London Futurists
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.
London Futurists
The Death of Death, with José Cordeiro
An intriguing possibility created by the exponential growth in the power of our technology is that within the lifetimes of people already born, death might become optional. Show co-hosts Calum and David are both excited about this idea, but our excitement is as nothing compared to the exuberant enthusiasm of our guest in this episode, José Cordeiro.
José was born in Venezuela, to parents who fled Franco’s dictatorship in Spain. He has closed the circle, by returning to Spain (via the USA) while another dictatorship grips Venezuela. His education and early career was thoroughly blue chip – MIT, Georgetown University, INSEAD, and then Schlumberger and Booz Allen.
Today, José is the most prominent transhumanist in Spain and Latin America, and indeed a leading light in transhumanist circles worldwide. He is a loyal follower of the ideas of Ray Kurzweil, and in 2018 he co-wrote "La Muerte de la Muerte", which has since been updated and is being published in English as “The Death of Death”. By way of full disclosure, his co-author was David.
Selected follow-ups:
https://thedeathofdeath.org/
https://cordeiro.org/
Forthcoming anti-aging conferences:
New York, 10-11 Aug: https://www.lifespan.io/ending-age-related-diseases-2023
Dublin, 17-20 Aug: https://longevitysummitdublin.com
Johannesburg, 23-24 Aug: https://conference.taffds.org
Copenhagen, 28 Aug - 1 Sept: https://agingpharma.org
Anaheim (CA), 7-10 Sept: https://raadfest.com/2023
Topics addressed in this episode include:
*) An engineering approach to improving health and longevity
*) Some cells and some organisms are already biologically immortal
*) How José met Marvin Minsky and Ray Kurzweil at MIT
*) Does death give purpose to life?
*) Why people have often resolved "to live with death"
*) Potential timescales for the attainment of longevity escape velocity for humans
*) Examples of changing lifespans for various animal species
*) The significance of the Nobel prize-winning research of Shinya Yamanaka
*) Limits of the capabilities of evolution
*) Different theories as to why aging happens: wear-and-tear vs. built-in obsolescence
*) Learning from animals that have extended lifespans - including anti-cancer mechanisms
*) Exponential progress: more funding, more people, more resources, more discoveries
*) Why longevity may soon become the largest industry in the history of humanity
*) The Longevity Dividend: "making money out of people not aging"
*) The role of politicians in accelerating the benefits of the Longevity Dividend
*) Which bold political leader will change history by being the first to declare aging as a curable disease?
*) The case for a European anti-aging agency
*) Things to say to people who insist that 80 to 85 years is a sufficiently long lifespan
*) The case for optimism, from Victor Frankl
*) The prevalence of irrational attitudes toward curing aging vs. curing cancer
*) How the MIT Technology Review changed its tune about longevity pioneer Aubrey de Grey
*) The three phases in the reception of powerful new ideas
*) Aspects of our present lifestyles that will be viewed, in 2045, as being barbaric
*) The world's most altruistic cause
Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
