London Futurists

Our guest today is Professor Steve Keen, an economist and author best known for his long-standing critique of mainstream neoclassical economics. He was one of the relatively few economists to warn publicly, in advance, of the dangers that culminated in the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. In 2010 he received the Revere Award from the “Real World Economics Review” for that work.

His books include “Debunking Economics”, “Can We Avoid Another Financial Crisis?”, and “The New Economics: A Manifesto”. He has held professorships at Kingston University London, the University of Western Sydney, and UCL – University College London.

Selected follow-ups:

• "Prof Steve Keen" - Patreon
• "Building a New Economics" - Steve Keen's substack 
• The Technoprogressive Opportunity: Event in London, Sept 19-20
• "‘4°C of global warming is optimal’ – even Nobel Prize winners are getting things catastrophically wrong" - The Conversation
• "Paul Romer and William Nordhaus – why they won the 2018 ‘economics Nobel’" - by Sergey Popov
• "Energy in packets – What did Planck discover?" - Max Planck Society
• "Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?" - by Pierre Azoulay et al
• "The Great Depression" - book by Lionel Robbins
• "Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism" - book by George Akerlof and Robert Shiller
• "Irrational Exuberance" - book by Robert Shiller
• "Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist" - book by Kate Raworth
• "Hyman Minsky" - Wikipedia
• "Ben Bernanke" - Wikipedia
• "Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises" - book by Charles Kindleberger
• "How is money created?" - Bank of England
• "The Economic Crisis from a Neoclassical Perspective" - paper by Lee Ohanian
• "What helium reveals about the next chip shortage" - by Michelle Nguyen 
• "Sovereign Money Creation and Basic Income" - London Futurists webinar featuring Geoff Crocker
• "The Paradox of Debt, by the Tycho Brahe of Credit" - Review by Steve Keen of the book by Richard Vague
• "Isabella Weber" - Wikipedia
• "Economics from the Top Down" - essays by Blair Fix
• "Stratospheric aerosol injection" - Wikipedia
• "Space mirror" - Wikipedia
• "Bamboo: A Vital Ally in Climate Action" - Climate Change Commission
• "The Role of Kelp Forests in Carbon Dioxide Removal and Climate Mitigation" - Kelp Forest Alliance
• "The two-year trail of financial controversy dogging Reform and Farage" - The Guardian
• "Water pollution: Facts & Figures" - Surfers against Sewage
• "Why is it so difficult to build new reservoirs?" - BBC News
• "Peter principle" - Wikipedia

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

Our guests in this episode are Pat Kane and Indra Adnan, the co-convenors of The Alternative Global. That project was launched in 2017 with the question, “If politics is broken, what’s the alternative?” Pat and Indra will be speaking at the London Futurists and IEET event in London on 19-20 September, “The Technoprogressive Opportunity,” where they’ll giving an update on progress with their project. Our episode today provides a chance to dive into what they have experienced and learned.

Pat is a writer, musician, curator, consultant, activist and futurist. He is the author of the book “The Play Ethic”, and has written for the Independent, the Sunday Times, the Guardian/Observer and Scotland’s Sunday Herald, of which he was a founding editor in 1999. He is currently a columnist with The National, and is researching a new book on politics, creativity and the science of emotions.

Indra is a psycho-social therapist, founder of the Soft Power Network, and a writer and events producer. She has consulted to the World Economic Forum, Indian, Finnish and Danish governments, NATO, the Scottish Executive and the Institute of Contemporary Arts amongst others. She is the author of the book “The Politics of Waking Up: Power & Possibility In The Fractal Age”.

