How can a binding international treaty be agreed and put into practice, when many parties are strongly tempted to break the rules of the agreement, for commercial or military advantage, and when cheating may be hard to detect? That’s the dilemma we’ll examine in this episode, concerning possible treaties to govern the development and deployment of advanced AI.

Our guest is Otto Barten, Director of the Existential Risk Observatory, which is based in the Netherlands but operates internationally. In November last year, Time magazine published an article by Otto, advocating what his organisation calls a Conditional AI Safety Treaty. In March this year, these ideas were expanded into a 34-page preprint which we’ll be discussing today, “International Agreements on AI Safety: Review and Recommendations for a Conditional AI Safety Treaty”.

Before co-founding the Existential Risk Observatory in 2021, Otto had roles as a sustainable energy engineer, data scientist, and entrepreneur. He has a BSc in Theoretical Physics from the University of Groningen and an MSc in Sustainable Energy Technology from Delft University of Technology.

Selected follow-ups:

• Existential Risk Observatory
• There Is a Solution to AI’s Existential Risk Problem - Time
• International Agreements on AI Safety: Review and Recommendations for a Conditional AI Safety Treaty - Otto Barten and colleagues
• The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity - book by Toby Ord
• Grand futures and existential risk - Lecture by Anders Sandberg in London attended by Otto
• PauseAI
• StopAI
• Responsible Scaling Policies - METR
• Meta warns of 'worse' experience for European users - BBC News
• Accidental Nuclear War: a Timeline of Close Calls - FLI
• The Vulnerable World Hypothesis - Nick Bostrom
• Semiconductor Manufacturing Optics - Zeiss
• California Institute for Machine Consciousness
• Tipping point for large-scale social change? Just 25 percent - Penn Today

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

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In this episode, we return to the subject of existential risks, but with a focus on what actions can be taken to eliminate or reduce these risks.

Our guest is James Norris, who describes himself on his website as an existential safety advocate. The website lists four primary organizations which he leads: the International AI Governance Alliance, Upgradable, the Center for Existential Safety, and Survival Sanctuaries.

Previously, one of James' many successful initiatives was Effective Altruism Global, the international conference series for effective altruists. He also spent some time as the organizer of a kind of sibling organization to London Futurists, namely Bay Area Futurists. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a triple major in psychology, sociology, and philosophy, as well as with minors in too many subjects to mention.

Selected follow-ups:

• James Norris website
• Upgrade your life & legacy - Upgradable
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen Covey)
• Beneficial AI 2017 - Asilomar conference
• "...superintelligence in a few thousand days" - Sam Altman blogpost
• Amara's Law - DevIQ
• The Probability of Nuclear War (JFK estimate)
• AI Designs Chemical Weapons - The Batch
• The Vulnerable World Hypothesis - Nick Bostrom
• We Need To Build Trustworthy AI Systems To Monitor Other AI: Yoshua Bengio
• Instrumental convergence - Wikipedia
• Neanderthal extinction - Wikipedia
• Matrioshka brain - Wikipedia
• Will there be a 'WW3' before 2050? - Manifold prediction market
• Existential Safety Action Pledge
• An Urgent Call for Global AI Governance - IAIGA petition
• Build your survival sanctuary

Other people mentioned include:

• Eliezer Yudkowsky, Roman Yampolskiy, Yan LeCun, Andrew Ng

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

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Our subject in this episode may seem grim – it’s the potential extinction of the human species, either from a natural disaster, like a supervolcano or an asteroid, or from our own human activities, such as nuclear weapons, greenhouse gas emissions, engineered biopathogens, misaligned artificial intelligence, or high energy physics experiments causing a cataclysmic rupture in space and time.

These scenarios aren’t pleasant to contemplate, but there’s a school of thought that urges us to take them seriously – to think about the unthinkable, in the phrase coined in 1962 by pioneering futurist Herman Kahn. Over the last couple of decades, few people have been thinking about the unthinkable more carefully and systematically than our guest today, Sean ÓhÉigeartaigh. Sean is the author of a recent summary article from Cambridge University Press that we’ll be discussing, “Extinction of the human species: What could cause it and how likely is it to occur?”

Sean is presently based in Cambridge where he is a Programme Director at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. Previously he was founding Executive Director of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, and before that, he managed research activities at the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford.

Selected follow-ups:

• Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh - Leverhulme Centre Profile
• Extinction of the human species - by Sean ÓhÉigeartaigh
• Herman Kahn - Wikipedia
• Moral.me - by Conscium
• Classifying global catastrophic risks - by Shahar Avin et al
• Defence in Depth Against Human Extinction - by Anders Sandberg et al
• The Precipice - book by Toby Ord
• Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks - by METR
• Cold Takes - blog by Holden Karnofsky
• What Comes After the Paris AI Summit? - Article by Sean
• ARC-AGI - by François Chollet
• Henry Shevlin - Leverhulme Centre profile
• Eleos (includes Rosie Campbell and Robert Long)
• NeurIPS talk by David Chalmers

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Our guest in this episode, Ramez Naam, is described on his website as “climate tech investor, clean energy advocate, and award-winning author”. But that hardly starts to convey the range of deep knowledge that Ramez brings to a wide variety of fields. It was his 2013 book, “The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet”, that first alerted David to the breadth of scope of his insight about future possibilities – both good possibilities and bad possibilities. He still vividly remembers its opening words, quoting Charles Dickens from “The Tale of Two Cities”:

Quote: “‘It was the best of times; it was the worst of times’ – the opening line of Charles Dickens’s 1859 masterpiece applies equally well to our present era. We live in unprecedented wealth and comfort, with capabilities undreamt of in previous ages. We live in a world facing unprecedented global risks—risks to our continued prosperity, to our survival, and to the health of our planet itself. We might think of our current situation as ‘A Tale of Two Earths’.” End quote.

12 years after the publication of “The Infinite Resource”, it seems that the Earth has become even better, but also even worse. Where does this leave the power of ideas? Or do we need more than ideas, as ominous storm clouds continue to gather on the horizon?

Selected follow-ups:

• Ramez Naam - personal website
• The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet
• The Nexus Trilogy (Nexus Crux Apex)
• Jesse Jenkins (Princeton)
• Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet - book by Mark Lynas
• 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo - Wikipedia
• We cool Earth, with reflective clouds - Make Sunsets
• Direct Air Capture (DAC) - Wikipedia
• Frontier: An advance market commitment to accelerate carbon removal
• Toward a Responsible Solar Geoengineering Research Program - by David Keith
• South Korea scales down plans for nuclear power
• Microsoft chooses infamous nuclear site for AI power
• Machines of Loving Grace: How AI Could Transform the World for the Better - Essay by Dario Amodei

Music: Spike Prote

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In this episode, our guest is Rebecca Finlay, the CEO at Partnership on AI (PAI). Rebecca previously joined us in Episode 62, back in October 2023, in what was the run-up to the Global AI Safety Summit in Bletchley Park in the UK. Times have moved on, and earlier this month, Rebecca and the Partnership on AI participated in the latest global summit in that same series, held this time in Paris. This summit, breaking with the previous naming, was called the Global AI Action Summit. We’ll be hearing from Rebecca how things have evolved since we last spoke – and what the future may hold.

Prior to joining Partnership on AI, Rebecca founded the AI & Society program at global research organization CIFAR, one of the first international, multistakeholder initiatives on the impact of AI in society. Rebecca’s insights have been featured in books and media including The Financial Times, The Guardian, Politico, and Nature Machine Intelligence. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences and sits on advisory bodies in Canada, France, and the U.S.

Selected follow-ups:

• Partnership on AI
• Rebecca Finlay
• Our previous episode featuring Rebecca
• CIFAR (The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research)
• "It is more than time that we move from science fiction" - remarks by Anne Bouverot
• International AI Safety Report 2025 - report from expert panel chaired by Yoshua Bengio
• The Inaugural Conference of the International Association for Safe and Ethical AI (IASEAI)
• A.I. Pioneer Yoshua Bengio Proposes a Safe Alternative Amid Agentic A.I. Hype
• US and UK refuse to sign Paris summit declaration on ‘inclusive’ AI
• Current AI
• Collaborative event on AI accountability
• CERN for AI
• AI Summit Day 1: Harnessing AI for the Future of Work
• The Economic Singularity

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The most highly anticipated development in AI this year is probably the expected arrival of AI agents, also referred to as “agentic AI”. We are told that AI agents have the potential to reshape how individuals and organizations interact with technology.

Our guest to help us explore this is Tom Davenport, Distinguished Professor in Information Technology and Management at Babson College, and a globally recognized thought leader in the areas of analytics, data science, and artificial intelligence. Tom has written, co-authored, or edited about twenty books, including "Competing on Analytics" and "The AI Advantage." He has worked extensively with leading organizations and has a unique perspective on the transformative impact of AI across industries. He has recently co-authored an article in the MIT Sloan Management Review, “Five Trends in AI and Data Science for 2025”, which included a section on AI agents – which is why we invited him to talk about the subject.

Selected follow-ups:

• Tom Davenport - personal site
• Five Trends in AI and Data Science for 2025 - MIT Sloan Management Review
• Michael Martin Hammer - Wikipedia
• AI winter - Wikipedia
• AI is coming for the OnlyFans chat industry - Fortune
• How Gen AI and Analytical AI Differ — and When to Use Each - Harvard Business Review
• Truth Terminal - The AI Bot That Became a Crypto Millionaire - a16z
• Jim Simons - Wikipedia
• Why The "Godfather of AI" Now Fears His Own Creation - Curt Jaimungal
  interviews Geoffrey Hinton
• Attention Is All You Need - Google researchers 
• Apple suspends error-strewn AI generated news alerts - BBC News
• Gen AI cuts costs by 30% - London Futurists Podcast episode featuring David Wakeling, partner at A&O Shearman
• The path to agentic automation is UiPath - UiPath
• Microsoft CEO Predicts: "AI Agents Will Replace ALL Software" - AI Insights Explorer
• NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang Keynote at CES 2025 - Nvidia
• Pioneering Safe, Efficient AI - Conscium
• A New Survey Of Generative AI Shows Lots Of Work To Do - October 2023 article by Tom Davenport

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In this episode, we return to a theme which is likely to become increasingly central to public discussion in the months and years ahead. To use a term coined by this podcast’s cohost Calum Chace, this theme is the Economic Singularity, namely the potential all-round displacement of humans from the workforce by ever more capable automation. That leads to the question: what are our options for managing the transition of society to increasing technological unemployment and technological underemployment.

Our guest, who will be sharing his thinking on these questions, is the prolific writer and YouTuber David Shapiro. As well as keeping on top of fast-changing news about innovations in AI, David has been developing a set of ideas he calls post-labour economics – how an economy might continue to function even if humans can no longer gain financial rewards in direct return for their labour.

Selected follow-ups:

• David Shapiro’s Substack
• David Shapiro's channel on YouTube
• Julia McCoy's channel on YouTube
• Next stop: Miami - Waymo
• Resource Based Economy
• Debt: The First 5,000 Years - book by David Graeber
• Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better - book by Lyn Alden
• The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking - book by Saifedean Ammous
• Normalcy bias - Wikipedia
• Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty - book by Daron Acemoğlu and James A. Robinson
• Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail - book by Ray Dalio
• Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom - book by Grace Blakeley
• The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and Fully Automated Luxury Capitalism - book by Calum Chace

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

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Our guests in this episode have been described as the world’s two oldest scientifically astute longevity activists. They are Kenneth Scott, aged 82, who is based in Florida, and Helga Sands, aged 86, who lives in London.

David has met both of them several times at a number of longevity events, and they always impress him, not only with their vitality and good health, but also with the level of knowledge and intelligence they apply to the question of which treatments are the best, for them personally and for others, to help keep people young and vibrant.

Selected follow-ups:

• Waiting For God - 1990s BBC Comedy
• Adelle Davis, Nutritionist
• Roger J. Williams, Biochemist
• The Importance of Maintaining a Low Omega-6/Omega-3 Ratio
• Life Extension Magazine
• California Age Management Institute
• Fibrinogen and aging
• Professor Angus Dalgleish, Nuffield Health
• About Aubrey de Grey speaking at the Royal Institution
• George Church, Geneticist
• James Kirkland, Mayo Clinic
• Daniel Munoz-Espin, Cambridge
• Nobel Prize for John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka
• VSELs and S.O.N.G. laser
• Xtend Optimal Health
• Follistatin gene therapy, Minicircle
• Exosomes vs Stem Cells
• Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease - book by Caldwell Esselstyn Jr 
• Dasatinib and Quercetin (senolytics)
• We reverse atherosclerosis - Repair Biotechnologies
• Bioreactor-Grown Mitochondria - Mitrix
• Nobel Winner Shinya Yamanaka: Cell Therapy Is ‘Very Promising’ For Cance

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Our guest in this episode is Jeff LaPorte, a software engineer, entrepreneur and investor based in Vancouver, who writes Road to Artificia, a newsletter about discovering the principles of post‑AI societies.

Calum recently came across Jeff's article “Valuing Humans in the Age of Superintelligence: HumaneRank” and thought it had some good, original ideas, so we wanted to invite Jeff onto the podcast and explore them.

Selected follow-ups:

• Jeff LaPorte personal business website
• Road to Artificia: A newsletter about discovering the principles of societies post‑AI
• Valuing Humans in the Age of Superintelligence: HumaneRank
• Ideas Lying Around - article by Cory Doctorow about a famous saying by Milton Friedman
• PageRank - Wikipedia
• Nosedive (Black Mirror episode) - IMDb
• The Economic Singularity - book by Calum Chace
• World Chess Championship 2024 - WIkipedia
• WALL.E (2008 movie) - IMDb
• A day in the life of Asimov, 2045 - short story by David Wood
• Why didn't electricity immediately change manufacturing? - by Tim Harford, BBC
• Responsible use of artificial intelligence in government - Government of Canada
• Bipartisan House Task Force Report on Artificial Intelligence - U.S. House of Representatives

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

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Our subject in this episode is altruism – our human desire and instinct to assist each other, making some personal sacrifices along the way. More precisely, our subject is the possible future of altruism – a future in which our philanthropic activities – our charitable donations, and how we spend our discretionary time – could have a considerably greater impact than at present. The issue is that many of our present activities, which are intended to help others, aren’t particularly effective.

That’s the judgement reached by our guest today, Stefan Schubert. Stefan is a researcher in philosophy and psychology, currently based in Stockholm, Sweden, and has previously held roles at the LSE and the University of Oxford. Stefan is the co-author of the recently published book “Effective Altruism and the Human Mind”.

Selected follow-ups:

• Stefan Schubert - Effective Altruism
• Effective Altruism and the Human Mind: The Clash Between Impact and Intuition - Oxford University Press (open access)
• Centre for Effective Altruism
• Professor Nadira Faber - Uehiro Institute, Oxford
• What are the best charities to support in 2024? - Giving What We Can
• Effective Altruist Leaders Were Repeatedly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed - Time
• Virtues for Real-World Utilitarians - by Stefan Schubert & Lucius Caviola, Utilitarianism
• Deworming - Effective Altruism Forum
• What we know about Musk's cost-cutting mission - BBC article about DOGE
• What is your p(doom)? with Darren McKee
• Longtermism - Wikipedia

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

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Our guest in this episode is Amory Lovins, a distinguished environmental scientist, and co-founder of RMI, which he co-founded in 1982 as Rocky Mountain Institute. It’s what he calls a think do and scale tank, with 700 people in 62 countries, and a budget of well over $100m a year.

For over five decades, Amory has championed innovative approaches to energy systems, advocating for a world where energy services are delivered with least cost and least impact. He has advised all manner of governments, companies, and NGOs, and published 31 books and over 900 papers. It’s an over-used word, but in this case it is justified: Amory is a true thought leader in the global energy transition.

Selected follow-ups:

• Inside Amory's Brain - RMI
• Get to know us - RMI
• Books by Amory B. Lovins - Goodreads
• Reinventing Fire - RMI
• Integrative Design: A Practice to Tackle Complex Challenges - Stanford d.school
• What is Integrative Design? - RMI

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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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In David's life so far, he has read literally hundreds of books about the future. Yet none has had such a provocative title as this: “The future loves you: How and why we should abolish death”. That’s the title of the book written by the guest in this episode, Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston. Ariel is a neuroscientist, and a Research Fellow at Monash University, in Melbourne, Australia.

One of the key ideas in Ariel’s book is that so long as your connectome – the full set of the synapses in your brain – continues to exist, then you continue to exist. Ariel also claims that brain preservation – the preservation of the connectome, long after we have stopped breathing – is already affordable enough to be provided to essentially everyone. These claims raise all kinds of questions, which are addressed in this conversation.

Selected follow-ups:

• Dr Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston - personal website
• Book webpage - includes details of when Ariel is speaking in the UK and elsewhere
• Monash Neuroscience of Consciousness
• Deep hypothermic circulatory arrest - Wikipedia
• Sentience and the Origins of Consciousness - article by Karl Friston that mentions bacteria
• List of advisors to Conscium
• Does the UK use £15,000, £30,000 or a £70,000 per QALY cost effectiveness threshold? by Jason Shafrin
• Researchers simulate an entire fly brain on a laptop. Is a human brain next? - US Berkeley News
• What are memories made of? A survey of neuroscientists on the structural basis of long-term memory - Preprint by Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston, Emil Kendziora, and Andrew McKenzie

Related previous episodes:

• Ep 91: The low-cost future of preserving brains, with Jordan Sparks
• Ep 77: The case for brain preservation, with Kenneth Hayworth

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

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Our guest in this episode is Sterling Anderson, a pioneer of self-driving vehicles. With a masters degree and a PhD from MIT, Sterling led the development and launch of the Tesla Model X, and then led the team that delivered Tesla Autopilot. In 2017 he co-founded Aurora, along with Chris Urmson, who was a founder and CTO of Google’s self-driving car project, which is now Waymo, and also Drew Bagnell, who co-founded and led Uber’s self-driving team.

Aurora is concentrating on automating long-distance trucks, and expects to be the first company to deploy fully self-driving trucks in the US when it deploys big driverless trucks (16 tons and more) between Dallas and Houston in April 2025.

Self-driving vehicles will be one of the most significant technologies of this decade, and we are delighted that one of the stars of the sector, Sterling, is joining us to share his perspectives.

Selected follow-ups:

• The future of transportation is here - Aurora website
• Leadership Team - Aurora website

Previous episodes also featuring self-driving vehicles:

• Ep 58: Whatever happened to self-driving cars, with Timothy Lee
• Ep 26: Peter James, best-selling crime-writer and transhumanist

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Our guest in this episode is Parmy Olson, a columnist for Bloomberg covering technology. Parmy has previously been a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and for Forbes. Her first book, “We Are Anonymous”, shed fascinating light on what the subtitle calls “the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency”.

But her most recent book illuminates a set of high-stakes relations with potentially even bigger consequences for human wellbeing. The title is “Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World”. The race is between two remarkable individuals, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Demis Hassabis of DeepMind, who are each profoundly committed to build AI that exceeds human capabilities in all aspects of reasoning.

Selected follow-ups:

• Parmy Olson, Bloomberg
• Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race that Will Change the World
• AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley and the new world order - book by Kai-Fu Lee
• The Coming Wave - book by Mustafa Suleyman
• Bromance Gone Sour: OpenAI and Microsoft’s Partnership Hits a Rough Patch - Geekflare
• For our Posterity - essay by Leopold Aschenbrenner
• OpenAI appoints Retired U.S. Army General Paul M. Nakasone to Board of Directors
• Do Computers Have Feelings? Don’t Let Google Alone Decide - article by Parmy Olson about Blake Lemoine
• Conscium - Pioneering Safe, Efficient AI

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Our guest in this episode is Andrea Miotti, the founder and executive director of ControlAI. On their website, ControlAI have the tagline, “Fighting to keep humanity in control”. Control over what, you might ask. The website answers: control deepfakes, control scaling, control foundation models, and, yes, control AI.

The latest project from ControlAI is called “A Narrow Path”, which is a comprehensive policy plan split into three phases: Safety, Stability, and Flourishing. To be clear, the envisioned flourishing involves what is called “Transformative AI”. This is no anti-AI campaign, but rather an initiative to “build a robust science and metrology of intelligence, safe-by-design AI engineering, and other foundations for transformative AI under human control”.

The initiative has already received lots of feedback, both positive and negative, which we discuss.

Selected follow-ups:

• A Narrow Path - main website
• ControlAI
• Conjecture - Redefining AI Safety
• What is Agentic AI - Interface.AI
• Chat GPT’s new O1 model escaped its environment to complete “impossible” hacking task - by Mihai Andrei
• Biological Weapons Convention - United Nations
• Poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal - Wikipedia (use of Novichok nerve agent in Salisbury, UK)
• Gathering of AI Safety Institutes in November in San Francisco
• Conscium - Pioneering safe, efficient AI
• The UK's APPG (All Party Parliamentary Group) on AI

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Our guest in this episode is David Wakeling, a partner at A&O Shearman, which became the world’s third largest law firm in May, thanks to the merger of Allen and Overy, a UK “magic circle” firm, with Shearman & Sterling of New York.

David heads up a team within the firm called the Markets Innovation Group (MIG), which consists of lawyers, developers and technologists, and is seeking to disrupt the legal industry. He also leads the firm's AI Advisory practice, through which the firm is currently advising 80 of the largest global businesses on the safe deployment of AI.

One of the initiatives David has led is the development and launch of ContractMatrix, in partnership with Microsoft and Harvey, an OpenAI-backed, GPT-4-based large language model that has been fine-tuned for the legal industry. ContractMatrix is a contract drafting and negotiation tool powered by generative AI. It was tested and honed by 1,000 of the firm’s lawyers prior to launch, to mitigate against risks like hallucinations. The firm estimates that the tool is saving up to seven hours from the average contract review, which is around a 30% efficiency gain. As well as internal use by 2,000 of its lawyers, it is also licensed to clients.

This is the third time we have looked at the legal industry on the podcast. While lawyers no longer use quill pens, they are not exactly famous for their information technology skills, either. But  the legal profession has a couple of characteristics which make it eminently suited to the deployment of advanced AI systems: it generates vast amounts of data and money, and lawyers frequently engage in text-based routine tasks which can be automated by generative AI systems.

Previous London Futurists Podcast episodes on the legal industry:

• Ep 53: The Legal Singularity, with Benjamin Alarie
• Ep 47: AI transforming professional services, with Shamus Rae

Other selected follow-ups:

• David Wakeling
• A&O Shearman
• ContractMatrix
• Harvey AI
• RAG - Retrieval-Augmented Generation
• Digital Operational Resilience Act (impacts banking)
• The Productivity J-Curve (PDF), by Erik Brynjolfsson, Daniel Rock, Chad Syverson
• Agentic AI: The Next Big Breakthrough That's Transforming Business And Technology, by Bernard Marr

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

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Our guest in this episode is Matt Burgess. Matt is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wyoming, where he moved this year after six years at the University of Boulder, Colorado. He has specialised in the economics of climate change.

Calum met Matt at a recent event in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and knows from their conversations then that Matt has also thought deeply about the impact of social media, the causes of populism, and many other subjects.

Selected follow-ups:

• Matt Burgess at the University of Wyoming
• Guided Civic Revival - Substack of Matt Burgess
• How polarization will destroy itself
• Roger A. Pielke Jr. - Wikipedia
• ‘My Life as a Climate Lukewarmer’ - National Review
• Shared Socioeconomic Pathways - Wikipedia (includes climate scenario SSP5-8.5)
• Exceeding 1.5°C global warming could trigger multiple climate tipping points - Science
• Fat-Tailed Uncertainty in the Economics of Catastrophic Climate Change (PDF) - explains "The Dismal Theorem"
• Sri Lanka’s organic farming disaster, explained - Vox
• Solar panel prices have fallen by around 20% every time global capacity doubled - Our World in Data
• Special guest speech by Mark Carney - YouTube
• Younger Dryas - Wikipedia (prehistoric period with rapid climate change)
• Platform policies of Jill Stein, US Green Party leader
• Agrowth – should we better be agnostic about growth? - degrowth
• ‘4°C of global warming is optimal’ – even Nobel Prize winners are getting things catastrophically wrong - The Conversation
• Economists' Statement on Carbon Dividends

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Digital Disruption with Geoff Nielson
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Our guest in this episode is Karl Pfleger. Karl is an angel investor in rejuvenation biotech startups, and is also known for creating and maintaining the website Aging Biotech Info. That website describes itself as “Structured info about aging and longevity”, and has the declared mission statement, “Everything important in the field (outside of academia), organized.”

Previously, Karl worked at Google from 2002 to 2013, as a research scientist and data analyst, applying AI and machine learning at scale. He has a BSE in Computer Science from Princeton, and a PhD in Computer Science and AI from Stanford.

Previous London Futurists Podcast episodes mentioned in this conversation:

• Ep 74: The Longevity Singularity, with Daniel Ives
• Ep 45: Generative AI drug discovery breakthrough, with Alex Zhavoronkov
• Ep 12: Pioneering AI drug development, with Alex Zhavoronkov

Other selected follow-ups:

• AgingBiotech.Info
• Lifespan.io rejuvenation roadmap
• AgingDB list
• Stealth Biotherapeutics
• NewLimit
• Juvenity
• Juvena Therapeutics
• Immunis
• Partnership between Calico and AbbVie
• Hevolution
• Unity Biotechnology
• Here's Why resTORbio Fell Over 83% Today
• A4LI Responds to NIH Reform Proposal
• Great Desire for Extended Life and Health amongst the American Public - a paper by Karl Pfleger. Kristen Fortney, Joe Betts-LaCroix and others, 
• LEV achieved for young people before it is achieved for old people
• Longevity Biotech Fellowship
• Foresight Institute

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Digital Disruption with Geoff Nielson
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Our guest today is Pedro Domingos, who is joining an elite group of repeat guests – he joined us before in episode 34 in April 2023.

