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PODCAST

London Futurists

London Futurists

Anticipating and managing exponential impact - hosts David Wood and Calum ChaceCalum 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

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All Episodes

36:41

LFP 137: Perspectives on Machine Consciousness

London Futurists ·

2026/10/08

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 bookAbout Conscium"Dr. Danie...

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40:11

LFP 136: Steve Keen - Will economists destroy...

London Futurists ·

2026/09/09

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”...

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44:54

LFP 135: Pat Kane & Indra Adnan - If politics is...

London Futurists ·

2026/08/24

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 i...

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37:04

LFP 134: Ewan McMillan - AI overhang and economics...

London Futurists ·

2026/08/12

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 h...

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40:31

LFP 133: Oliver Ritchie - Waking up Economists

London Futurists ·

2026/08/04

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 Treasur...

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50:27

LFP 132: Matteo Rossi MacDermant - Technoprogressive...

London Futurists ·

2026/07/21

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...

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35:30

LFP 131: Ben Luong - The Discontinuity Thesis

London Futurists ·

2026/06/28

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 cogni...

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42:31

The AI Automation Layoff Trap, with Gerry Tsoukalas...

London Futurists ·

2026/06/01

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 ext...

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45:03

Post-labour economics and the future of capitalism,...

London Futurists ·

2026/05/09

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 accum...

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45:36

Windfall Trust and the Economic Singularity, with...

London Futurists ·

2026/04/22

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 ...

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52:14

Anticipating 2026

London Futurists ·

2026/01/07

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 20...

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35:07

The puzzle pieces that can defuse the US-China AI...

London Futurists ·

2025/12/23

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 Oxfo...

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45:20

Jensen Huang and the zero billion dollar market, with...

London Futurists ·

2025/12/16

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 foun...

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43:42

What's your p(Pause)? with Holly Elmore

London Futurists ·

2025/12/05

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 DeepMi...

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40:25

Real-life superheroes and troubled institutions, with...

London Futurists ·

2025/10/31

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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41:15

Safe superintelligence via a community of AIs and...

London Futurists ·

2025/10/10

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...

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37:08

How progress ends: the fate of nations, with Carl...

London Futurists ·

2025/09/17

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 ...

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35:54

Tsetlin Machines, Literal Labs, and the future of AI,...

London Futurists ·

2025/09/08

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...

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40:10

Intellectual dark matter? A reputation trap? The case...

London Futurists ·

2025/08/05

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,...

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53:39

AI agents, AI safety, and AI boycotts, with Peter Scott

London Futurists ·

2025/07/29

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 ...

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137 results

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