London Futurists

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 excuse the pun, his driving passion was always the environment, and he is one of the world’s most persistent and dedicated pioneers of hydrogen cars.

He is co-founder and CEO of Riversimple, a 24 year-old pre-revenue startup, which have developed 5 generations of research vehicles. Hydrogen cars are powered by electric motors using electricity generated by fuel cells. Fuel cells are electrolysis in reverse. You put in hydrogen and oxygen, and what you get out is electricity and water.

There is a long-standing debate among energy experts about the role of hydrogen fuel cells in the energy mix, and Hugo is a persuasive advocate. Riversimple’s cars carry modest sized fuel cells complemented by supercapacitors, with motors for each of the four wheels. The cars are made of composites, not steel, because minimising weight is critical for fuel efficiency, pollution, and road safety. The cars are leased rather than sold, which enables a circular business model, involving higher initial investment per car, and no built-in obsolescence. The initial, market entry cars are designed as local run-arounds for households with two cars, which means the fuelling network can be built out gradually. And Hugo also has strong opinions about company governance.

Selected follow-ups:

• Hugo Spowers - Wikipedia
• Riversimple

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

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 resolution for 20 years, across 25 different countries, where his clients have included the British Army, the Saudi Space Agency, and Goldman Sachs. His previous books include “Change their minds” and “The leader’s guide to negotiation”.

Selected follow-ups:

• Simon Horton
• The End of Conflict - book website
• The Better Angels of our Nature - book by Steven Pinker
• Crime in England and Wales: year ending March 2024 - UK Office of National Statistics
• How Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley forged an unlikely friendship - Belfast Telegraph
• Review of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now by Scott Aaronson
• A Detailed Critique of One Section of Steven Pinker’s Chapter “Existential Threats” by Philosophy Torres
• End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration - book by Peter Turchin
• Why do chimps kill each other? - Science
• Using Artificial Intelligence in Peacemaking: The Libya Experience - Colin Irwin, University of Liverpool
• Retrospective on the Oslo Accord - New York Times
• Remesh
• Polis - Democracy Technologies
• Waves: Tech-Powered Democracy - Demos

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

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.

Nate joined MIRI in 2014 after working as a software engineer at Google, and since then he’s been a key figure in the AI safety community. In a blogpost at the time he joined MIRI he observed “I turn my skills towards saving the universe, because apparently nobody ever got around to teaching me modesty.”

MIRI has long had a fairly pessimistic stance on whether AI alignment is possible. In this episode, we’ll explore what drives that view—and whether there is any room for hope.

Selected follow-ups:

• Nate Soares - MIRI
• Yudkowsky and Soares Announce Major New Book: “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” - MIRI
• The Bayesian model of probabilistic reasoning
• During safety testing, o1 broke out of its VM - Reddit
• Leo Szilard - Physics World
• David Bowie - Five Years - Old Grey Whistle Test
• Amara's Law - IEEE
• Robert Oppenheimer calculation of p(doom)
• JD Vance commenting on AI-2027
• SolidGoldMagikarp - LessWrong
• ASML
• Chicago Pile-1 - Wikipedia
• Castle Bravo - Wikipedia

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

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, Machines, and Moral Status,” Henry examines the recent rapid advancements in machine learning and the questions they raise about machine consciousness and moral status. He suggests that public attitudes towards artificial consciousness may change swiftly, as human-AI interactions become increasingly complex and intimate. He also warns that our tendency to anthropomorphise may lead to misplaced trust in and emotional attachment to AIs.

Note: this episode is co-hosted by David and Will Millership, the CEO of a non-profit called Prism (Partnership for Research Into Sentient Machines). Prism is seeded by Conscium, a startup where both Calum and David are involved, and which, among other things, is researching the possibility and implications of machine consciousness. Will and Calum will be releasing a new Prism podcast focusing entirely on Conscious AI, and the first few episodes will be in collaboration with the London Futurists Podcast.

Selected follow-ups:

• PRISM podcast
• Henry Shevlin - personal site
• Kinds of Intelligence - Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence
• Consciousness, Machines, and Moral Status - 2024 paper by Henry Shevlin
• Apply rich psychological terms in AI with care - by Henry Shevlin and Marta Halina
• What insects can tell us about the origins of consciousness - by Andrew Barron and Colin Klein
• Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness - By Patrick Butlin, Robert Long, et al
• Association for the Study of Consciousness

Other researchers mentioned:

• Blake Lemoine
• Thomas Nagel
• Ned Block
• Peter Senge
• Galen Strawson
• David Chalmers
• David Benatar
• Thomas Metzinger
• Brian Tomasik
• Murray Shanahan

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

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

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

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
• Trustworthy AI Systems To Monitor Other AI: Yoshua Bengio
• The Unilateralist’s Curse - by Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg

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

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

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
• Why is machine consciousness important? (Conscium)
• Brain, Mind & Consciousness (CIFAR)

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

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
• Gen AI: Too much spend, too little benefit? - Goldman Sachs

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