Pedro is Professor Emeritus Of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. He has done pioneering work in machine learning, like the development of Markov logic networks, which combine probabilistic reasoning with first-order logic. He is probably best known for his book "The Master Algorithm" which describes five different "tribes" of AI researchers, and argues that progress towards human-level general intelligence requires a unification of their approaches.

More recently, Pedro has become a trenchant critic of what he sees as exaggerated claims about the power and potential of today’s AI, and of calls to impose constraints on it.

He has just published “2040: A Silicon Valley Satire”, a novel which ridicules Big Tech and also American politics.

Selected follow-ups:

• Pedro Domingos - University of Washington
• Previous London Futurists Podcast episode featuring Pedro Domingos
• 2040: A Silicon Valley Satire
• The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World
• The Bonfire of the Vanities
• Ron Howard
• Mike Judge
• Martin Scorsese
• Pandora’s Brain
• Transcendence
• Future of Life Institute moratorium open letter
• OpenAI working on new reasoning technology under code name ‘Strawberry’
• Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach - by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig
• Google's AI reasons its way around the London Underground - Nature
• Conscium
• Is LaMDA Sentient? — an Interview - by Blake Lemoine
• Could a Large Language Model be Conscious? - Talk by David Chalmers at NeurIPS 2

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Our guest in this episode is the journalist and author James Ball. James has worked for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, The Guardian, WikiLeaks, BuzzFeed, The New European, and The Washington Post, among other organisations. As special projects editor at The Guardian, James played a key role in the Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the NSA leaks by Edward Snowden.

Books that James has written include “Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World”, “Bluffocracy”, which makes the claim that Britain is run by bluffers, “The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us”, and, most recently, “The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World”.

That all adds up to enough content to fill at least four of our episodes, but we mainly focus on the ideas in the last of these books, about digital pandemics.

Selected follow-ups:

• James Ball (personal website)
• The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World - book by James Ball
• Guardian and Washington Post win Pulitzer prize for NSA revelations
• Meme - as described by Richard Dawkins
• Dreyfus affair
• Blood libel
• Future Shock - book by Alvin and Heidi Toffler
• How The Gulf Of Tonkin Incident Sparked The Vietnam War
• Why Narcissists Love Conspiracy Theories
• Nigel Farage - UK politician 
• WarGames - 1983 movie
• Gish gallop - rhetorical technique
• Dominic Cummings has admitted the Leave campaign won by lying
• Reality check: how do Farage’s claims on immigration, economy and crime hold up?
• Facts don’t change minds – and there’s data to prove it

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

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In this episode, we have not one guest but two – Brett King and Robert Tercek, the hosts of the Futurists Podcast.

Brett King is originally from Australia, and is now based in Thailand. He is a renowned author, and the founder of a breakthrough digital bank. He consults extensively with clients in the financial services industry.

Robert Tercek, based in the United States, is an expert in digital media with a successful career in broadcasting and innovation which includes serving as a creative director at MTV and a senior vice president at Sony Pictures. He now consults to CEOs about digital transformation.

David and Calum had the pleasure of joining them on their podcast recently, where the conversation delved into the likely future impacts of artificial intelligence and other technologies, and also included politics.

This return conversation covers a wide range of themes, including the dangers of Q-day, the prospects for technological unemployment, the future of media, different approaches to industrial strategy, a plea to "bring on the machines", and the importance of "thinking more athletically about the future".

Selected follow-ups:

• The Futurists
• Brett King
• Robert Tercek
• Episode of The Futurists featuring David and Calum
• Neptune's Brood - Wikipedia article on the novel by Charles Stross
• Jobs lost, jobs gained: What the future of work will mean for jobs, skills, and wages - McKinsey Global Institute
• Wirecutter - New York Times product review site
• Could AI create a one-person unicorn? Sam Altman thinks so - Fortune
• The book The Rise of Technosocialism
• Professor Richard Petty
• Comparison of economic growth, Europe vs. USA - Centre for European Reform
• LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman wants Kamala Harris, if elected, to replace Lina Khan as head of the Federal Trade Commission - MSNBC

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

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Our guest in this episode is Jordan Sparks, the founder and executive director of Oregon Brain Preservation (OBP), which is located at Salem, the capital city of Oregon. OBP offers the service of chemically preserving the brain in the hope of future restoration.

Previously, Jordan was a dentist and a computer programmer, and he was successful enough in those fields to generate the capital required to start OBP.

Brain preservation is a fascinating subject that we have covered in a number of recent episodes, in which we have interviewed Kenneth Hayworth, Max More, and Emil Kendziorra.

Most people whose brains have been preserved for future restoration have undergone cryopreservation, which involves cooling the brain (and sometimes the whole body) down to a very low temperature and keeping it that way. OBP does offer that service occasionally, but its focus – which may be unique – is chemical fixation of the brain.

Previous episodes on biostasis and brain preservation:

• The case for brain preservation, with Kenneth Hayworth
• Cryonics, cryocrastination, and the future: changing minds, with Max More
• Stop cryocrastinating! with Emil Kendziorra

Additional selected follow-ups:

• Oregon Brain Preservation
• The costs of the services provided by Oregon Brain Preservation
• Focused Ultrasound: A Promising Tool for Cryonics - Tomorrow Bio
• Investigation of Electromagnetic Resonance Rewarming Enhanced by Magnetic Nanoparticles for Cryopreservation - Langmuir
• Pre-epithelialized cryopreserved tracheal allograft for neo-trachea flap engineering - Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology
• Aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation by Robert McIntyre and Gregory Fahy - Cryobiology
• Oregon's Death with Dignity Act
• 14-year-old girl who died of cancer wins right to be cryogenically frozen - The Guardian

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declar

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Our guest in this episode is Holly Joint, who was born and educated in the UK, but lives in Abu Dhabi in the UAE.

Holly started her career with five years at the business consultancy Accenture, and then worked in telecomms and banking. The latter took her to the Gulf, where she then spent what must have been a fascinating year as programme director of Qatar’s winning bid to host the 2022 World Cup. Since then she has run a number of other start-ups and high-growth businesses in the Gulf.

Holly is currently COO of Trivandi and also has a focus on helping women to have more power in a future dominated by technology.

Calum met Holly at a conference in Dubai this year, where she quizzed him on-stage about machine consciousness.

Selected follow-ups:

• Women for Tech UAE
• Trivandi appoints Holly Joint
• Trivandi - "Creating Events and Venues, Better"
• With a Few Bits of Data, Researchers Identify ‘Anonymous’ People - New York Times
• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism - Shoshana Zuboff
• Rankings out of 142 cities - Smart City Observatory (Abu Dhabi ranked #10 in 2024)
• Women in Tech: Time to close the gender gap - A PwC research report
• Why are so many big tech whistleblowers women? - The Conversation
• Falcon - the Arabic language LLM
• Collapse of Silicon Valley Bank - Wikipedia

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

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How do we keep technology from slipping beyond our control? That’s the subtitle of the latest book by our guest in this episode, Wendell Wallach.

Wendell is the Carnegie-Uehiro fellow at Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, where he co-directs the Artificial Intelligence & Equality Initiative. He is also Emeritus Chair of Technology and Ethics Studies at Yale University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, a scholar with the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics, a fellow at the Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technology, and a senior advisor to The Hastings Center.

Earlier in his life, Wendell was founder and president of two computer consulting companies, Farpoint Solutions and Omnia Consulting Inc.

Selected follow-ups:

• Wendell Wallach Personal Website
• Wendell Wallach - Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs
• The Artificial Intelligence & Equality Initiative
• Nobel Peace Prize Lecture by Christian Lous Lange (1921)
• Thomas Midgley Jr. - Wikipedia
• Montreal Protocol - Wikipedia
• Robot Dog Highlighted at China-Cambodia Joint Military Exercise (video)
• For Our Posterity - essay by Leopold Aschenbrenner
• Campaign by Control/AI against deepfakes

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

Promoguy Talk Pills
Agency in Amsterdam dives into topics like Tech, AI, digital marketing, and more drama...

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Digital Disruption with Geoff Nielson
Discover how technology is reshaping our lives and livelihoods.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify