprisingly effective at solving complex problems - without the opacity or computational overhead of large neural networks. AI has long had two main camps, or tribes. One camp works with neural networks, including Large Language Models. Neural networks are brilliant at pattern matching, and can be compared to human instinct, or fast thinking, to use Daniel Kahneman´s terminology. Neural nets have been dominant since the first Big Bang in AI in 2012, when Geoff Hinton and others demonstrated the foundations for deep learning. For decades before the 2012 Big Bang, the predominant form of AI was symbolic AI, also known as Good Old Fashioned AI. This can be compared to logical reasoning, or slow learning in Kahneman´s terminology. Tsetlin Machines have characteristics of both neural networks and symbolic AI. They are rule-based learning systems built from simple automata, not from neurons or weights. But their learning mechanism is statistical and adaptive, more like machine learning than traditional symbolic AI. Selected follow-ups: Noel Hurley - Literal Labs A New Generation of Artificial Intelligence - Literal Labs Michael Tsetlin - Wikipedia Thinking, Fast and Slow - book by Daniel Kahneman 54x faster, 52x less energy - MLPerf Inference metrics Introducing the Model Context Protocol (MCP) - Anthropic Pioneering Safe, Efficient AI - Conscium Smartphones and Beyond - a personal history of Psion and Symbian The Official History of Arm - Arm Interview with Sir Robin Saxby - IT Archive How Spotify came to be worth billions - BBC Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
S1 · E119
Aug 5, 2025 · 40 min
Intellectual dark matter? A reputation trap? The case of cold fusion, with Jonah Messinger
Could the future see the emergence and adoption of a new field of engineering called nucleonics, in which the energy of nuclear fusion is accessed at relatively low temperatures, producing abundant clean safe energy? This kind of idea has been discussed since 1989, when the claims of cold fusion first received media attention. It is often assumed that the field quickly reached a dead-end, and that the only scientists who continue to study it are cranks. However, as we’ll hear in this episode, there may be good reasons to keep an open mind about a number of anomalous but promising results. Our guest is Jonah Messinger, who is a Winton Scholar and Ph.D. student at the Cavendish Laboratory of Physics at the University of Cambridge. Jonah is also a Research Affiliate at MIT, a Senior Energy Analyst at the Breakthrough Institute, and previously he was a Visiting Scientist and ThinkSwiss Scholar at ETH Zürich. His work has appeared in research journals, on the John Oliver show, and in publications of Columbia University. He earned his Master’s in Energy and Bachelor’s in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was named to its Senior 100 Honorary. Selected follow-ups: Jonah Messinger (The Breakthrough Institute) nucleonics.org U.S. Department of Energy Announces $10 Million in Funding to Projects Studying Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions (ARPA-E) How Anomalous Science Breaks Through - by Jonah Messinger Wolfgang Pauli (Wikiquote) Cold fusion: A case study for scientific behavior (Understanding Science) Calculated fusion rates in isotopic hydrogen molecules - by SE Koonin & M Nauenberg Known mechanisms that increase nuclear fusion rates in the solid state - by Florian Metzler et al Introduction to superradiance (Cold Fusion Blog) Peter L. Hagelstein - Professor at MIT Models for nuclear fusion in the solid state - by Peter Hagelstein et al Risk and Scientific Reputation: Lessons from Cold Fusion - by Huw Price Katalin Karikó (Wikipedia) “Abundance” and Its Insights for Policymakers - by Hadley Brown Identifying intellectual dark matter - by Florian Metzler and Jonah Messinger Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
S1 · E118
Jul 29, 2025 · 53 min
AI agents, AI safety, and AI boycotts, with Peter Scott
This episode of London Futurists Podcast is a special joint production with the AI and You podcast which is hosted by Peter Scott. It features a three-way discussion, between Peter, Calum, and David, on the future of AI, with particular focus on AI agents, AI safety, and AI boycotts. Peter Scott is a futurist, speaker, and technology expert helping people master technological disruption. After receiving a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Cambridge University, he went to California to work for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His weekly podcast, “Artificial Intelligence and You” tackles three questions: What is AI? Why will it affect you? How do you and your business survive and thrive through the AI Revolution? Peter’s second book, also called “Artificial Intelligence and You,” was released in 2022. Peter works with schools to help them pivot their governance frameworks, curricula, and teaching methods to adapt to and leverage AI. Selected follow-ups: Artificial Intelligence and You (podcast) Making Sense of AI - Peter's personal website Artificial Intelligence and You (book) AI agent verification - Conscium Preventing Zero-Click AI Threats: Insights from EchoLeak - TrendMicro Future Crimes - book by Marc Goodman How TikTok Serves Up Sex and Drug Videos to Minors - Washington Post COVID-19 vaccine misinformation and hesitancy - Wikipedia Cambridge Analytica - Wikipedia Invisible Rulers - book by Renée DiResta 2025 Northern Ireland riots (Ballymena) - Wikipedia Google DeepMind Slammed by Protesters Over Broken AI Safety Promise Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
S1 · E117
Jul 18, 2025 · 43 min
The remarkable potential of hydrogen cars, with Hugo Spowers
The guest in this episode is Hugo Spowers. Hugo has led an adventurous life. In the 1970s and 80s he was an active member of the Dangerous Sports Club, which invented bungee jumping, inspired by an initiation ceremony in Vanuatu. Hugo skied down a black run in St.Moritz in formal dress, seated at a grand piano, and he broke his back, neck and hips when he misjudged the length of one of his bungee ropes. Hugo is a petrol head, and done more than his fair share of car racing. But if he’ll excuse the pun, his driving passion was always the environment, and he is one of the world’s most persistent and dedicated pioneers of hydrogen cars. He is co-founder and CEO of Riversimple, a 24 year-old pre-revenue startup, which have developed 5 generations of research vehicles. Hydrogen cars are powered by electric motors using electricity generated by fuel cells. Fuel cells are electrolysis in reverse. You put in hydrogen and oxygen, and what you get out is electricity and water. There is a long-standing debate among energy experts about the role of hydrogen fuel cells in the energy mix, and Hugo is a persuasive advocate. Riversimple’s cars carry modest sized fuel cells complemented by supercapacitors, with motors for each of the four wheels. The cars are made of composites, not steel, because minimising weight is critical for fuel efficiency, pollution, and road safety. The cars are leased rather than sold, which enables a circular business model, involving higher initial investment per car, and no built-in obsolescence. The initial, market entry cars are designed as local run-arounds for households with two cars, which means the fuelling network can be built out gradually. And Hugo also has strong opinions about company governance. Selected follow-ups: Hugo Spowers - Wikipedia Riversimple Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

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