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 externalities — costs on third parties to a transaction. The classic example of that is pollution: a factory produces goods but creates pollution. The market price of the goods doesn't reflect the pollution costs, so the factory managers don’t try very hard to minimise them.

A Pigouvian tax adds the social cost of the pollution into the price, so the producer is incentivised to minimise it.

Gerry Tsoukalas and Brett Falk have published a well-received paper called “The AI Layoff Trap”, which recommends introducing a Pigouvian tax on automation that eliminates human jobs. Their proposal deserves credit for taking seriously the idea that AI may well cause severe automation, perhaps full automation – i.e. the Economic Singularity.

The paper describes how firms face a prisoner’s dilemma. If they automate all their jobs then there will be no consumers to pay for any of their products. But if any of them don’t, their automating competitors will drive them out of business. Tsoukalas and Falk point out, counter-intuitively, that the fiercer the competition, the more acute the dilemma, so if we want to hold back automation, we might be better off with monopoly-ridden economies. 

Selected follow-ups:

• Gerry Tsoukalas
• Brett Hemenway Falk
• The AI Layoff Trap - The Wharton School Research Paper
• PDF of the AI Layoff Trap paper
• Arthur Pigou - Wikipedia
• Prisoner's dilemma - Wikipedia
• "Microsoft AI chief gives it 18 months—for all white-collar work to be automated by AI"
• "Chinese court rules firms can’t lay off workers on AI grounds"

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

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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 accumulation of value within small groups of owners of capital will cause economic instabilities and a subsequent collapse. Despite these forecasts, capitalism has, so far, demonstrated great resilience, defying predictions of its collapse. But if human labour is increasingly displaced by advanced automation, the balance of labour and capital will be fundamentally changed, and capitalism will come under unprecedented pressures.

That’s the thesis of our guest today, Ted Shelton. David first met Ted about 25 years ago, when Ted was Chief Strategy Officer of the software development tools company Borland, and David was an executive within the early smartphone industry. Since that time, Ted has worked for a variety of companies in and around Silicon Valley, including PwC, Cognizant Technology Solutions, Catalytic, Bain, and Inflection AI. Recently, he has been giving a great deal of thought to where AI is taking the economy.

Selected follow-ups:

• Ted Shelton's posts on LinkedIn
• "On the Transformation of Capitalism's Fundamental Assumptions Under Conditions of Scaling Machine Intelligence" - working paper by Ted Shelton
• "The Industrial Economy Is Ending. What Comes Next?" - by Ted Shelton
• Thomas Piketty's book "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" - Wikipedia
• Nicholas Eberstadt's book "Men Without Work: America's Invisible Crisis" - Wikipedia
• Richard Sutton's essay "Bitter Lesson" - Wikipedia
• "Technofeudalism" - articles by Yanis Varoufakis

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

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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 intelligence”.

Their work starts from a simple premise: if AI systems significantly reshape the economy, then the question is not only how we build them, but how we prepare for their impacts, and how the gains are ultimately shared.

Before founding Windfall Trust, Adrian was the founding Executive Director of the Centre for Public Impact, worked as a policy advisor in the UK Cabinet Office, and held roles at McKinsey and the Boston Consulting Group.

Selected follow-ups:

• Windfall Trust
• Exercise Cygnus (Wikipedia)
• Erik Brynjolfsson (personal site)
• Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence (paper by Erik Brynjolfsson and colleagues)
• Anton Korinek (personal site)
• Windfall's UK Scenarios exercise
• The Economic Singularity (recent discussion paper by Calum Chace)
• Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age (OpenAI)
• UK Government announcement of the formation of "The AI and Future of Work Unit"
• UK Chancellor Rachel Reeve's announcement of a new "AI Economics Institute"
• "AI will kill income tax" - episode of Robert Peston's podcast "The Rest is Money"
• Windfall Policy Atlas
• Task-Completion Time Horizons of Frontier AI Models (METR)

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

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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 2026, it’s a good time for the two of us to take stock.

Accordingly, in this episode, we each pick out a number of events from the last 12 months which we see as potential signals of larger exponential impact ahead.

Selected follow-ups:

• An MIT report that 95% of AI pilots fail spooked investors - by Jeremy Kahn
• The Shape of AI: Jaggedness, Bottlenecks and Salients - by Ethan Mollick
• The Road To Superintelligence - by Calum
• AI Doomers, Accelerationists & Scouts - Digital Disruption
• The Economic Singularity - book by Calum
• How can better foresight actually improve the world? - Webinar in the series "From forecasts to levers"
• Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign - Anthropic
• Major Neuromorphic Computing projects - listed by Conscium
• Why AI Agent Verification Is A Critical Industry - by Calum
• Climate change and populism: Grounds for optimism? - LFP episode with Matt Burgess
• What's Our Problem? - book by Tim Urban
• OpenAI and Retro Biosciences achieve 50x increase in expressing stem cell reprogramming markers
• Progress at LEVF, December 2025 - by David
• UK Biobank
• The THRIVE Act - Regenerative Medicine Foundation

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

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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 Oxford China Policy Lab, or OCPL for short. OCPL describes itself as a global community of China and emerging technology researchers at Oxford, who produce policy-relevant research to navigate risks in the US-China relationship and beyond.

In parallel with her role at OCPL, Kayla is pursuing a DPhil at the Oxford Internet Institute. She is a recent fellow at the Centre for Governance of AI, and the lead researcher and contributing author to the Oxford China Briefing Book. She holds an MSc from the Oxford Internet Institute and a BA with Honours in International Relations, Public Policy, and Mandarin Chinese from the University of Denver. She also studied at Peking University and is professionally fluent in Mandarin.

Kayla previously worked as a diplomat in the U.S. Mission to China, where she specialized in the governance of emerging technologies, human rights, and improving the use of new technology within government services.

Selected follow-ups:

• Kayla Blomquist - Personal site
• Oxford China Policy Lab
• The Oxford Internet Institute (OII)
• Google AI defeats human Go champion (Ke Jie)
• AI Safety Summit 2023 (Bletchley Park, UK)
• United Kingdom: Balancing Safety, Security, and Growth - OCPL
• China wants to lead the world on AI regulation - report from APEC 2025
• China's WAICO proposal and the reordering of global AI governance
• Impact of AI on cyber threat from now to 2027
• Options for the future of the global governance of AI - London Futurists Webinar
• A Tentative Draft of a Treaty - Online appendix to the book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
• An International Agreement to Prevent the Premature Creation of Artificial Superintelligence

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

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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 foundation in a Denny's restaurant in 1993 as a video game component manufacturer, to becoming the world's most valuable company, and the hardware provider for the current AI boom.

Stephen's previous book, “How Music Got Free”, is a history of music piracy and the MP3, and was also a finalist for the FT Business Book of the Year.

Selected follow-ups:

• Stephen Witt - personal site
• Articles by Stephen Witt on The New Yorker
• The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip - book site
• Stephen Witt wins FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year - Financial Times
• Nvidia Executives
• Battle Royale (Japanese film) - IMDb
• The Economic Singularity - book by Calum Chace
• A Cubic Millimeter of a Human Brain Has Been Mapped in Spectacular Detail - Nature
• NotebookLM - by Google

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

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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 DeepMind. A group of 30 PauseAI protesters gathered outside the OpenAI headquarters in San Francisco. Other protests have taken place in New York, Portland, Ottawa, Sao Paulo, Berlin, Paris, Rome, Oslo, Stockholm, and Sydney, among other cities.

Previously, Holly was a researcher at the think tank Rethink Priorities in the area of Wild Animal Welfare. And before that, she studied evolutionary biology in Harvard’s Organismic and Evolutionary Biology department.

Selected follow-ups:

• Holly Elmore - substack
• PauseAI US
• PauseAI - global site
• Wild Animal Suffering... and why it matters
• Hard problem of consciousness - Wikipedia
• The Unproven (And Unprovable) Case For Net Wild Animal Suffering. A Reply To Tomasik - by Michael Plant
• Leading Evolution Compassionately - Herbivorize Predators
• David Pearce (philosopher) - Wikipedia
• The AI industry is racing toward a precipice - Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI)
• Nick Bostrom's new views regarding AI/AI safety - reddit
• AI is poised to remake the world; Help us ensure it benefits all of us - Future of Life Institute
• On being wrong about AI - by Scott Aharonson, on his previous suggestion that it might take "a few thousand years" to reach superhuman AI
• California Institute of Machine Consciousness - organisation founded by Joscha Bach
• Pausing AI is the only safe approach to digital sentience - article by Holly Elmore
• Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers - book by Geoffrey Moore

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

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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 London-based journalist. Earlier in his career he worked in newspapers, mostly for the Telegraph, where he was a staff feature-writer and commissioning editor. He is currently a senior editor at UnHerd, where he commissions essays and occasionally writes them. Perhaps one reason why he writes so well is that he has a BA in English Language and Literature from Oxford University, where he was a Casberd scholar.

Selected follow-ups:

• About Tom Ough
• The Anti-Catastrophe League - The book's webpage
• On novel methods of pandemic prevention
• What is effective altruism? (EA)
• Sam Bankman-Fried - Wikipedia (also covers FTX)
• Open Philanthropy
• Conscium
• Here Comes the Sun - book by Bill McKibben
• The 10 Best Beatles Songs (Based on Streams)
• Carrington Event - Wikipedia
• Mirror life - Wikipedia
• Future of Humanity Institute 2005-2024: final report - by Anders Sandberg
• Oxford FHI Global Catastrophic Risks - FHI Conference, 2008
• Forethought
• Review of Nick Bostrom’s Deep Utopia - by Calum
• DeepMind and OpenAI claim gold in International Mathematical Olympiad
• What the Heck is Hubble Tension?
• The Decade Ahead - by Leopold Aschenbrenner
• AI 2027
• Anglofuturism

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

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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 sold that company in 2020, and now spends his time working out how to make the first superintelligence safe. As he puts it, he wants to reduce P(Doom) and increase P(Zoom).

Selected follow-ups:

• iQ Company
• Superintelligence - by iQ Company
• Herbert A. Simon - Wikipedia
• Amara’s Law and Its Place in the Future of Tech - Pohan Lin
• The Society of Mind - book by Marvin Minsky
• AI 'godfather' Geoffrey Hinton warns of dangers as he quits Google - BBC News
• Statement on AI Risk - Center for AI Safety
• I’ve Spent My Life Measuring Risk. AI Rings Every One of My Alarm Bells - Paul Tudor Jones
• Secrets of Software Quality: 40 Innovations from IBM - book by Craig Kaplan
• London Futurists Podcast episode featuring David Brin
• Reason in human affairs - book by Herbert Simon
• US and China will intervene to halt ‘suicide race’ of AGI – Max Tegmark
• If Anybody Builds It, Everyone Dies - book by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares
• AGI-25 - conference in Reykjavik
• The First Global Brain Workshop - Brussels 2001
• Center for Integrated Cognition
• Paul S. Rosenbloom
• Tatiana Shavrina, Meta
• Henry Minsky launches AI startup inspired by father’s MIT research

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

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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 is Carl Benedikt Frey, the Dieter Schwarz Associate Professor of AI & Work at the Oxford Internet Institute. Carl is also a Fellow at Mansfield College, University of Oxford, and is Director of the Future of Work Programme and Oxford Martin Citi Fellow at the Oxford Martin School.

Carl’s new book has the ominous title, “How Progress Ends”. The subtitle is “Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations”. A central premise of the book is that our ability to think clearly about the possibilities for progress and stagnation today is enhanced by looking backward at the rise and fall of nations around the globe over the past thousand years. The book contains fascinating analyses of how countries at various times made significant progress, and at other times stagnated. The book also considers what we might deduce about the possible futures of different economies worldwide.

Selected follow-ups:

• Professor Carl-Benedikt Frey - Oxford Martin School
• How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations - Princeton University Press
• Stop Acting Like This Is Normal - Ezra Klein ("Stop Funding Trump’s Takeover")
• OpenAI o3 Breakthrough High Score on ARC-AGI-Pub
• A Human Amateur Beat a Top Go-Playing AI Using a Simple Trick - Vice
• The future of employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation? - Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne
• Europe's Choice: Policies for Growth and Resilience - Alfred Kammer, IMF
• MIT Radiation Laboratory ("Rad Lab")

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

C-Suite Perspectives
Elevate how you lead with insight from today’s most influential executives.

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