London Futurists

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 siteArticles by Stephen Witt on The New YorkerThe Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip - book siteStephen Witt wins FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year - Financial TimesNvidia ExecutivesBattle Royale (Japanese film) - IMDbThe Economic Singularity - book by Calum ChaceA Cubic Millimeter of a Human Brain Has Been Mapped in Spectacular Detail - NatureNotebookLM - by GoogleMusic: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain DeclarationHow Hacks HappenHacks, scams, cyber crimes, and other shenanigans explored and explained. Presented...Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify PodMatchPodMatch Automatically Matches Ideal Podcast Guests and Hosts For Interviews

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 - substackPauseAI USPauseAI - global siteWild Animal Suffering... and why it mattersHard problem of consciousness - WikipediaThe Unproven (And Unprovable) Case For Net Wild Animal Suffering. A Reply To Tomasik - by Michael PlantLeading Evolution Compassionately - Herbivorize PredatorsDavid Pearce (philosopher) - WikipediaThe AI industry is racing toward a precipice - Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI)Nick Bostrom's new views regarding AI/AI safety - redditAI is poised to remake the world; Help us ensure it benefits all of us - Future of Life InstituteOn being wrong about AI - by Scott Aharonson, on his previous suggestion that it might take "a few thousand years" to reach superhuman AICalifornia Institute of Machine Consciousness - organisation founded by Joscha BachPausing AI is the only safe approach to digital sentience - article by Holly ElmoreCrossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers - book by Geoffrey MooreMusic: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain DeclarationHow Hacks HappenHacks, scams, cyber crimes, and other shenanigans explored and explained. Presented...Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify PodMatchPodMatch Automatically Matches Ideal Podcast Guests and Hosts For Interviews

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 OughThe Anti-Catastrophe League - The book's webpageOn novel methods of pandemic preventionWhat is effective altruism? (EA)Sam Bankman-Fried - Wikipedia (also covers FTX)Open PhilanthropyConsciumHere Comes the Sun - book by Bill McKibbenThe 10 Best Beatles Songs (Based on Streams)Carrington Event - WikipediaMirror life - WikipediaFuture of Humanity Institute 2005-2024: final report - by Anders SandbergOxford FHI Global Catastrophic Risks - FHI Conference, 2008ForethoughtReview of Nick Bostrom’s Deep Utopia - by CalumDeepMind and OpenAI claim gold in International Mathematical OlympiadWhat the Heck is Hubble Tension?The Decade Ahead - by Leopold AschenbrennerAI 2027AnglofuturismMusic: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain DeclarationHow Hacks HappenHacks, scams, cyber crimes, and other shenanigans explored and explained. Presented...Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify PodMatchPodMatch Automatically Matches Ideal Podcast Guests and Hosts For Interviews

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 CompanySuperintelligence - by iQ CompanyHerbert A. Simon - WikipediaAmara’s Law and Its Place in the Future of Tech - Pohan LinThe Society of Mind - book by Marvin MinskyAI 'godfather' Geoffrey Hinton warns of dangers as he quits Google - BBC NewsStatement on AI Risk - Center for AI SafetyI’ve Spent My Life Measuring Risk. AI Rings Every One of My Alarm Bells - Paul Tudor JonesSecrets of Software Quality: 40 Innovations from IBM - book by Craig KaplanLondon Futurists Podcast episode featuring David BrinReason in human affairs - book by Herbert SimonUS and China will intervene to halt ‘suicide race’ of AGI – Max TegmarkIf Anybody Builds It, Everyone Dies - book by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate SoaresAGI-25 - conference in ReykjavikThe First Global Brain Workshop - Brussels 2001Center for Integrated CognitionPaul S. RosenbloomTatiana Shavrina, MetaHenry Minsky launches AI startup inspired by father’s MIT researchMusic: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, availablHow Hacks HappenHacks, scams, cyber crimes, and other shenanigans explored and explained. Presented...Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify PodMatchPodMatch Automatically Matches Ideal Podcast Guests and Hosts For Interviews

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 SchoolHow Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations - Princeton University PressStop Acting Like This Is Normal - Ezra Klein ("Stop Funding Trump’s Takeover")OpenAI o3 Breakthrough High Score on ARC-AGI-PubA Human Amateur Beat a Top Go-Playing AI Using a Simple Trick - ViceThe future of employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation? - Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. OsborneEurope's Choice: Policies for Growth and Resilience - Alfred Kammer, IMFMIT Radiation Laboratory ("Rad Lab")Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain DeclarationHow Hacks HappenHacks, scams, cyber crimes, and other shenanigans explored and explained. Presented...Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify PodMatchPodMatch Automatically Matches Ideal Podcast Guests and Hosts For Interviews