London Futurists

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134

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Aug 2026

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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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August 12, 2026Episode 13437 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 websiteEwan 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" - Wikipedia2025 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 LabMusic: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

August 4, 2026Episode 13340 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" - GwernMusic: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

July 21, 2026Episode 13249 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 19-20The IEET - A Technoprogressive Think-TankMatteo Rossi MacDermant - LinkedInBread and Robots - Podcast and Substack by Matteo Rossi MacDermantAn Introduction to Technoprogressive Worldbuilding"Technoprogressive Declaration" - from Transvision 20142017 update to the Technoprogressive DeclarationUBI Guide - by Scott SantensUniversal Basic Capital - Windfall Trust"How a Land Value Tax Can Fund a UBI" - Scott SantensUniversal 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

June 28, 2026Episode 13134 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

June 1, 2026Episode 13041 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 TsoukalasBrett Hemenway FalkThe AI Layoff Trap - The Wharton School Research PaperPDF of the AI Layoff Trap paperArthur Pigou - WikipediaPrisoner'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

May 9, 2026Episode 12944 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 SheltonThomas Piketty's book "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" - WikipediaNicholas Eberstadt's book "Men Without Work: America's Invisible Crisis" - WikipediaRichard Sutton's essay "Bitter Lesson" - Wikipedia"Technofeudalism" - articles by Yanis VaroufakisMusic: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

April 22, 2026Episode 12844 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 TrustExercise 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 exerciseThe 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 AtlasTask-Completion Time Horizons of Frontier AI Models (METR)Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

January 7, 2026Episode 12751 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 KahnThe Shape of AI: Jaggedness, Bottlenecks and Salients - by Ethan MollickThe Road To Superintelligence - by CalumAI Doomers, Accelerationists & Scouts - Digital DisruptionThe Economic Singularity - book by CalumHow can better foresight actually improve the world? - Webinar in the series "From forecasts to levers"Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign - AnthropicMajor Neuromorphic Computing projects - listed by ConsciumWhy AI Agent Verification Is A Critical Industry - by CalumClimate change and populism: Grounds for optimism? - LFP episode with Matt BurgessWhat's Our Problem? - book by Tim UrbanOpenAI and Retro Biosciences achieve 50x increase in expressing stem cell reprogramming markersProgress at LEVF, December 2025 - by DavidUK BiobankThe THRIVE Act - Regenerative Medicine FoundationMusic: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

December 23, 2025Episode 12634 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 siteOxford China Policy LabThe 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 - OCPLChina wants to lead the world on AI regulation - report from APEC 2025China's WAICO proposal and the reordering of global AI governanceImpact of AI on cyber threat from now to 2027Options for the future of the global governance of AI - London Futurists WebinarA Tentative Draft of a Treaty - Online appendix to the book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone DiesAn International Agreement to Prevent the Premature Creation of Artificial SuperintelligenceMusic: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

December 16, 2025Episode 12544 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 siteArticles by Stephen Witt on The New YorkerThe Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip - book siteStephen Witt wins FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year - Financial TimesNvidia ExecutivesBattle Royale (Japanese film) - IMDbThe Economic Singularity - book by Calum ChaceA Cubic Millimeter of a Human Brain Has Been Mapped in Spectacular Detail - NatureNotebookLM - by GoogleMusic: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration