London Futurists

Our guest in this episode is Nick Mabey, the co-founder and co-CEO of one of the world’s most influential climate change think tanks, E3G, where the name stands for Third Generation Environmentalism. As well as his roles with E3G, Nick is founder and chair of London Climate Action Week, and he has several independent appointments including as a London Sustainable Development Commissioner.Nick has previously worked in the UK Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, the UK Foreign Office, WWF-UK, London Business School, and the UK electricity industry. As an academic he was lead author of “Argument in the Greenhouse”; one of the first books examining the economics of climate change.He was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Jubilee honours list in 2022 for services to climate change and support to the UK COP 26 Presidency.As the conversation makes clear, there is both good news and bad news regarding responses to climate change.Selected follow-ups:Nick Mabey's websiteE3G"Call for UK Government to 'get a grip' on climate change impacts"The IPCC's 2023 synthesis reportChatham House commentary on IPCC report"Why Climate Change Is a National Security Risk"The UK's Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC)Bjørn LomborgMatt RidleyTim LentonJason HickelMark CarneyMusic: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain DeclarationDigital Disruption with Geoff Nielson Discover how technology is reshaping our lives and livelihoods.Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Science and technology journalist Sally Adee discusses the use of electricity in the body and its potential future applications, including improving brain performance, healing wounds, stimulating regeneration, combating cancer, and reversing aspects of aging.

Professor Stuart Russell, author of 'Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach', discusses the need for safe AI, potential risks of advanced AI systems, the impact on work and human self-worth, implications of superintelligence, training neural networks, and overcoming limitations of language models.

Rebecca Gorman, CEO of Aligned AI, discusses the challenges of aligning and controlling superintelligent AI. Aligned AI focuses on safety in AI systems and has developed products like ACE and Equitire to self-correct models and address bias. The podcast also explores the commercial and humanitarian interests in deploying AI and the concept of using ACE to achieve breakthrough results in the coin run test.

Our guest in this episode is Dhiraj Mukherjee, best known as the co-founder of Shazam. Calum and David both still remember the sense of amazement we felt when, way back in the dotcom boom, we used Shazam to identify a piece of music from its first couple of bars. It seemed like magic, and was tangible evidence of how fast technology was moving: it was creating services which seemed like science fiction.Shazam was eventually bought by Apple in 2018 for a reported 400 million dollars. This gave Dhiraj the funds to pursue new interests. He is now a prolific investor and a keynote speaker on the subject of how companies both large and small can be more innovative.In this conversation, Dhiraj highlights some lessons from his personal entrepreneurial journey, and reflects on ways in which the task of entrepreneurs is changing, in the UK and elsewhere. The conversation covers possible futures in fields such as Climate Action and the overcoming of unconscious biases.Selected follow-ups:https://dhirajmukherjee.com/https://www.shazam.com/https://dandelionenergy.com/https://technation.io/Entrepreneur Firsthttps://fairbrics.co/https://neoplants.com/Al Gore's Generation Investment Management Fundhttps://www.mevitae.com/Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain DeclarationDigital Disruption with Geoff Nielson Discover how technology is reshaping our lives and livelihoods.Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Our guest in this episode is James Hughes. James is a bioethicist and sociologist who serves as Associate Provost at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is also the Executive Director of the IEET, that is the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, which he co-founded back in 2004.The stated mission of the IEET seems to be more important than ever, in the fast-changing times of the mid-2020s. To quote a short extract from its website:The IEET promotes ideas about how technological progress can increase freedom, happiness, and human flourishing in democratic societies. We believe that technological progress can be a catalyst for positive human development so long as we ensure that technologies are safe and equitably distributed. We call this a “technoprogressive” orientation.Focusing on emerging technologies that have the potential to positively transform social conditions and the quality of human lives – especially “human enhancement technologies” – the IEET seeks to cultivate academic, professional, and popular understanding of their implications, both positive and negative, and to encourage responsible public policies for their safe and equitable use.That mission fits well with what we like to discuss with guests on this show. In particular, this episode asks questions about a conference that has just finished in Boston, co-hosted by the IEET, with the headline title “Emerging Technologies and the Future of Work”. The episode also covers the history and politics of transhumanism, as a backdrop to discussion of present and future issues.Selected follow-ups:https://ieet.org/James Hughes on Wikipediahttps://medium.com/institute-for-ethics-and-emerging-technologiesConference: Emerging Technologies and the Future of WorkMusic: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain DeclarationDigital Disruption with Geoff Nielson Discover how technology is reshaping our lives and livelihoods.Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Rebecca Finlay, CEO of PAI, discusses the guidelines developed by the Partnership on AI to address risks associated with advanced AI systems. Topics include societal risks, synthetic media framework, non-regulatory levers for responsible use of technology, public input for AI guidance, and the idea of a moratorium on advanced AI development.

