London Futurists

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