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
Building brain-like AIs, with Alexander Ororbia
Some people say that all that’s necessary to improve the capabilities of AI is to scale up existing systems. That is, to use more training data, to have larger models with more parameters in them, and more computer chips to crunch through the training data. However, in this episode, we’ll be hearing from a computer scientist who thinks there are many other options for improving AI. He is Alexander Ororbia, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York State, where he directs the Neural Adaptive Computing Laboratory.
David had the pleasure of watching Alex give a talk at the AGI 2024 conference in Seattle earlier this year, and found it fascinating. After you hear this episode, we hope you reach a similar conclusion.
Selected follow-ups:
- Alexander Ororbia - Rochester Institute of Technology
- Alexander G. Ororbia II - Personal website
- AGI-24: The 17th Annual AGI Conference - AGI Society
- Joseph Tranquillo - Bucknell University
- Hopfield network - Wikipedia
- Karl Friston - UCL
- Predictive coding - Wikipedia
- Mortal Computation: A Foundation for Biomimetic Intelligence - Quantitative Biology
- The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory? - Nature Reviews Neuroscience
- I Am a Strange Loop (book by Douglas Hofstadter) - Wikipedia
- Mark Solms - Wikipedia
- Conscium: Pioneering Safe, Efficient AI
- The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness (book by Mark Solms)
- Carver Mead - Wikipedia
- Event camera (includes Dynamic Vision Sensors) - Wikipedia
- ICRA (International Conference on Robotics and Automation)
- Brain-Inspired Machine Intelligence: A Survey of Neurobiologically-Plausible Credit Assignment
- A Review of Neuroscience-Inspired Machine Learning
- ngc-learn
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