Guest Connor Leahy, German-American AI researcher and entrepreneur, discusses the balance between excitement and concerns surrounding new technologies, the potential outcomes of superintelligence, and the challenge of controlling an entity that is much smarter than humans. The importance of addressing AGI as a problem for its beneficial impact is emphasized, along with the need for regulations, safety measures, and raising awareness to address the challenges of artificial intelligence.

The launch of GPT-4 on the 14th of March this year was shocking as well as exciting. ChatGPT had been released the previous November, and became the fastest-growing app ever. But GPT-4’s capabilities were a level beyond, and it provoked remarkable comments from people who had previously said little about the future of AI. In May, Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak described superintelligence as an existential risk to humanity. A year ago, it would have been inconceivable for the leader of a major country to say such a thing.The following month, in June, Sunak announced that a global summit on AI safety would be held in November at the historically resonant venue of Bletchley Park, the stately home where during World War Two, Alan Turing and others cracked the German Enigma code, and probably shortened the war by many months.Despite the fact that AI is increasingly humanity’s most powerful technology, there is not yet an established forum for world leaders to discuss its longer term impacts, including accelerating automation, extended longevity, and the awesome prospect of superintelligence. The world needs its leaders to engage in a clear-eyed, honest, and well-informed discussion of these things.The summit is scheduled for the 1st and 2nd of November, and Matt Clifford, the CEO of the high-profile VC firm Entrepreneur First, has taken a sabbatical to help prepare it.To help us all understand what the summit might achieve, the guest in this episode is Ollie Buckley.Ollie studied PPE at Oxford, and was later a policy fellow at Cambridge. After six years as a strategy consultant with Monitor, he spent a decade as a civil servant, developing digital technology policy in the Cabinet Office and elsewhere. Crucially, from 2018 to 2021 he was the founding Executive Director of the UK government's original AI governance advisory body, the Centre for Data Ethics & Innovation (CDEI), where he led some of the original policy development regarding the regulation of AI and data-driven technologies. Since then, he has been advising tech companies, civil society and international organisations on AI policy as a consultant.Selected follow-ups:https://www.linkedin.com/in/ollie-buckley-10064b/https://www.publicaffairsnetworking.com/news/tech-policy-consultancy-boosts-data-and-ai-offer-with-senior-hirehttps://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ai-safety-summit-programme/ai-safety-summit-day-1-and-2-programmehttps://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ai-safety-summit-introduction/ai-safety-summit-introduction-htmlAn open event at Wilton Hall, Bletchley, the afternoon before the AI Safety Summit starts: https://www.meetup.com/london-futurists/events/296765860/Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain DeclarationDigital Disruption with Geoff Nielson Discover how technology is reshaping our lives and livelihoods.Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

In the future, energy will be too cheap to meter. That used to be a common vision of the future: abundant, clean energy, if not exactly free, then much cheaper than today's energy. But a funny thing happened en route to that future of energy abundance. High energy costs are still with us in 2023, and are part of what's called the cost-of-living crisis. Moreover, although there's some adoption of green, non-polluting energy, there seems to be as much carbon-based energy used as ever.Regular listeners to this show will know, however, that one of our themes is that forecasts of the future often go wrong, not so much in their content, but in their timing. New technology and the associated products and services can take longer than expected to mature, but once a transition does start, it can accelerate. And that's a possible scenario for the area of technology we discuss in this episode, namely, space-based solar power.Joining us to discuss the prospects for satellites in space gathering significant amounts of energy from the sun, and then beaming it wirelessly to receivers on the ground, is John Bucknell, the CEO of the marvellously named company Virtus Solis.John has been with Virtus Solis, as CEO and Founder, since 2018. His career previously involved leading positions at Chrysler, SpaceX, General Motors, and the 3D printing company Divergent.Selected follow-ups:https://virtussolis.space/Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain DeclarationDigital Disruption with Geoff Nielson Discover how technology is reshaping our lives and livelihoods.Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify