London Futurists

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

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 Cancer, Parkison's, More
• Death of the world's oldest man, 25th Nov 2024
• Blueprint protocol - Bryan Johnson

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

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

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

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

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

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
• Taking Neuromorphic Computing to the Next Level with Loihi 2 Technology Brief - Intel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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