Our topic in this episode is progress with ending aging. Our guest is the person who literally wrote the book on that subject, namely the book, “Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime”. He is Aubrey de Grey, who describes himself in his Twitter biography as “spearheading the global crusade to defeat aging”. In pursuit of that objective, Aubrey co-founded the Methuselah Foundation in 2003, the SENS Research Foundation in 2009, and the LEV Found...
Apr 21, 2024•41 min•Season 1Ep. 80
As artificial intelligence models become increasingly powerful, they both raise - and might help to answer - some very important questions about one of the most intriguing, fascinating aspects of our lives, namely consciousness. It is possible that in the coming years or decades, we will create conscious machines. If we do so without realising it, we might end up enslaving them, torturing them, and killing them over and over again. This is known as mind crime, and we must avoid it. It is also po...
Apr 13, 2024•45 min•Season 1Ep. 79
Our guest in this episode is Adam Kovacevich. Adam is the Founder and CEO of the Chamber of Progress, which describes itself as a center-left tech industry policy coalition that works to ensure that all citizens benefit from technological leaps, and that the tech industry operates responsibly and fairly. Adam has had a front row seat for more than 20 years in the tech industry’s political maturation, and he advises companies on navigating the challenges of political regulation. For example, Adam...
Apr 04, 2024•39 min•Season 1Ep. 78
In this episode, we are delving into the fascinating topic of mind uploading. We suspect this idea is about to explode into public consciousness, because Nick Bostrom has a new book out shortly called “Deep Utopia”, which addresses what happens if superintelligence arrives and everything goes well. It was Bostrom’s last book, “Superintelligence”, that ignited the great robot freak-out of 2015. Our guest is Dr Kenneth Hayworth, a Senior Scientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Jane...
Mar 29, 2024•43 min•Season 1Ep. 77
Our guest in this episode is Lou de K, Program Director at the Foresight Institute. David recently saw Lou give a marvellous talk at the TransVision conference in Utrecht in the Netherlands, on the subject of “AGI Alignment: Challenges and Hope”. Lou kindly agreed to join us to review some of the ideas in that talk and to explore their consequences. Selected follow-ups: Personal website of Lou de K (Lou de Kerhuelvez) Foresight.org TransVision Utrecht 2024 The AI Revolution: The Road to Superint...
Mar 22, 2024•35 min•Season 1Ep. 76
Calum and David recently attended the BGI24 event in Panama City, that is, the Beneficial General Intelligence summit and unconference. One of the speakers we particularly enjoyed listening to was Daniel Faggella, the Founder and Head of Research of Emerj. Something that featured in his talk was a 3 by 3 matrix, which he calls the Intelligence Trajectory Political Matrix, or ITPM for short. As we’ll be discussing in this episode, one of the dimensions of this matrix is the kind of end goal futur...
Mar 15, 2024•43 min•Season 1Ep. 75
In the wide and complex subject of biological aging, one particular kind of biological aging has been receiving a great deal of attention in recent years. That’s the field of epigenetic aging, where parts of the packaging or covering, as we might call it, of the DNA in all of our cells, alters over time, changing which genes are turned on and turned off, with increasingly damaging consequences. What’s made this field take off is the discovery that this epigenetic aging can be reversed, via an in...
Mar 07, 2024•47 min•Season 1Ep. 74
In this episode, we look further into the future than usual. We explore what humanity might get up to in a thousand years or more: surrounding whole stars with energy harvesting panels, sending easily detectable messages across space which will last until the stars die out. Our guide to these fascinating thought experiments in Paul M. Sutter, a NASA advisor and theoretical cosmologist at the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University in New York and a visiting profess...
Feb 21, 2024•40 min•Season 1Ep. 73
AI systems have become more powerful in the last few years, and are expected to become even more powerful in the years ahead. The question naturally arises: what, if anything, should humanity be doing to increase the likelihood that these forthcoming powerful systems will be safe, rather than destructive? Our guest in this episode has a long and distinguished history of analysing that question, and he has some new proposals to share with us. He is Steve Omohundro, the CEO of Beneficial AI Resear...
Feb 13, 2024•44 min•Season 1Ep. 72
In this episode, our subject is the rise of the robots – not the military kind of robots, or the automated manufacturing kind that increasingly fill factories, but social robots. These are robots that could take roles such as nannies, friends, therapists, caregivers, and lovers. They are the subject of the important new book Robots and the People Who Love Them , written by our guest today, Eve Herold. Eve is an award-winning science writer and consultant in the scientific and medical nonprofit s...
Feb 06, 2024•37 min•Season 1Ep. 71
Our guest in this episode is Riaz Shah. Until recently, Riaz was a partner at EY, where he was for 27 years, specialising in technology and innovation. Towards the end of his time at EY he became a Professor for Innovation & Leadership at Hult International Business School, where he leads sessions with senior executives of global companies. In 2016, Riaz took a one-year sabbatical to open the One Degree Academy, a free school in a disadvantaged area of London. There’s an excellent TEDx talk ...
Jan 25, 2024•37 min•Season 1Ep. 70
In this episode, our subject is Uncontrollable: The Threat of Artificial Superintelligence and the Race to Save the World . That’s a new book on a vitally important subject. The book’s front cover carries this endorsement from Professor Max Tegmark of MIT: “A captivating, balanced and remarkably up-to-date book on the most important issue of our time.” There’s also high praise from William MacAskill, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford: “The most accessible and engaging introduct...
Jan 18, 2024•43 min•Season 1Ep. 69
Our guest in this episode is Nick Mabey, the co-founder and co-CEO of one of the world’s most influential climate change think tanks, E3G, where the name stands for Third Generation Environmentalism. As well as his roles with E3G, Nick is founder and chair of London Climate Action Week, and he has several independent appointments including as a London Sustainable Development Commissioner. Nick has previously worked in the UK Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, the UK Foreign Office, WWF-UK, London B...
Jan 11, 2024•45 min•Season 1Ep. 68
Our subject in this episode is the idea that the body uses electricity in more ways than are presently fully understood. We consider ways in which electricity, applied with care, might at some point in the future help to improve the performance of the brain, to heal wounds, to stimulate the regeneration of limbs or organs, to turn the tide against cancer, and maybe even to reverse aspects of aging. To guide us through these possibilities, who better than the science and technology journalist Sal...
Jan 05, 2024•37 min•Season 1Ep. 67
We are honoured to have as our guest in this episode Professor Stuart Russell. Stuart is professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and the traditional way to introduce him is to say that he literally wrote the book on AI. Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach , which he co-wrote with Peter Norvig, was first published in 1995, and the fourth edition came out in 2020. Stuart has been urging us all to take seriously the dramatic implications of advanced AI for lo...
Dec 27, 2023•50 min•Season 1Ep. 66
Our guest in this episode is Rebecca Gorman, the co-founder and CEO of Aligned AI, a start-up in Oxford which describes itself rather nicely as working to get AI to do more of the things it should do and fewer of the things it shouldn’t. Rebecca built her first AI system 20 years ago and has been calling for responsible AI development since 2010. With her co-founder Stuart Armstrong, she has co-developed several advanced methods for AI alignment, and she has advised the EU, UN, OECD and the UK P...
Dec 09, 2023•35 min•Season 1Ep. 65
Our guest in this episode is Dhiraj Mukherjee, best known as the co-founder of Shazam. Calum and David both still remember the sense of amazement we felt when, way back in the dotcom boom, we used Shazam to identify a piece of music from its first couple of bars. It seemed like magic, and was tangible evidence of how fast technology was moving: it was creating services which seemed like science fiction. Shazam was eventually bought by Apple in 2018 for a reported 400 million dollars. This gave D...
Nov 27, 2023•33 min•Season 1Ep. 64
Our guest in this episode is James Hughes. James is a bioethicist and sociologist who serves as Associate Provost at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is also the Executive Director of the IEET, that is the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, which he co-founded back in 2004. The stated mission of the IEET seems to be more important than ever, in the fast-changing times of the mid-2020s. To quote a short extract from its website: The IEET promotes ideas about how technologic...
Nov 13, 2023•43 min•Season 1Ep. 63
The Partnership on AI was launched back in September 2016, during an earlier flurry of interest in AI, as a forum for the tech giants to meet leaders from academia, the media, and what used to be called pressure groups and are now called civil society. By 2019 more than 100 of those organisations had joined. The founding tech giants were Amazon, Facebook, Google, DeepMind, Microsoft, and IBM. Apple joined a year later and Baidu joined in 2018. Our guest in this episode is Rebecca Finlay, who joi...
Oct 30, 2023•31 min•Season 1Ep. 62
This is the second episode in which we discuss the upcoming Global AI Safety Summit taking place on 1st and 2nd of November at Bletchley Park in England. We are delighted to have as our guest in this episode one of the hundred or so people who will attend that summit – Connor Leahy, a German-American AI researcher and entrepreneur. In 2020 he co-founded Eleuther AI, a non-profit research institute which has helped develop a number of open source models, including Stable Diffusion. Two years late...
Oct 25, 2023•44 min•Season 1Ep. 61
The launch of GPT-4 on the 14th of March this year was shocking as well as exciting. ChatGPT had been released the previous November, and became the fastest-growing app ever. But GPT-4’s capabilities were a level beyond, and it provoked remarkable comments from people who had previously said little about the future of AI. In May, Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak described superintelligence as an existential risk to humanity. A year ago, it would have been inconceivable for the leader of a ma...
Oct 18, 2023•35 min•Season 1Ep. 60
In the future, energy will be too cheap to meter. That used to be a common vision of the future: abundant, clean energy, if not exactly free, then much cheaper than today's energy. But a funny thing happened en route to that future of energy abundance. High energy costs are still with us in 2023, and are part of what's called the cost-of-living crisis. Moreover, although there's some adoption of green, non-polluting energy, there seems to be as much carbon-based energy used as eve...
Oct 11, 2023•36 min•Season 1Ep. 59
Self-driving cars has long been one of the most exciting potential outcomes of advanced artificial intelligence. Contrary to popular belief, humans are actually very good drivers, but even so, well over a million people die on the roads each year. Globally, for people between 12 and 24 years old, road accidents are the most common form of death. Google started its self-driving car project in January 2009, and spun out a separate company, Waymo, in 2016. Expectations were high. Many people shared...
Sep 27, 2023•35 min•Season 1Ep. 58
One of the short-term concerns raised by artificial intelligence is cybercrime. Cybercrime didn’t start with AI, of course, but it is already being aggravated by AI, and will become more so. We are delighted to have as our guest in this episode somebody who knows more about this than most people. After senior roles in audit and consulting firm Deloitte, and the headhunting firm Korn Ferry, Stacey Edmonds set up Lively, which helps client companies to foster the culture they want, and to inculcat...
Sep 20, 2023•35 min•Season 1Ep. 57
The UK government has announced plans for a global AI Safety Summit, to be held in Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, outside London, on 1st and 2nd of November. That raises the importance of thinking more seriously about potential scenarios for the future of AI. In this episode, co-hosts Calum and David review Calum's concept of the Economic Singularity - a topic that deserves to be addressed at the Bletchley Park Summit. Selected follow-ups: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-governmen...
Sep 13, 2023•31 min•Season 1Ep. 56
This episode, like the previous one, consists of a number of short interviews recorded at the Longevity Summit Dublin between 17th and 20th August, featuring a variety of different speakers from the Summit. In this episode, we'll hear first from Matt Kaeberlein, the CEO of a company called Optispan, following a 20 year period at the University of Washington studying the biological mechanisms of aging and potential interventions to improve healthspan. Among other topics, Matt talks to us abo...
Sep 06, 2023•45 min•Season 1Ep. 55
The Longevity Summit Dublin took place from 17th to 20th August. In between presentations, Calum and David caught up with a number of the speakers to ask about their experiences at the Summit. This episode features three of these short interviews. First up is Aubrey de Grey, the President and Chief Science Officer of the LEV Foundation - a person deeply involved in the design and planning of the Summit. Next, we hear from Andrew Steele, who is an author and campaigner. The third interview featur...
Aug 30, 2023•32 min•Season 1Ep. 54
The legal profession is rarely accused of being at the cutting edge of technological development. Lawyers may not still use quill pens, but they’re not exactly famous for their IT skills. Nevertheless, the profession has a number of characteristics which make it eminently suited to the deployment of advanced AI systems. Lawyers are deluged by data, and commercial law cases can be highly lucrative. One man who knows more about this than most is our guest in this episode, Benjamin Alarie, a Profes...
Aug 23, 2023•39 min•Season 1Ep. 53
Our guest in this episode is Aidan McCullen. For ten years from 1998 to 2008, Aidan was a professional rugby player, delighting crowds in Ireland, England, and France. He made the very natural transition from that into sports commentating, but he also moved into digital media. He started as an intern at Communicorp to learn digital media and marketing, and he learned about digital by doing it, living it and building it – as he puts it, by jumping off a cliff and building a plane on the way down....
Aug 16, 2023•38 min•Season 1Ep. 52
Our guest in this episode is Martin O'Dea. As the CEO of Longevity Events Limited, Martin is the principal organiser of the annual Longevity Summit Dublin. In a past life, Martin lectured on business strategy at Dublin Business School. He has been keeping a close eye on the longevity space for more than ten years, and is well placed to speak about how the field is changing. Martin sits on a number of boards including the LEV Foundation, where, full disclosure, so does David. This conversati...
Aug 09, 2023•31 min•Season 1Ep. 51
