London Futurists

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137

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Oct 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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October 8, 2026Episode 13736 min

LFP 137: Perspectives on Machine Consciousness

Our topic in this episode is a new book that has just been published, “Perspectives on Machine Consciousness”. It contains 26 chapters written by a total of 31 authors, who include a wide range of distinguished neuroscientists, philosophers, technologists, AI specialists, science fiction authors, and futurists. One of the book’s co-editors is Calum, which is why David is asking the questions today. Selected follow-ups: "Perspectives on Machine Consciousness" - the book About Conscium "Dr. Daniel Hulme" - personal website Verify ax (AI agent verification platform) "Hard Problem of Consciousness" - Wikipedia "The Evidence for AI Consciousness, Today" - by Cameron Berg "Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness" by Patrick Butlin et al "Why AI Isn’t Going to Become Conscious" - Anil Seth at TED "Futures with Digital Minds" - by Lucius Caviola and Bradford Saad "Will AI outsmart human intelligence? - with 'Godfather of AI' Geoffrey Hinton" - The Royal Institution "Richard Dawkins concludes AI is conscious, even if it doesn’t know it" - The Guardian "Judgment Day" - Terminator Wiki "Mindcrime" - Less Wrong "Elon Musk wants to save Western civilization from empathy" - CNN "Agent Smith's Disgust for Humanity – Iconic Matrix Scene" "Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will" (book by Robert Sapolsky) - Wikipedia "International Coordination on Advanced AI Red Lines" - IASEAI "AGI Red Lines and Green Arrows" - Daniel Faggella "Mark Solms: Engineering Consciousness – Can Robots 'Give a Damn?'" - Prism "Can analogue minds live forever?" - Chris Percy "The 'Pandora's Brain' series" - Calum Chace "The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations" - Dwarkesh Patel "Gaia hypothesis" - Wikipedia "Can AI Become Conscious? with Susan Schneider" - Closer to Truth "The frontier of brain science: AI and organoid research takes center stage in Silicon Valley" - UC Santa Cruz News Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

September 9, 2026Episode 13640 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

August 24, 2026Episode 13544 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

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 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

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" - Gwern Music: 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 19-20 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

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 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

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 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

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 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