Selected follow-ups:

• "The Alternative"
• "The Daily Alternative" (newsletter)
• "Who Is Pat Kane?"
• "About Indra Adnan"
• "The Politics of Waking Up: Power and Possibility in the Fractal Age" - book by Indra
• "The Play Ethic: A Manifesto For a Different Way of Living" - book by Pat
• "Fourth Generation Civilization" - Substack by Michel Bauwens
• "Cosmolocalism: A Framework for Building Sustainable Network State Economies" - by Sterlin
• "Ecocivilisation through the CAN of CANs [Community Agency Networks]"
• "Alternative Editorial: All For Devolution"
• "Scottish Community Coalition on Energy release a Manifesto for Community Renewables"
• "Alternative Editorial: Facing The Chasm" (covers Three Horizons)
• "Climate Whistleblower: We Face COLLAPSE" - Aaron Bastani Meets Kevin Anderson
• "Disruptive Climate Futures, with Dr Tom Harris" - London Futurists
• "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" by John Maynard Keynes (1930)
• "Spring: a social and political invitation"
• "Emotions and the Brain with Mark Solms" - New Thinking Allowed, with Leanne Whitney
• "Mo Gawdat"
• The Technoprogressive Opportunity: Event in London, Sept 19-20

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

We are continuing our investigation into the implications of the Economic Singularity, the time when we need a new economic system because full automation by AI means that people can no longer obtain the resources they need by doing jobs.

Our guest today is Ewan McMillan, the founder of New Gradient, an Edinburgh-based consultancy that builds AI systems for a variety of industries, from biotech to mining. He took a degree in theoretical physics at the University of Edinburgh, and since then he has spent seven years delivering applied AI R&D. 

We wanted to have Ewan on the show because he also writes about the economics of AI from the perspective of someone who is actually implementing it. This spring he posted a series of thought-provoking articles called “The Economics of AGI”.

Selected follow-ups:

• New Gradient - Company website
• Ewan McMillan - LinkedIn
• "The Economics of AGI" - Part 1  of Ewan's essay
• "The Innovation Paradox" - Part 2 of the essay
• "The Allocation Stack" - Part 3 of the essay
• "Bitter lesson" (general AIs will in due course out-perform specific AIs) - Wikipedia
• "AlphaZero" (covers the chess match vs. Stockfish) - Wikipedia
• "Smartphones and Beyond: Lessons from the remarkable rise and fall of Symbian" - book by David
• "Culture series" (about science fiction series written by Iain M Banks) - Wikipedia
• "Aghion–Howitt model"  - Wikipedia
• 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics (recipients include Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt)
• "The First Solo Unicorns Are Here: Meet the One-Person Companies Racing to $1B in 2026" - Founder Institute
• "Understanding Alpha in Investing" - Investopedia
• "'We Must Act Now': Sixteen Nobel Laureates Join Leading Economists and AI Researchers in Call to Prepare for AI’s Economic Transformation" - Stanford Digital Economy Lab

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

We are continuing our investigation into the implications of the Economic Singularity, the time when we need a new economic system because full automation by AI means people can no longer obtain the resources they need by doing jobs.

Our guest today is Oliver Ritchie, the UK Policy Lead at the Future of Life Institute. Previously, he was a Senior Fellow at the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy, and a Research Scholar at GovAI. He also spent over six years in policy formation at the Treasury, which is where many of the brightest minds in UK public sector work, and where the really big decisions are made, because the Treasury hold the purse strings.

We wanted to have Oliver on the show because he has written two thought-provoking articles on the Economic Singularity, a paper called “The Fiscal Challenge of Advanced AI”, and a Substack post which summarises it, called “Can we afford to support workers whose jobs are displaced by AI?” 

Selected follow-ups:

• "Oliver Ritchie" - Future of Life Institute
• "Return on Intelligence" - Oliver's Substack
• "Can we afford to support workers whose jobs are displaced by AI?"  - Substack article by Oliver
• "The Fiscal Challenge Of Advanced AI" (PDF) - article by Oliver
• "The case for G20 coordination on wealth taxes" - article by Liam Byrne
• "US super-rich 'pay almost no income tax'" - BBC
• "Trump to meet AI leaders to discuss US investment in their companies" - BBC
• "Getting Ahead of AI's Economic Disruption" - Windfall Trust
• "AI’s Role in Reshaping Power Distribution" - Future of Life Institute project
• "Can you safely build something that may kill you?" (about Sam Altman) - by Kelsey Piper
• "Exploring Machine Consciousness" - Prism / Conscium podcast, cohost Calum Chace
• "The biggest blockages to successful governance of advanced AI" - Review by David Wood, contains section "Why a pause isn’t that inconceivable"
• "Trump considering AI controls after OpenAI hacking incidents" - BBC
• "Pacing the Frontier" - A statement from over 1,300 employees of frontier AI companies
• "Why a Custom AI Just Beat Every Frontier Model" - about Thinking Machines Lab and Bridgewater
• "The On-Device LLM Revolution" - by Steve Roddy
• "AI Economics Institute (AIEI): Prospectus" - UK Government
• "Minister of State for the Future of Work" - Kate Dearden MP (LinkedIn)
• "'We Must Act Now': Sixteen Nobel Laureates Join Leading Economists and AI Researchers in Call to Prepare for AI’s Economic Transformation" - Stanford Digital Economy Lab
• "A Potential Path to Safer AI Development" by Yoshua Bengio, introduces Scientist AI
• "Bitter lesson" (general AIs will in due course out-perform specific AIs) - Wikipedia
• "Why Tool AIs Want to Be Agent AIs" - Gwern

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

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 University of New Mexico. Matteo hosts a show called “Bread and Robots”, which covers subjects such as post-scarcity economics, universal basic income, the tech workers movement, and how technology can be steered toward collective abundance rather than corporate exploitation. Matteo is also the instructor for an online course called “An introduction to technoprogressive worldbuilding”.

Selected follow-ups:

• The Technoprogressive Opportunity: Event in London, Sept 19-20
• The IEET - A Technoprogressive Think-Tank
• Matteo Rossi MacDermant - LinkedIn
• Bread and Robots - Podcast and Substack by Matteo Rossi MacDermant
• An Introduction to Technoprogressive Worldbuilding
• "Technoprogressive Declaration" - from Transvision 2014
• 2017 update to the Technoprogressive Declaration
• UBI Guide - by Scott Santens
• Universal Basic Capital - Windfall Trust
• "How a Land Value Tax Can Fund a UBI" - Scott Santens
• Universal Basic Income and/or Alternatives - London Futurists conference held in 2018
• "Why the AI world is suddenly obsessed with a 160-year-old economics paradox" - Jevon's Paradox explained by Greg Rosalsky
• "The Longevity City: Cities as the Engines of Healthy Longevity" - essay by Matteo Rossi MacDermant
• "The London boroughs with the best and worst 'healthy life' expectancy"
• "The Abolition of Aging" - book by David Wood (includes analysis of economic implications)

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

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 cognitive labour will remain significant for the majority of people, so that capitalism can continue in place, even with AI having greatly expanded capabilities. According to Ben, each of these arguments fail. These back-and-forth debates are what we explore in this episode.

Selected follow-ups:

• "The Discontinuity Thesis: A Sequence of Seven Essays on Why Postwar Capitalism Ends" by Ben Luong
• "Mark Zuckerberg just declared war on the entire advertising industry" - The Verge
• "P versus NP problem" - Wikipedia
• "KPMG Pulls AI Report After Hallucinated Claims About Major Organisations" - AI Insider 
• "GDPval-AA v2 Leaderboard" - Artificial Analysis
• "OSWorld: 369 real computer tasks across Windows, macOS, and Ubuntu requiring GUI interaction... Much harder than web-only benchmarks"
• "Sorites paradox" - Wikipedia
• "Young people not in education, employment or training (NEET), UK: May 2026" - Office of National Statistics
• "Five Years" - Song by David Bowie
• "How ZEISS and ASML Enable the Modern Chip Industry" - Rob Hoeijmakers
• "Mistral AI’s $830 Million Debt Financing: Inside the European Bet on 13,800 Nvidia GPUs and a Paris AI Data Center" - Marcus Chen
• "Colossus (data center)" - Wikipedia
• "Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence" - Stanford Digital Economy Lab
• "Appendix I: What Would Refute the Thesis" - by Ben Luong
• "The Cope Index: Tracking who's coping hardest about the end of work" - by Ben Luong
• "The AI Alignment Problem" - from "The Singularity Principles"

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

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

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

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

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