London Futurists

Epizódy

• LFP 132: Matteo Rossi MacDermant - Technoprogressive Worldbuilding 21.07.2026 50min

  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...
• LFP 131: Ben Luong - The Discontinuity Thesis 28.06.2026 35min

  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...
• LFP 130: Gerry Tsoukalas and Brett Falk - The AI Automation Layoff Trap 01.06.2026 42min

  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...
• LFP 129: Ted Shelton - Post-labour economics and the future of capitalism 09.05.2026 45min

  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...
• LFP 128: Adrian Brown - Windfall Trust and the Economic Singularity 22.04.2026 45min

  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 ...
• LFP 127: Anticipating 2026 07.01.2026 52min

  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...
• The puzzle pieces that can defuse the US-China AI race dynamic, with Kayla Blomquist 23.12.2025 35min

  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...
• Jensen Huang and the zero billion dollar market, with Stephen Witt 16.12.2025 45min

  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...
• What's your p(Pause)? with Holly Elmore 05.12.2025 44min

  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...
• Real-life superheroes and troubled institutions, with Tom Ough 31.10.2025 41min

  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...
• Safe superintelligence via a community of AIs and humans, with Craig Kaplan 10.10.2025 41min

  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...
• How progress ends: the fate of nations, with Carl Benedikt Frey 17.09.2025 37min

  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 ...
• Tsetlin Machines, Literal Labs, and the future of AI, with Noel Hurley 08.09.2025 36min

  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...
• Intellectual dark matter? A reputation trap? The case of cold fusion, with Jonah Messinger 05.08.2025 40min

  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,...
• AI agents, AI safety, and AI boycotts, with Peter Scott 29.07.2025 54min

  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 ...
• The remarkable potential of hydrogen cars, with Hugo Spowers 18.07.2025 44min

  The guest in this episode is Hugo Spowers. Hugo has led an adventurous life. In the 1970s and 80s he was an active member of the Dangerous Sports Club, which invented bungee jumping, inspired by an initiation ceremony in Vanuatu. Hugo skied down a black run in St.Moritz in formal dress, seated at a grand piano, and he broke his back, neck and hips when he misjudged the length of one of his bungee ropes. Hugo is a petrol head, and done more than his fair share of car racing. But if he’ll excus...
• AI and the end of conflict, with Simon Horton 23.06.2025 39min

  Can we use AI to improve how we handle conflict? Or even to end the worst conflicts that are happening all around us? That’s the subject of the new book of our guest in this episode, Simon Horton. The book has the bold title “The End of Conflict: How AI will end war and help us get on better”. Simon has a rich background, including being a stand-up comedian and a trapeze artist – which are, perhaps, two useful skills for dealing with acute conflict. He has taught negotiation and conflict reso...
• The AI disconnect: understanding vs motivation, with Nate Soares 11.06.2025 49min

  Our guest in this episode is Nate Soares, President of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, or MIRI. MIRI was founded in 2000 as the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence by Eliezer Yudkowsky, with support from a couple of internet entrepreneurs. Among other things, it ran a series of conferences called the Singularity Summit. In 2012, Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil, acquired the Singularity Summit, including the Singularity brand, and the Institute was renamed as MIRI....
• Anticipating an Einstein moment in the understanding of consciousness, with Henry Shevlin 28.05.2025 41min

  Our guest in this episode is Henry Shevlin. Henry is the Associate Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, where he also co-directs the Kinds of Intelligence program and oversees educational initiatives. He researches the potential for machines to possess consciousness, the ethical ramifications of such developments, and the broader implications for our understanding of intelligence. In his 2024 paper, “Consciousness, Machin...
• The case for a conditional AI safety treaty, with Otto Barten 09.05.2025 37min

  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...