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...

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...

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,...

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...

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.orgTransVision Utrecht 2024The AI Revolution: The Road to...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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 ever. Regular...

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...

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...