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London Futurists

London Futurists

123 episodes

1 week ago

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 Lon...

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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 Lon...

Show more...

Episodes (20/123)

London Futurists

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 Lon...

1 week ago

40 minutes

London Futurists

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...

1 month ago

41 minutes

London Futurists

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 ...

1 month ago

37 minutes

London Futurists

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, f...

2 months ago

35 minutes

London Futurists

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,...

3 months ago

40 minutes

London Futurists

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 ...

3 months ago

54 minutes

London Futurists

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 excus...

3 months ago

44 minutes

London Futurists

AI and the end of conflict, with Simon Horton

Can we use AI to improve how we handle conflict? Or even to end the worst conflicts that are happening all around us? That’s the subject of the new book of our guest in this episode, Simon Horton. The book has the bold title “The End of Conflict: How AI will end war and help us get on better”. Simon has a rich background, including being a stand-up comedian and a trapeze artist – which are, perhaps, two useful skills for dealing with acute conflict. He has taught negotiation and conflict reso...

4 months ago

40 minutes

London Futurists

The AI disconnect: understanding vs motivation, with Nate Soares

Our guest in this episode is Nate Soares, Executive Director of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, or MIRI. MIRI was founded in 2000 as the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence by Eliezer Yudkowsky, with support from a couple of internet entrepreneurs. Among other things, it ran a series of conferences called the Singularity Summit. In 2012, Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil, acquired the Singularity Summit, including the Singularity brand, and the Institute was renamed...

5 months ago

50 minutes

London Futurists

Anticipating an Einstein moment in the understanding of consciousness, with Henry Shevlin

Our guest in this episode is Henry Shevlin. Henry is the Associate Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, where he also co-directs the Kinds of Intelligence program and oversees educational initiatives. He researches the potential for machines to possess consciousness, the ethical ramifications of such developments, and the broader implications for our understanding of intelligence. In his 2024 paper, “Consciousness, Machin...

5 months ago

42 minutes

London Futurists

The case for a conditional AI safety treaty, with Otto Barten

How can a binding international treaty be agreed and put into practice, when many parties are strongly tempted to break the rules of the agreement, for commercial or military advantage, and when cheating may be hard to detect? That’s the dilemma we’ll examine in this episode, concerning possible treaties to govern the development and deployment of advanced AI. Our guest is Otto Barten, Director of the Existential Risk Observatory, which is based in the Netherlands but operates internationally...

6 months ago

38 minutes

London Futurists

Humanity's final four years? with James Norris

In this episode, we return to the subject of existential risks, but with a focus on what actions can be taken to eliminate or reduce these risks. Our guest is James Norris, who describes himself on his website as an existential safety advocate. The website lists four primary organizations which he leads: the International AI Governance Alliance, Upgradable, the Center for Existential Safety, and Survival Sanctuaries. Previously, one of James' many successful initiatives was Effective Altruism...

6 months ago

49 minutes

London Futurists

Human extinction: thinking the unthinkable, with Sean ÓhÉigeartaigh

Our subject in this episode may seem grim – it’s the potential extinction of the human species, either from a natural disaster, like a supervolcano or an asteroid, or from our own human activities, such as nuclear weapons, greenhouse gas emissions, engineered biopathogens, misaligned artificial intelligence, or high energy physics experiments causing a cataclysmic rupture in space and time. These scenarios aren’t pleasant to contemplate, but there’s a school of thought that urges us to take t...

6 months ago

43 minutes

London Futurists

The best of times and the worst of times, updated, with Ramez Naam

Our guest in this episode, Ramez Naam, is described on his website as “climate tech investor, clean energy advocate, and award-winning author”. But that hardly starts to convey the range of deep knowledge that Ramez brings to a wide variety of fields. It was his 2013 book, “The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet”, that first alerted David to the breadth of scope of his insight about future possibilities – both good possibilities and bad possibilities. He still vividly re...

7 months ago

45 minutes

London Futurists

PAI at Paris: the global AI ecosystem evolves, with Rebecca Finlay

In this episode, our guest is Rebecca Finlay, the CEO at Partnership on AI (PAI). Rebecca previously joined us in Episode 62, back in October 2023, in what was the run-up to the Global AI Safety Summit in Bletchley Park in the UK. Times have moved on, and earlier this month, Rebecca and the Partnership on AI participated in the latest global summit in that same series, held this time in Paris. This summit, breaking with the previous naming, was called the Global AI Action Summit. We’ll be hea...

8 months ago

38 minutes

London Futurists

AI agents: challenges ahead of mainstream adoption, with Tom Davenport

The most highly anticipated development in AI this year is probably the expected arrival of AI agents, also referred to as “agentic AI”. We are told that AI agents have the potential to reshape how individuals and organizations interact with technology. Our guest to help us explore this is Tom Davenport, Distinguished Professor in Information Technology and Management at Babson College, and a globally recognized thought leader in the areas of analytics, data science, and artificial intelligen...

9 months ago

33 minutes

London Futurists

Post-labour economics, with David Shapiro

In this episode, we return to a theme which is likely to become increasingly central to public discussion in the months and years ahead. To use a term coined by this podcast’s cohost Calum Chace, this theme is the Economic Singularity, namely the potential all-round displacement of humans from the workforce by ever more capable automation. That leads to the question: what are our options for managing the transition of society to increasing technological unemployment and technological underemp...

9 months ago

42 minutes

London Futurists

Longevity activism at 82, 86, and beyond, with Kenneth Scott and Helga Sands

Our guests in this episode have been described as the world’s two oldest scientifically astute longevity activists. They are Kenneth Scott, aged 82, who is based in Florida, and Helga Sands, aged 86, who lives in London. David has met both of them several times at a number of longevity events, and they always impress him, not only with their vitality and good health, but also with the level of knowledge and intelligence they apply to the question of which treatments are the best, for them pe...

10 months ago

45 minutes

London Futurists

Models for society when humans have zero economic value, with Jeff LaPorte

Our guest in this episode is Jeff LaPorte, a software engineer, entrepreneur and investor based in Vancouver, who writes Road to Artificia, a newsletter about discovering the principles of post‑AI societies. Calum recently came across Jeff's article “Valuing Humans in the Age of Superintelligence: HumaneRank” and thought it had some good, original ideas, so we wanted to invite Jeff onto the podcast and explore them. Selected follow-ups: Jeff LaPorte personal business websiteRoad to Artifici...

10 months ago

41 minutes

London Futurists

From ineffective altruism to effective altruism? with Stefan Schubert

Our subject in this episode is altruism – our human desire and instinct to assist each other, making some personal sacrifices along the way. More precisely, our subject is the possible future of altruism – a future in which our philanthropic activities – our charitable donations, and how we spend our discretionary time – could have a considerably greater impact than at present. The issue is that many of our present activities, which are intended to help others, aren’t particularly effective. ...

10 months ago

34 minutes